Elizabeth Smart will speak about her abduction and forgiveness March 8 in Fort Wayne.“It was Sept. 5, 2008, and it happened at home. I was at my sink doing my dishes,” says Nicole Kimmet, 30, as she begins her story.
In broad daylight, someone came up behind her and whacked her on the back of her head. She doesn’t know with what.
“My jaw hit the edge of the sink and I dropped to the floor. That’s the last thing I remember,” she says.
Four men then raped Kimmet repeatedly. She knows it was four because that’s the number of unexplained DNA types a police rape kit found.
The men stole her things, trashed the house and left her bleeding “from every place you could be bleeding,” she says.
“I went into shock. My hearing stayed on, but my senses went out. I was, like, paralyzed. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t scream, but I heard everything … It was like there were a million people around me.”
When she came to, Kimmet, dazed and disoriented, walked down the block to a gas station and called police – and, she says, fell into a long, self-destructive spiral.
Already using alcohol and drugs, she began to use more heavily. She isolated herself from her boyfriend and her family. She lived in fear, blaming herself for what happened because she had left the front door open – although she had done that many times in the years she had lived in the house.
Things only got worse, she says, when five months later, she found out she was pregnant with a child conceived around the time of the rape. She tested positive for cocaine at the time of the little boy’s birth, and he was removed from her custody by child welfare officials.
“While I used while I was pregnant to cope with the rape, I was basically trying to make it go away,” she says. “Just the thought of my perpetrator coming out of my body only made it worse.”
Kimmet, who lived outside Merrillville at the time of the rape, is now a resident of the Transitions addiction-recovery program in Fort Wayne. She says she didn’t seek counseling for the rape in the beginning. But after Nicolas was born, she had a major change of heart.
“I fell in love the day he popped out,” she says. “All the emotions and things I thought about him – once I saw him, and he was breathing and had 10 fingers and toes and was beautiful and healthy, … it was like, ‘My God, what was I thinking?’ ”
Kimmet says there’s a possibility the child is her boyfriend’s because his DNA was also found when she was tested. He accepts the child as his, she says, and is adamant about not wanting paternity testing.
He was there for the birth and has been supporting the baby, but he was deported to Mexico five months ago, Kimmet says.
“He’s been a very good dad to the baby. It’s really hard for him right now,” she says. “He was disappointed he wasn’t there to protect me.”
Kimmet says child welfare officials pushed her to pursue counseling and reunification with her son. She says she has learned that, although a victim once, she doesn’t have to be one for the rest of her life.
There will be tough times ahead – what will she say when he asks about his father? What will she do if her perpetrators are ever caught?
But come November, she says, she’s going to college to become a dental assistant, and she plans to make a life for herself and her son.
“You have to make a decision whether you’re going to straighten up and do things right and be a mother for your child or keep living a crazy life, and an unhealthy life,” she says.
“I chose to be a mother and live life. I don’t have to live in fear.”
