Statutes of Limitations Put an Expiration Date on Prosecuting Sexual Assault. In the #MeToo Era, Survivors Want Them Eliminated

“Honestly, I’m always more surprised when survivors do disclose,” she says.

For survivors who spend years building up the courage to come forward, statutes of limitations are a bitter impediment to justice. And researchers argue that the rationale for the statutes—that memory and physical evidence will have eroded in the intervening years—doesn’t hold up.

Jim Hopper, a professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and a researcher of the neurobiology of trauma, has written extensively about the fact that our brains are actually wired to hold on to the details of stressful and traumatic experiences. “Memories of highly stressful and traumatic experiences, at least their most central details, don’t tend to fade over time,” he wrote in Scientific American in September 2018, reflecting on the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford at the 2018 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

With the rise of DNA testing as a form of forensic evidence, statutes of limitations could become an even greater obstacle to finding perpetrators. “I worked with the City of Detroit after they found they had 11,000 rape kits in storage,” Campbell says. “One of the things we did in the process was we actually tested a batch of kits that were, by the date, behind the statute of limitations, and what we found is that they had statistically significant standards to be loaded into the FBI database for forensic DNA, and that when they went in the database, they matched a living criminal.

“So what does that tell us? It tells us that these old cases that everyone says are beyond the statute of limitations still have DNA that are providing prosecutors with viable leads to those and other criminal cases,” Campbell says.

Many states do have an exemption to statutes of limitations when it comes to DNA evidence. “DNA is relatively new,” Cooper says. “And it’s only been in the last decade that we’ve come to understand how valuable it is as a law enforcement tool, and the more that’s been culturally accepted, the more likely law enforcement is to move those kits from their shelves and get them tested.”

Several states are in the process of changing their statutes of limitations laws for sex crimes, especially in reaction to the public realization, during the #MeToo movement, that many survivors of sexual violence had been holding on to their stories for decades. In the past two years, 15 states have either nixed or extended their criminal and civil statutes of limitations. The Associated Press reports that eight states and Washington, D.C., have opened “lookback windows” in civil cases, allowing survivors whose civil claims have expired under their state’s statute of limitations to sue within a certain window of time. Seven other states raised the maximum age that survivors can file civil suits. Some did both.

The new standards haven’t gone unnoticed. Thousands of people are now, at last, seeking justice. In December 2019 the Associated Press reported that the changes in those states could result in 5,000 new sexual abuse cases against the Roman Catholic Church alone. Extending windows or dropping statutes of limitations entirely helps “give survivors time to get the kind of support that they need to withstand what this process is likely going to be for them,” Campbell says.

“It’s not so much that more survivors are coming forward because the laws are changing. I think more survivors are coming forward because the culture is changing,” Cooper says. “There’s safety in numbers. For a long time I think rape survivors felt very alone and isolated, and with the discussions around #MeToo, I think they feel that they’re less alone in coming forward and have more support.”

Those numbers could continue to grow if more statutes of limitations are expanded or discarded. Like Giuffre, Sarah Ransome, another Epstein survivor, says her top priority is getting abusers into courtrooms—and then prisons.

“There are some people who need to be stopped,” she told Glamour. “Because if they’re not stopped, they will move to Brazil, France, South Africa, and perpetrate there. Because if they’re not [stopped], they’re going to continue to hurt more and more girls. So that’s what needs to change. These people need to be behind bars, where they can’t hurt anybody else.”

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour.