Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Enough! This is the way a woman described her  rape assault to Connecticut Commentary  in 2014: “James had assaulted me many years ago and was sentenced to one year, I believe. He served six months. A protective order was put in place. Approximately six months after his release…  He broke into my house and waited for me to return home. He beat me for hours using anything at his disposal: the china cabinet, the TV, stereo, speakers, his fists, the phone. I sustained extensive serious physical and mental trauma. I had escaped the house twice, but he dragged me back and continued beating me. The third time I escaped the house, a snow plow truck driver saw me on the side of the road in a pool of blood, interceded and saved my life.”

"The past is never dead. It's not even past"  – William Faulkner Faulkner’s notion that we drag the past into the present with us in order to plot our futures is just common sense. In our life’s play, perhaps the most important character, ever-present but invisible, is the lived and remembered past. We learn from the past because we do not wish to be doomed to repeat fatal errors. And this applies in a darker sense to those who have suffered grievous wrongs. The moment is never far from them, and sometimes the moment, if you are a woman who has suffered a vicious assault, is present as a recalled event, a haunting ever present horror and a future possibility. After Deanna Pichette was assaulted by James Bartis III in December 2000, she was immediately hospitalized. This was the second go-around for Mr. Bartis, who had served six months in prison for a prior assault on Ms. Pichette, then his girlfriend. The hospital report on the injuries sustained by Ms. Pi...