Joanna Connors was thirty years old and married when she was raped by a stranger on an empty stage in Cleveland in 1984.
She went on to raise a family and build a career as a reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Now, almost a quarter century later, Joanna Connors has written the biggest story of her life — about that rape, and its many years of consequences, in her life and the lives around her.
She tried to bury the memory, she says, but it wouldn’t go away. Not close.
This hour, On Point: One woman speaks out, loud and clear, on the long road back from rape.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Joanna Connors, reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, in Cleveland, Ohio. She writes about her own rape in 1984 in a series entitled “Beyond Rape: A Survivor’s Journey.”
Veronica Reed Ryback, clinical instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, former director of the Rape Crisis and Intervention Program at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
