This Iowa man was sexually assaulted. Now he's telling his story.

Editor's note: This article contains graphic descriptions of a sexual assault.

5 Year Anniversary
It’s been five years ago today
That put me on this path
In light of this fact, I feel the need to reflect
On the progress I have made
As well as the progress I still have left.
— Caleb Byers, June 2017

COUNCIL BLUFFS, Ia. — Caleb Byers still struggles talking about the night he says he was sexually assaulted.

When he starts to describe the scene — the way a male acquaintance he considered a father figure gave him a cup of “basically pure” Bacardi 151 and sat uncomfortably close before dragging a hand up his leg — the normally ebullient, easily excited, nerdy 25-year-old’s face goes blank.

His gaze becomes hazy as he stares nowhere in particular. His head drops, the weight of what he’s saying making it just too heavy to hold up.

Even five years past, the raw pain of that night and the years of addiction, depression and PTSD that followed are always there, he said, just one memory away.

The Register does not normally identify victims of sexual assault, but Byers, a Council Bluffs native, consented to make his name public in an effort to break the stigma he says exists against male victims of sexual violence. By telling his story, he hopes others feel safe to tell theirs, too.

“One of the worst things about recovery is that it’s incredibly lonely,” Byers said. "It feels like nobody will ever understand, because apparently nobody else has been through it. But they have, they just don’t talk about it.”

Long thought to be an anomaly or simply ignored, nearly one in six men has experienced “contact sexual violence” during his lifetime, according to a 2017 Centers for Disease Control report. And although females report rape and sexual violence at a higher rate than men, as ideas around masculinity and sexual assault evolve, the number of male-identified victims willing to go public — or at least have themselves counted in federal data — grows, experts said.

In Iowa, the number of adult male victims of sexual abuse who sought help has grown by at least 76 percent, from 260 in 2014 to 460 in 2016, according to the Iowa Attorney General’s Crime Victim Assistance Division annual reports. (The Attorney General didn't start collecting gendered data until 2014.) 

One crisis center in Oskaloosa has seen such a dramatic increase in male survivors requesting help that they set up a fishing club where men could talk about their experiences away from the pressure of a counseling session. 

Yet long-held gender roles defining men as “strong” and “capable of protecting themselves” endure and can be potent enough to keep some from seeking help, said Beth Barnhill, executive director of the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault and an anti-rape advocate for more than 20 years. For those that do come forward, the resources available for men are fewer than those available for women, she added.

It’s hard to say whether more males are being assaulted or more are finally feeling comfortable enough to tell their stories. Barnhill and others tend to think it’s the latter.

While Byers believes that all victims of sexual violence are worthy of recognition, compassion, and legal and medical intervention, he also says American culture hasn’t traditionally been a welcoming place for men who want to talk about sexual violence.

It’s his personal mission to change that.

After years of struggling in silence, Byers has chosen to face his demons and reclaim his life. In late 2014, he launched WeAreNotPowerless.com in an attempt to give male survivors a digital place to gather, learn, grieve and heal. He goes to therapy, speaks around Omaha about his experience and writes poetry to make sense of his feelings.

And the one thing he wants to make clear up-front is that he’s not a victim. He is a survivor.

About 7 p.m., June 7, 2012

The memory of him, biting my neck and chest
So hard it left bruises and took my breath.…
They say you can't have pleasure without pain
But I beg to differ, all this is, is hurt.

Byers had a full night of partying planned for this lazy summer Thursday. His second stop of the evening, after a good friend’s graduation party, was a friend's apartment.

He’d been over to this friend's house “probably 20 times” before this particular evening. Even though Byers was underage, they always drank, which was part of the allure, Byers admits. Sometimes they’d watch TV, but they mostly just talked.

Byers never felt close to his incredibly strict father, he said, so he yearned for an adult male role model. In his early 60s, this man offered long-term perspective to the then-20-years-old Byers’ problems.

“I learned some of his family history and he asked me about mine,” Byers remembered. “They were all conversations that started off minor and progressively got more intimate … I valued his opinion and what his advice was and all that stuff.”

But from the minute he arrived this night, something felt off, Byers said. His friend seemed like he had “an agenda.” As he normally did, the man made Byers a cocktail, but it was especially strong and the newbie drinker got drunk quickly.

The man then sat next to Byers on the couch, which struck Byers as odd because he normally sat in the nearby love seat or chair. He put his arm around Byers, who excused himself to the bathroom to ease the awkward tension, he said.

When he returned, the man had taken his shirt off. He grabbed Byers, forcefully removed his clothes and started “kissing me and biting me and rubbing my body,” Byers said. He performed oral sex on Byers, according to a police report, and made Byers touch him, too.

Byers froze. He said he felt like he was watching himself during the assault, floating above the scene like some kind of silent ghost. He panicked, he said, and it was painful.

“I remember laying there just praying that this wasn’t happening to me,” Byers said. “’This can’t be real. This has to be some kind of (expletive) nightmare.’”

Byers told police the man, who was taller and strong, overpowered him. Feeling drunk, Byers couldn't fight him off and he was scared that if he made the man angry, the assault would get worse.

