In 2018, New York Times journalist Pagan Kennedy was working on a column about the origin of everyday objects when she became obsessed with finding out who created the rape kit.
Rape kits are boxes used to collect evidence after a sexual assault. The kit's invention was commonly credited to a Chicago police sergeant named Louis Vitullo, who had died in 2006. But as Kennedy dug deeper, another name popped up.
"I kept seeing the name Marty Goddard as somebody who had been involved or helped him or something," Kennedy says.
Through research and interviews, Kennedy learned that Martha "Marty" Goddard, who died in 2015, had been a community activist, and that she had volunteered at a phone hotline for runaway teens in Chicago in the 1970s. Many of the callers Goddard spoke with had experienced sexual abuse, but few had reported the abuse to the police. Goddard wanted to know why, so she joined a task force to look into the matter.
"She went into the crime lab. She interviewed everybody there. She went to hospitals. She talked to administrators, nurses, everybody," Kennedy says. "What she was trying to do was get so deep in the weeds that she understood the problem of evidence either not being collected or thrown out."
Goddard helped develop a standard for the evidence that would be collected following a rape. Kennedy says the creation of the kit opened the door to our understanding of victims and abuse.
"It sends a signal that we can solve sexual assault cases," she explains. "That there can be evidence, that it's not all just a he said/she said — and if you're not able to get the evidence, maybe you're just not working hard enough."
Kennedy's new book is called The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story.
Interview highlights
On why Goddard's invention became known as the "Vitullo Kit," named after Louis Vitullo, a Chicago police sergeant
So Marty Goddard was running this nonprofit, and under her nonprofit, trademarked the kit as "the Vitullo Kit," and it became known as that for a long time. And I've talked to people who worked with her and they're generally of the opinion that she had to do a lot to work with the police department and all the different men who were in charge of allowing this system to be built. And so she had to smooth a lot of feathers. And part of that [was] that it would be very helpful to have this kit known as the Vitullo Kit, and look very much have the imprimatur of the police department and have a man's name on it, essentially. ... I don't think she was interested in taking credit. She was just really interested in getting it done.
On the Playboy Foundation helping to fund Goddard's rape kit project
Marty Goddard in her various interviews talks about how she went around to the usual sources of money, which would be the fancy funding groups where people meet up in golf clubs, or country clubs, and it's all very well-heeled. Back then you did not say the word rape in polite society. And so none of those groups wanted anything to do with this. So she really had trouble finding a funder. And there was a woman she had met when she was volunteering at the hotline .... [who] was working for the Playboy Foundation then. And so offered up the idea that you should try to apply, see whether Hugh Hefner's foundation will fund you, because Hefner was very much about sexual liberation and even women's empowerment. And in the end, that's where she got her first funding from.
On the kit being critical in the courtroom
The whole point of this project was to have a survivor stand up and tell her story, but be backed up in a courtroom and be believed. And she would be backed up by a person, a nurse or doctor in a white lab coat and a kit with seals on it that looked super official. And so there was a kind of theater element to showing the jury that you had collected evidence — could be semen or blood or pictures of the wounds. And you'd done it very, very carefully and it couldn't be faked, because there was so much suspicion that the survivor would be lying. So it was very much about that — at a time when juries would be very oriented against an accuser, showing that there was a whole group of experts who were behind her.
On the invention of the rape kit helping to exonerate innocent men, particularly men of color
From day one, [Goddard] was very clear that part of the point of this was to clear the names of men who were falsely accused. And in the '80s, when she was sort of beginning to leave the stage, that was something she was outspoken about. But I would say that this is something that I feel people aren't aware enough of that one of the things that's really important about building and protecting a rape kit evidence system is the fact that so many exonerations can come from this system.
On why it's important to know Marty Goddard's name
I think one reason it's important is her story tells us a lot about how change can be made in difficult times. … She got in, she talked to everybody. She had this curiosity and she was just very oriented towards what exactly is the problem and how can we fix it? And I think she was working at this level as a designer and a creator. That is very inspiring to me and I hope to other people because often if you just simply dig in and kind of get in the weeds and figure out what a problem is and solve it quietly, you can actually make quite a significant change for the good.
Sam Briger and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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