Attacker's apology revives a victim's nightmare

‘How can you live with yourself?’
In the minivan, Seccuro was crying so hard her frightened daughter had begun to wail.

“I can scarcely begin to understand the degree to which, through your eyes, my behavior has affected you in its wake,” Beebe had written. “Still, I stand prepared to hear from you about just how, and in what ways you’ve been affected, and to begin to set right the wrong I’ve done.”

Over the next week, she felt afraid and vulnerable. Was her family in danger?

The questions finally overwhelmed her. She grabbed her BlackBerry.

“How can you live with yourself?” she typed.

He e-mailed back the next day.

“I always felt tremendous guilt for the ways in which I imagined my conduct had damaged you, and for years too the only solution seemed to be the bottle, which worked less and less over time to assuage the guilt,” he wrote. “This is to say that the way that I lived with myself was of course not really living at all.

“It appears I have laid the groundwork for a shattered life, and I simply do not know what to do, save for doing what you ask.”

But Seccuro didn’t know what to do either. Yet she wondered: Why had he done what he’d done?

The only way to find out, she reasoned, was to write back. And so began a two-month e-mail correspondence. Seccuro told Beebe of the devastating effects of his actions; Beebe detailed the devastating effects of the bottle.

After that night in 1984, Seccuro was never the same. She reported the attack to university officials and campus police, she said, but immediately felt dismissed and disbelieved.

She became a loner. Her grades plummeted. At 22, she entered a tumultuous marriage that quickly unraveled.

Part of her felt dead. Panic attacks were frequent and frightening.

Gradually, life improved. She married Mike, gave birth to beautiful Ava, and found success as an event planner in Greenwich, Conn.

But she never stopped wondering what had become of him.

Failing as a person
His life, too, had been filled with miseries, he wrote. After that night, he was summoned to the dean’s office and told of possible judicial proceedings.

“I was pinned by my failure as a person,” he wrote. “A day or so later I withdrew from UVA, unwilling to step up to the plate.”

Even then, he wrote, his drinking was a problem. One afternoon, it hit him: Was he an alcoholic?

He entered rehab and moved home. A month later, he was drinking again.

Over the next nine years, he wrote, he exhausted his parents, employers and friends. Women dismissed him as a drunken, selfish slob.

He arrived at AA in 1993, after years of trying to get sober in the fellowship, he wrote. This time, he stayed.

From the moment he read AA’s eighth step — making a list of those he’d harmed — he wanted to contact Seccuro. But his sponsor said that would only hurt her.

As the years passed, Beebe wrote, his sponsor fell off the wagon. The man later told him he’d started drinking again over unfinished amends.

Beebe’s new sponsor told him to pray and search for Seccuro. Twice he wrote her, but the addresses were wrong and the letters returned. Eventually, he tried again.

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