Awakening in a friend’s bedroom after drinking too much at a sleepover, Audrie Pott knew she’d been sexually abused when she saw she’d been written and drawn on.
Her attackers had written and drawn on intimate parts of her body, her family’s attorney said this week, as the teen’s suicide gains national attention.
Over the next week, she pieced together one detail after another, and tried to confront three boys she had known since junior high who she believed did it.
At school, Audrie Pott saw a group of students huddled around a cellphone and realized that at least one humiliating photo of her was circulating.
“I have a reputation for a night I don’t even remember and the whole school knows,” she wrote on Facebook. “I cried when I found out what they did.”
Eight days after the attack, she called and asked her mom to pick her up at school. She said she couldn’t deal anymore but would not say what was wrong.
And then she hanged herself.
The Pott family disclosed the new details of the ordeal at an emotional news conference, discussing painful details of what their daughter was put through.
They are demanding that three 16-year-olds arrested eight months after the assault be tried as adults, an unusual and unlikely scenario under California law.
The family claims the boys took off her pants and “digitally penetrated her, and/or penetrated her with a foreign object, and/or sexually abused her.”
All after she drank alcohol and passed out.
The boys arrested in the Pott case are each charged with sexual battery, dissemination of child pornography and possession of child pornography.
Under California law, such less severe charges are usually filed if a victim was unconscious and did not have the ability to fight off a sexual assault.
Audrie’s mother, Sheila Pott, thinks that is unacceptable as she seeks justice for her daughter, and she hopes to change that with a new “Audrie’s Law.”
“I want to take serious steps to see that this doesn’t happen to another one of our children,” she said of a scenario that is happening all too frequently.