Actor and rape survivor Mo Culberson helps train doctors to treat other rape survivors.
Mauree "Mo" Culberson loved physics and chemistry when she was younger. While helping her physics teacher hang lights for the theater department a spotlight hit her on a dark stage and she's been performing ever since. Mauree is a writer, storyteller, and performer. She earned her degree in Theatrical Design and Technology and English from the University of Mississippi. Mauree has written for The Atlanta Fringe Festival, the Working Title Playwrights 24 Hour Play Festival and Emory University’s Brave New Works. She has shown her skills as a puppeteer, actor, comic, and improviser in Atlanta. The interaction of art and science continues to be her muse.
This story originally aired February 2, 2018 in an episode titled “Recovery.”
Story Transcript
So I am sitting in a chair and I’m wearing a summer dress. I don't have a bra on. I’m just sitting there on my summer dress and I’m fidgeting and I’m shaking. I’m trying my absolute best, but when the healthcare workers walk into this doctor’s office that I’m sitting in, I do everything possible except for make direct eye contact with them.
Now, I am shaking. The doctor has a clipboard and he's asking me questions about my story. He's trying to get my story out of me and I cry at some point. He reaches out to touch me and I jerk back a couple of feet.
So I’m sitting there in this chair and he's asking me all these different questions. He seems nervous to me as well, but he's making it through it. He's kind of mumbling his words and kind of stammering over some of them, but that’s because I’m telling him my story of sexual assault.
Now, all of a sudden he asked me to stand on this sheet. I stand on the sheet and a nurse holds up a sheet for my modesty and I have to take off all of my clothes. As I’m taking of all of my different clothes, my shoes, my panties, my dress, different parts are being placed into bags and then sealed and then handled very carefully with gloved hands. Then they hand me their hospital gown and I've got to put the hospital gown on behind the sheet.
Then I put the hospital gown on and I’m still a little shaky. Finally, they ask me to sit on the exam table. And I sit on the exam table and I start to breathe a sigh of relief. That sigh of relief is very important because I now get to be, instead of the actress that I am as the raped character that they have just interviewed, I get to be Mo. The me in me.
I work as a standardized patient. If you don’t know what a standardized patient is that is people who pretend to be sick, crazy, whatever, for doctors-in-training.
So I’m on the exam table and I’m sitting there finally kind of relaxing because I get to be more of the me in me, because the story part is over. However, the me in me is actually a sexual assault victim -- survivor, I think, is what you're supposed to call it now. I will tell you, back when this happened to me, I had absolutely no chance at justice. And I definitely remember them telling me my character searched for her cell phone. When this happened to me, I hadn’t even seen a cell phone in real life yet so I didn’t even know what they looked like. But I will tell you, she definitely had a better chance at justice than I did.
I remember being very scared and running through a forest and getting all scratched up and hearing cars and being like, “That’s gotta be a street or highway,” and running towards it. I got really lucky because, when I’m stumbling through this forest at nighttime, a police cop cruiser friend of mine just happened to come by and he, thankfully, let me fall into the back of his police cruiser and bleed and cry while he drove me back to campus. Now, we had a moment because he did ask me if I wanted to go to a hospital and report it. I definitely didn’t report what happened to me, but he did ask me if I wanted to report it and I laughed at him.
I said, “You know, I might be the one that’s drunk but you're the one who sounds crazy.” Luckily, he took that comment all in stride, but that’s the last he mentioned of it. But I knew there was no way for me to get justice because I was an under-aged black girl in a small town in Mississippi. He drove me back to town.
But back in the simulation, my job is to teach doctors-in-training how to deal with this, how to take a history and do a pelvic exam and handle a rape kit. If you have never seen a rape kit before, I will tell you. Before this particular simulation, I also had never seen a rape kit before and I will tell you it has way too many parts.
There is a moment where I am on the exam table and there are Styrofoam cups with Q-tips sticking out labeled with different places that they have swabbed on me and there's little slides they're supposed to swab and then those are supposed to be sealed and labeled again with those carefully gloved hands and signed multiple times to make sure there's no tampering. I’m telling you, there's just way too much stuff, way more stuff than you ever wanted to know about.
But I will tell you, the me in me, Mo, one of the things that I did find out after being a sexual assault victim survivor, whatever it’s called, I will tell you one of the things that I did find out is that you and I, if you ever happen to be in my shoes, you lose all of your modesty. When I say you lose all of your modesty I mean I could change clothes completely. I could strip all the way down with you, your grandmother and the queen all in the same room, no problem.
That modesty thing has been an issue so what I generally try to do is I generally try to look around for other ladies to find out what the modesty level is supposed to be. It’s a little hard for me because a handful are theater ladies and they are not the most modest people I know, but I will tell you I take my cues from the other people around me.