The Register tried to contact the accused man multiple times but he did not return messages. The Register is not identifying him because he was not criminally charged in this assault.

“For the second half (of the assault), I was trying to figure out what I could do to get out of there, and an idea hit me and I was like, ‘I have to go to the bathroom,’” Byers said. “I grabbed my clothes and just ran. I shouldn’t have been driving.”

The assault was Byers' first sexual experience.

About 9 p.m., June 7, 2012

Pain gives way to self-destructive beliefs
They say what doesn't kill me makes me stronger...
But I can't (expletive) take this much longer.

Byers’ twin brother, Luke Byers, was about two-thirds of the way through a movie after work when his brother walked in. Luke immediately noticed that something was off, he said.

“We call it twinning, but basically I’m just way into it with Caleb,” he said. “I can feel what he is feeling.”

After a long silence, Caleb blurted out: “He assaulted me.”

Caleb and Luke both say they have always been each other’s best friends. They were the kind of kids who didn’t get into trouble at school and mostly stayed to themselves, their mother Linda said.

Luke was the protector. When their parents’ marriage was crumbling and after the divorce, Luke shielded his twin from what he could, he said.

So in that moment, when Caleb told his brother that he had just been assaulted, Luke laughed. It had to be a weird joke, right?

It wasn’t, Caleb said, and Luke’s head started swirling. Byers had talked about this friend who gave him alcohol, but the relationship “didn’t raise any red flags” to Luke.

“There was a lot of guilt in that moment,” Luke said. “’Why wasn’t I there? Why didn’t I see it? What could I have done differently?"

“I knew good and well, right then, that the brother that I had grown up with was never going to be the same again,” he said.

When Byers woke up to go to work the next day, Luke remembers his brother grabbing the pocket knife he always carried around.

“It was like he was hugging it almost, trying to find some sort of security,” Luke said.

All Byers remembers from the morning after the assault was taking “at least five shots” of alcohol before heading into work.

A week later

You asked for it. You're so much less of a man.
I don't know how you look at yourself in the mirror.
You're lower than dirt.

Byers went to see Brigette Maas, the therapist who worked with his family during his parents’ separation, about a week after his assault. At that first session, he was wearing the face he still gets when he talks about that night. Total shock, Maas remembered.

“It’s like his mind was not even connected to his body; just like, ‘Hello, are you with me?’” she said. “We went through quite a few stages of grief because I think it was completely the loss of his innocence.”

Byers told Maas he had been living off of “caffeine, nicotine, anger and confusion.”

“I just felt like everybody knew, and like I had, ‘I was sexually assaulted by a male,’ tattooed or branded or whatever across my forehead,” he said. 

It’s not a stretch to say most people think of sexual assault one way: a disheveled male stranger attacking an unknowing female victim, said Lara Stemple, the director of the UCLA Health and Human Rights Law Project and an expert on male sexual victimization.

But in a recent analysis of five sets of federal data, Stemple found that those surveys actually “detect a high prevalence of sexual victimization among men — in many circumstances similar to the prevalence found among women.”

RELATED: 10 myths about sexual assault

Still, even as data comes out attacking the binary belief that males are perpetrators of sexual violence and females are victims, stereotypes subsists.

“The stereotype is a man under threat should be able to defend himself,” Stemple, who is based in Los Angeles, said during a phone interview. “And because of that stereotype and the others we hold about men — that they are sexually insatiable and are sexual aggressors — men coming forward are facing skepticism about whether they suffered any real harm.”

Late July, 2012

I hope to find my place in life again
Try as I might, I just don't quite fit in…
If life were a puzzle, I'm missing a piece,
But if I'm being honest, it's more like thirty

Byers returned to the friend's apartment one evening after dark. He doesn’t remember exactly when, and he still doesn’t know why he did. The details of what happened are hazy, Byers said, but what he does remember is sitting on the same couch and flipping the blade from his pocket knife in and out. The two had a conversation, in which the friend did most of the talking, and eventually Byers left. 

“I remember (Caleb) being like, ‘What the heck did I do?’,” Maas said, “but it is really common for people that have gone through this to re-enact or to go back and figure out, ‘Wait, maybe I misunderstood. Maybe, you know, it wasn’t that.’ ”

For a year after revisiting the apartment, Byers would spiral out of control, he said. Alcohol became his “anti-anxiety pill,” and he went from drinking “a shot, to a six-pack, to a fifth” a day. He was driving drunk and recklessly.

He didn’t sleep, and when he did, he was haunted by nightmares. He would carve smiley faces into his upper thigh “because, hey, at least something could be happy.”

Both his twin and his mother noticed his personality changes, but neither were sure what to do.

“He just shut down,” Linda said. “He had this look about him of being angry, and he was swearing all the time. I loved my son, but I didn’t like the man he was becoming. I told him that I was there for him, but had never been faced with this situation before.”

Byers enrolled as a student at the University of Iowa to get away, but “his demons” followed him. He told a teacher’s assistant that he might want to die, and was taken to the hospital where he was diagnosed with PTSD, according to hospital records.

