LOS ANGELES _ The buzz of the lights. That is all you can hear in this big gymnasium, the buzz of the lights overhead and the sound of Brenda Tracy's voice, which remains steady even as she begins to cry.
Her gaze shifts to the floor, if only for a moment. Standing alone on an empty basketball court, she straightens up and looks at the hundreds of people watching from the stands.
Dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, Tracy resumes telling them about the night so long ago when she stopped by a friend's apartment. She recalls the football players who were there, how they persuaded her to have a drink, how she passed out a short time later.
"The first time I regained consciousness, I became immediately aware I was laying on my back on the floor," she says. "I was naked and I couldn't move my arms or legs."
The man on her left tried to force her to have oral sex. So did the man on her right.
"So I turned from them and looked up and the third man was raping me," she says. "And I remember feeling like I was trying to say or yell 'Stop.'"
Twenty years later, this is what the 45-year-old mother of two does, traveling the country to stand before strangers and share her most awful memory. She has appeared before 110,000 fans at Michigan's football stadium and 15 or so players on a basketball team. This crusade, which started years before the #MeToo movement, takes her any place where people will listen.
On this night, at Sacramento State, the school has made attendance mandatory for all of its athletes. A half-hour earlier, the 500 or so young men and women walked in chatting, laughing, searching for friends to sit beside; now they have fallen quiet, leaning forward, some of them lowering their heads.
Tracy has no memorized speech, no notes or litany of statistics about sexual violence in America. She hits her audience with something different: sheer honesty, a graphic and unflinching description of that night.
"The next time I came into consciousness, one of the men was cradling me in his arm and he was pouring a bottle of hard alcohol down my throat and I was choking and gagging on it," she says. "And I passed out again."
In theory, this was supposed to get easier for her _ the telling _ but it hasn't. Wiping away tears, she says: "I've shared my story at least 80 times, and I cannot go back into that apartment and tell you what they did to me without feeling this intense amount of shame and embarrassment and pain."
