On November 4, 2014, the US Department of Justice put Palestinian-American Rasmea Odeh on trial for allegedly lying on her naturalization application ten years earlier, when she did not indicate that the Israeli state arrested, convicted, and imprisoned her in 1969. On October 27, foreshadowing the injustices to come, Judge Gershwin Drain ruled that Odeh could not speak of her imprisonment in Israel.

What Odeh could not say was the following: an Israeli military sweep had picked up her and five hundred other Palestinians in 1969. The Israelis sexually tortured her for forty-five days, pushing her into a confession about two bombings that killed two people and injured many more. She had testified about the torture at the United Nations upon her release in 1979. She had been denied a fair trial. And she withdrew her confession shortly after she made it.

And as he condoned the culture of rape, Judge Drain prevented her from discussing her sexual assault, diminished her experience of what he called “torture, rape, and all that stuff,” and ensured that the perpetrators would remain protected. He continued to allow the prosecutor to mention that she was convicted of a bombing that killed people, and the prosecutor repeated this over fifty times throughout the trial.