Better Redress: on Pagan Kennedy’s “The Secret History of the Rape Kit”

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If I could travel back to 1968 and give a second-wave feminist consciousness-raising group my Netflix log-in, they might assume that future society cares significantly more about women than it actually does. Today’s streaming television is bursting with docuseries that not only tell horrific abuse stories (usually of women or children), but also seek to uncover long-buried narratives and speak up for the voiceless. Sometimes, the subject is self-explanatory: Surviving Jeffrey Epstein. My Father, The BTK Killer. Lorena (Bobbitt). Less obvious titles include Quiet on Set, about exploited child actors, and Victim/Suspect, about women charged with reporting “false” rapes by misogynistic cops, whose stories are later found to be real. 

I call this media redress slop, a genre that isn’t quite true crime, especially not the dominant style of the 2010s, because redress slop does attempt an acknowledgment of the real harm done to the often still-living victims. It’s not My Favorite Murder and the like, where the focus on serially murdered women is mostly for entertainment. It’s closer to the comparatively highbrow, prestige TV and podcast-driven boom in reclaiming “maligned” women from tabloid headlines of the late twentieth century in that it tries to address historic misogyny and violence. But streaming services can produce this content quickly and carelessly and still make billions. Redress slop is full of sensational tropes, like reality show drama music and oddly dusky set design, to keep you locked into viewing without having to think too hard about the systemic harms of abuse or what we should demand from institutions in response.

I don’t seek out redress slop, but I’m a professional, public feminist. My Women’s Studies 101 students and others eagerly tell me what they learn from this content and ask for my insights. I’m pleased that there’s a public appetite for popular media telling captivating stories that try to make up for misogynistic violence and other harms. It suggests that there are viewers—largely young women—who yearn for tales of feminist heroism, of wrongs against women and children being acknowledged and righted. This is hopeful and reassuring. But we should demand better of this genre. I think of Pagan Kennedy’s exemplary redress text The Secret History of The Rape Kit: A True Crime Story. Kennedy—whose previous work includes zines, a NYT column about inventions, and a book about a pioneer of gender-affirming care—describes her efforts to track down Martha “Marty” Goddard (1941–2015), the advocate who developed rape kits in the 1970s. Until Kennedy’s 2020 New York Times article, most sources credited only Louis Vitullo (1924–2006), a Chicago cop who helped run the city’s then-nascent “crime lab.” Goddard rose from being a conventional non-profit worker to an activist unafraid of pushing the infamously misogynistic and racist Chicago police to take rape seriously. Kennedy’s capacious book also elevates several stories of rape, including tales of several victims whom Chicago police abused, more modern instances of leaving rape kits untested, and Goddard’s own rape, which, highlighting the ubiquity of sexualized terror for women, happened almost a decade after she began her anti-rape campaign. 

Kennedy does not merely tell a neat story of injustice, but takes time to sort through difficult concepts and reflect on the significance of her project. For example, she begins her text with an author’s note weighing how to “describe people who have been sexually assaulted”: “victim” or “survivor.” Kennedy traces the history of both terms, settling on “‘victim’ whenever it seemed historically or technically appropriate” and, in other instances, “survivor.” Taking the time to sort out this discursive problem immediately conveys that this text will amble through big questions about justice, not breathlessly sprint toward what’s most eye-catching or dramatic. Similarly, Kennedy spends time matter-of-factly explaining what a rape kit contains and, with wide-eyed wonder, why she thinks the rape kit matters: “It was part of a system designed, at least in theory, to be wielded equally against a multimillionaire, a media mogul, a Catholic bishop, or a cop.” She doesn’t cultivate nonspecific outrage, but rather a particular kind of pride in one feminist’s achievement and a hope for more change. 

Late in the text, Kennedy shares that showrunners had reached out to her about bringing Goddard’s story to the screen after the 2020 NYT article. I can’t say for certain what a Goddard series would look like, but Kennedy’s version of her story has the basic contours of redress slop. That is, it solves a mystery tinged with blatant sexism: Goddard’s invention being attributed to a man. It’s an injustice, certainly, but one black and white enough to go down easily with the liberal viewing public. It would be tempting for a Goddard biographer to tell her story while watering down its radical politics, to situate the act of telling it in and of itself as redress enough. 

This kind of dilution is my main issue with redress slop. The genre asks so little of viewers and institutions. It recalls what Alex Green terms the “having conversations industrial complex,” only vis-à-vis sexism. Green writes specifically about the ways politicians and corporations made vows to listen and learn in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests, even platforming some activists, but all as a means to “defuse radical demands.” Redress slop dictates viewer response to unspecified horrors, driving “conversations” with no actual redress. It’s harmful, limiting, and deeply seductive. Indeed, I have felt the siren call to have post-slop-viewing “conversations” without understanding why. I have lost countless hours to scrolling Reddit threads, reading hot takes on the recent actions of previously exploited child actors or insights from posters who claim to have grown up in the same town where a documentary-ed rape took place. It feels like doing something, but it’s really a typical social-media induced dopamine loop, with one particularly nefarious result: no real, serious bearing witness to rape and abuse, and no attention paid to how to solve this problem. 

