One of the most powerful inventions of the 20th century is also an object that no one ever wants a reason to use. The sexual-assault-evidence collection box, colloquially known as the “rape kit,” is a simple yet potent tool: a small case, perhaps made of cardboard, containing items such as sterile nail clippers, cotton swabs, slides for holding bodily fluids, paper bags, and a tiny plastic comb. Designed to gather and preserve biological evidence found on the body of a person reporting a sexual assault, it introduced standardized forensics into the investigation of rape where there had previously been no common protocol. Its contents could be used in court to establish facts so that juries wouldn’t have to rely solely on testimony, making it easier to convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent.
The kit, conceived within the Chicago Police Department in the mid-1970s, was trademarked under the name “Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit,” after Sergeant Louis Vitullo. The Chicago police officer had a well-publicized role in the 1967 conviction of Richard Speck, who had murdered eight student nurses in one night. Vitullo’s second claim to fame is more complicated. The Secret History of the Rape Kit, a revealing new book by the journalist Pagan Kennedy, doubles as an account of the largely unknown history of the collection box’s real inventor—a woman named Martha “Marty” Goddard, whose broader goal of empowering survivors led her to cede credit to a man. In a cruel irony, a woman who drove major social change failed to get her due as a result of politics and sexism.
Kennedy became obsessed with the rape kit in 2018, after hearing Christine Blasey Ford testify during the confirmation process for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and wondered, “Had anything ever been specifically invented to discourage sexual assault?” Her investigative dive begins in 1970s Chicago, where the women’s-liberation movement was gaining ground and the police had a reputation for corruption. The brutality of the police crackdown on protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention was still fresh in the public mind. Rape was also rampant throughout the city, Kennedy writes—in 1973, according to an article in the Daily Herald, an estimated 16,000 sexual assaults took place, only a tenth of which were reported. And less than 10 percent of those 10 percent led to a criminal trial. In court, the proceedings usually devolved into “he said, she said.”
In 1974, Goddard was a divorcée in her early 30s working for a philanthropic organization that tapped into a local family department-store fortune to help Chicago’s needy. The job gave Goddard, whom a friend once described as “fucking relentless,” access to a wide swath of the people who formed the city’s civic backbone. She also volunteered for a teen-crisis center, where she heard stories from runaways who had experienced sexual abuse. Goddard, who grew up with an abusive father and had briefly run away from home as a teenager, became consumed with the question of why so few women reported rapes—and why perpetrators were rarely punished.
That year, she met with the state’s attorney Bernard Carey to discuss the “failure points in the sexual assault evidence system.” He soon appointed her to a new citizens’ advisory panel affiliated with the city’s new Rape Task Force. Goddard thus gained access to the police department and, more important, to its crime lab. She discovered that it was a mess. Cops told her that they didn’t even receive usable evidence from the hospital, such as properly collected swabs of semen, saliva, and blood. This was in part because hospital staff had never been trained to collect it properly. But even when police officers did have evidence, they weren’t always trained to preserve it.
Goddard approached Sergeant Vitullo, the crime lab’s chief microanalyst, with a written description of her vision: a sexual-assault-evidence collection kit. As one of Goddard’s colleagues told Kennedy, Vitullo “screamed at her” and told her to leave his office.
A few days later, Kennedy reports, Vitullo invited Goddard back and, to her surprise, showed her a complete mock-up of exactly the box she had described. Both the sergeant and the State’s Attorney’s Office wanted the credit for Goddard’s idea. As a compromise, Goddard agreed to have the kit recognized as a collaboration among them. Her accommodation was realistic and also strategic. She knew that “[Vitullo’s] name could open doors—and hers couldn’t,” Kennedy writes. Goddard was a visionary, but she was not a lawyer, a cop, or an expert, and she had no formal experience in forensics.
In 1978, a nonprofit group Goddard had formed, Citizens Committee for Victims Assistance, filed a trademark for the Vitullo Evidence Collection Kit. With this move, Goddard had, as Kennedy puts it, “seemed to collaborate in her own erasure.” That same year, The New York Times noted that the “Vitullo kit” was being used in 72 hospitals across Chicago, citing Goddard as the kit’s co-creator. Mentions of her in the media were otherwise glancing at best. Upon Vitullo’s death in 2006, Kennedy writes, “an obituary in a local paper celebrated him as the ‘man who invented the rape kit.’”
Many women inventors have shared a similar fate. This past November, Kay Koplovitz, a co-founder of the business accelerator Springboard Enterprises and the founder of television’s USA Networks, noted in an interview with The New York Times that “if a woman co-founder has at least one male co-founder, the woman somehow does not get credit for raising the capital.” In science, this phenomenon is so common that it even has a term of art: the Matilda Effect, named for the writer and women’s activist Matilda Joslyn Gage. There are scores of examples of the Matilda Effect, but to pick just a couple: Lise Meitner described the theory behind what she named nuclear fission, but credit went to her former lab partner Otto Hahn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944. Eunice Newton Foote described the greenhouse effect in 1856, but posterity remembers John Tyndall, who presented his own experiments three years later. No known photograph of Foote remains today.
Every one of these backstories carries its own particular ironies. In Kennedy’s telling, Goddard’s obscurity stems from the sacrifices she made for the rape kit to exist. Not only did she relinquish credit for her invention, but she also did all the grunt work to get it out into the world—including the fundraising. Conservative philanthropists were just as squeamish as Sergeant Vitullo had initially been about the idea of being associated with sexual shame; the word rape simply carried too much stigma. And so she turned to an organization that had made shamelessness its mission; through her nonprofit, she applied for and received a grant of $10,000 from the Playboy Foundation. “I decided,” she later said, “we had to put aside our feelings for objectification of women in [Playboy] magazine.”
