S O C I E T Y

Conduct Unbecoming:  One female cadet's tale in the Air Force Academy's growing rape scandal

By CATHY BOOTH THOMAS/TUCSON

Monday, Mar. 10, 2003

Sharon Fullilove plops down on the bed in her dorm room at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The walls, like those in college rooms everywhere, are plastered with pictures of friends and happy times, including a black-framed memorial to her hero, the Dell dude. It's a world away from the spare room she used to occupy at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. She never sat on the bed there; she didn't even sleep on it. Sheets had to be ironed perfectly for twice-weekly inspections, so like her fellow cadets, Fullilove simply slept on the floor. Yet she loved every moment of being there. "All I ever wanted to be was a bird and fly F-15s," she says. "Both my parents are Air Force. The Air Force Academy was the only place I even applied to for college. I wanted to show my patriotism and go to war."

 Today all that's left of that dream is the bruising memory of a rape and the lingering anger over the academy's alleged failure to fully investigate her complaint, accusing her instead, she says, of being a "liar." Over the past month, at least 22 other women--13 former cadets and nine currently enrolled — have made similar charges, accusing academy officials not only of failing to investigate sexual assaults but of actively discouraging women from reporting them, and retaliating when they did. Yet in the past decade, only one academy cadet has been court-martialed on a rape charge; the cadet was acquitted. "It's the good-ole-boy society," says Fullilove. "The guy who did this to me knew nothing would happen to him."

Spurred by the rising number of women speaking out, Air Force Secretary John Roche made a rare visit to the school last week to address 2,000 cadets, warning that he would "not tolerate" rapists or a culture that accepted sexual harassment at the academy. "There are now many questions about the character of all Air Force Academy cadets and recent graduates due to reported sexual assaults — clearly criminal acts — by a dangerous minority." He promised that "these bums" would be investigated and prosecuted. His trip followed a meeting with Colorado Senator Wayne Allard in Washington, who presented Roche with a list of nine questions about assault cases reported to his office since last summer.

 Meanwhile, the Air Force's top general, John Jumper, told reporters in Washington that the process for reporting abuse was not working and that "intimidation in the chain of command" may have kept women silent. The Senate Armed Services Committee, on which Allard sits, is likely to push for a full hearing.

 The new rape cases, first uncovered by the investigative unit at Denver's ABC affiliate KMGH, raise the question of whether the Tailhook sex-abuse scandal that hit the Navy in the early 1990s ever produced a new system capable of punishing men who commit these kinds of crimes. In 1993 the Air Force Academy launched a program touted as a model for teaching character, and three years later it instituted a rape-crisis hot line run by cadets. The academy claims fewer than 100 calls were placed to the hot line between 1996 and 2002, but this may be because some cadets went to civilian rape-crisis centers. A center in Colorado Springs says it has counseled at least 22 cadets over the past 15 years, including one who was gang-raped. In the past seven years, only 20 cases of sexual assault have been formally investigated at the school, leading to the dismissal of eight male cadets.

 The level of disillusionment Fullilove feels matches the enthusiasm she felt as an 18-year-old high school senior from Dayton, Ohio, visiting the Air Force Academy for the first time in the spring of 1999. Only the best and brightest, the top 20% of their high school class, have a chance at admission. Fullilove was that and more. She was a straight-A student, a cheerleader, a hurdle jumper and a swim-team member. A dance champion by age 5, she choreographed her own routines, sang and did comedy. She was determined to follow in the footsteps of her mother, an Air Force lieutenant colonel with a 20-year career in biomedical research, and her stepdad, a reservist who regularly ships out to battle zones as a medical technician.

But Fullilove had been at the academy barely six months when her hopes were shattered. Shortly before Thanksgiving 1999, she joined some friends to watch the movie She's All That at Arnie's, a lecture hall hangout on the school grounds where no alcohol is allowed. As Fullilove and three girlfriends were leaving, an upperclassman they knew offered them a ride to their dorms. Fullilove was the last to be dropped off, but she trusted the male cadet; he had bailed her out of two infraction charges that eventually proved unfounded but could have resulted in her being expelled. So, she says, she wasn't even worried when he pulled over and locked the car doors. But, struggling now to hide her emotions like a good soldier, she sums up the moment she lost her virginity simply: "He forced himself on me. I tried to scream and fight, but of course everybody's in shape at the academy. Me against him was no fight."

Dazed and confused, she told no one in the days afterward what had happened. He was an upperclassman who could ruin her career with just one accusation. She knew all too well from older female cadets the consequences of reporting a rape. "We were told if you want to stay at the academy, don't report it. They'll get you [thrown] out." But when her attacker walked unannounced into her dorm room two days later, saying he was "sorry if he had done anything inappropriate," she realized the threat would always be there. She decided to leave.

Once at home, she fell apart but could not confide in anyone, fearing that her parents, as military personnel, would blame themselves. "She was a basket case. She sat on the floor of her room all day, sobbing," says Fullilove's mother, who wants to remain unnamed so that she can work for change within the Air Force. She persuaded her daughter to report the rape four months afterward but that proved fruitless, even for an officer's daughter. Says her mother: "We went through hell for a couple of years."

 Is the academy's cocky flyboy culture at fault for its continuing woes? Or were wrong signals sent by the chain of command? Or both? Senator Allard has publicly identified Brigadier General S. Taco Gilbert III, the commandant of cadets, as a "common thread" in reports of women victims who felt they were treated punitively or indifferently. For the academy superintendent, Lieut. General John R. Dallager, a combat pilot with 600-plus hours' flying over hot spots like Southeast Asia and Bosnia — and the father of three daughters in the military — the scandal has been devastating. "There is a power relationship," he notes. "There is a potential for abuse."

 Susan Archibald, an academy graduate who says she was sexually taken advantage of by an academy chaplin when she was a cadet in 1983, argues that the academy's attempt to keep the problems hidden is what has so dispirited female cadets. Says Archibald, who now runs a nonprofit for survivors of clergy abuse in Louisville, Ky.: "We know in the military that bad things are going to happen to us, in terms of going to war, dying, so you go in with the mind-set of sacrifice. But we didn't think that sacrifice means keeping your mouth shut about being personally abused."

Fullilove, 21, is putting the nightmare behind her, getting on with life, taking predental courses and teaching hip-hop at the campus gym. "I had a perfect childhood. I was the perfect student. Nothing bad ever happened to me until this," she says, recalling her experience. "But I got through it." Now it's the academy's turn to do the same.

 — With reporting by Rita Healy/Colorado Springs
 

From the Mar. 10, 2003 issue of TIME magazine