Though the television interest in Goddard’s story comes as no surprise, I’m grateful that Kennedy’s next step after the NYT article wasn’t a buzzy streaming documentary. Instead, she wrote a hopeful, unhurried text that presents rape, and the pervasive lack of justice for rape survivors, as solvable problems. It’s not a horror in which to merely wallow, but one that everyday people can change. Kennedy highlights contemporary examples, including feminist campaigns to test long-neglected kits, a rape crisis center designed by and for Black women, and at-home rape kits. Like Goddard’s original rape kits, these were initially and smugly dismissed as useless, but amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, they became revolutionary necessities for women. 

Goddard is, in the most genuine sense, inventive. Her kits are authentically genius and paradigm-shifting in how they challenged purported “truths”—that “rape was a unique and ‘unsolvable’ crime” or “cops were justified when they threw out evidence or refused to collect any.” Goddard’s insistence on holding cops accountable, no matter the pushback (including when Goddard forced a first meeting with Vitullo, ending with his “screaming” at her) is similarly valuable. Ultimately, the rape kit, Kennedy writes, “is not just a technical feat. It is also a political act.” Perhaps the only other invention that so positively upended women’s lives was the birth control pill. 

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Raised in the Michigan suburbs, , Goddard grew up in a family that maintained their image as “Republican, straight-arrow kind of people” while coping with private abuse and dysfunction. Goddard, who would “go nuts” at her father’s anti-Civil Rights racism, first runs away as a young teenager, briefly living with a friend. She permanently leaves at “about nineteen or twenty,” according to her sister, while Goddard was living at home and attending college. A cruel beating by her father ensured Goddard’s final, permanent escape: “She quit college and moved all the way to New York City to work for the World’s Fair.”

Goddard moves to Chicago, marries and divorces by thirty, and starts working for the Wieboldt Foundation, a fund for progressive causes. Kennedy paints Goddard as a professional, frank, give-no-nor-accept bullshit kind of woman, who values and benefits from second-wave feminist victories without getting too in the weeds. She’s not the type to attend the Liberation School, but she has a sense of what is right and wrong in her community and what she should do about it. Inspired by her past, Goddard begins volunteering at Metro-Help, a crisis center for troubled youths. Nearly all the girls who call report rape.

Goddard places an earnest call to a local news department, asking for an investigation into the city’s rape problem. She is, Kennedy notes, “tremendously concerned” about pervasive sexual violence and the ways “girls were often victimized all over again” by cops. It would be tempting to characterize Goddard as a kind of plucky everywoman who gets herself involved in a big activist world, the anti-rape Erin Brockovich. 

Even with her superheroic characterization of Goddard, though, Kennedy never dips into this boring trope. Instead, she constantly emphasizes Goddard’s cool confidence, suggesting less that she’s an unexpected activist and more that a feminist hero can come in all kinds of forms, even guileful and scheming. The recently-divorced Goddard, for instance, was desperate for a credit card (for new professional clothing), which banks categorically banned for most single women. Through her wits, “she managed to finagle an American Express card under the name ‘Marty Goddard’; the company had apparently assumed that ‘Marty’ was a man.” Kennedy portrays Goddard as fearless, too. When a cop stalks and intimidates Goddard on the street late at night, “she stared at him pointedly, as if to say, ‘I see you.’” 

Goddard wasn’t perfect, and Kennedy doesn’t cower from sharing her messier qualities. After her own rape, Goddard increasingly pulled back from public life, eventually becoming reclusive and politically disengaged as an older woman. Relatives share accounts of alcoholism, and Goddard’s rare post-2000 public comments betray erratic behavior. But Kennedy’s less-than-positive coverage never becomes lurid. With Goddard now gone a decade, it’s impossible to definitively say how Kennedy’s work would have impacted her. But I find it plausible that Kennedy’s reverent, “avenging” treatment might have positively intervened in Goddard’s final, troubled chapter.

Kennedy does not simply mine Goddard’s life for an interesting story. She asks readers to bear witness to the precise horrors of sexual violence by weaving in her own experiences being molested and raped. Kennedy’s vulnerability is admirable, and her willingness to share her own trauma—not just represent that of others—prevents the text from being potentially exploitative. She and her subject are equals, women with personal vendettas against sexual violence. 

