How one young woman was raped by her date who encouraged other men to join in the act
Jane* came home bleeding and barefoot after the attack but she ignored the bruises until evidence she'd been raped was irrefutable
THE room fell silent as the 12 members of the jury walked back into the Metro Courthouse in Nashville in April.
After over four hours of deliberations, they’d reached a verdict.
Brandon Vandenburg, the tall, heavyset 23 year old on trial, raised his head, while his mother burst into tears.
Her son was found guilty on all counts: five of aggravated rape, two of aggravated sexual battery and one of unlawful photography.
On the other side of the room, Jane*, a blonde 24 year old, visibly exhaled.
Her shoulders shook with relief and for the first time in three years of court proceedings, a tentative smile flickered across her face.
Sources close to Jane maintain that her life was straightforward up until June 2013.
She was studying neuroscience at Vanderbilt Unversity – dubbed the “Harvard of the South” – and was on the cheerleading squad.
On Saturday nights, she and her roommate Lauren Miller would have a few drinks in their campus flat before heading out into Nashville.
The weekend of June 22, 2013, was no different.
They had drinks at home then went to the Tin Roof bar on Demonbreun Street with friends Katie White and Julianna Martel.
“It was just a normal night,” said Lauren in a court interview in January 2015.
“[Jane] was just her normal, happy self.”
By midnight, the bar was crowded with students knocking back vodka and Red Bull.
Inside, Jane spotted the guy she’d been dating for a few weeks – Vandenburg, a Californian on a football scholarship.
He’d only been at Vanderbilt for a few weeks, but was already considered a “Vandy Boy”.
He got her a cinnamon-flavoured shot and a gin and tonic before buying her a California Iced Tea – a famously lethal concoction of rum, tequila, gin and vodka.
Earlier that day, Vandenburg had sent a text to his friend Joseph Quinzio, bragging that he was going to “make sure” he had sex that night.
By the time Vandenburg handed her drink number three, Jane’s friends were leaving to make the 20-minute walk back to campus.
Lauren asked her to text if she needed anything, but reassured that her roommate was safe with her almost-but-not-quite boyfriend, she headed home.
“They’d been hanging out for a little bit so we trusted him,” says Lauren.
Jane’s vision began to cloud after she was passed a bright-blue drink.
After a couple of sips, she suddenly felt drunk. Then she blacked out.
Lieutenant Donnie Harville, a member of the Vanderbilt university police, was used to scrolling through security videos.
On Monday June 24, he was asked to analyse CCTV after a heavy door on the second floor of Gillette Hall (a hall of residence) had been kicked in a couple of nights earlier.
When faced with the footage, he discovered that at around 2.30am on Sunday morning, four students had half-carried, half-dragged an apparently unconscious girl into room 213.
Over the next couple of hours, those men, and others, entered the room fully clothed and left in their boxers.
That was until 3.41am, when Vandenburg walked out into the hallway and threw a towel over the CCTV camera.
Inside room 213, Jane was being raped, assaulted and urinated on at the hands of Vandenburg and three fellow students: Cory Batey, then 19, Brandon Banks, then 19, and Jaborian “Tip” McKenzie, then 18 – all of whom he had run into when he’d needed help carrying Jane up the stairs.
Later, hundreds of thousands of people would watch the videos the foursome made of her unconscious body being dumped on the floor of his room.
People would learn how a water bottle had been inserted inside her, how condoms were passed around like candy, and how the guy she’d been falling for had egged the other men on, before filming the assault and sending it to his friends.
“Dog, kick that bitch out or gang bang her,” one of his mates, Miles Finley, had replied.
At 8am the next day, Jane woke up alone in Vandenburg’s bunk bed.
“I felt very out of it,” she’d say later.
“It was horrible, horrible.”
She texted him to see what happened.
Vandenburg had his story ready.
She’d been so drunk, he’d had to take her back to his place.
She’d thrown up all over his dorm room and he had to clear it up.
As he reprimanded her, Jane felt nauseous and embarrassed and apologised repeatedly.
They’d only met at a recruitment fair one month before, and Vandenburg was already touted as the university sports hero.
But here she was – vomit caked in her hair, smeared make-up and a hangover from hell.
Looking round the room, she couldn’t even see the black heels she’d worn to go out.
He told her he’d forgive her this time.
When Jane walked in the door of her student flat an hour later, barefoot and bleeding from a gash on her knee, Lauren recoiled in shock at her appearance.
But Jane shrugged it off.
Vandy students worked hard and played hard, and anyway, she was 21.
Slowly, she cleaned herself up, avoiding the places on her face and legs that felt newly bruised, which she put down to drunken stumbles.
Then she reluctantly went out with her friends for brunch.
A few hours later, Vandenburg texted asking Jane to come over.
He seemed “nicer than usual”, she thought, and he initiated sex, which surprised her after he’d seemed so annoyed earlier. Then she left.
