“So as she stood before the jury that August day in 1997, Harris, 32, did something risky: She acknowledged all of her victim’s flaws. Yes, the young girl had lied to the police about being forced to enter the Oakland home where she was raped. Yes, she also lied about her age and the clothes she was wearing. She was, in Harris’ candid estimation, “difficult to deal with,” “emotionally immature, and probably not very developed.”
“But the law does not say that you have to like the victim in order to decide that she should be protected,” Harris continued. “The law does not say that she had to grow up in a normal family, whatever that is, grow up under the normal circumstances, whatever that may be, in order to be protected by the law.”
It was a bold strategy, one even veteran prosecutors might have thought twice about, but it displayed Harris’ early aptitude for performing well in high-stakes battles fraught with obstacles. “The truth isn’t always how you picture it — rosy and everyone’s happy and everyone comes from a great background and it’s easy,” said Ken Mifsud, who was in the same intern class as Harris in 1988 at the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office.”
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“Harris herself asked the victim a crucial question: Why did she lie to both the police and at the preliminary hearing about being forced into the house where she was raped?
“Because I was scared that if I had told them that I would go there willingly,” the girl replied, “that it was not rape.”
Harris followed up with why she eventually decided to tell the truth. “Because I had talked to you guys and understood how important it was,” the girl said.
I called one of the preeminent authorities on child witnesses to get a sense of how unusual Harris’ strategy was. Gail Goodman, the director of the Center for Public Policy Research at UC Davis, is widely credited as the founder of the modern scientific study of child victims as witnesses. “That is unusual, in my experience, that a prosecutor would do that,” Goodman told me.
The girl, Harris told the jury in her closing statement, was the “perfect victim” for the men to go after. Would a girl who was healthy and secure enter that apartment, thinking that the men in there would “talk her through her problems at the group home” across the street? No, she would not.
“Are you to believe that [she] went through this entire process of testifying, of being cross-examined in that manner, of being physically examined, because she’s just making it up because she wants to manipulate?” Harris asked the jury. “Is she that complex? No.”
“She is that vulnerable. And they knew it, and they raped her.”
The jury believed the girl on the most important question. They found the two men guilty of rape. Evans was sentenced to 18 years in prison and Lee to 14 years. When the victim heard the verdict, she “melted in front of us,” according to O’Malley.
“Nobody ever stood up for her,” O’Malley said. “No one ever spoke for her. … Kamala made her feel like she was the only important person in her life. She focused on her. She empowered her.” (Years later, O’Malley reconnected with the young woman, who she said turned her life around. She was married with kids and was “very happy.”)”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/22/kamala-harris-sex-crimes-prosecutor-00175347