The Job That Broke Me
Imagine walking into an office lined with trauma. A desk stacked with intake forms, counseling referrals, rape kit logs, paperwork that represents lives split open. You settle into your chair and look up. There, above you, is a photo of your boss. The Commander-in-Chief. A man who bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy."
That was my job.
I was a Sexual Assault Response Coordinator in the United States Marine Corps under President Donald J. Trump. My role was to advocate for survivors of sexual violence, many assaulted by people in their own command. My job was to help them navigate the system, believe in the chain of command, trust that justice was possible.
But how do you tell a survivor they matter when the most powerful man in the military doesn't? How do you ask someone to report when the President himself is the reason you stopped believing?
I joined the military at seventeen, fueled by hope and desperation. I believed the Marine Corps would harden the softest parts of me, make me stronger than the pain I carried from childhood abuse and unreported trauma. I became a C-130 pilot, one of the few women flying in a world designed by men for men. I never felt like I belonged, but I pushed harder anyway. Overachieving, overfunctioning, overcompensating. Hiding what hurt.
When I was tapped to serve as a victim advocate in the DoD's Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, I wasn't ready. I knew what it could trigger. But I said yes, because someone had to. Because I hadn't been believed, and I didn't want that for anyone else. Because I still believed change was possible.
Then Trump was elected.
The locker room talk he made famous returned to our actual locker rooms. Inappropriate jokes got louder. The quiet bigotry that had started to fade roared back, emboldened by the man at the top. And the portrait on the wall stopped being an image. It became a warning.
I sat with survivors who had been raped by fellow Marines. I held their hands as they detailed every violation. I stood beside them in offices where their truth was inconvenient. I watched their cases disappear, delayed, or quietly transferred away.
I never saw justice delivered. Not once.
Each case chipped away at my belief that the system could work. Every day, I wore the same uniform as the people who had hurt them. I wore it while watching their lives fall apart, knowing the only person being held accountable was the one telling the truth.
I left the service in 2019. Not because I was done, but because I couldn't keep pretending. In the civilian world, people didn't want to hear about military sexual trauma. They loved the troops… just not these troops. Not the ones who didn't make the system look heroic.
That silence is what I refuse to pass on to my daughters.
The Predator in Power
There is a soul-deep nausea that comes from realizing your Commander-in-Chief, whose face hangs in every military office, whose decisions determine your body, your mission, your war, is a known predator. Not whispered-known, but known in the way that sixteen women stepped forward with different names, different dates, but the same spine: he touched, grabbed, forced, entered, humiliated, and laughed.
I was pregnant with my first daughter when the Access Hollywood tape dropped. Not the first time I'd heard that talk, but the first time it was excused on a national stage by those meant to protect us from it. Election night, I held my newborn, believing she'd wake to the first woman president. Instead, she woke to a rapist in the Oval Office. I held her closer that morning, already knowing what I'd have to teach her about survival in a country that just told her she was worth less than a man's impulse to grab.
How do you say you matter when the man at the top brags about grabbing women's pussies and half the country says yeah but Hillary's emails?
I knew then what I feel in my bones now: this country doesn't just tolerate predators, it elects them, protects them, lets them rewrite history while survivors relive theirs until even the pain sounds rehearsed.
It wasn't just the tape. It was E. Jean Carroll testifying he shoved her against a wall and violated her. The civil jury believed her, confirmed the abuse, the lasting harm, yet headlines read jury does not find Trump guilty of rape as if fingers aren't weapons, as if the law didn't confirm what we knew: Donald Trump raped her, lied about it, then lied about the lie.
The pageant girls. The underage teens. Dressing rooms and unwelcome hands. Stories accumulating into background noise, ambient trauma. (Oh, and Epstein.)
Still, I wore the uniform. I sat across from survivors and told them to report, that it was safe, that the system would help. Then I'd return to my office, stare at his face, swallow my rage, and whisper I'm sorry into empty rooms, until one of my victims committed suicide, and I couldn't pretend anymore.
Because when a predator sits atop the chain of command, the whole tree rots. When a nation gives him nuclear codes and moral authority, it tells every survivor that what happened to them doesn't matter. Not as much as power. Not as much as keeping things comfortable for men who've always gotten away with it.
The Death of Integrity in Uniform
There is a particular betrayal that lives in the marrow when the men who tell you to respect the chain of command built that chain from silence, settlements, and redacted police reports. I'd settled into civilian life when Pete Hegseth—Fox News mouthpiece turned presidential echo chamber—was named Secretary of Defense. The same rage flared.
Not because it surprised me, but because it confirmed what I already knew: the rot wasn't isolated. It was institutional, with a seat at the highest table.
I read the report like a woman who had read too many. A conference, a hotel, a Republican women's afterparty. A woman blocked from leaving, her phone taken, memory returning in fragments—"I remember saying no a lot," she told police. If you've lived through it, you know exactly what that means.
She remembered his body, his dog tags. Trying to leave and being stopped. Waking on a couch or bed—some combination—because in trauma, time folds in on itself, and what you feel becomes the only thing you can trust.
Then came the familiar script: he says it was consensual, points to the drinking, acts surprised she came upstairs, claims she showed "signs of regret" but never specifies what those signs were. Power never does.
Police forwarded the case. The DA declined to prosecute. Not because she lied, but because she couldn't prove it beyond reasonable doubt. The bar for survivor credibility is so punishing that even remembering dog tags brushing your face as you said no isn't enough. You were drinking. You didn't scream. You apologized for his behavior at the pool, like we're trained to do when the man violating rules is more valuable than the woman holding truth. He paid her $50,000 like she was a prostitute, and the news moved on.