Taking money from the philanthropic arm of a nudie-magazine publisher turned out to be a canny move. Playboy’s foundation, also headquartered in Chicago, gave generously to progressive causes. Hugh Hefner, the founder and editor in chief of Playboy, considered the feminist movement “a sister cause to his own effort to free men from shame and guilt,” Kennedy wrote in The New York Times, in an opinion article that fueled the book.
Kennedy does not mention that Hefner was the subject of several accusations of sexual assault, both before and after his death in 2017. (The director Peter Bogdanovich claimed in his book The Killing of the Unicorn, published in 1984, that Hefner sexually assaulted Bogdanovich’s late partner, the playmate Dorothy Stratten. Hefner denied the allegation.)
Still, when it came to Goddard’s invention, Playboy stayed true to its public mission, and the organization donated more than money. The magazine’s graphic artists designed the outer box of the original rape kit to feature a bright-blue line drawing of a woman’s face swathed in a thick mane of wavy hair. An early “Vitullo kit” was recently acquired by the Smithsonian.
In 1982, New York City adopted the Vitullo kit, and Goddard commuted to the East Coast to train doctors, nurses, and cops. The Department of Justice paid her to travel to other states that wanted to develop their own rape-kit programs. Goddard invented not just the box but the entire training system, teaching hospital staff and the police to collaborate on evidence collection.
Without that essential training to help surmount powerful systemic barriers, the kit would have been useless—and in that sense, the job is still woefully unfinished. Untested rape kits have languished across the country: In 2009, more than 11,000 were discovered abandoned in Detroit; in 2014, Memphis had backlog of more than 12,000 kits, and 200 more were found in a warehouse. One study estimates that from 2014 to 2018, 300,000 to 400,000 kits remained untested in the United States. Since then, aggressive fundraising efforts with help from survivors, combined with $350 million from the Department of Justice, have whittled down that backlog significantly.
Kennedy examines the gaps that still remain in the medical system. In 2021, just over 2,100 Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner–certified nurses were registered with the International Association of Forensic Nurses. The examination requires survivors to undergo hours of waiting and testing, and can feel invasive and re-traumatizing. This may be one reason so few people—only one-fourth of victims— report rapes, she writes.
Some of these limitations can be traced to a lack of effective innovation in the 50 years since the Vitullo kit was developed. In recent years, several women have conceived of and even sold at-home rape kits that would allow a victim to collect evidence of her assault herself. These ideas and products were met with strong resistance—and in one case, death threats. Detractors argued that self-collected evidence would never be taken seriously by juries. Apparently, accusers were still considered unreliable. Only after COVID made virtual doctor visits a necessity did the push for at-home testing gain a modicum of traction. With an at-home test, the victim received instructions, sometimes via a virtual nurse, on how to swab her own body, collect other physical evidence, and seal the kit.
In the late 1980s, Goddard abruptly disappeared from public life and lost contact with friends and family members. Kennedy painstakingly traces the confluence of events that may have led to her decline: In the late ’70s, she survived a violent rape while on vacation in Hawaii. A workaholic, she seems to have reached the point of burnout by the end of the decade. Somewhere along the line, she developed a problem with drinking. Kennedy concludes that she “bounced around the country, taking odd jobs and drinking heavily,” until finally settling in Arizona.
Kennedy works deftly with sometimes scant information, weaving her reporting on Goddard’s life and contribution into the narrative. The result is less a true-crime story, as advertised in the subtitle, than a page-turning mystery. The subject is also personal for Kennedy, who was molested in childhood. She confesses that her book was fueled by rage, pain, and her desire to restore “the woman who had believed little girls” to her rightful place in history.
As Goddard’s life shrank, the influence of the rape kit grew exponentially—especially after DNA fingerprinting was invented in 1984, eventually making it possible to trace a single drop of sperm or blood to a specific person. Evidence stored in the kits, sometimes for decades, allowed cold cases to be solved and wrongful convictions to be overturned.
Goddard’s last years were marked by alcoholism, erratic behavior, and diagnoses of dementia and “manic depression.” In 2015—the year of her death—a CNN reporter managed to track Goddard down. The resulting article credited Vitullo with the invention but noted Goddard’s role in distributing it, describing her as the “formidable woman” behind the “successful man.” During the interview, Goddard expressed anger at how her role had been downsized, calling Vitullo “an asshole.” The sergeant “had nothing to do with it,” she told the reporter. But those comments never made it into the story, partly because Vitullo was no longer around to defend himself and partly because Goddard struck the journalist as an unreliable witness—a woman who couldn’t be believed.
Thanks to Kennedy’s dogged reporting, CNN’s story wasn’t the final one, and Goddard can step out from the shadows of history. Upon Goddard’s death, no ceremonies or memorials marked her passing. In accordance with her wishes, there was no funeral or obituary. Nevertheless, her work leaves a remarkable legacy. The rape kit reoriented the public attitude toward survivors—as not potential liars but “an eyewitness whose body might reveal real evidence of a violent crime.” Yet Kennedy’s book isn’t just the hero’s journey of a forgotten heroine. It acknowledges that the system works best when it can be improved by those who are most affected by sexual assault—and the women who are willing to risk obscurity or damage to their reputation in order to finish the job Goddard started.
The post The Forgotten Inventor of the Rape Kit appeared first on The Atlantic.