By then, on a campus of only 12,000 students, rumours had already started about the supposed scandal that had happened in Gillette Hall the night before.
One guy reckoned he’d been texted a video of four guys assaulting an unconscious girl, but claimed he’d deleted it because he didn’t want that kind of “horrific” thing on his phone.
Somebody else was told that Vandenburg had orchestrated the whole thing.
But even when Jane heard her name being thrown around, she dismissed it.
She would know if she’d been assaulted.
“I’ll do everything I can to clear your name,” she texted Vandenburg reassuringly.
“My biggest concern at the time was trying to protect him,” she explained quietly in court later.
“I was worried about him getting kicked off the football team.”
In the end, it came down to the detectives.
Convinced something sinister had gone on in room 213, Lieutenant Horville reported it to the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department, who immediately launched a sex crimes investigation.
As they gathered evidence – obtaining a search warrant for the room and another to seize all the men’s phones – Vandenburg actively began destroying anything incriminating.
He deleted the videos and photos of Jane and Googled: “Can police recover deleted picture messages?”
He texted Batey, Banks and McKenzie about how to cover their tracks.
He even went to California and threw Finley’s phone in a lake.
Meanwhile, Jane was getting worried. The police had contacted her and rumours were getting worse.
It took three days for her to agree to speak to them.
At the police station, she panicked and refused to hand over her phone, worried she’d be getting Vandenburg into trouble.
“I wasn’t in pain like I’d been sexually assaulted,” she told them.
But the next day police detective Jason Mayo had accumulated enough evidence to break the news to Jane, arranging to meet her at the campus crisis centre.
“In the presence of counsellors, I informed her that she had been raped or sexually assaulted,” he recalls, adding that she was “visibly upset” and cried a lot before agreeing to undergo examination in hospital.
Learning the truth, she agreed to press charges.
The faculty at Vanderbilt suspended Vandenburg, Banks, Batey and McKenzie from campus and Jane didn’t see Vandenburg again until his trial 18 months later.
In court on January 22, 2015, she was shown images police had found on Vandenburg’s phone, along with videos from the security camera. Most of the footage she’d never seen.
“That’s me,” she said tearfully, adding she’d experienced many “dark times” since the assault.
Since then, Jane has sat through three trials, each lasting up to nine days, as strangers are shown images of her naked body being assaulted. She sat in front of Vandenburg as he pleaded not guilty and heard his lawyers argue that because he was drunk too, he shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions.
“Brandon Vandenburg didn’t know that even though he was 6ft 6in tall he would get in over his head,” the defence claimed, saying he covered the CCTV camera up out of fear.
“To be honest,” said Vandenburg, “I wasn’t thinking clearly and there was a girl passed out in my room. And I didn’t think it was the best image, I guess.”
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Jane also had to deal with the initial trial – which tried both Vandenburg and Batey at the same time and found them both guilty – being thrown out because at the time a member of the jury hadn’t disclosed they’d been a victim of sexual assault.
At the second trial this April, Batey was found guilty of four counts of aggravated rape, two counts of aggravated sexual battery and one of attempted aggravated rape.
When the footage was shown, a tearful Jane doubled over in court and appeared to vomit.
Meanwhile, Banks and McKenzie are yet to be tried – and Jane is expected to testify at least twice more.
However, what has surprised people is that while Brock Turner received just six months for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman behind
a campus dumpster, Vandenburg is looking at a sentence of up to 25 years.
According to investigator Bonnie Russell, this is down to the determination of the Nashville police force to protect Jane, alongside the cooperation of Vanderbilt University.
“Misogyny and rape are baked into American culture,” explains Bonnie, who has spent three years researching the Vanderbilt trial in a bid to
raise awareness of gender inequality within the American judicial system which she fights for on her blog.
“That’s why this case is such a big deal. The details are disgusting, but the way the police acted was exceptional. They consistently put the victim first.”
For Jane and her friends – one of whom admitted to Fabulous that they’re only just starting to come to terms with the disgust they felt for the men they previously considered friends (they were in the cheerleading squad, and the men were all on the football team) – the recent verdict is a long time coming.
Jane is currently working towards her neuroscience PHD, but after graduating with honours from Vanderbilt, she was forced to move to
a different state as, while her identity was protected by the media, it was impossible to keep it a secret on campus.
It also didn’t help that Vandenburg’s defence team continued to use her real name in court, even though they knew the proceedings were being live-streamed online.
“She is one of the strongest people I know,” says assistant district attorney general Jan Norman, prosecuting in the trial.
“The media scrutiny every single time there was a hearing, everything being streamed and people commenting… She has incredible courage.”
Meanwhile, as she tries to look to the future, Jane has only one thing to say publicly: “I want to remind other victims of sexual violence: you are not alone. You are not to blame.”
*Name has been changed