A new company that says it has developed a way for sexual assault survivors to “take back control” by administering their own rape kits after being attacked seems to be learning the hard way that, no, there is not an app for that. The product at issue is the MeToo Kit, an at-home kit that would supposedly allow rape survivors to collect evidence of their assault in the privacy of their own homes.
But according to everyone from actual sexual assault support professionals to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and other prosecutors, the kits could be damaging both to victims’ health and their chances of bringing assailants to justice. Nessel sent the MeToo Kit Company a Notice of Intended Action on Aug. 29. In a press release announcing the action, Nessel’s office said that in addition to filing a petition in Ingham County Circuit Court seeking authority to start issuing investigative subpoenas, the MeToo Company has 10 days to reply with “assurances of voluntary compliance, which must include an agreement that the company will not sell these sexual assault kits to Michigan consumers.”
According to Nessel, the company is potentially in violation of Michigan’s Consumer Protection Act. “There is absolutely no benefit here for victims,” Nessel said in the release. “In addition, some of the pitches the company is making actually demonize the process that allows the justice system to work.”
A Nessel spokesperson told Daily Kos that the attorney general’s office was alerted to the existence of the company and its plans because “the company sent some kind of a pitch to a Title IX coordinator who is also a former criminal sexual assault prosecutor. She forwarded it to another prosecutor, who forwarded it to us. All shared the same deep concerns about the approach.”
Diane Zalecki Bertalan, the program director of the forensic nurse program at sexual assault and domestic violence service organization HAVEN, said that one glaring issue with the proposed kits is that they “completely ignore the medical aspect of the exam.” During a sexual assault examination, Zalecki said during a Sept. 5 interview, specially trained forensic nurses assess patients for injury and offer necessary medication to prevent the STDs and unwanted pregnancy that can result when someone is raped.
A survivor who decides not to seek post-assault care could also miss out on learning about the services available to them, including counseling and support through the criminal justice process. In addition, Zalecki Bertalan explained, the law requires professionals who collect evidence during a forensic sexual assault examination to follow a very exacting process to ensure that evidence will be admissible in court.
“When we take evidence from a patient, we maintain the chain of custody,” she explained. “In other words, we collect our evidence, we put it in a special kit, we seal (the kit) up, we lock it, we have documented who it is that collected the evidence, and that same person is the one that seals the kit. And then we document when it's handed off to the police so that there is no question that this was done under the legal premise of chain of custody.”
While Zalecki Bertalan wasn’t willing to say outright that home-collected evidence wouldn’t be admissible in court, saying that she wonders “how that would be accepted,” others have been more direct. According to a statement from the Campus Advocacy & Prevention Professionals Association, “producing admissible evidence is not currently possible with self-collection and at-home storage.”
“By claiming to offer a viable alternative to a hospital-based forensic exam,” the statement continues, “Me Too Kits actually risk damaging any collectible evidence and removing a survivor’s option to obtain an examination that can be used as evidence in future criminal proceedings.”
In other words, by using the MeToo Kit instead of going to an agency like HAVEN, a hospital, or law enforcement, a rape victim is at serious risk of being unable to see their attacker brought to justice.
Matt Wiese, who is Marquette County prosecuting attorney and president-elect of the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan, agreed. “There are several practical problems with admissibility of the MeToo kits,” he said in a Sept. 5 statement provided to Daily Kos.
For a rape kit to be admissible in court, Wiese explained, a medical professional needs to testify about how the evidence from the kit was collected “and that it was done with the proper procedures and protocols.”
“A victim performing the test on herself/himself would not be qualified to perform that kind of testing and there is an issue as the victim is not an independent witness,” Wiese said.
The lack of an independent, expert witness to certify the evidence in the kit isn’t the only problem. Courts also require testimony about the procedure used in transporting rape kits and about both the accreditation and procedures used by the lab that processes the kits. Wiese joined HAVEN’s Zalecki Bertalan in saying that proving the chain of custody of MeToo kits would also be an issue.
Or, as Attorney General Nessel’s office said to the MeToo Kit Company in its Notice of Intended Action, “Your speculation about such admissibility is a poor justification for sales of a product that appears destined to delay sexual assault victims from seeking prompt medical attention.”
While Michigan’s attorney general is the only one to take legal action against the company to date, other attorneys general haven’t hesitated to speak out against the MeToo Kit. “This company has a dangerous and misleading product that seeks to take advantage of people at their most vulnerable,” said North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein in a Sept. 4 statement. While adding that professionally administered rape kits are free to victims in North Carolina, the statement goes on to say “It is unconscionable that this company is suggesting that victims pay for a kit that likely won’t help bring a rapist to justice. In fact, these kits are likely to undermine law enforcement investigations.”
Chief Assistant District Attorney Karen Friedman Agnifilo of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office agreed with that assessment. “Material collected with this product would be inadmissible in court, and the use of this product would deprive a survivor of critical medical and trauma services that only trained professionals can provide,” she said in a statement quoted in a Sept. 4 New York Post article.
The MeToo Kit Company was founded by 2018 Hampshire College graduate Madison Campbell. On July 25, according to a cached Medium post linked to by the New York Post, the company was invited to take part in the 2019 “Data Future Lab” incubator at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. The post no longer mentions the company.
NYU spokesperson John Beckman told Daily Kos in a Sept. 5 email that the university “manages several business incubators for start-ups in conjunction with NYC and NYS economic development agencies through its Tandon School of Engineering,” but that “the businesses in these incubators are typically unconnected to NYU.”
Beckman was quite clear that the startup is not affiliated in any way with NYU. “MeToo Kit is not run by NYU grads or faculty, does not use technology developed in NYU labs, has no arrangement to sell their product to NYU, and is not in a partnership with NYU. NYU takes no equity and has no stake in the company,” he said.
He added that the Medium post announcing the Data Future Lab’s support of the MeToo Kit Company “which was written by incubator staff, not the University,” was taken down because MeToo has started working with a PR firm “to provide a more accurate public characterization of their start-up” because of the attention it has received.
Evidence of the planned PR approach was received by Daily Kos on Sept. 6. In an undated press release, company founder Campbell said that as a sexual assault survivor herself, she found Attorney General Nessel’s comments “disappointing,” “false, and downright shameful.”
“Rather than sending a subpoena and making aggressively statements to the press,” the statement continues, “Attorney General Nessel should be more concerned with creating a productive dialogue in which my colleagues and I can address some of the concerns she may have on behalf of the people of Michigan.”
Campbell goes on to claim that in 2018, there were more than 7,000 reported rapes in Michigan, “of which less than 15% resulted in arrest, and even fewer convictions.” While the Michigan State Police’s 2018 report agrees that the clearance rate for 1st Degree Criminal Sexual Conduct is quite low (at 25%, not 15%), the actual number of reported rapes, according to the report, was 3,670.
Campbell’s other main venture, called Iyanu, outsources engineering jobs to Nigeria. In Attorney General Nessel’s opinion, Campbell’s MeToo Kit company is similarly exploitive. “This company is shamelessly trying to take financial advantage of the ‘Me Too’ movement,” Nessel said in a public statement accompanying her office’s cease-and-desist letter.
Dawn Wolfe is a freelance writer and journalist based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.