Summer Willis’s fifth marathon was in New York City, in March 2024, with a 45-pound mattress strapped to her bare shoulders.
Less than a year — and dozens of marathons — later, she tackled another race in Austin.
Dropping to her hands and knees, Willis crawled for the first 13 miles as a demonstration of strength and resilience.
It was mere yards from the street where she said she was sexually assaulted a decade prior.
These physical displays of grit were part of a two-year effort to embrace her own visceral form of advocacy — running, crawling, and fighting for change. In 2023, she founded Strength Through Strides, an advocacy and awareness nonprofit aiming to “reframe the narrative around sexual violence” and “empower survivors to reclaim their stories.”
“Not a lot of people want to talk about sexual assault,” the 30-year-old told The Barbed Wire. “I felt like I had to do these big, crazy things.”
And it worked. Advocates, survivors, and lawmakers began engaging with her. More survivors told their stories — about what needs to change, about grit in the wake of trauma.
Then, in February, state legislators sat her down for a talk. They were about to introduce a bill that would, hopefully, close the legal loopholes that had denied her justice for so long. They wanted to name it after her.
“It was a great honor,” Willis said, “but it also felt like the weight of 8.5 million survivors was now on my back.”
This week, the Summer Willis Act took effect.
Before Sept. 1, the state’s sexual assault laws only defined what was not consent via a list of 14 scenarios, such as cases where a perpetrator uses or threatens “physical force, violence, or coercion,” or intentionally incapacitates someone “by administering any substance without the other person’s knowledge.” The law also defined assault in terms of power dynamics, recognizing instances in which healthcare professionals, coaches, tutors, and clergymen wield coercion tactics.
But even as advocates, lawmakers, and prosecutors fought to expand the state’s definition of assault over time, the enumerations weren’t comprehensive. And if a victim’s sexual assault didn’t fall neatly within the statute’s lines, their case would be that much more difficult to prosecute.
Like Summer Willis’s.
In 2014, as a sophomore at University of Texas at Austin, Willis said she was raped at a college party. The assault, like countless others, fell within a loophole: Because she was drugged by one attacker and raped by another, none of the 14 specific “non-consent” clauses applied to her.
“What happened to me, the rape that changed me, that haunted me, and nearly broke me, wasn’t even considered rape in Texas,” Willis said in her March 25 testimony to the House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence. “The law didn’t recognize my assault.”
Now, prosecutors are ready to test it in court.
“We know it when we see it,” prosecutor Janna Oswald, division chief of the Adult Sex Crimes Division in Harris County, told The Barbed Wire. “When you hear a fact pattern of sexual assault, you say, ‘Yeah, she didn’t consent. That was rape.’ And then (needing to take) whatever that fact pattern is and being like, ‘Okay, was she intoxicated? Did he use force? Physical force? Was he unaware that she was unaware?’”
Such legal hoop-jumping, Oswald said, makes prosecuting assault “very difficult, sometimes.”
“It would just be nice to say ‘she didn’t consent,’ and then be able to present the fact pattern to a jury, and they say: ‘She didn’t consent, therefore it is sexual assault.’”
‘Intoxication Is a Weapon’
The Summer Willis Act ushers in two significant changes to the state’s sexual assault statute, attorney adviser Kerri New told The Barbed Wire.
New works for AEquitas, a national nonprofit that aids prosecution practices for sexual assault, stalking, and domestic violence, “with the goal of improving the criminal justice response to those particular crimes,” New said. She previously was a prosecutor in Dallas and Rockwell counties, specializing in sexual, domestic, and family violence cases.
The first major change? Consent is defined.
At the bottom of the act, an amendment clarifies that the sexual assault laws will incorporate the state’s legal definition of consent — “assent in fact, whether express or apparent” — which was defined elsewhere in the penal code. Just not for assault.
“It looks like (it’s) not that big a deal. It’s like, 10 words in a sentence … But what that looks like, from a practical sense, could be really profound,” New told The Barbed Wire. “It’s an opportunity to say for the first time that this is what consent looks like.”
Under the Willis Act, the burden of proving consent might shift from the victim to the offender.
The other change finally recognizes “alcohol-faciliated” assaults, which have become increasingly common in recent years, New said.
The previous law accounts for assault via involuntary intoxication, such as a perpetrator drugging someone without their knowledge. But, it overlooked cases in which a victim voluntarily drank alcohol, “a gaping hole in our law,” New said.
Now, prosecutors can charge offenders for taking advantage of someone who is intoxicated, without necessarily causing it themselves.
“Alcohol and drug intoxication is a weapon, so to speak, that perpetrators use,” New said. “(It is) an incredibly successful one, an easy one to find … and one that leaves no lasting mark.”
Over the past 20 years, New has observed alcohol-facilitated assault evolve into something “that is very much the norm.”
Previously, it could dismantle an entire case, she said. by decreasing a victim’s chances of reporting the assault, diminishing their ability to accurately relay details to police, and assassinating their character in front of a jury. Voluntary intoxication is a “very successful exit strategy” for offenders, New said.
“Why would you use a gun or a knife if you don’t need to?”
‘We Did the Impossible’
The contents of the Willis Act are hardly novel — affirmative consent is a decades-old concept, which found its birthplace on the campus of a small-town Ohio liberal arts college at the turn of the century. In 1990, a group of students successfully lobbied Antioch College to codify explicit, verbal consent into the school’s policy.
“Though the college did accept our demands, the broader culture did not,” Bethany Saltman, one of the first champions of affirmative consent, wrote for The Cut in 2014. “In fact, we became laughingstocks. And the Antioch College Sexual Offense Prevention Policy (SOPP) became a stand-in for Ridiculous PC Bullshit, mercilessly mocked by pundits, reporters, family members, and even ‘Saturday Night Live.’”
