WARNING: The following story contains discussion of sexual assault. Discretion is advised. A former Manitoba MLA is sharing her experience with sexual assault in the wake of a lawsuit against an American university. A woman known as Jane Doe has filed a lawsuit against Cornell University, alleging she was raped by seven men at a 2024 fraternity party. Since the allegations at Cornell resurfaced, sexual assault victims have been sharing their experiences online, saying they were Jane Doe in solidarity with the Cornell victim. Rochelle Squires, a former Manitoba MLA and current CEO of CentreVenture, posted her experience with sexual assault on social media over the weekend, revealing she was gang raped when she was 13 years old following her Grade 8 graduation party. “In the morning after, I didn’t have the words to understand what had happened to me, and neither did anybody around me,” Squires said in an interview with CTV Your Morning Winnipeg. “This is 1984 in Moose Jaw, Sask., and I had taken that shame and swallowed it as my own.” Squires said the trauma from the event followed her into her adulthood, when she was able to put into words what happened. “I think that when horrific things happen to us as survivors, our brain automatically gives us the message that we need to survive the day,” she said. “That message was, ‘You’re not a victim. You went along with this. You were a participant in this. You offered consent’. These are the messages that our brain gives us. “It’s only after we find ourselves in a safe space, only after we have time to process the trauma properly, that we can put the proper language around it and start to say, ‘I wasn’t at fault. This was not something I had asked for or incited. This was wrong, and I was a victim.’” Squires said seeing the Jane Doe stories inspired her to go public and offer her support to survivors. “We know that there are a lot of survivors out there, and a lot of survivors like me, who have spent years in solitude just processing what happened and coming to terms with it,” she said. “And so, when I saw all the posts on social media about Jane Doe, I really wanted to stand in solidarity with her, and I thought now is a time where I feel I can create a safe space for others to join the conversation and to talk about and process their own trauma, because I really believe it takes looking at other people’s experiences, and sometimes we need other people to offer us the language so that we can understand our own trauma.” If you or someone you know is struggling with sexual assault or trauma, the following resources are available to support people in crisis: -With files from CTV’s Rachel Lagacé
