The who you are "before" and the who you are......"after"

Sometimes there are events in our lives that are so powerful they change who we are forever.Watching pop singer Rhianna talk about her abusive relationship with artist Chris Brown took me back recently to the relationship I had when I was 18.Mine also ended with a horrific crime and my former husband going to prison, 15 years ago today. November. 9 1994 is not an anniversary I celebrate but the events of that day had an enormous impact on the person I am now.I have talked about it publicly on my radio show,to women's groups and at conferences.I realized today however that while it was published a few years ago in the Bakersfield Californian I had never posted it on my blog.......Above is the Bakersfield Californian article on March 26,2006..12 years after it happened..below is the article plus some in its entirety.)

Sixteen years ago this month, I turned 16 years old.

As I have every year since I was 8, I wrote in my diary that week. I hadn’t looked at that particular entry since, but I opened it last week and what I read almost
knocked the air out of me.The excerpt I am sharing with you is significant because the story that will follow is something I have never written about publicly:

FEB 1990

“Dear Me, (I felt I was too old to be writing ‘Dear Diary’), Well, I turn 16 tomorrow, the same age my mother was when I was born. She’s 32 now and my only wish for this birthday is that Scott (my former stepfather)will really leave us alone. I can’t believe he found out where we live again! I am scared because we don’t have a car and my mom rides her bike to work and I just know one of these days Dustin (my brother) and I will get a phone call that Scott has killed her. I swear I will NEVER marry a man who beats me up on a weekly basis. I’m pretty sure I know what to look for in a bad guy by now.”

I didn't know anything.

My first husband is a convicted rapist.

I met Louie the month before I graduated high school. I was working at a kiosk in the middle of the mall. He had walked by a few times and finally ––with his movie star good looks –– he came over to me, introduced himself and proceeded to tell me that I was the girl he was going to marry. Six months later, we were engaged. I was 18, Lou was 21, and he treated me like a queen. Experts later explained that often times people with sociopathic personalities (Louie) tend to idolize and dote upon certain people in their lives, and the object of that affection (me) never sees the “real” person, just the facade.

( Louie & I, Christmas 1992.Wearing sweat shirts that HE "puffy painted" for us.How was I to know a sociopath hid underneath?)

That wasn’t the case with me. I was intuitive, yet extremley insecure.When the Kern County Sheriff’s Department showed up at our apartment at 3 a.m. a month after we got engaged and told Louie they were arresting him for the forcible rape of a woman just hours before I should have run fast and far. Instead, I was paralyzed. What? I knew Louie had been out with a friend, but why would he even be talking to another girl, much less touching her, and –– even more unimaginable –– raping her?
I listened through the kitchen door as he eventually told deputies that he had slept with a woman that night at a motel, but it was consensual and he couldn’t believe she had said he raped her. I threw up. As he was being led out the door in handcuffs, he told me to call his mother. At that point, I couldn’t even remember where the phone was located.
I remember rationalizing that while he may have slept with someone else there was no way my “perfect fiance’” who wrote me poems and picked me flowers once a week and made me feel like I was the only woman in the world every day could rape someone.

Besides (again trying to justify it in my head), the woman who accused him was married, and she and Louie met at a bar, and I convinced myself that they were both drunk and somehow her husband found out so she got scared and said Louie raped her.

Resolving to stay with him and work this “thing” out, I bailed him out of jail. In the process I lost all self-respect and disconnected myself from what I called “the incident.”

Together we told a few friends and family members. An older female relative simply looked at me and said, “Men cheat, Rachel. I’m glad you’re giving him a second chance. He’s so handsome, sweet and charming, after going through this I’m sure he won’t cheat again.” No one could believe that Lou was being charged with such a heinous act.

A jury didn’t believe it, either, and months later, to our relief, Louie was acquitted.

The day of my wedding, Sept. 11, 1993, my Maid of Honor, Jennifer looked at me in the bathroom and said, “You know, it’s not to late for us to make a run for it.”

I was puking in a stall, knowing that even though I loved Louie and he treated me so well, I was making a mistake. Who marries a man who just months before went through a
rape trial? You may be thinking what I’d be thinking if I read this: “What an idiot”!

Truth was, I was an insecure 19-year-old girl who didn’t think a lot of herself, despite what I showed to the outside world. (Me and Louie at our wedding reception..I was only 19 & had to toast with sparkling cider.Just over a year later Louie commited the heinous rape)

To most people I had the world by the tail. I was just starting out at KGFM and was a field reporter and part-time anchor for our sister stations,KERN and KGEO. I was doing television commercials and going to college. Me,Rachel Legan, a girl who grew up in an environment in which statistics show should have led me to poverty or teen pregnancy, drugs and maybe even prison. It appeared I was going to be successful, but deep down inside my biggest fear was that Louie would stop loving me and cheat on me again. That I wasn’t good enough for him, even though HE didn’t make me feel like that. I made myself feel that way.

