'I am a survivor,' sexual assault survivor says as attacker gets 25 years
“I am a survivor.”
A 46-year-old Schaumburg woman who was sexually assaulted and strangled by a man she has known half her life — who was beaten by that man so severely her eyes swelled shut; who spent a week in the hospital and months in therapy recovering from his kicks and punches — wrote those words in the victim impact statement she delivered this week at his sentencing hearing.
Convicted last month of aggravated criminal sexual assault and aggravated domestic battery following a bench trial before Cook County Judge Joel Greenblatt, Demetrius Singleton, the woman's longtime boyfriend and father of her two youngest children, was sentenced to 25 years in prison Tuesday.
“I am no longer a victim. I am a survivor,” the woman wrote in her lengthy, detailed statement, in which she described the attack of Aug. 29, 2014, as “the day I tried to protect myself from the hands of someone I trusted, someone I spent half my life with and someone I thought loved me.”
Prosecutors say Singleton, 43, attacked the woman after an argument during which he complained she put other people ahead of him. Their youngest child, who tried several times to enter the bedroom where Singleton was pummeling the woman, heard his mother crying and pleading with Singleton to stop. Distraught, the little boy cried and screamed for his mother on the other side of the locked bedroom door, according to the woman's statement. Their older daughter and the woman's son were away at the time.
Unable to believe her attacker was the same man who six days earlier threw her a graduation party, she initially thought she was dreaming.
“But when I came to after the first time he strangled me, he was standing over me with a look of hate and I knew it was real,” she wrote.
Describing the sexual assault as the “most humiliating, demeaning, disturbing encounter a woman can ever endure,” she said it inflicted emotional as well as physical wounds.
She wrote of spending months in therapy learning to walk again and even longer recovering from the loss of dignity, self respect and ability to trust and the blame she placed on herself.
Singleton might have thought to break her, she wrote, but the experience strengthened her.
“You tried to silence me,” she wrote, “but I found my voice. I will no longer be quiet or hold back from speaking the truth.”
Describing the myriad ways her children and family rallied around her, she expressed her gratitude to them. She praised and thanked Schaumburg police officers and detectives; prosecutors and victim advocates; paramedics, medical personnel and therapists; and her neighbors — practically strangers — who took her in after she ran to them bloodied after Singleton fled the home. (He was arrested on a warrant last year in Champaign).
Thanking her pastor and church family, she referenced her strengthened faith and forgiveness, which she offered to the man who once shared her life.
“We are the ones who suffer when we choose not to forgive and I've already suffered enough by you.”