Jane Doe No More (35 page)

We did a lot of praying over those scary few days, and we were all incredibly relieved to find that the surrounding tissue was clean and that I didn’t need any further treatment. So there it was: the realization that had the mole not been discovered in time, I may not have lived past my twenties.

When I pray, I always ask for God to help me deal with what’s ahead. I know it is part of His greater plan and not my will but Thy will be done. I did the same when I found the lump while we were in the Outer Banks. I prayed that whatever obstacles lay ahead of me, God would give me the strength to deal with them. If it was His will that it not be cancer, so be it. I also used the opportunity to strengthen my relationship with God. To think about all that He had done for me and my family and how often when things are good I do not thank Him as much as I should. The situation humbled me. This new predicament strengthened my commitment to give thanks to God always—but maybe more important, prepared me for what was ahead.

Donna’s doctor called the next day. She had been anticipating this news all night long. She didn’t really need to hear him say it. She knew.

“Donna, Donna, Donna, I am
so
sorry,” he said. “Listen, I want you to come in here so I can look in your eyes and tell you how sorry I am and that it is going to be okay. But you have breast cancer. The tumor came back positive.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY
-
TWO

A Battle Begins

Donna Palomba was fighting two cancers at the same time. She’d waited seven years for her day in court against what had become a growing cadre of police officers and civic leaders who had accused her of lying, and now she had a second, internal cancer to fight as well.

If I am going to die from cancer, I want the truth known before I breathe my last. It is my only recourse and hope for redemption—that secondary condition we rely on when our truth has been stripped from us.

Donna’s family grew concerned for her mental and physical well-being. Was she sacrificing her health by moving forward with the suit? Was she taking her cancer diagnosis seriously? Stress was not the best remedy for fighting cancer.

Donna, however, believed that putting the brakes on the legal process now would be even more detrimental to her health, and extremely so to her state of mind. She needed to face down whatever crisis came her way, find a solution to it, or deal with the ramifications of failure. To quit now and begin a full-on battle with cancer would destroy any momentum she had built up in her case, and the lack of resolution would fester inside her.

Cancer treatment, Donna and her doctors decided, would have to wait until the trial was over.

The city made an eleventh-hour offer of a financial settlement. Within that offer was the claim that city officials would “work with” Donna regarding her demands for changes in policy and procedure.

Sitting, listening to the offer, however, I realized that it was a half-hearted attempt once again to buy me off. I got a sense the money was a way to purchase my silence. How easy would it have been for me, I considered, to take this money and begin my fight against cancer. The money, nearly a quarter of a million dollars, would certainly help in that regard. Everyone told me to take it. But I thought,
This is my life!
My reputation had been irreversibly damaged. I would never be the same person in this community. Some people would always doubt my story and view me as a liar. If I accepted a payout, it would have given those who don’t believe me more reason not to. More important, how would other rape victims hiding in the community, afraid to come forward, feel? The city had pushed me around for over seven years. I needed to go to trial as much to set the record straight—and publicize this fiasco—as to bring Jane Doe out from behind the curtain and into the spotlight, simply so she could speak for women victimized and re-victimized by the system. After all, I felt, I probably was not the WPD’s only victim. How many more victims were being mistreated?

Donna was now forty-four years old. It was January 5, 2001, when opening arguments in
Jane Doe v. Douglas Moran, et al.,
began. Donna and John should have been celebrating John’s birthday; instead, they were heading into court.

Each side took its respective role and laid its case out for the jury. After both unassuming opening statements were made and the 911 call from the night of the crime was played, the most important person involved in the case took the stand.

Donna appeared strong despite shaking a little and feeling on the verge of tears. But she had no trouble talking jurors through every last aspect of being the victim of a brutal sexual assault inside her home during the only time her husband had been away in all the years of their marriage. And then the tale of betrayal unfolded, as Donna spoke of how, when she needed the police the most, they had turned their backs on her and made her feel as though she should question herself.

As she sat for what turned out to be nearly three days on the witness stand, Donna talked about hearing those footsteps that changed her life.

The sound of the attacker’s voice.

How he smelled.

That she believed he had a gun.

How he covered her face and tied her up.

Threatened to kill her.

And then, without warning, disappeared into the night.

But that was only the half of it, she explained.

Raped once, she turned to the WPD for help but, within a few weeks, felt as though she had been assaulted all over again, this time by Douglas and Robert Moran.

“Here he is,” Donna told jurors at one point, “threatening me . . . I left there believing I was going to be arrested. I have never been unfaithful to my husband. I was a victim. Now, I was being attacked by the police. It was too much for me to bear.”

As she answered questions on the witness stand, it did not take long for the local press to begin what Donna later called “their biased reporting” of the case. Instead of allowing the testimony to speak for itself, one local newspaper account seemed to editorialize the cross-examination Donna endured by the city’s attorneys. Those lawyers, Cheryl Hricko and Jayne Welch, according to Donna, were relentless in their attack on her character, and the local press never questioned that strong-armed tactic of trying to beat down the alleged victim of a rape until she cracked. In her questioning of Donna, Hricko “maintained that police did a thorough investigation that revealed some oddities and inconsistences in the case . . .”

Hricko’s argument banged the “no forced entry” drum the WPD had been beating for years. It cited inconsistencies in lab reports, and the idea that the “evidence” left at the scene did not support what Donna had told police. That rumormonger, the “confidential informant” Moran had used as the main source for his accusation of an extramarital affair, was now being called “an outside source,” as he was introduced (anonymously) by Hricko.

Not to Donna’s surprise, because she and John had already found out during the evidence phase leading up to trial, Hricko produced a tape recording of that day when Donna and John sat with Captain Robert Moran and Phil Post. The WPD had secretly recorded the interview so many years ago when Donna and John had made their complaint about Douglas Moran and his finger-in-the-chest accusations against Donna.

On top of the fold of the local newspaper following the first day’s testimony, the headline read: TRIAL
:
W
OMAN STICKS TO STORY THAT SHE WAS RAPED
.

“Sticks to story.” The phrase struck Donna as catering to the WPD, as though there was still a question about Donna being sexually assaulted. It was Donna who had brought the suit against the city, not the other way around. For Donna and John, the way the article was written told a story unto itself—to some, she was guilty by walking into the courtroom.

On Wednesday, January 10, 2001, Kathy Wilson took the stand and verified that Donna “fit the rape category.” In one contradictory breath, however, Wilson then explained that Donna’s crime-scene reactions weren’t distraught enough. And then she switched back to another description, saying Donna was wandering the scene like a “lost soul.” Wilson ultimately used language like “flippant” to describe how Donna acted after she had claimed to have been sexually assaulted. To listen to Wilson, a woman who had been trained in how to manage, speak to, and deal with a sexual assault victim, one might get the idea that Donna’s irregular and inconsistent behavior was a red flag. The problem with this testimony, though, was that Donna’s behavior, the way in which Wilson described it, was actually textbook. It was completely in line with what any rape victim might do moments after being attacked.