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Bedoya in Washington / Lauren Wolfe


Journalists around the world face intimidation every day, at times including the especially horrific and invasive threat of sexual violence, which definitively silences the press in some cases. Bedoya told me that four of her colleagues had been covering the Colombian prison story, too, but all dropped it after she was raped.

"Sexual assault and rape are not about sex," said Columbia University journalism professor Helen Benedict, who has written extensively on rape and the military, in "The Silencing Crime." "It's about humiliation and degradation and power."

Justice is elusive around the world because of corrupt police or legal systems as well as cultural biases, my CPJ report found. But even without legal recourse, over and over, women journalists told me that they had chosen to stay quiet until recently, inspired by Logan, who has opened up space for them to say that they too have been sexually assaulted in the course of their reporting.

The telling itself is a step forward in a profession in which women have long had to prove that they can hold their own among men. "Women need to know what to avoid so it won't happen again," said MaryAnne Golon, who was a photo editor at Time magazine for 24 years.

The sense I found among women journalists is that they have struggled to be taken seriously; speaking about sexual violence, they fear, would only lessen their standing among newsroom higher-ups. "They don't want you to be a liability," said Thailand-based senior Getty Images photographer Paula Bronstein, repeating something that many journalists have told me. "They don't want to worry about you any more than they have to -- about you being raped or molested. It's just something they'd rather not think about."

This is perhaps why Logan has worked so hard to make clear that even a single act of sexual violence against a journalist is in fact an attack on the entire fourth estate and the public at large.

"My attack was retribution against the free press in general and the flow of information -- it was meant to discredit the revolution," Logan told me. "It had a much bigger purpose to it."

Logan said of Bedoya, "An attack in retribution for your reporting speaks directly to the First Amendment. It's terrifying in a different way. In her case, justice is critical because if you're allowed to attack journalists with impunity, there will be no free press, especially if the government is involved."

Bedoya is still reporting in Colombia, now for newspaper El Tiempo. Three bodyguards accompany her on reporting assignments, and now the Colombian government will give her a bulletproof car because of her increased visibility, she said. She's nervous and has reason to be. She receives threats regularly, has already fled the country once, and once found the lock to her house forced open.

In May, a paramilitary soldier confessed to having been one of Bedoya's rapists. When I asked her about this, she went silent. "Did you see their faces?" I asked.

She nodded, groaning quietly and dropping her head to the table.

"After what happened to me ... my life was broken into before and after," she said. "There's a distinction between what happened to you as a journalist and what happened to you as a woman. Before there was the risk -- we always had a fear of something happening to us when we covered conflict, but now I have the additional fear of what can happen to me because I'm a woman, the specific vulnerability of what can happen to my body because I'm a woman."

Bedoya is waiting for yet another investigation to advance. In the meantime, she works -- with her three bodyguards, her bulletproof car, and her belief that after 11 years, her fight against her attackers will matter, if only in the sense that she is now the public face of sexual violence in Colombia. She may now also be, like Lara Logan, a face of sexual violence against the media. If all goes as she hopes, Bedoya may come to represent journalists, and women, who fight for justice until they win.