Daisy Coleman: This Is My Story

"Daisy's case" has the nation's attention, and today Daisy Coleman tells her story in an essay on xoJane.com. "My whole life since January 8, 2012, has been a long, reckless winter," she writes. That was the night she and her friend Paige, then ages 14 and 13, snuck out of Coleman's Maryville home to meet up with some older boys. "My older brother had warned me about [Matt], but I didn't listen. Looking back, I wish I did," Coleman writes. Even so, she says she wasn't interested in the "popular senior boy" romantically, she just considered him a friend, and she trusted him.

At Matt's house, his friends urged Daisy to drink about five shots' worth of alcohol from a tall shot glass they labeled the "b---- cup." "I guess I didn't know how badly it would mess me up. But the boys who gave it to me did," she writes. "Then it was like I fell into a dark abyss." She doesn't remember anything else before waking up, "freezing and sick and bruised," having been left outside in the snow. Both she and Paige had been raped, she writes, and what followed—the bullying, her mom losing her job, their house burning down—was a nightmare. "But I ... refuse to be a victim of cruelty any longer. This is why I am saying my name. This is why I am not shutting up," she writes. That her case will be reopened "is a victory, not just for me, but for every girl." Click for her full piece. (More Daisy Coleman stories.)