Content warning: This article includes mention of rape and sexual assault.
People tell things to Erika Krouse. Things they may not even be ready to tell themselves, but things they suddenly find they cannot deny once they’re sitting before her.
When I first met Krouse, it was on a Monday afternoon in a small room stuffed away in the upper floors of the Norlin Library. She sat, leaning against a table at the head of the room, thoroughly absorbed in a conversation with my professor.
Krouse is a soft, but sturdy presence in the room. She leans into her chair, at ease, welcoming those who sit around her and making the supposed “interview” style of the class feel more like a conversation with an old friend. She laughs freely and it carries, putting any nerves or jitters at ease. She has large, brown eyes that crinkle when she smiles and a face that says “It’s alright. I believe you. You’re safe here.”
When she turns to me to answer my question, I feel as though I’m being clearly seen for the first time in a very long while. I suddenly understand why people tell her everything.
Her presence that day in the classroom can be explained with her memoir. See, we had just finished reading her work Tell Me Everything — a beautiful, twisted, and brutally honest telling of the events that took place on a campus nestled just below the Flatirons a mere 24 years ago. Our professor had invited Krouse to come speak with us and answer our multitude of questions. She graciously agreed.
In Tell Me Everything, Krouse tells of the bravery of a young woman (in the memoir she is called Simone), who came forward seeking justice after she was assaulted by a hoard of the universities football players and recruits in her home. Krouse details her unexpected recruitment as a private investigator to the team working to defend Simone and how, throughout the years she spent working on the case, they came to uncover the horribly corrupt and deeply misogynistic culture of the universities football team back in the early 2000s.
Krouse’s work left me speechless. The story not only chronologizes the discovery of the culture of abuse, rape, assault, and misogyny of the universities football team, but it also delves into the PI’s own childhood abuse at the hands of a man known as “X” in the work. Krouse masterfully blends her current reality with her past truth to create a complex and compelling story that drew me in, forcing me to reckon with the past horror of my community, my own story, and our collective future.
Her words carved intricate grooves into my mind, forever altering the way I viewed not only my own campus, but the world I lived in as a whole. By the end of her story, I felt both entirely crushed by the reality of the events in her novel, and so ecstatically hopeful that through the work and knowledge of people like Krouse they would never be repeated.
After the discussion, I stayed behind — twisting my pencil furiously and trying very hard to appear as calm and professional as possible. I don’t remember how I asked her to participate in an interview. The whole conversation is a blur in my brain, but I’m pretty sure it involved me blubbering on about how much I enjoyed her work, how inspired I was by her own struggles and overcomings, and how I would very much, please, appreciate it if she would perhaps answer a few questions. I do remember that she agreed and that I spent the rest of the day on Cloud 9, grinning my way through my classes.
What follows are those very questions and the beautifully crafted answers Krouse gave. They say never meet your heroes, but I am so grateful I met mine.
Throughout your memoir you describe a rat running on a wheel. Running and running and running, but getting nowhere. I wish not to assume, but I believe that this was a representation of your anxiety, something you mention living with throughout your life. After the case, you note that the rat disappeared and the spinning stopped. Has this spinning stayed away? Has it returned? What was it about the case that you believe helped dull the spinning?
The cool thing about activism is that it’s, well, active, whereas being abused (and the panic abuse creates) is by nature passive, because you’re helpless to stop it. Having the opportunity to work on the case was a partial cure for anxiety, and so was writing about it. You get to make art out of trauma — take something destructive and turn it into something creative that has the potential to help other people.
You mention in your epilogue that if we give you 20 minutes alone, we’ll tell you everything. Pre-case this ability, to lure out the truth without meaning to, didn’t bother you. Post-case it made you feel deceitful. Uncomfortable. How do you feel about it now? Given the space from the case? How do you feel now when you are able to use your ability?
I think it does help me to connect with people. And as a writer, I love hearing secrets and other writers have told me that people tell them all their secrets, all the time. Deeply listening to people is important, I think, and it takes practice.
You could have made this a very objective book. You could have focused solely on the stories of the women and their rapists. You could have listed facts and figures or brought in emotional elements from the survivors’ stories. Yet, you include incredibly vulnerable bits from yourself. You weave in your mother and X and JD. The book is incredibly vulnerable and it’s beautiful. Why did you choose to make it so personal? So vulnerable?
