What happens after military sexual trauma when you never reported it?

This article discusses sexual assault. It contains no descriptions of what happened to anyone.

Chelsey Gray met her husband in her platoon. In her words, he is the one who came in and rescued her.

“I didn’t even tell him about the assault until 2023.”

Hear it at 15:16

She got to her unit in 2019. That is four years of not telling the person closest to her, who had been standing right there.

We will say this plainly, because the question in the headline deserves a plain answer before anything else. On paper, the answer is on VA’s own military sexual trauma page: “You don’t need to have reported the MST at the time or have other proof that the MST occurred to get care.” The same page says the treatment is free, that no disability rating is needed, and that it covers most former service members, including those with an Other Than Honorable discharge.

That is the form. What follows is what the years in between were like for the people who have talked to us about it, in interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit. There are not many. Three of our guests name military sexual trauma as their own on camera. Two more speak about sexual assault without saying where or when it happened, and we are not going to guess. This piece is shorter than our others because that is what we honestly have. We report only what each of them chose to say.

Why nothing got said

Gray, a U.S. Marine Corps Veteran and parachute rigger who now speaks up for other survivors, graduated at the top of her class three times over before she reached the fleet.

“I was the only female in my platoon when I first arrived.”

Hear it at 5:16

She wanted what every new Marine wants, which is to belong to the unit. When things started going wrong, she did not go to anyone.

“I didn’t feel like I could speak up about it. There was so much shame.”

Hear it at 6:33

The part she calls hardest is not the event. It is who it was.

“The hardest part is that the trust was so deeply broken, because I trusted them that they were going to take care of me.”

Hear it at 10:34

Every branch runs on the promise that the people beside you have your back. She is describing what silence looks like when the people beside you are the reason for it.

By 2020 she was out of the Marine Corps, and the silence came with her.

“You just super compartmentalize about what just happened, because you can’t just stop and sit and process, because you have to survive.”

Hear it at 23:05

Anisa Palmer, a U.S. Army Veteran who served two combat tours in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division and founded the nonprofit I Will Survive, wrote a book. It took her about seven years. She says the delay was one story, a rape she does not place or date on camera.

“I never disclosed it ever until I was having so many Veterans who were sharing, men and women, stories overseas of molestation, rape, all the things.”

Hear it at 53:48

Other people’s stories are what moved hers. Men and women, she says. And then a question she put to herself:

“How am I supposed to help people until I can help myself?”

Hear it at 54:05

And when you do report

It would be tidy if the lesson were “report it.” Nikki Kraus, a U.S. Air Force Veteran and weather forecaster, did. She says there were two incidents while she was stationed in Korea, and that a senior NCO, an E-7 to her E-4, received an Article 15. She told us this almost in passing.

“I haven’t even said this on camera. It’s not even in my book.”

Hear it at 19:15

While the cases ran, she was named Airman of the Year for her command.

“I was performing and I was fighting these two sexual harassment, sexual assault cases and all this stuff on the back end.”

Hear it at 20:07

One person, her flight chief, stood by her. Then she rotated to her next base.

“Nobody cared when I came back.”

Hear it at 22:02

The collapse, she says, came after that, when things went quiet. So here are two Veterans on opposite sides of the reporting line, one who said nothing and one who used the system, and neither describes feeling looked after by it at the time.

Saying it to other Veterans

Jessica Jay Dee, a Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant and combat Veteran, said it on our set at a Marine Corps Birthday taping, in one sentence.

“I don’t say this out loud very often, but I’m diagnosed PTSD, military sexual trauma.”

Hear it at 18:16

She says she has done the counseling and the medication, and that what helped most was turning around to help someone else.

Jennifer Marshall, a U.S. Navy Veteran, actress, firefighter EMT and cancer survivor, speaks of PTSD from being sexually assaulted; she does not say on camera where or when. She took it to VA support groups, where, she says, some combat Veterans told her it was not the same as theirs. She found her way through it somewhere stranger: on a film set, playing a character who had been assaulted.

“The difference was I could stop that scene whenever I wanted. When it happened to me in real life, I couldn’t stop it.”

Hear it at 45:54

Five women. They do not share a method. Gray talks about it loudly now. Jay Dee almost never does. Kraus left it out of her own book. Palmer put it in hers. Marshall acted it. What they share is the gap: every one of them describes a stretch of time, sometimes years, between what happened and the first time she said it to anyone who could help.

Gray has a reason for that gap, and she does not limit it to women.

“This is why so many women and men, okay, they choose not to share because they feel shame.”

Hear it at 13:38

No man has spoken to us about this on camera. That is a hole in our record, not a finding.