SPOKANE — When Tamara Leitner came back to her true-crime novel after 20 years of setting it aside, she realized she couldn’t tell the story without telling her own.
In Scottsdale, Ariz., Leitner awoke to crime scene tape outside her apartment one day in 1999. Her neighbor had been sexually assaulted, police told her. She was interviewed, her live-in boyfriend was interviewed, but no one heard anything — even though the assault took place on the other side of the wall. Detectives were looking for a black Velcro watch the rapist was wearing, too — and Leitner had found one — smack in the middle of the floor in her home.
“Was he in my home?” she thought.
Leitner still had to go to work that day as the crime reporter at the city’s local newspaper. She knew she had to write about the assault. But she was personally close to it.
Throughout the decades, Leitner embarked on a journey to connect the assault to others in the area. A man who she refers to as “the predator” was later convicted for multiple rapes in Arizona and Florida. He admitted to 18 rapes; police think he may have committed up to 100, she said.
Leitner later published her book, “Don’t Say a Thing,” which details her investigative work as a reporter, her trauma and the survivor stories of those who were sexually assaulted. During an interview earlier this month by Hollywood producer and Spokane native Mandi Price, Leitner said she remembered every night she lived in that apartment, thinking the rapist would come back.
“I would barricade myself into my apartment. I would stack furniture in front of my door,” she told the crowd. “There was no separation between home and the assault. … It was a 24-hour thing I was constantly living.”
For a long time, Leitner didn’t know she carried the experience of a sexual assault so close to her heart. But she pushed through it anyway.
“As a journalist, we put up walls. We have to. That is how we are able to do our job,” she said.
Leitner became a TV news correspondent, an Edward R. Murrow award winner and is also a 12-time Emmy-award winner.
When she came back to her book years later, she realized she had to revisit the experience of an investigative journalist. She drove to the crime scenes, she spoke to survivors and — in a way — grappled with her own trauma at the same time.
Leitner was in an emotionally abusive relationship during the time of her neighbor’s assault, and she was feeling the implications of that, too.
“The more I talked to these women, the more I realized that I wanted to share my shame and my trauma in order to possibly help others move through their trauma and their shame,” she said. “They helped me, in a way.”
Leitner’s book is vulnerable — it brings rawness to the surface that stirs up an honest conversation about the stigma surrounding sexual assault. And that is what is important, she said.
“Reliving the worst moment of your life and choosing to share your story with me is a pretty damn big deal,” Leitner said. “… If we continue the dialogue and make it easier to talk about. … We will realize it’s always the predator’s fault.”
