Woman and Her Rapist Reunite Onstage to Share Their Story

A woman who was raped as a teen reunited with the man who assaulted her for an extraordinary reason: to heal, with each other. The pair stood onstage at a recent TED Talk to share their experience, which will be recounted in their upcoming book, South of Forgiveness.

In 1996, Tom Stranger was an 18-year-old Australian exchange student who traveled to Iceland to live with a host family. While attending school, he joined the student play and met Thordis Elva, who was 16. The pair soon fell in love and became a couple — but one night after returning home from a party, Stranger raped Elva.

“My head had cleared up, but my body was still too weak to fight back, and the pain was blinding,” Elva told the crowd during the TED Talk. “I thought I’d be severed in two. In order to stay sane, I silently counted the seconds on my alarm clock. And ever since that night, I’ve known that there are 7,200 seconds in two hours.”

Stranger soon broke up with Elva and returned to Australia, leaving the teen to reconcile herself with what had happened to her. “Tom wasn’t an armed lunatic,” she said. “He was my boyfriend. And it didn’t happen in a seedy alleyway; it happened in my own bed.”

Elva’s experience is common — nearly one in 10 women has been raped by an intimate partner in her lifetime, and in 8 out of 10 cases of rape, the victim knew her attacker, according to statistics complied by the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.

So Elva internalized the trauma, swallowing the narrative she had been taught about sexual assault: Girls get raped for a reason. “Their skirt was too short, their smile was too wide, their breath smelled of alcohol,” she said. It took years before she realized that “the only thing that could’ve stopped me from being raped that night is the man who raped me — had he stopped himself.”

Nine years went by and Elva was headed toward an admitted nervous breakdown. After wandering into a cafe one day, she decided to pen a letter to Stranger — “the most pivotal letter I’ve ever written, in an attempt to find closure.” That meant forgiving her rapist. What followed was an eight-year global correspondence between Elva and Stranger.

“Deep down, I knew I had done something immeasurably wrong,” Stranger said onstage. “I also drew heavily upon other parts of my life to construct a picture of who I was. I was a surfer, a social science student, a friend to good people, a loved brother and son, an outdoor recreation guide and, eventually, a youth worker. I gripped tight to the notion that I wasn’t a bad person.”

Their letters became a healing ground of sorts, a safe space for them to talk through the rape itself.

One day, Elva, who by then was married with a son, asked Stranger to face their past in person during a one-week trip to Cape Town, South Africa. Of course, Elva had her doubts. “When the plane bounced on that landing strip in Cape Town,” she recalled, “I remember thinking, ‘Why did I not just get myself a therapist and a bottle of vodka like a normal person would do?”

The two established some guidelines for their meeting. “We followed a strict policy of being honest,” says Stranger, “and this also came with a certain exposure, an open-chested vulnerability. There were gutting confessions, and moments where we just absolutely couldn’t fathom the other person’s experience. The seismic effects of sexual violence were spoken aloud and felt, face to face. At other times, though, we found a soaring clarity, and even some totally unexpected but liberating laughter.”

Stranger views the experience as a rare opportunity to evolve. “I was offered to really own what I did and found that it didn’t possess the entirety of who I am. … Saying to Thordis that I raped her changed my accord with myself, as well as with her. But most importantly, the blame transferred from Thordis to me.”

Elva insists their experience is unique. “Nobody has the right to tell anyone else how to handle their deepest pain or their greatest error.” She also acknowledges her “privilege” to speak about rape without fearing for her life. She’s now making it her mission to read, write, and speak on the issue to both women and also to men, who she says are generally excluded from the national conversation about rape. “But all of us are needed here,” she said. “Just imagine all the suffering we could alleviate if we dared to face this issue together.”

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