That part of me disappeared on Election Day 1994. I was doing live radio reports from Republican headquarters when a cameraman friend of mine asked me if Louie drove a green Dodge truck. Yes, I told him, why are you asking? “Well,” he said, “this is going to sound kind of weird, but Carol (the reporter in his truck) and I were listening to the police scanner when Louie’s name came up as the owner of a truck with the license plate the cops had run as a suspect vehicle in a rape and robbery in Campus Park.”

I became sick and dizzy as the camera guy said, “You know, it’s probably just a case of mistaken identity.” Yeah, I agreed, but I knew in my gut as I called Louie and began questioning him.

He lied and said that yeah, he’d been in Campus Park that day looking for new gardening clients, but the suggestion that he was involved in a rape was ludacris.

I immediately called work, said I was sick and drove home. I told Louie I was going to call the police to clear everything up because if they had said his name on a police scanner then something was really wrong. He promised he would call the next day because it was already midnight and he said if the police had his license plate information then they obviously knew where we lived and why didn’t they come question him?

Again I rationalized that while that was true, my gut said differently.Hours later I drove to work after not having slept, trying to figure out what I was going to do.

This couldn’t be happening again, could it? Why was this happening to me? Scanning the paper that morning I saw the story. A real estate agent had been raped.

Oddly enough, that was my news assignment for the day –– get information on the suspect or suspects and do a follow-up story. When I spoke with the Public Information Officer at the Bakersfield Police Department, I told him what had happened the night before; how Louie’s name was on the scanner. The PIO was a friend of mine at the time, and asked me for Louie’s full name and put me on hold.

When he came back to the phone he said, “Sweetie,Louie is not the guy we’re looking for, that’s not the name I have here.”

Relief and embarrassment washed over me as I hung up and headed to Superior Court. I was also working on the Bruce and Jeremy Sons case at the time(Bruce was accused in the murder of CHP officer Richard Maxwell.Jeremy is his son), and Jeremy was in court. I got off work later than usual that night, and when I got home I noticed that Louie, a “neat freak,” had left dishes in the sink and that the back door was open. As I walked outside, two policemen had Louie in handcuffs in our alley.

One of them asked me what I was doing there. How did I get there so quickly?
“I live here, he’s my husband’ I said.

I think he may have thought I was working as a reporter and was there to get the story on the man who raped a Bakersfield real estate agent. I asked them if I could get in the police car with Louie and they said it was alright.
They let me go back in the house and get him a jacket, which they searched before he put it on. I knew right then that life as I knew it was over.
At the station, they handcuffed Louie to a little wall in a little room.I asked to see the PIO , who explained that when he talked to me earlier he was looking at a list of suspects for another crime and he was sorry for the mix-up. I was in shock as officers said it would be alright for me to speak to Louie because he wasn’t admitting anything to them. When they put me in that little room with Louie he told me that he woke up that morning (of the rape) just knowing he was going to do something bad. I asked him if he raped that woman and for all of the details, and he told me, as he kept touching his head and saying, “Something’s wrong with me up here Bubbas(a name we used to call each other)”.

I asked him why over and over again. Wasn’t our life the greatest? Weren’t we the best of friends? Why, God?Why would you do something like this, how could you hurt someone like that?Oh My God, everything is ruined, we are not going to have the babies we talked about or the life we planned. How? Why? Why? I had already been through so much trauma in life and I really believed he and I were this
"new chapter".He had no answer, he just kept touching his head. I asked to be let out of the room, and the officers told me that our conversation had been recorded and they had all they needed. They then asked to look at the rings I was wearing. Louie had stolenher rings, they explained, and they wanted to make sure I didn’t have them on. The only rings I had on were my wedding ring and my one-year anniversary ring. I was 20 years old and I wanted to die.

(Article by Steve Swenson in The Bakersfield Californian Nov,15 1994 at Louie's 1st arraignment.There were 12 stories in the paper between 1994 and 1995 about the case)

On my 21st birthday, Louie was sentenced to 38 years in prison. The judge miscalculated the sentence, and he was brought back to court the next day and
given over 50 years in prison. I divorced him and haven’t spoken to him since. It has been 12 years, and I still can’t really wrap my mind around what happened. I felt that I, too, must have been “headsick” to have loved a person who could hurt another human being like he did. Until recently, I had even forgotten that I liked him. He was never abusive to me, so the hatred I came to feel for him confused me, yet fueled me at times.It was like he died but worse.I felt awful for the woman who accused him of rape before we got married, it is obvious that she was telling the truth. I felt awful for the real estate agent, her family, Louie’s family, me, my family –– it was a situation in which everyone lost.

I feel like I’m publishing my gut but it’s a story I have wanted to tell for a long time. I just didn’t have the strength until now.

The real estate agent, who I have met and talked with, was interviewed in the paper after Louie was sentenced. She is an amazing person, and I have so much respect and admiration for her. Her family and friends pulled her through like mine did. I don’t know if I would have had the strength she showed.

***Rachel Legan has been happily remarried since 2002 and is a stepmother. She continues to be one of the most-recognized and respected media personalities in Kern County!***