In 2018, as the nation watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, author and journalist Pagan Kennedy, who grew up in similarly privileged circumstances and attended the same high school as Ford, confronted her own experience of being sexually abused.
“I know a lot of other people were very affected by the Kavanaugh hearings because it was seeing somebody so many decades later who’s still so affected,” says Kennedy, who spoke from her Brooklyn apartment on Zoom last month. “I wasn’t acknowledging to myself that I was still affected, or that this still ate at me. And it kind of gives you permission when you see somebody after decades still grappling with what happened to them in childhood that you realize, Oh, it’s normal to continue to grapple.”
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That grappling led Kennedy, who has written extensively about inventions and makers, to begin a web search into the creation of what is commonly known as the rape kit, which collects evidence of sexual assault. Kennedy recounts her odyssey in “The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story,” which weaves together her own personal narrative, the origin and implementation of the kit, and the identity of the person who conceived of it.
It had long been thought that a Chicago police officer had come up with the idea in the 1970s, but through interviews and research, Kennedy identified Martha “Marty” Goddard as the woman who’d conceived of the rape kit, assembled its prototype and then, inexplicably, allowed others to take the credit. Then, in the 1980s, Goddard dropped out of sight.
Goddard may have declined credit for her work to get buy-in from law enforcement, but she was no meek pushover. A fearless advocate in the 1970s for what were then referred to as “teenage runaways,” Goddard intuited that sexually trafficked children ended up on the streets because of abuse at home rather than youthful wanderlust. She headed a Chicago task force to study how to improve the policing and handling of sexual assault and its victims, and, as Kennedy argues, Goddard used her position in ways that would fundamentally change policing, forensics and evidence handling.
“The important thing with the Chicago kit was that it was really different in that it was survivor-led, and then became the blueprint for what became the national system,” says Kennedy, adding how later advances in DNA testing meant these kits held even more information than had been initially imagined.
“Once DNA fingerprinting came along, you had all these kits from the ’70s or ’80s that had biological evidence, and then they might have blood or semen or something that you could test,” she says. “That was how the Golden State Killer was found.”
Kennedy spent years on the story, even writing a 2020 piece for the New York Times Magazine about Goddard’s role in the rape kit — which led to a number of people who knew Goddard to come forward to speak with Kennedy.
“I spent a very long time tracking down person after person after person who had known her and worked with her. And the strangest thing about it was that none of them knew where she was. They all said, I was very close to her. I worked with her, but then she just kind of disappeared in the ’80s, and I lost track of her,” says Kennedy.
Kennedy, who writes in the book that her own abuser became a Washington insider, says that she included her own story to underscore how widespread the problem is.
“I decided to put my story in, not because it’s exceptional at all, but because I think it’s just so incredibly normal and part of what so many people go through. I thought that if I wove in my story then it’s also sort of the story of the evolution of this new forensic system,” says Kennedy. “I felt like it was a good lens through which to track how this system affects people and affects the way we think about what happened to us.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You spent years working on this book. Can you talk about your commitment to the story?
I think the best stories are like that. When I started this in 2018, rape kits were actually in the news then because of the backlog scandals where the kits had not been tested, and so that was sort of the buzz in the background.
I’ve written a lot about invention. I was really interested in the question of what objects are designed by and for women. What does technology look like when it’s made by and for people who are out of power?
One day, I just thought about the rape kit, which was something I’d always been aware of since college but had never really thought about. It didn’t seem unusual at all that police departments would be throwing them out or refusing to test them — that seemed completely on-brand for our world — but what did amaze me when I really thought about it was that the rape kits existed at all.
Q. Initially, you read that a Chicago police officer had created it, but then later determined this wasn’t the case.
I looked it up on Wikipedia at the time and it said that Sgt. Louis Vitullo of the Chicago Police Department invented this kit and created the entire system.
There was very little information. But I kept seeing this name Marty Goddard as sort of his helper and I thought she might be alive … so I set about trying to find her.
