Behind a hospital curtain, under strip lighting, with a specialist nurse and a rape crisis volunteer at her side, Amanda Nguyen lay dazed and bruised. Her body and soul hurt in places she didn’t know could hurt. She felt icy cold but at the same time burning hot – she was, she said, a cold slab of meat while her insides were liquid magma. Yet from her hospital bed, she was expected to process information and make decisions that could change her life.
Just hours earlier, Nguyen, then 22, had been living her dream. “I was a student at Harvard, three months from graduation with the rest of my life in front of me,” she says. Her head was buzzing with two possible futures: her lifelong ambition of becoming an astronaut – astrophysics was her subject and she’d interned at Nasa aged 18 – or a career with the CIA, as a spy. She had been approached by a recruiter and started the process of onboarding. Then, a frat party had ended in rape – one so planned and precise that she is convinced her rapist had done it before – and here she was in the early hours, at a Harvard teaching hospital, her body suddenly a crime scene.
The nurse wanted to know if she would be pressing charges. Did Nguyen want evidence to be collected, a rape kit completed, did she feel able to undergo further intrusive procedures? And if so, would it be done in her name (how might this affect her future with Nasa or the CIA?) or did she want a “Jane Doe rape kit” with no name attached? An anonymous rape kit would be stored in case one day she chose to initiate a police report – the statute of limitations for prosecuting rape in Massachusetts is 15 years. Nguyen went for this option, then there were many tests done – blood count, microbiology tests, chemistry tests, a pregnancy test – and many pills given (about 30, including antibiotics, and hepatitis B and HIV prevention medication). Finally, she was discharged with a bill – $4,863.79 – as well as 65 pieces of paper: prescriptions and their side-effects, forms to sign, leaflets, a medical letter for university-work extensions. It was only later, back in her bedroom, that she found buried in them a devastating, nonsensical piece of information: all rape kits would be destroyed after six months.
“The statute of limitations is 15 years because it recognises that trauma takes time to process,” says Nguyen. “It allows a victim to revisit that justice. It gives grace to the experience of trauma. But destroying the rape kit after six months prevents a survivor from being able to access vital evidence. I learned that those kits aren’t even being processed. Why would I go through this invasive procedure for it to be destroyed before it’s even tested? In murder cases, cold cases are solved years later because evidence is not destroyed. So why was this particular crime that predominantly impacts women the one where evidence was chucked out?”
In the days that followed, Nguyen was also informed by her rape crisis volunteer that a prosecution would take on average two to three years and there was a 1% conviction rate. Was she ready to put her life on hold, freeze her applications and ambitions, for something with a 99% chance of failure? “The system was stacked against me, it felt rigged, and that felt like a greater betrayal to me than being raped,” she says. The person she had been just days before had vanished. “It was an elemental chemical transformation,” she says. “The life had gone out of me. I felt like a skeleton of that vivacious, happy young student. I was like a dried-up leaf and would never get back to being green and young.” She quietly laughs. “But I could transform into something else. It could become an ignition.”
Nguyen’s memoir, Saving Five, tells the story of that ignition. Ultimately, she built a team of survivors into a powerful grassroots movement, Rise, and together they wrote a Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, which included the right not to have your rape kit destroyed until the statute of limitations expired, and the right not to have to pay for it to be carried out. (For what other crime would you pay for evidence collection?) President Obama signed it into federal law in October 2016 – three years after Nguyen was raped. Since then, Rise has worked to guarantee the same protections in each state – it has successfully passed 91 laws over the last decade – and is also pursuing an international treaty that gives universal jurisdiction for rape cases. (This exists for drug crime, murder and torture but not sexual violence.) In 2019, Nguyen was nominated for the Nobel peace prize and in 2022, she was one of Time magazine’s women of the year. Nguyen is also an astronaut now, and will become the first Vietnamese woman to go to space when she flies on the forthcoming Blue Origin rocket launch this spring.
Saving Five is an account of trauma, rage and activism, and also a kind of guide through grief, which shows how every stage propelled Nguyen and served a purpose. More than this, though, the memoir goes further back to reveal how Nguyen became the person she is. If every student at Harvard is “driven”, then Nguyen was turbocharged. She arrived on her first day at college with her arm in a cast, having spent the previous night in hospital after an explosion of violence in her suburban California home. While other students hugged proud parents goodbye, Nguyen had police officers beside her and a no trespass order in place against her father.
Her original plan for Saving Five included none of this. “I wasn’t going to write about my parents at all,” she says. “The pivotal conversation that changed my entire trajectory was with Tara Westover, who wrote the memoir Educated. I asked her where she found the strength and bravery to write about people who had hurt her and who are still alive. She said: ‘If I can forgive them for my childhood, then they can forgive me for writing about it.’ I thought: ‘Wow. That’s right.’ I wanted to show the complicated nature of loving somebody who has hurt you, and also how surviving my childhood is the reason I had the skills to survive a broken criminal justice system.”