But lacking that modesty has helped me because I have done these simulations before where new doctors-in-training are doing pelvic exams for the first time. So I’m generally sitting on an exam table in a room filled with twenty to thirty soon-to-be or already-are doctors and I am getting a full breast exam and a pelvic exam. Then they all stand up, and I actually encourage this from all, to get into a little kindergarten line and go one by one in front of the exam table and then look down and look and see their first or second real-life cervix ever. By the way, I haven't seen my cervix, but I assume it’s amazing because sometimes they say thank you.
But I will tell you this. They say thank you, but the problem that I have with that moment of all of the folks going by is that I can’t stay awake. I keep falling asleep during this part.
Because I have the kind of background that I do, being a survivor, that means that I have a lot of anxiety. I have a real hard time sleeping. Sometimes, in the beginning, there were a lot of flashbacks and stuff. But after you get over all of that stuff, then all the dreams are like regular, normal human crap. You walk outside of your door and you get hit by a bus in your dream. It wakes you up. You walk outside of your door and you're standing on a balcony. That’s really worrisome. I don't know why. Wakes you up. You think about a loved one or a friend or something in danger who’s totally not in danger, but in your brain they are. So that wakes you up. So you don’t get a lot of sleep.
You drop a cup of water in your own kitchen and you cry like the world has ended. But nonetheless, Mo, wipe that up. Get it together. Tomorrow go to your day job. Go smile at strangers while they are slightly uncomfortable that you're not letting your co-worker help them out even though your co-worker’s like faking an illness so they can leave early.
But nonetheless, put your stuff in your bag, get on the train, ride on down to the fake doctor’s office and be there completely naked and lying on the exam table and people like, “Oh, she's producing tears.” “Oh, man, she's really in character.” And, “Why can’t she stay awake?” It’s because that moment may be the most peaceful moment of my whole day.
Now, back in the simulation, I want to be the person that people make mistakes on. When people say the wrong thing or the doctor tries to touch a newly victimized person and I get to be the person to recoil, I want those things to happen to me so that maybe the next survivor might not have to deal with these things.
But back in the simulation, with the brand-new rape kit, there I am. We’re finishing up and, luckily, we’re simulating a lot of the rest of the rape kit because some of it involves plucking out twenty-five to fifty hairs out of your head with the root intact and then combing through your pubic hair to put all the dried bits in a little napkin and then putting that inside of a plastic bag and labeling it again with those carefully gloved hands. Then maybe plucking out twenty-five to fifty pubic hairs, again, with the root intact.
Now, this may be hard to listen to, but think about if this happened to you on the day where you had the worst human interaction, I hope, in your whole life. It’s pretty insane.
So I’m sitting there in the simulation and the poor, bless him, doctor-in-training is there about to be in a really awkward moment of truth where he's about to insert the speculum. He's got the gloves and the speculum and the lube and the light. It’s a lot of stuff, people. There's a stool. You got to be sanitary. He's got everything going.
Then I hear what I think is his nervousness because I hear this little sound, tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. And that is the speculum on the Mayo stand tapping and tapping and tapping. I’m really relaxed, but I’m pretty sure he's not. But then we get through it. There's some laughter. There's some missteps, but, again, I can smile and correct those right here, right now in this simulation.
So there I am. He's taking the appropriate swabs. Again, putting them in those slides and all of a sudden we hear in this very intense moment outside of the fake doctor’s office door, dum-dum-dum, “Maintenance.” And the door swings wide open.
Everybody else in the room is all a-flurry, mortified and the poor 55 to 60-year-old man who has just opened the door, he and I have now made eye contact. But in between he and I are my feet still in the stirrups with the gown on and the sheet and speculum in there and I can’t stop laughing. I am laughing so hard I don't hear anything he says; I don't hear anything anybody else says. I laugh so hard my knees go together, speculum pops out, hits the floor. Now, it’s a big mess and our moment is over.
Everyone is mortified and, I will tell you, in future simulations now that that has happened, they now turn the exam table the other way so that it’s no longer facing the door. But I will tell you this. I know that that maintenance man and all the people involved and the lady running the event, everybody is mortified. But I will tell you this. When I think about it, I think what’s more mortifying than a new sexual assault victim having to tell their story to strangers over and over again because you might have to tell it to the doctor then the social worker. Then you have to take off your clothes and you get swabbed forty million times. You get plucked and photographed and swabbed like you're the criminal, but it’s because your body is the evidence. But you're getting violated again and then you're getting another foreign object of the day inserted into you. Maybe that’s the most horrifying part.
But what I can do with my lack of modesty is I can help these doctors-in-training and when they do the wrong thing, when they use the word “maybe” when they definitely shouldn’t be using the word “maybe” in that scenario, I can smile at them and I can correct that. I can correct when they try to touch somebody who just definitely got touched when they didn’t want to. I can correct that. I can take a couple of those maybes away because it’s really all science, right? You're gathering data, you're taking the story. I want to take just a few of those maybes away on the other side for the doctors-in-training so that maybe the next sexual assault victim won’t have to worry about anything, and also the maintenance guy.