This is the moment I experienced a sexual assault involving a Coast Guardsman. It is an official U.S. Coast Guard photo from Sector Hampton Roads. What is visible in the image is not always what people immediately register, but it is clear when you know what happened in that moment. You can see he is right up against me, and my foot is displaced from where it had been standing. What is not visible is the frozen terror inside me.

I’d been through a harrowing 1,500-mile voyage aboard a boat with multiple failed systems, the only time in 12,000 miles of sailing that I texted my kids “I love you,” in case our vessel didn’t make it. My nervous system was exhausted.

Having joined the line-up for photos as the Coasties requested, I felt the Boatswain’s Mate, second class (BM2) Geoffrey Wells, the coxswain for the operation, slam against me, simultaneously kicking my boot just before the photo was taken. He held his position of physical contact. The BM2’s stance is firm. Mine is defensive: angled away, hands in pockets, a body refusing while a face is forced to smile. This felt like a deliberate, dominant message: a sexual assault meant to override me and my sense of safety. The perpetrator briefly left the lineup to go forward and take a photo. Then he returned to the lineup, where I felt him press against me again.

This official photo was posted on the Coast Guard’s official site. After significant effort, I had that taken down. Then I had to chase it down across news outlets and stock photo sites. They all took it down eventually. I have chosen to publish the image and describe what I experienced because it is part of my lived history. I am naming it directly from my own perspective to make sense of what happened and to document it as I experienced it.

I spent years trying to get help for the fallout of this and other assaults, only to find that the systems we’re supposed to turn to for help don’t recognize trauma unless it fits their narrow definition. They punish people like me for having human reactions to harm. They protect people like him by default. The responses I received did not lead to accountability or acknowledgment in a way that addressed my experience of sexual assault in a public, official setting, during a Coast Guard operation, while in a vulnerable post-voyage condition.

My experience is a perfect example of how power works on the nervous system. When you’re overwhelmed, when there’s no safe place to go, when uniforms and official authority surround you, your body shuts down to survive. That’s biology. 

I refuse to carry shame that doesn’t belong to me. I use my words and watercolors to expose the abuses of systems that put maintaining the power structure above human well-being. Sharing the truth of my lived experience, I reclaim the narrative because this is how we break the grip of the domination hierarchy.