Anna Combrink feels a haunting connection to Audrie Pott and Rehtaeh Parsons - the tragic teens who took their own lives in recently revealed cases of alleged rape and sexual cyberbullying.
Like the two girls from opposite coasts, Combrink was raped at age 15 by a fellow high school student, she told the Daily News Thursday.
Unlike Pott and Parsons, she had only one attacker and no compromising photos to deflect - but she too was publicly humiliated and contemplated suicide, she said.
"It was horrible," Combrink, of Burleson, Texas, said. "First it was the loss of innocence, the loss of feeling safe in your own body. Then it was the loss of my social group."
The Christian choir singer from a sleepy Dallas suburb said she was shocked when the first friend she confided in sent out gossipy text messages suggesting the sex was consensual.
Cruel comments and taunting poems soon followed on social media, she said.
"My entire social circle was in the choir, and I was told I wasn't welcome anymore," she recalled. "I remember they had cookies one day and announced, 'Girls who cry rape don't get cookies, and those who talk to them don't get cookies either.'"
She said her family and key officials believed and supported her, but the doubt from her peers caused her to wonder, "Did I really say no enough? Did I fight enough?"
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