Daisy Coleman, a survivor of rape who became an advocate for sexual assault victims, has committed suicide at the age of 23.
Daisy was only 14 when she was raped. She was a new girl in school, and made the mistake of sneaking out of her home Maryville, MO with her thirteen year old friend to meet with a high school senior on the football team named Matthew Barnett:
“Daisy and her friend slipped out a window and went to Barnett’s house. Daisy drank a big glass of something. She doesn’t remember what happened next. Her 13-year-old friend went into a bedroom with a 15-year-old boy, who later told the police that “although the girl said ‘no’ multiple times, he undressed her, put a condom on and had sex with her.” Daisy was carried out of a bedroom where she’d been with Barnett “unable to speak coherently.” The boys drove the girls home. The 13-year-old and three of the boys told the police Daisy was crying when she was carried to the car. Her mother found her scratching at the front door in the early morning. The boys had told the 13-year-old to go inside, saying they’d wait with Daisy until she sobered up. They left her outside in a T-shirt and sweatpants. She’d been out for about three hours, in 22-degree weather. Melinda Coleman, a veterinarian whose husband, a doctor, had died in a car accident six years earlier, sounds like she did everything right. She gave her daughter a warm bath, noticed signs of rape or sex, called 911, and took Daisy to the hospital.” (Bazelon, 2013)
The police officers who investigated the rape, including Sheriff Darren White, did a thorough and competent investigation, after which he “felt confident the office had put together a case that would ‘absolutely’ result in prosecutions … Within four hours, we had obtained a search warrant for the house and executed that … We had all of the suspects in custody and had audio/video confessions” (Bazelon, 2013). With the confessions of the rapists, surely this sexual assault was beyond contestation and slut shaming could not be employed to excuse it? Sadly, no.
Matthew Barnett, the grandson of a local political figure, and his family were popular in Maryville and the town rallied around the rapist. They didn’t want this poor boy’s life ruined just because some trollop snuck out of her house and got herself raped. In spite of the evidence, in March of 2012 Nodaway County prosecutor Robert Rice did not charge Matthew Barnett with a crime of any kind. Instead, Daisy Coleman was slut shamed and bullied so viciously that she tried to commit suicide. The whole Coleman family was targeted so brutally by the good townsfolk of Maryville that Daisy’s widowed mother (who had been fired from her job) had to flee the area with her children. The Coleman house then burned down in “mysterious” circumstances. The only thing Maryville failed to do while driving the family out on a rail was to tar and feather them.
The case was only reopened when it came to national attention following an article in the Kansas City Star by reporter Dugan Arnett and the scrutiny of the hacker activists group Anonymous. The information uncovered was so bad that one article in The New Republic journalist Michael Schaffer was boldly titled “Maryville, Missouri Is a Lawless Hellhole”. Due to international outcry, a special prosecutor named Jean Peters Baker was assigned to investigate the rape in October of 2013. After a few months of searching, Baker “did not file sexual assault charges due to there being a lack of evidence to pursue the charge” and because “she also took into account the large amount of unrest the case has caused in Maryville” (Green, 2013). Did the audio/video confessions evaporate? One can only assume.
When the travesty of Matthew Barnett’s escape from punishment became wider public knowledge, there was enough of an outcry to finally earn the rapist a slap on the wrist for his crimes. In January of 2014, Matthew Barnett – who was a student at the University of Central Missouri and had gotten to go back to his nice, normal life after raping Daisy and destroying the Coleman family before the world found out about his vile actions – plead guilty to the misdemeanor charge of endangering the welfare of a child and received a suspended sentence of probation for two years for his crime.
If you go by the punishment received, Daisy’s “crime” of telling the cops she was raped is worse than the rape itself. Is it any wonder so many rape victims are reluctant to report their assaults?
However, even the light punishment Matthew Burnett received was too much according to his family and defenders. The Daily Mail (I will no support the tabloid by linking to the article here) ran headlines wailing “‘MY son is the victim here’: Teacher mother of football player at center of Maryville rape case breaks her silence”. The article sympathetically asserts that “Barnett’s parents have furiously protested his innocence, painting him as the victim and urged people to dig beneath the surface to find the truth.” The Daily Mail further supported the Burnett family’s POV with articles like “’U wanna come drink wit me and chill?’ Maryville ‘rape victim suggested she would swap sexual favors for alcohol with teen she alleges assaulted her,’ police files reveal.” Because nothing says the promise of ‘sexual favors’ like the word chill?
Nor where Burnett’s parents the only ones claiming Daisy had been ‘asking for it’ by getting drunk, or had consented to sex by leaving her house. In a quote to the Kansas City Star, “another parent of one of the teens at the Barnett house that night was the only one to comment briefly to The Star: “Our boys deserve an apology, and they haven’t gotten it yet.”” Apparently it was super mean to call Matthew Burnett a rapist, or to say something bad about the boy that filmed the rape, or imply it wasn’t nice to be the kind of teen boy who stood by and snickered while Matt Burnett raped Daisy Coleman. Gee, why did Matthew Burnett and the other boys turned out to be the kind of people who think a football player is entitled to rape drunk children? Could it possibly be their parent’s justifying their sons’ behavior at all costs?
As it so happens, in spite of Burnett’s parents pleading that they wanted the ‘truth’, they were not thrilled by the truth uncovered in the 2016 Netflix documentary Audrey & Daisy. Neither, I assume, were the parents of the other rape-enablers happy with the documentary, which exposed them, their sons, and most of Maryville, MO as bullies and monsters determined to destroy a rape victim and her family for the sin of speaking out. As the documentarians pointed out, “This community just wanted to expel the family from within, torture them to the point where they had to leave town. We couldn’t believe that was going on in our country.”
However, the rapist Matthew Burnett, his co-conspirators, and the people of Maryville, MO who insisted he and his male friends should be spared punishment while the rape victim was slut-shamed into silence, should be pleased now. Daisy Coleman has paid the ultimate price for speaking out against her rapist. She has been tormented into taking her own life, a death sentence handed down by the rape enablers of Maryville, MO. I hope the whole community is super proud of itself, and give each other extra hugs next time they meet up in one of the town’s plethora of churches.