The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story

This short book took a long time to come together. Kennedy, a star of the zine movement in her twenties, had become a design columnist at the NYT, writing about everyday inventions, when one invention—and its little-known inventor—became her obsession: the rape kit, a simple, transformative technology created in a very unlikely place (the '70s Chicago police department). Credited to a man, it was actually the brainchild of a woman, the tireless, fascinatingly complicated, and biographically elusive activist Marty Goddard, and Kennedy's search for the facts of Goddard's life and her subtle, wide-ranging, and often deeply personal analysis of forensics and justice for the crime of rape make this single tale into a compelling American story.
(Download the audiobook, read by Clare Danes, from our partners at Libro.fm.)