In a recent interview in New York magazine, writer Jamie Hood responded to question about justice. Hood, the transgender author of a new book Trauma Plot: A Life, claims to have been raped three times in the span of two years between 2012 and 2013. One of the alleged rapes, Hood says, was at the hands of five men. Asked by reporter Grace Byron what justice would look like after such trauma, Hood answers with this:

I don’t know what it looks like. There was no point in time where I was like, I’m going to report. I went into a police precinct once, and it was after the last time I was raped, and it was because [the assailant] had robbed me and taken everything. My Social Security card was in there, my license, every sort of important document was in my wallet. Of course, you look back on that and think, What if I had just left my wallet at home and carried cash on me that night? But I went in, not even to report the rapes, but to see if I could find my wallet and I was in there and the police laughed at me. You know, they laughed. It was not that it was even surprising to me. But it was paralyzing.

In Trauma Plot, Hood, a “transgender woman,” claims that rape is a regular part of our patriarchal culture, like the air we breathe. It’s also said to be “political” and thriving in the age of Trump. It is also obviously devastating. “Rape severed me from time,” Hood writes, “of which I lost much, in terms of memory and self-presence, yes, but also in the sense of just living—I don’t know if I was doing that until recently. In an early poem I wrote for the book, I described myself as a ‘persistence of biology.’ The years passed through me. Was this like life? The way trauma annihilates time seems to me one reason we consider it unspeakable.’”

Reading Hood’s interview and then reading Trauma Plot, I was left with two impressions. The first is that Jamie Hood, as in the example above, has a penchant for interacting with authority figures who are unfailingly cruel, uncaring, and indifferent to the suffering associated with rape. Secondly, Jamie Hood has the consistent misfortune of getting sexually assaulted in circumstances that make it nearly impossible to catch the perpetrator—even in an age of ubiquitous video cameras and cell phones. These facts alone make it exceedingly difficult to believe the claims made in Trauma Plot.