I hated it there
I still feel nauseous when I get within an hour of Lynchburg. Anytime I get close to it I start to sweat and have flashbacks.
I attended the residential program of pre-law during 2014-2016. I watched the falwells bend over to Trump and give him the election. We watched an exodus of leadership who were protecting us, walk away and never come back.
I saw the shift in sexual violence occur on that campus. It was never safe for women. But it got worse. There were a group of serial rapists that were active near the tunnel that led from campus to the Walmart. They would sit there late at night and wait until an unsuspecting woman walked through and attack her. The FBI called it a title IX (sexual based crimes against humanity). They were wrong. If I was the prosecutor I would have called it attempted murder. It didn’t matter anyways, none of them were ever caught. The ones that were, were given a free pass to keep behaving that way.
I remember being treated like a “problem” for saying those things. My RAs said they would have to “pray about it” before they talk to me. Pray about what? Disclosing the truth is free.
We brought up the fact that the falwells and other people on campus were inflating numbers around the media, in the middle of the political circus (which they were). All in an effort just to try to get more transparency from a university that claimed to be different that the others but who was just as shady behind the scenes. We were run out of town by the death threats. Just for doing our job.
I never had a complicated relationship with god or religion before the private schools. I considered god to be good, some of his followers might be bad but in general he was good and so were the majority of his people.
And I can’t bring it up to anyone except people who attended the school around the same time that I did. Almost no one else knows or cares. Even if they do care, we’re all so defeated and weighed down by it that I can’t bring myself to do anything.
At one point I was young and I really thought I would finish law school and come back to Lynchburg as an attorney and take down some of the professors and administrators that created the environment necessary for things like that to happen. Now it’s clear that it broke me, and I’ll never be close to that same person ever again.
I tried so hard and it still got the better of me. I just really hate that I spent my best years of my life in a literal cult…. And then when you try to talk about it, people still treat you like you’re the issue.