Our Other True-Crime Obsession

You hardly know him but now he thinks he knows you:he has taken down your worst momenton a machine and filed it in a file.He knows, or thinks he knows, how much you imagined;he knows, or thinks he knows, what you secretly wanted.—Adrienne Rich, “Rape”

In mid October, a Los Angeles–based screenwriter named Kathryn Borel, widely known as the former CBC employee who came forward with a sexual-assault charge against disgraced Q host Jian Ghomeshi, published a post on her Facebook page. “I want to join the chorus of women sharing their experiences with sexual assault,” she wrote, proceeding to note, with harrowing matter-of-factness, that she had been “raped and sodomized” by a stranger four years earlier. Borel had alluded to the incident in an interview with Maclean’s magazine after Ghomeshi publicly apologized to her as part of his court-ordered peace bond. But in the post, which referenced