Kennedy’s inclusion of personal trauma is not merely interesting in and of itself. Her vivid, alarming detail deepen the power of her testimony. As the text’s second half begins, Kennedy transitions from hard-boiled researcher to a scared tween fearful first of a stranger and later a family friend. The stranger has a constant, fleeting presence—“like smoke, he seeped into our house”—for the rest of Kennedy’s childhood. The familiar rapist, on the other hand, renders Kennedy “a dead animal he had found by the road” and “anesthetized and rubbery.”

The graphic accounts of how these men attack her deepen these feelings of haunting and disembodiment. In one brutal scene, she is raped with different children’s toys. Reading this, I felt the same uncanny revulsion that I did while first reading second-wave feminist classics like Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man (1976) or Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977), which contain rape scenes some might consider gratuitous. These moments always repel me, yet I always feel like I can stop the unfolding, gendered horrors if I continue suffering through them. This style of anti-rape representation has fallen out of favor over legitimate concerns that it may be retraumatizing. Yet the harrowing quality of Kennedy coolly listing off the “dolls, tiny chairs, Legos, erector-set pieces, dinosaurs, a knife for cutting Play-Doh” and other benign objects used to terrorize her, serves an important function. Many readers and viewers have become inured to the specific horrors of rape. Too much of today’s media and too many discussions of sexual violence tend to rely on an unstated premise that rape and abuse are only vaguely bad. It risks obscuring finer, important points from feminist consciousness-raising about why rape matters, how it has regrettably structured women’s choices and lives. Kennedy, by contrast, depicts rape as an emergency. 

The Secret History is not all about righteous vengeance, though. At times, I felt more like I was reading a mystery novel than a feminist polemic, to positive ends. It kept me focused on the issues at hand and excited to find out what happens next to Goddard and the other characters. Kennedy amusingly, but lovingly, clocks her subjects as crime drama archetypes, for instance, in a way that left me wanting to see how they’d fulfill or transcend their roles. Vitullo is the longtime public servant who, on one hand, does care, deep down. He just needs a kick in the pants from the new kid, the ambitious Goddard. She, along with her early collaborator Cynthia Gehrie, is sophisticated and mysterious, the kind of women who have to “fight off the men who swarmed around them, offering to buy them Harvey Wallbangers or show them around town,” before they find their real callings. 

Kennedy herself is the detective, haunted by Goddard and unable to focus on anything but “solving” her quasi-disappearance: 

“I was terribly worried about her. What the hell had happened to Marty Goddard? Did she have people looking out for her, or had she just been dumped somewhere?”

Her care toward Goddard and desire to find the truth make the text a genuine page-turner. Only rarely did Kennedy leave me wanting more. Near the end of her commemoration of modern anti-rape technology, Kennedy celebrates the app-based, telemedicine, “contactless” rape kits that became legally sound during the pandemic. Her uncaveated celebration of the “Margo kit,” a prototype for an at-home rape kit involving “software…downloaded to the phones of both the patient and the nurse,” alarms me. I have strong privacy concerns over the idea of an intimate, post-rape medical exam taking place through a video app.

On the other hand, is your phone knowing your sexual assault exam results any more invasive than the local cops knowing? I don’t think Kennedy’s celebration is wrong; it just stops short of engaging with the critical questions she poses well in, say, the author’s note about “victim” vs. survivor. Goddard’s collaboration with the Chicago police may too have benefited from more critical questions. Some readers will likely find Kennedy’s silence on the specific ethics of that partnership a stumbling point, though I did not find it exceptionally disturbing. Though she could be more direct about Goddard’s ethics, Kennedy does not hold back in her coverage of the police department’s abuses, from violently stalking feminists to the murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton.

Similarly, Kennedy describes how Goddard, with “only one choice” left, accepts funding to build kits from the Playboy Foundation. Kennedy, who is otherwise willing to perform well-informed but speculative psychoanalysis of Goddard’s mindsets, merely quotes her hero as saying she “had to put aside our feelings for objectification of women.” This partnership goes beyond accepting a few unpleasantries, though—Goddard accepted money from a man who had recently ordered a hit piece on feminists. If she wasn’t going to critically analyze this specific collaboration, I wish that Kennedy had, at least, offered more of this sordid context, as she did with Chicago cops. For better or worse, Goddard’s no-bullshit, delightfully impatient ethic of getting work done meant she did just that, even if her partnerships were less than ideal by the standards of police abolitionists, radical feminists, and others. 

Still, amid today’s backlashes against feminism, I find this kind of punched-up, hero story refreshing. In Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000), bell hooks writes that the world should have “T-shirts and bumper stickers and postcards and hip-hop music, television and radio commercials, ads everywhere and billboards, and all manner of printed material that tells the world about feminism.” I’m pretty certain hooks didn’t mean today’s redress slop, exactly, but well-crafted celebrations of feminism and its victories, such as what Pagan Kennedy succeeds in writing.