But the movement kept its momentum, even in Texas.
In 2017, a proposed bill asked for higher education institutions to adopt an affirmative consent standard in their sexual assault policies. It died in the House.
In 2021, state Rep. Nicole Collier, a Democrat, introduced a nearly identical version of the Willis Act, which recognized affirmative and withdrawn consent in the penal code. It died in the Senate.
Then, in February, House Bill 3073 was introduced by state Rep. Donna Howard, also a Democrat, who authored the bill alongside fellow Democratic Reps. Ann Johnson, Ellen Troxclair, and Collier. But it was also championed in the Senate by its main sponsor, state Sen. Angela Paxton, a Republican, who, this year, also passed a law banning the use of non-disclosure agreements for sexual abuse survivors.
Willis credits much of this bill’s success to a massive social media campaign, which drew endorsements from women like Monica Lewinsky, Katie Couric, and Christy Turlington. Also standing behind her: Sky and Amanda Roberts, the brother and sister-in-law of the late Virginia Giuffre, one of the most vocal survivors of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
And part of the momentum, of course, came from Willis herself.
“Change takes time,” Willis told The Barbed Wire, “but if you have a story, that can ignite change. I kept on asking myself, ‘How can I be a story to carry this bill forward?’”
By the time it passed, House Bill 3073 had amassed swaths of bipartisan support. In late May, on the very last day the Senate could consider House bills, legislators had heard 22 of the 88 pending bills; Willis’s was not one of them. The Senate had 30 minutes until it would adjourn for the night and all unheard legislation would die with it.
Willis and her sons, waiting by the television, had been watching the whole day. And then, right down to the wire, the bill was read. And it passed — unanimously.
“That made me really, really proud to be a Texan,” Willis said. “We did the impossible, I think.”
And while Gov. Greg Abbott would sign it into law just weeks later, the bill didn’t progress without a series of edits and compromises first. In particular, two introduced changes were struck from the final version of the law: withdrawal, which would have clarified that consent can be withdrawn at any point, and a legal precedent called the “reasonable person standard.”
The “reasonable person standard” asks the jury to place themselves at the scene of the crime, in the shoes of a reasonable person. It’s a legal precedent often used in self-defense cases like robberies or home invasions. In sexual assault cases, this standard would prompt juries to weigh whether an offender took advantage of a victim — or, if a reasonable person should know they hadn’t received consent.
“Why do we define reasonable standards for all these other legal definitions, but not for sexual assault?” Oswald, who testified alongside Willis in support of the bill in March, told The Barbed Wire.
“My wallet and my purse have more protections than my genitalia,” she continued, “because you’ve already defined consent from there, but not for me.”
But, Oswald said that neither of these eliminations will have significant consequences for how state prosecutors operate. For example, a myriad of previous cases have already set a legal precedent that consent can be withdrawn anytime — but the challenge is getting that practice written into law.
“A lot of these things don’t change the way that we’re prosecuting here in Harris, because right now, we find ways around,” Oswald said. “We just look at the way that (laws are) worded and say, ‘I can argue it this way.’”
She continued: “Will this change in wording “hopefully make it a little bit more streamlined? Sure. Did it make it perfect? No.”
It’s a similar case for the reasonable person standard, where New says the burden of proof won’t look too different either way: “How do you prove what someone knew?”
Whether or not that particular provision passed, prosecutors would still have to pinpoint specific evidence of outward intoxication — such as slurred speech or difficulty walking — to prove, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” that the offender knew his victim couldn’t consent.
“The standard is just a little higher,” New said.
‘Is That Going to Be Enough?’
Prosecutors’ next task is in a courtroom: litigating cases under the brand-new statute and testing the waters in front of a judge or jury.
“In the cases (that don’t) neatly fit into an enumeration, and I go forward under ‘consent didn’t exist,’ is that going to be enough?” Oswald said. “Or is the appellate court going to say, ‘No, this isn’t sufficient.’”
“That’s always a scary process, to try a case under an un-litigated statute,” she continued. “You don’t know if it’s going to get punted back … Then I have to come back and tell a Summer Willis, or my complainant, ‘Hey, it didn’t work.’”
“I met many survivors who have gone through the hard crawl (of) depression and PTSD and finding healthy relationships again,” Willis said. “It’s just so important to make sure that even if sexual assault happens to this next generation … they don’t have to go through the same thing that I went through.”
But, concerns about current attitudes toward sexual assault loom large — and, despite legislative wins like the Summer Willis Act, may still dissaude victims from pursuing justice.
“I just don’t feel like this administration, in the state or the nation, is all that friendly to women,” Oswald said. “Sexual assault victims are looking at large cases, the Epstein case … the way the P. Diddy case was tried. I’ve had at least three complainants mention that to me.”
“Over the last several decades, people report more often than they used to,” Harris County assistant district attorney Jay Gordon told The Barbed Wire. “Not because of necessarily changes in the law, but changes in attitudes.”
In the immediate aftermath of the MeToo movement’s zenith in 2017, sex crime reports spiked 14% across 24 countries, and 7% in the U.S., according to a Yale University-funded study published in 2019. Those numbers reflect a much larger reality about sexual assault, misconduct, and pursuing justice: It happens in the public eye.
Optimistically, Willis accepts this reality.
“I think that people are good and they want to do good,” she said. “They just don’t necessarily know what’s going on, especially at state politics. And by letting the everyday person know that this is happening, that was our biggest success. Getting the community behind us.”
She recounts a story from one of her interns, whose grandmother broke into tears when she learned about the bill.
“After a lifetime,” she finally confessed to her family that she had been assaulted when she was young, Willis said.
“Having a win, having a victory for survivors,” she added, “gives a lot of people hope that there will be change.”