About Me

My name is Kathleen Light. I am a writer, researcher, public-records advocate, and the founder of RapeIsRape.org.

I created this website after surviving sexual violence and discovering how difficult it can be to obtain meaningful accountability, even when a survivor reports what happened, preserves evidence, cooperates with investigators, and continues asking questions long after institutions would prefer silence.

RapeIsRape.org began as a place to document my own experience. It has since become a broader record of what happens when sexual violence intersects with professional influence, institutional self-protection, public-records systems, political power, and the enormous credibility burden placed on survivors.

This is not a commercial project. I do not profit from this website. Maintaining it costs me money, time, privacy, and more emotional energy than I can easily describe. I continue because documentation matters. Public records matter. Timelines matter. The words people use when they believe no one else is listening matter.

I am not interested in presenting myself as a perfect victim. Perfect victims do not exist. Survivors can be frightened, angry, confused, attached to the person who harmed them, slow to understand what happened, inconsistent while processing trauma, and still be telling the truth. Trauma does not arrive as a polished legal argument. It arrives in fragments, memories, physical reactions, unanswered questions, and the gradual realization that something you tried to survive was never acceptable.

My work focuses on those gaps: the distance between what the law promises and what institutions deliver; the difference between consent and submission; the ways power shapes whose account is believed; and the public’s right to understand how government agencies respond when allegations involve people connected to those systems.

I publish source documents whenever I legally and ethically can. I correct errors when I find them. I distinguish between documented fact, personal recollection, analysis, and unanswered questions. Some posts are carefully researched. Others reflect the reality of living through trauma while trying to make sense of institutions that rarely explain themselves.

This website is not only about one man, one incident, or one case. It is about the machinery surrounding sexual violence: disbelief, delay, silence, reputation management, procedural barriers, and the expectation that survivors must remain calm, agreeable, and endlessly credible while describing experiences that shattered their lives.

I am still here. I am still asking questions. I am still building the record.

That is what this site is for.