A first-person account of sexual violence, the access that preceded it, the confusion that followed it, and what happened after I identified Luca Tzimas as the person who raped me.
The assault happened in one night. Understanding what happened — and what followed — took much longer.
The chronology tells what happened. The analysis explains why it was difficult to understand while I was living it.
I experienced these events one at a time: first a teaching assistant, then a fraternity member, then someone who tracked me; alongside that were missing pieces of a night and information from people I trusted.
Hindsight can make a pattern look obvious because the reader receives the whole story at once. I did not. I lived each piece before I knew how—or whether—it connected to the others. The distance between those two vantage points is central to everything that follows.
Luca Tzimas entered my life first as my teaching assistant and later as a member of the law fraternity I had already built myself into. I now understand that what happened to me was not only about one night. It was also about access: how somebody became familiar, how that familiarity expanded, and how the same person eventually occupied several parts of a life that existed long before he entered it.
I had never encountered a predator before, and I did not know how to recognize what was happening while I was inside it. I thought danger would look more obvious. Instead, I noticed things about Luca that made me uncomfortable and repeatedly found explanations that allowed the version of him I already knew to remain intact.
Some of what I describe comes from things I experienced directly or later reconstructed through records. Other parts are what I understand differently now, with distance. I do not need to claim that every action was part of some perfectly designed master plan in order to explain what those actions ultimately accomplished.
I did not meet Luca while searching for direction. I already knew I wanted to go to law school, and that goal had shaped the academic choices, extracurricular commitments, and professional experiences I was deliberately building around myself.
Phi Alpha Delta was part of that plan before Luca knew me. I had intended to join the university's law fraternity since my freshman year and deliberately waited until campus activities returned in person after COVID restrictions. When I finally joined during my sophomore year, I became president of my joining class and my roommate became vice president.
After crossing into the organization, I was elected Professional Development Chair. My roommate and I became much closer through that process. This was the environment Luca later entered.
The following semester, I enrolled in a small Writing and Critical Inquiry course focused on law. I had specifically sought permission to join because the course fit the path I was already pursuing. It involved analytical and self-reflective writing, including early work on a law-school personal statement. Luca was the course TA.
That role created an information imbalance before there was ever anything resembling a personal friendship between us. I was expected to submit writing, respond to prompts, accept feedback, and meet with him about work that was often personal by design.
I cannot know exactly what Luca thought when he read my work. What I can say is that his institutional role gave him access to information about me that I would never have voluntarily handed to a random nineteen-year-old man.
Only a few weeks into the semester, Luca told me he was considering interviewing for Phi Alpha Delta. Before he became independently known there, people primarily knew him through me: he was “Belli's TA.”
During his interview, Luca chose to reenact a rape scene from a television show and selected me to play the victim. I treated it as bizarre and inappropriate. My roommate took a photograph because of how absurd the moment seemed.
No one in the room treated it as something that required intervention, and I did not understand it as a warning about what Luca would later do.
After Luca joined Phi Alpha Delta, the joining process gave him structured opportunities to meet existing members. During one of those early interactions, Luca and my roommate began talking and connected quickly. Eventually, she became his fraternity “big,” meaning his mentor within the organization.
Before joining the fraternity, much of Luca's access to my social world ran through me. Afterward, that was no longer true. He had his own standing inside the organization, his own relationships, and a direct connection to the person living with me and knowing me better than almost anyone else.
I cannot tell you everything Luca and my roommate said to one another. What I can describe is the position that relationship gave him.
I did not fail to notice everything. What I lacked was not perception. It was interpretation.
Less than two weeks before the assault, Luca placed a tracking device inside my backpack without my knowledge. I found it, immediately removed it, and took the battery out because I was genuinely disturbed.
I cannot prove exactly why he put it there or tell you with certainty what he was thinking. I can tell you what happened: he crossed an enormous privacy boundary, I discovered it, and even then I did not reorganize my understanding of him around danger.
I was alarmed by the object. I was not sufficiently alarmed by him.
On April 22, Phi Alpha Delta held a themed “brother party” created by the semester's joining class. They chose to create a wedding party. My roommate and I were selected as the bride and groom. We held a mock ceremony and later went to an Airbnb for the reception.
I was intoxicated, and my memory toward the end of the night is spotty. I do not remember everything in one clean sequence. What I have are pieces. I remember walking downstairs toward the bathroom. I remember being on the floor of the downstairs bathroom fighting someone off of me. I remember the physical struggle and trying to resist. I remember leaving with my tights ripped, my body hurting, and feeling completely unlike myself.
What makes that period difficult to explain is that I had memories before I had an understanding of them. I remembered fragments of what happened, but I did not yet know how to place them into a coherent timeline or what they meant in relation to the rest of the night. I was not waking up the next morning with a complete narrative of an assault. I was waking up injured, confused, and carrying pieces of a night I could not yet fully account for.