Q. How did you finally begin to make headway?
The moment the story really opened up for me was when I located Cynthia Gehrie, who had worked very closely with Marty and had been kind of her partner. It was Cynthia who said, I remember her calling me after this meeting with Vitullo and proposing the idea of creating a rape kit — and a whole system. People tend to focus on the object [of the rape kit], but the power of this is as a system where they’re all connected: All the kits are in a database. There’s hospitals everywhere doing this, there’s trained nurses, there’s trained police officers. It’s not just the kit.
Vitullo was involved, to give him his due, although she did raise all the money and did all the trainings and really did the hard work of getting it into the hospitals and talking to everybody.
Q. You wrote about the rape kit for the New York Times, too.
I did a version for them, and then I just kept going because after I did the story so many other people came forward and had more to tell me about Marty and the kit. I also was able to connect with the Smithsonian and they acquired the original Chicago Vitullo Kit, as it was called. The curators there shared a lot of information, and they were able to do an even deeper dive into materials that I couldn’t get.
There was just so much more of the story to tell. People who hadn’t wanted to talk to me were much more willing after the article came out, like Marty Goddard’s sister. So I just learned so much more about the story itself, and then also that even the rape kit that I learned that the Chicago kit was not the first. There were little experiments here and there.
Q. You write that the city of Santa Ana had an early version, which you credit to P. Lee Johnson, a colorful former Santa Ana police officer, bar owner and politician.
He was really quite an interesting, roguish character, but not the guy you’d want to be creating a rape kit.
In that kit from California, it was written into the instructions that the police officer had the right not to give the kit to any woman he felt was, you know, a prostitute or of loose morals — or if he just didn’t like her.
Marty Goddard was really committed to this scientifically. The scientific way to do this is not about how you feel about the victim of the crime. I mean, it doesn’t matter if this person lives on the street or if they’re a prostitute or who they are — we need to collect their story and their data and evidence from them.
There were probably little experiments like this all over the country, here and there, you know, that just never really got going. The important thing with the Chicago kit that was different was that it was survivor-led, and that became the blueprint for what became the national system.
Q. One of the book’s many surprising elements was that Goddard got support from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy organization, even on the graphic design of the kit itself.
Everybody remembers such different things. Her cousin came to me when I was at the end of the project, more or less just found me. She had these great memories of that party at the Playboy Mansion, and I was just like, ‘Tell me everything.’ It was typical Playboy Mansion stuff, but it was interesting that there was this fundraiser there.
They were deeply involved in this effort, and she was not able to get any help from the Girl Scouts club or the Kiwanis, so she had to go to the Playboy Foundation.
Q. Some of the things you describe are infuriating — the dismissal of victims, the neglect of sex crime evidence, the racism and misogyny and more — were you shocked by what you found?
One of my regrets is that I couldn’t put it all in. But you know, in the ‘70s, nobody talked about the abuse of men. That really got started in the ‘80s.
Q. What accounted for the backlog of these tests — was it just the cost?
People have gone through a really traumatic process in the wake of an attack to then allow themselves to be examined. It’s such a gift that a survivor gives to other people. I mean, they don’t want to do it, but they want to make sure no harm comes to anybody else. And so it’s such a valuable thing to have these kits. And when you see those trashed or thrown away or sitting in a parking garage or wherever, it tells you about the culture in police departments.
The problem of the backlog is, I wouldn’t say it’s solved, but there was a time when there were nearly half a million untested kits, and most of those have been worked through. But it’s so valuable — and not just for identifying perpetrators, but also for preventing false accusations. I dug up through one of the exoneration projects reports that showed a graph of how many fewer false accusations there were.
So in 2010, thanks to a whole lot of activists working really hard, the country began testing all these untested kits. And so there was this flood of data after that, and way more information. The system became more powerful after that. And so in the wake of that, there were a lot fewer accusations against innocent Black men for rape. And I think that’s something that’s not really been talked about enough, because it’s another huge win.
It’s important to exonerate people, but how much better would it be to not put them in prison in the first place?
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