Content Warning: This story discusses sexual assault.
In 2016, Ohio native Alex Stuckey joined the Salt Lake Tribune expecting to do healthcare beat reporting. One week later, a woman at Brigham Young University (BYU) disclosed that the school had chastised her when she reported being raped. A deeper dive by Stuckey’s colleague uncovered countless Title IX files echoing an all-too-familiar narrative of universities silencing survivors and protecting perpetrators of sexual violence. Unexpectedly, Stuckey’s boss reassigned her to cover sexual assault cases on Utah campuses: the Salt Lake Tribune needed all hands on deck.
Stuckey’s Utah college campus investigation amplified survivors’ voices, uncovered dusty police reports and pushed powerful institutions under a microscope. Stuckey explained how BYU’s culture and religious bureaucracy impacted her ability to obtain Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and find sources. Stuckey’s experience and risk-taking go hand-in-hand.
“It’s pretty nerve-wracking,” Stuckey said in a Zoom interview. “You can’t mess it up.”
In 2017, Stuckey and her team won a Pulitzer Prize. Judges commended the Salt Lake Tribune for an exposé that unveiled “the perverse, punitive and cruel treatment given to sexual assault victims at Brigham Young University, one of Utah’s most powerful institutions.”
Although honored by the Pulitzer’s prestige, Stuckey doesn’t consider it her proudest journalistic moment. To Stuckey, journalism is a vehicle for helping others.
The edges of Stuckey’s mouth curl slightly upward when she recalls the sublime career moment — actualized justice for survivors. Former Utah State University Football (USU) and National Football League player Torrey Green, the focus of the USU investigation, had been accused of sexual assault, but the case went nowhere.
Thanks to Stuckey’s reporting, Green was sentenced to more than 25 years, she said.
“I felt like I had changed the course of lots of people’s lives,” Stuckey said, adding that she remembers sobbing upon hearing the news. “It felt like: this is why I do this job. You can make a difference.”
Stuckey’s reporting also contributed to revised USU sexual violence policies and a Department of Justice investigation.
Despite all that digging, a muffled secret festered beneath the surface. As a survivor herself, Stuckey wasn’t so different from her interviewees. She, too, had been silenced by the system. The problem? No one knew: “It was a very traumatic time for me. I hadn’t coped with anything that happened.”
Earlier this year, Stuckey came forward to share her own personal narrative on sexual violence survivorship in a story for the Houston Chronicle, which she joined as a reporter in 2017. The piece, “You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape,” is a narrative intertwining chronological memories of college sexual experiences, harassment in the workplace and periodical flashbacks to 10 years ago, the night she was raped in the backseat of a stranger’s SUV. Stuckey writes of the denial, loneliness and shame she felt after the assault.
“I thought if I worked hard enough, I could will myself into believing it never happened,” she wrote in the Houston Chronicle. “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If a terrified girl is raped and doesn’t tell anyone, did it actually happen?”
Fast-forward to Stuckey’s first week at the Salt Lake Tribune when her boss tasked her with interviewing rape victims and filing through Title IX and police reports, a duty that turned into a year-and-a-half-long endeavor.
“A nightmare,” wrote Stuckey, describing the incessant anxiety that consumed the reporting processes. She carried her trauma as a camouflaged albatross around her neck. On top of the trauma triggers, Stuckey’s wading into other survivor stories initiated an internal push-and-pull rooted in guilt.
“It didn’t matter that my reporting had helped dozens of women find their voices. I was still voiceless,” she wrote. “It’s hard to feel like a survivor when every day you’re struggling to survive.”
For Stuckey, the writing process felt cathartically selfish: coming forward swore allegiance to survivors everywhere and to herself.
“It didn’t feel okay to me [to remain silent] while begging people to tell the world about their story,” she said.
Textbook journalistic reporting is objective: unbiased, impersonal, neutral. Stuckey attributes this guilt and anxiety during the Utah investigations to journalism’s golden rule: objectivity.
According to Stuckey in “You can’t outrun a nightmare: The lasting trauma of rape,” journalistic objectivity is, “One that demands reporters distance their life and opinions from the area they cover. One that assumes they have control over that. One that isn’t forgiving for those of us who had that control ripped away from them.”
Stuckey references a July lawsuit between political reporter Felicia Somnez and The Washington Post to address the problematic nature of objectivity. In the Somnez suit, The Post barred Somnez’s coverage on Christine Blasey Ford’s 2018 testimony of an alleged sexual assault to the Senate Judiciary Committee, perpetrated by then-Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh. The Post reasoned that Somnez’s reporting of sexual violence was compromised by her identity as a sexual assault survivor but did not suspend Somnez’s male colleague facing sexual misconduct allegations from journalistic coverage within the same realm.
Stuckey said she does not let identity taint her journalistic professionalism and cites her two decades of experience. Stuckey has worked in over 10 newsrooms. She’s reported on state legislatures in Arizona and Missouri, health care and sexual violence at the Salt Lake Tribune, and came to the Houston Chronicle to cover NASA, science, and the environment.
Today, Stuckey focuses on investigative work. This summer, the Houston Chronicle published her story that uncovered serious violations lurking behind the walls of Texas psychiatric hospitals — the kind of corruption long ignored by Texas Health and Human Services Commission officials. Rather than a burden that compromises Stuckey’s journalism, she believes her identity’s niche nuances enhance it.
“I think it makes me a better person to cover it. I understand the best way to talk to those people,” she said. “I know what they need. I understand what they might be going through. It makes me a more compassionate reporter.”