That distinction became important later. My memory was incomplete, but it was not empty. The bathroom was there. The struggle was there. The condition of my clothes was there. The pain in my body was there. What I did not yet have was the chronology that would allow me to understand those memories for what they were.
I would only begin to understand the full significance of those fragments later, after I started reconstructing the night through records, messages, transportation information, photographs, and other people's recollections.
I also remember leaving the Airbnb on April 22 with Luca carrying me down toward the ride home. What I eventually understood was that Luca raped me that night.
My first police report did not begin with a clean factual timeline of my assault. I made that report while I was injured, receiving medical care, and trying to understand a night I had not fully reconstructed.
In those first days, I went to people I trusted because I believed they knew more about what had happened than I did. Information they supplied entered the initial account because I was relying on people I believed were helping me understand the event.
That is not the same thing as me independently remembering another person assaulting me, and it is not the same thing as me personally identifying that person as my rapist.
After the SANE exam, I was in one of the most vulnerable states of my life. I was injured, frightened, exhausted, and trying to understand something that had happened to my own body.
Two people close to me gave me a version of the night that directed my attention toward another person. At that point, I did not yet have the transportation records, timestamps, photographs, messages, or reconstructed timeline that would later allow me to test what I was being told.
I cannot claim to know every motive behind what I was told. I can describe the effect. At a moment when I desperately needed reality stabilized, reality became harder to understand.
I began rebuilding the night systematically. I approached people who had attended the event and asked for photographs, videos, times, recollections, and information about who had been in different parts of the house.
Transportation records contradicted the timeline I had initially been given. Once the departure time changed, the timeline changed, and attention returned to the Airbnb.
The reconstruction did not create a different assault. It allowed me to understand the assault that had already happened.
For years, I thought of April 22 as the point where Luca's predatory behavior ended and the aftermath began. I do not understand it that way anymore.
By then, he was no longer simply my TA. He had his own place inside my fraternity, independent relationships with people who knew me, a particularly important relationship with my roommate, and credibility that existed separately from me.
Control can operate through information, credibility, access, who talks to whom, whose version sounds calm, who is believed, and whose confusion becomes evidence against them.
Phi Alpha Delta is one of the hardest parts of this story because I had invested myself in that organization before Luca entered it. I had joined intentionally, led my joining class, been elected, built relationships with existing leadership, and organized professional programming there.
Then I became the person reporting sexual violence. I told fraternity leadership that Luca raped me.
I expected the difficult question to be what it meant to keep him inside an organization where I was already a member and leader. Instead, the practical difficulty increasingly became my refusal to behave as though his presence was normal.
By September 2022, I filed a formal sexual-misconduct complaint with UAlbany. I entered that process believing the purpose of an investigation was to investigate.
By then I had medical documentation, photographs, timelines, transportation records, potential witnesses, contradictory accounts that needed examination, and months of work reconstructing what had happened.
The complaint was ultimately dismissed, and I appealed. My appeal challenged what I understood as procedural irregularities, failures to investigate, evidentiary decisions, the treatment of mental-health information, and the reasoning used to terminate the case.
While I was still inside all of this, I spoke publicly to the Student Senate about Luca, the assault, and the university process I was trying to survive.
Whatever individual fraternity members had previously heard through private conversations, my position was now unmistakable. I was saying publicly that Luca raped me.
Almost immediately, the organization convened an emergency meeting. That sequence matters. The allegation was public. Luca's name was public. My experience was public. The organization had to respond to that reality somehow.
After my Student Senate speech, Phi Alpha Delta held an emergency meeting. I walked into a room where people were already talking about me.
Some had been present on April 22. Some knew Luca socially. Some knew me before Luca ever entered the fraternity. Some had leadership roles. Some had information potentially relevant to understanding the night. Yet the meeting became a place where people discussed whether I was credible, what they believed about me, how they interpreted my behavior, and what they thought might be wrong with me.
That is not a minor detail. People who existed inside the factual universe of the allegation were simultaneously participating in a social discussion about whether the person making the allegation should be believed.
I had publicly said that Luca raped me. The organization responded by urgently gathering to discuss whether something might be wrong with me.
The most important thing about the meeting is not simply that people talked about me. It is what the organization implicitly defined as the emergency.
I had publicly accused a fraternity member of rape. That should have presented an obvious organizational crisis. But the meeting increasingly turned toward a different crisis — me.
Whether I was believable. Whether I was stable. Whether I was causing problems. Whether alternative theories could make the situation easier to understand. Whether the organization could continue functioning normally around Luca.
The question stopped being “What happened to her?” and became “What is going on with her?”
One of the most disturbing aspects of the emergency meeting was timing. The factual process was not finished. I was still producing information, reconstructing the night, dealing with institutional processes, and trying to understand contradictions.