I remember Marines coming to me in whispered fear, asking what to do if someone powerful touched them, cornered them. I held their stories in my body while men like Hegseth smiled on television, got book deals, told the nation what patriotism sounds like—claiming women's service and DEI made the military weak and woke, not the abuse from men like him.
So no, I'm not shocked. But I am tired.
Tired of pretending our military is built on honor when it's propped by silence. Tired of watching integrity camouflage abuse. Tired of knowing the institutions that trained me to believe in justice will bend backward to protect the men dismantling it.
The Rot Runs Deep
There are stories so vile, so perfectly engineered for domination that your first instinct is to believe they're outliers—singular monsters, not blueprints. But dig into the Diddy trial and you realize this isn't exception but revelation. A spotlight on the putrid underbelly of a culture that rewards violence dressed as power, excuses abuse wrapped in fame, and repackages human suffering as spectacle to keep the empire's gears turning.
What else do you call decades of empire built on women's backs and bodies? A man who documented degradation, orchestrated rooms like stages, performances like rituals, pain like proof? Who used money, cameras, and cachet not just to exploit but to entrap, archive, warn?
Still, people asked: where's the evidence?
As if a woman's broken memory isn't the most damning record. As if Cassie watching herself beaten in hallway footage, crying "Yes, he beat me during the freak offs," isn't a generation choking on silence. As if 900 bottles of lube, weapons caches, footage cataloged like trophies, freak offs directed like pornographic war crimes weren't enough to name this—not just assault, rape, or trafficking—but ritualized power, a system so familiar it barely registers as criminal until the archive goes public.
Even with guilty verdicts, survivor testimony, juries affirming what the public struggles to hold—the culture hesitates. People wonder if he's framed, if these women lie, if this is just what happens in those circles. In that doubt, the rot grows.
This isn't about one man. It's the infrastructure of impunity. How predators are protected when fame serves the system. How women must choose between safety and survival, between truth and belief, between breaking silence and being broken by it.
I think about how long it took, how many women had to publicly shatter for one man's partial accountability. Not for everything he did, not every life warped, but the few stories meeting legal thresholds—the narrow sliver of horror fitting inside admissible pain.
That's the rot. Not hidden. Not fringe. Not new.
It's American power's architecture—patriarchy industrialized, rape culture institutionalized, violence commodified, silence monetized.
I Told Her No
My daughter looked up at me with that grin she gets when she wants to make me proud—eyes lit like she's already halfway to grown—and said, "Maybe I'll join the military someday. Be strong like you, Mama."
Something broke in me so suddenly I almost missed it. Not pride—panic. Not legacy—a fucking warning bell.
I didn't say "That's amazing" or "Let's talk about it."
I said no.
Hard, sharp, gut-level. Not you. Not ever. Not in this uniform. Not after everything I've seen.
Because I don't want her to become my victims. Women walking from sterile rooms after trauma exams, handing underwear in Ziploc bags, wiping tears off discharge papers, whispering reports in half-sentences while their command looked away.
I don't want her to become Vanessa, whose name sits in my throat like a splinter. Twenty years old. Bludgeoned to death in the armory by a coworker. Dismembered. Burned. Buried in pieces along a riverbed while the Army fed her family lies and logistics.
I don't want my daughter silenced by a chain of command that treats rape as PR problems, told to report up the ladder where her predator sits, outranking her. Gaslit by an institution so invested in order it lets women die for appearances. Her spirit withering under "This is just how it is," spending her youth surviving a culture that calls itself honorable while protecting the men who destroy us.
I don't want her afraid to sleep in her own barracks, carrying pepper spray in one hand and a chain-of-command flowchart in the other, praying one keeps her alive.
Vanessa told people she was being harassed. She didn't file formally—she was afraid. Retaliation is real. Her mother was undocumented. Every woman in uniform weighs the cost of speaking up. Silence is safer. Until it isn't.
They passed legislation in her name, renamed a gate. But the rot remains—at Fort Hood, the Pentagon, every institution teaching young women to equate service with silence, convincing girls like mine that strength means swallowing pain and calling it patriotism.
So no, baby girl. Not for this country. Not for a flag that lets its daughters be buried in pieces. Not unless it becomes something worthy of you.
I Think About It Every Day
I once had a superior who'd beaten his girlfriend publicly in a mall—charges dropped, wrist slapped. He cornered me in his office over a clerical error, berating me while my mind couldn't function in his presence. He was an abuser, and I had to report to him. No one saw the conflict.
I used to believe silence was strength. That if I never spoke it out loud, it couldn't take more from me. That buried under ambition, armor, and resilience, I'd be fine. The exception. The survivor.
But survival isn't silence, and silence isn't strength. The truth is—I was sexually assaulted by a Marine ten years older when I was still underage. I never told anyone until after I left the service, because that's how the system trains you: to believe your body is patriotism's collateral cost.
No trial. No justice. No fallout for him. Just a form filled out years later, when speaking was safe but too late to matter. A checkbox on a military database—yes, this happened; yes, it affected you; now go back to your life.
And I did. I kept going, believing the lie that silence makes things disappear.
It didn't ruin my life, but it rewired my nervous system. Changed how I flinch when men raise their voices. Taught me to scan rooms before entering, laugh when uncomfortable, hold my breath when alone with someone who outranks me.
Two decades later, I think about it every fucking day.
I think about how many of us exist. How many stories stay untold, names never make headlines, reports die in inboxes of people who want problems to disappear. How many women in uniform right now calculate the math between career and safety, loyalty and survival.
I used to ask, how the fuck did we get here?
But now I know.
We were built for war. Not truth. Not justice. And definitely not women.
About the Author
I’m Alisa Sieber; a writer, veteran, and relentless question-asker, exposing the patterns of power, control, and resistance that shape our world. My work blends personal reckoning with systemic critique, challenging the narratives we’ve been told and demanding we ask harder questions.
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