Nguyen’s parents met in the US, having both arrived as refugees after the fall of Saigon. They had left their country on small boats with no belongings and without most of their family members, using celestial navigation – their stories made the night sky magical for Nguyen from a young age. Nguyen’s father grew into a violent, angry, abusive man. While some childhood homes are marked by children’s heights noted on the wall, Nguyen says that hers was marked with head-shaped dents in the plaster. Entire days were spent with her mother in the local library or bookstore while they waited for her father to “cool down”. Before re-entering their home, her mum would always leave Nguyen outside while she checked it was safe. Nguyen would count the stars as she waited. “The idea of going to space meant an extra layer of promise to myself,” she says, “that I would find a way to escape.”
Harvard was her first haven as well as her whole future. “I had no safety net,” she says. “If I didn’t win that internship, if I didn’t get that scholarship, I had nothing to fall back on. That wiring pushed me to succeed – because success was my safety.” Nguyen didn’t go home in the holidays. She remained on campus and was given staff access. “I really did feel like Harry Potter because I lived there,” she says. “I had the Marauder’s Map! I could explore on my own terms; I got to know all the staff, the janitors, everyone. I was so happy to have built this life, with a community of friends and to be living that dream. That’s why what happened there, and the institutional betrayal that followed, felt all the more hurtful.”
From the moment she learned that her rape kit would be destroyed in six months’ time, Nguyen lived with a countdown. “It felt as if there was a clock above my head and I was never released from it,” she says. “It wasn’t in the background. It was a thundering tick that I heard every single day.” She wasn’t ready to press charges – she was barely able to leave her building – but nor could she stand the thought of losing all chance of future justice.
While slowly picking up her life, graduating, moving to Washington DC and undergoing long, secretive recruitment rounds with the CIA, Nguyen was simultaneously on a mission to save her rape kit. She was cold calling and emailing forensic labs, trying to locate it. Cambridge police directed her to Harvard University police who directed her back to Cambridge police. Finally, days before the six months were up, the kit was located and the lab agreed to extend the deadline. However, this guarantee couldn’t be emailed or posted to her. Instead, Nguyen had to fly from DC to Boston to pick up a piece of paper that said “request done and accepted”. After her initial relief, she realised that in six months’ time she’d have to do it all again.
Though Nguyen had never seen herself as an activist, she was one now. She started out by sending a group email, with almost everyone she knew copied in, setting out what she wanted to change and why. The response was overwhelming. Friends offered to build a website, to calculate the economic impact; a Harvard law team helped draft the bill. However, it was the messages from survivors that stood out. Women from across the country sent her their own stories. “They had experienced the terrible consequences of the criminal justice system being broken,” says Nguyen. One woman’s daughter had been raped and murdered by someone who had previously raped two other women. Their rape kits had been destroyed and never processed. “Maybe if they had, he would have been convicted and their daughter would have been saved,” says Nguyen. Another had been pursued by creditors demanding payment for her rape kit expenses. “Every one of the rights included in the bill was written for a woman on my team who had experienced the absolute tragedy of not having them.”
For Nguyen, this is key. “Although I don’t think there is a malicious legislator trying to make survivors jump through hoops,” she says, “I do think that there aren’t enough politicians and public servants who sit down with the communities they serve to work on these issues. If the people affected aren’t at the drafting table, then these huge gaps happen.” For this reason, Rise has also developed a 12-week training programme for activists who want to change the law and who come from the communities they wish to serve.
Pushing through the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act took up all of Nguyen’s life. She withdrew her CIA application. “It was all-consuming,” she says. “I ate, slept and dreamed it, and could not go anywhere without talking about it. I’m not saying that’s healthy but it was certainly a major factor for the momentum.” While 99% of bills don’t make it through Congress, this one passed unanimously. Although the senior counsel from the Senate judiciary suggested calling it Amanda’s Law, Nguyen wanted it to represent all survivors. “When it was voted through, it felt almost like an out of body experience,” she says. “It felt like a curse was breaking.”
In the years that followed, Nguyen got back to the life that had been derailed. She now fits Rise around her astronaut training. “I’m so excited to be part of this incredible, historic flight,” she says. One of her experiments in space will be around bleeding and menstruation – fluid absorption during different moments of gravity. “Historically, Nasa barred women from becoming astronauts and one of the reasons they cited the most was menstruation,” she says. “That’s why I’m doing it.”
Whether or not she will access her rape kit and press charges is a decision for the future. The point is, she has kept the door open. “I’ve given myself time,” she says. “We’ve rewritten the law to give my future self that choice. I’m just so grateful I screamed and the world listened.”