Yet socially, judgments were already being made.
A formal process might require documents, interviews, records, timelines, and evidentiary standards. A social group requires almost none of that. Within an hour, an informal credibility system can form. People leave the room with impressions, and those impressions become the next person's background information.
That is how reputation can begin replacing evidence.
One of the ugliest labels attached to me during this period was “schizophrenic.” Schizophrenia is an actual psychiatric diagnosis. It is not shorthand for a woman who is frightened, angry, confused, persistent, or unwilling to accept somebody else's explanation of her own experience.
Once people begin framing a person as unstable, almost every later reaction can be filtered through that assumption. If I found a contradiction, perhaps I was paranoid. If I documented something, perhaps I was obsessive. If I was angry, perhaps I was irrational.
Meanwhile, Luca's conduct became easier to move away from. The tracker became secondary. The assault became secondary. The inconsistent stories became secondary.
Before the assault, I had social and organizational power inside Phi Alpha Delta. I had leadership, relationships, history, and credibility. Luca was the new person.
After I accused him, that arrangement gradually reversed. My history became less important than the disruption associated with me. My leadership became less important than the discomfort surrounding my allegation.
Power looked like him being able to remain while I had to defend my right to be there. Power looked like other people discussing my mind while his conduct remained unresolved.
Power looked like my fraternity holding an emergency meeting after my speech and discovering that I could be treated as the emergency.
The emergency meeting was not important only because of what was said while people were sitting together. It mattered because of what followed.
Afterward, my relationship to the fraternity changed in ways that made my exclusion increasingly tangible. Communication changed. Access changed. My place in decision-making changed.
Exclusion rarely arrives with somebody saying, “We have decided to isolate you.” It happens procedurally and socially. Information no longer reaches you. Decisions affecting you occur elsewhere. People stop responding the same way.
For years, I described everything after April 22 simply as “the aftermath.” That language now feels incomplete.
The confusion benefited Luca. The inaccurate first timeline benefited Luca. His independent relationships inside the fraternity benefited Luca. The fraternity's preference for normalcy benefited Luca. The conversation about my mental health benefited Luca.
That does not require me to claim Luca personally engineered every one of those outcomes. Systems can protect somebody without the protected person controlling every individual inside the system.
I do not think every predator behaves exactly like Luca. I do think my experience taught me several things I wish I had understood earlier.
Access can be institutional before it is personal.
One strange interaction can be explained away. So can another.
Separate relationships can alter how information and loyalty move through a social environment.
Credibility is accumulated before anyone knows it will matter.
Isolation can happen when relationships become unreliable and information becomes uneven.
Once the question changes from “what did he do?” to “what is wrong with her?”, the accused person is no longer the center of the controversy.
I am publishing this because silence did nothing useful for me. I want the chronology preserved. I want the difference between an initial confused report and a later evidence-based reconstruction understood.
I want people to understand how predatory access can develop through ordinary roles and legitimate institutions, how social protection can emerge without a secret conspiracy, and how the aftermath of sexual violence can involve far more than the original act.
I cannot tell you every private conversation that occurred around me. I cannot prove every thought Luca had. I can tell you what happened to me, what I documented, what I understood then, and what I understand now.
For years, other people had extraordinary freedom to explain me. This is me explaining myself.
ABOUT THIS SECTION These are interpretive frameworks, not diagnoses. Where a concept draws on outside scholarship, the underlying research is linked directly.
After the assault, the problem was not only social isolation. It was losing confidence in whose information I could trust while trying to reconstruct my own missing time.
Correcting an inaccurate early account after obtaining better records can look inconsistent even when the correction is exactly what accuracy requires.
Research on trauma and memory is complex and does not support a single required pattern of recall. My reconstruction rests on the records, timestamps, photographs, messages, and other information that became available afterward.
A person does not need to be openly defended to be protected. Continued inclusion, familiarity, and institutional inertia can preserve his place.
This is my interpretation of the dynamics I experienced. Research on institutional betrayal provides a broader framework for how institutional actions and failures can compound harm following sexual trauma.
You cannot fairly judge an earlier decision using information I only learned later.
Once an outcome is known, earlier events can look more obvious or predictable than they did in real time. Psychology describes this as hindsight bias. The reader encounters the chronology with the pieces already assembled; I experienced them one at a time.
You cannot judge what I did then by information I only learned later.
I did not live through this story with the benefit of hindsight.
I lived it one piece at a time, with incomplete information, inside relationships and institutions I still trusted. What looks obvious when the entire story is visible was not obvious while I was still living through it.
The pattern became clear only after enough pieces existed to form one.
I cannot explain every private conversation or prove every motive behind every decision another person made. I can explain what happened to me, what I remembered, what I was told, what the records later showed, and what changed as I learned more.
For years, other people had extraordinary freedom to explain me.
This is me explaining myself.