Initially, I wanted to write it that way; more objectively and journalistically. I’m primarily a fiction writer, and I don’t like writing about myself. But as a fiction writer, I knew any reader would wonder why I was so obsessed about the case, and why I was the correct person to tell this story (as opposed to one of the plaintiffs, the lawyer, etc.). For me to have authority, I had to talk about why this case mattered so much to me on a personal level — what it was like to investigate a sexual violence case as a survivor of sexual violence. And how could I write with integrity about the brave women who came forward if I wasn’t willing to come forward myself? It would feel false, and that would have translated to the page.
The majority of the people in your memoir have aliases. You have given your abuser the name X. Other characters have full length names but he remains a singular letter. Why did you choose the name X? What was the process of choosing this name?
Childhood sexual abuse is rampant-yet-secret, so the name X sounded right to me. X marks the spot; X is something that’s crossed out; X is the generic mark people used to sign documents if they couldn’t write their names (and there could have been legal backlash if I wrote his name). The real-life X had a specific identity for me, of course, but given another family or situation, X could also have been anybody at all. Also, I don’t think he deserves a name in my story.
Currently, CU hosts a football team of primarily African American students. We have hired an ex-NFL player to be our head coach. We spend and make millions of dollars through our football program. We are in the process of hiring a running back couch with a history of sexual assault accusations. Seeing this, do you feel we are going down a road where we could replicate the incidents of 2001? What would you caution against? What would you advise us to do instead to avoid a repeat?
When a head coach and a school hire sexual abusers as assistant coaches, they’re not “only” endangering their entire student population with those individuals. They’re also sending an overt message to the students and players. That message is that any efforts to protect students from sexual assault are just lip service; that those in power only truly value winning and money. Students learn that their safety is irrelevant, because their safety cuts into profit margins. The players learn that assaulting women carries no consequences; a player or coach can be a predator and still get hired to coach at a Division I team (or, often enough, the NFL). They learn that the sport of football is not concerned with ethics, so don’t bother having a conscience. So, yes, I think there’s a very real danger of the same crimes happening, if they haven’t happened already.
Did this experience with the university and issue with gender-based violence pique your interest in other social justice issues? If so, what area?
I like to write about moral ambiguity — grey areas where there might be options, but no good ones — no solutions. In my most recent book, Save Me, Stranger, I wrote short stories about gun violence, euthanasia, abortion, racism, child abuse and neglect, domestic violence, the Holocaust…I’m interested in stories that explore the conundrums inherent in big topics.
Would you consider yourself a feminist? Was this the beginning of your feminist journey? Or had you declared your feminist after a previous experience?
Oh yes; I’m very much a feminist. It feels like I’ve always been one, even when I was a child, based on what I believed and the questions I remember asking. It just always felt like common sense: fairness and equality for all genders.
You just released a new book, Save Me Stranger. Tell me about that process. What was it like to pivot from writing something so personal to a work of fiction? What was it like to pivot from writing about such a heavy topic based in reality to exploring heavy topics based in fiction? What was your inspiration for Save Me Stranger? What do you hope the readers draw from it?
Save Me, Stranger is my fourth book (my third book of fiction), so fiction is really home base for me. I wrote the first story of that collection after a friend and writing compatriot died by suicide, and I was full of remorse that I hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t been able to stop it somehow. Could I have helped him? Can we save each other? How well do we really know one another? What do we owe each other? I hope readers will ask similar questions, or maybe questions of their own.
Speaking of new works, what inspires you to write? How do you choose what subjects to pursue and what to leave behind?
I usually intend to write something specific, but I never like being told what to do (even by myself), so I usually end up writing something else. I know the idea will turn into a story when I keep researching and researching the topic for months or even years, and I’m still interested in it and can’t stop researching. I guess it’s about obsession, in a way.
What are your upcoming projects? Are you particularly excited about anything coming our way?
My next project will be a historical murder mystery set in 1929 New York City. I’ve never written a book-length murder mystery, nor historical fiction, so I have no idea what I’m doing. Which is exciting! Let’s see if I can pull it off.
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I am eternally grateful to Krouse for her willingness to answer all of my questions and for all her dedication, passion, and labor. She played an essential role in obtaining justice for survivors on the universities campus and her work continues to impact each life she touches. I thank her for her strength, her kindness, and her willingness to conquer her fear and stand in solidarity with us in the face of injustice. I hope that both the university and I can make her proud in whatever comes next.