11,431 Rape Kits Were Collected and Forgotten in Detroit. This Is The Story of One of Them.

Clark weaves the story of Ardelia Ali’s 1995 rape—one of 11,431 Detroit cases in which the rape kit had been left untested—into a profile of Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy, who took on the testing of those kits and the prosecution of perpetrators as a personal mission. Worthy, both the first woman and first African American to hold her position, is a rape survivor herself. Her commitment to women brave enough to report what happened to them is rooted, in part, in her own regret for not going to the police after her own experience, leaving her rapist free possibly to attack other women.