He “would call and was intoxicated, (or) call and tell me 'I just got out of this treatment,' ” Maas said. “I was concerned. I didn’t know if he would make it, to be honest.” 

January 12, 2014

I need to forgive myself,
So I can move on and heal,
Maybe I can start to feel real.

Byers waited a year and a half to report his assault to authorities. The pain was too fresh and the fear too overwhelming before then, Byers said.

“Just the thought of telling a complete stranger, especially a complete stranger in a position of power, shut me down,” he said. 

By January 2014, Byers wasn’t all the way out of the spiral state, but he was focused on school (now attending the University of Nebraska-Omaha) and dedicated to his recovery. Maybe pressing charges would be the final push he needed to get over his addictions and depression, he thought.

Instead, the experience was demoralizing, Byers said. The officers asked questions he called “really direct and insensitive.” 

“Are you sure you’re not just gay?”

“Why didn’t you push him off?”

“Why did you let him make you drinks?”

“Are you really sure it happened?”

“It was traumatic telling my story to people who I could tell really didn’t believe me or who were skeptical, at best,” he said. 

The Council Bluffs Police Department, where Byers reported the incident, receives a lot of training on sexual assault, Chief Tim Carmody wrote in an email.

After graduating from the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, new officers go through the Field Training Program, which lasts about 16 weeks and includes instruction on sexual abuse investigations.

From then through the end of their career, staff “receives 32 hours of in-service training per year.”

On the topic of sexual assault, the department partners with Catholic Charities, who provide research and information on working with victims in general and by gender, said program manager Diane McKee, who has also seen an increase in male survivors seeking help.

“We’re always disappointed when a victim doesn’t feel that their investigation or case was handled the way they would have preferred,” Carmody said. “I have been the chief here since September 2014 and don’t recall hearing about Mr. Byers raising his concerns, asking for clarification, or filing a complaint. We would have gladly listened to Mr. Byers' concerns and worked to address them to his satisfaction.”

Byers’ case was closed a few months later due to “lack of evidence,” according to police files. It turned into a “he-said, he-said” situation, Carmody wrote, adding that the case was handled by a “seasoned sex abuse investigator.”

“Although there were similarities in their stories, there wasn’t sufficient information and no physical evidence to take to the Pottawattamie County Attorney for review and prosecution,” Carmody wrote.

June 13, 2017

In this galaxy of humanity.
Just keep breathing…
Take back your self-worth.

On a hot sticky June day, five years and change from the one that Caleb says changed his life, Maas and Byers stand over a sandbox filled with delicately placed action figures and children’s figurines. It’s Byers’ bi-monthly therapy session and the pair are dissecting the scene, which is Byers’ visual depiction of his journey from assault to today.

For the version of himself at the time of the incident, Byers chooses Toothless, the small creature from the “How to Train Your Dragon” franchise and the embodiment of his innocence.

“You have no idea what you are in for,” Byers says, pointing to the smiling figurine.

But he’s come a long way from that little guy, Byers acknowledges. His life turned around soon after he started his website, which has been visited by people from 13 countries and 38 states, he said. Sharing his story and hearing from others with similar stories was the first time he didn’t feel defined “by that one hour of my life.”

He’s not cutting anymore and he’s watching his drinking. He lives with his longtime girlfriend. He has a new full-time job and he’s on track to graduate with a master’s degree in social work. He hopes to go into private practice or become a speaker on the topic of male victims of sexual assault.

RELATED: Advocates, experts, research and survivors address false conceptions about sexual assault

“The biggest thing I can tell people is don’t suffer in misery, don’t self-destruct,” he said. “I did that for months and it almost killed me.”

In general, the best way to help male victims of sexual assault is to believe them when they report and make them feel comfortable to seek help, experts said.

Many also caution against making the issue of sexual assault support too much of a men-versus-women idea. Much of the work around sexual assault advocacy has been led by women and done for women, said Steve LePore, who runs the Los Angeles-based male victim advocacy group 1in6.org, and male-identified survivors have to be respectful of that.

Men can’t expect major changes overnight, he said, though he and other advocates would eventually like to see more resources and funding made available for male survivors.

“Compassion,” Stemple said, “is not a finite resource.”

Moving across the sandbox from Toothless, Byers lines up figures representing his addictions (the Joker); meeting Maas (Wonder Woman); reporting to the police (a crossing guard); and starting his website (two giant hippos turned on their side to represent the emotional weight he shed from telling his story).

For the version of himself today, Byers chooses Batman. The Dark Knight is a sort of alter-ego for the comic-obsessive because Bruce Wayne is able to rise above a background of deep pain and abiding loss to serve his community.

“We all have our past, but it doesn’t have to define us,” Byers said. “We can become better and be better and do good things because of it.”

He paused before adding: “We can move from victim to survivor. I did.”

5 Year Anniversary (con’t)
This is only the beginning of the story
That started this unexpected journey,
And has come to define the man I am.…
Stay tuned, I'm still writing the end.
— Caleb Byers, June 2017