There’s a moment that “changed the entire trajectory” of Kimberly Corban’s life: “I released my name and took my power back”
NEED TO KNOW
- When she was a junior at the University of Northern Colorado, Kimberly Corban was attacked by a strange man in her apartment
- She transformed her trauma into advocacy, becoming a public speaker and crusader for other sexual assault survivors
- Years later, she fell in love with Michael Rourke, the prosecutor who helped convict her rapist, and they now share a blended family
Michael Rourke met Kimberly Corban at perhaps her life’s lowest point.
It was June 2006, one of those days right on the cusp of slipping into summer, and the then-20-year-old Corban was seated in a conference room with her parents in a suburb of Denver. She had been raped in her college apartment days earlier, and police in Greeley, Colo., had just arrested the man responsible for taking her prisoner and terrorizing her.
“What I saw was a broken young lady who couldn’t make eye contact with me. Most of the time, I felt like I was talking to her mom and dad,” recalls Rourke, who was a deputy in the Weld County District Attorney’s Office assigned to Corban’s case. “A lot of what I was saying wasn’t getting through to her.”
A lot has changed since then. Not only is Corban’s rapist serving a 24-years-to-life prison sentence—thanks to her testimony — but the once-shell-shocked young woman transformed herself into a powerful advocate for other survivors of sexual abuse.
And, in a made-for-TV twist years later, she got married to Rourke, who successfully prosecuted her attacker.
The work Corban does today — speaking internationally, advocating for treating assault survivors with empathy instead of skepticism and working in development and marketing for a victims’ center — is sorely needed. Some 26% of female undergraduate students experience rape or sexual assault, and less than 30% of those women, according to the anti-sexual-violence group RAINN, summon the courage to report their attacks.
“We’re called ‘survivors’ because not all of us survive,” says Corban, 40. “For someone who has just been through probably the worst thing that they’ll ever experience, to have a fellow survivor sit across from them and say ‘I believe you’ can be lifesaving.”
Take PEOPLE with you! Subscribe to PEOPLE magazine to get the latest details on celebrity news, exclusive royal updates, how-it-happened true crime stories and more — right to your mailbox.
Credit: Courtesy Kimberly Corban
‘Time Just Seemed to Freeze’
It was still dark outside on the morning 20 years ago when Corban, a University of Northern Colorado junior studying marketing and advertising, awoke to find a man over her in the off-campus apartment she’d recently moved into with several sorority sisters.
“‘Shut the f— up. Don’t say anything,’ ” she remembers him telling her before he pushed her face down onto a pillow. “It was one of the moments where time just seemed to freeze.”
She knew what was about to happen and was desperate to escape, pleading with her assailant to let her use the bathroom. When that didn’t work, Corban tried concocting a story that she had a sexually transmitted infection before realizing she wasn’t going to be able to “fight my way out.”
Credit: BRET HARTMAN/THE GREELEY TRIBUNE
Even as she was abused, she never saw the man’s full face because he’d pulled a shirt over her head. While she spent much of the next two hours wondering what would happen — “Is this really how my life is going to end?” — she also reminded herself to focus.
Through fragmentary glimpses around the fabric covering her eyes, she sought to memorize every detail about her attacker, who eventually left after promising, bizarrely, to return and “do something nice” for her.
Moments after he fled, Corban dialed 911. She was taken to a hospital where DNA evidence was collected and then spent hours going over the details she’d captured of her rape.
Three weeks later, 24-year-old Ronnie Pieros was arrested; Corban’s memories of his voice and DNA she had preserved helped confirm he was the rapist. By then Corban — who began having seizures from trauma — had moved home.
“I was reduced to sleeping between my parents,” she says, “like a kid scared of the monster under her bed.”
Credit: courtesy Kimberly Corban
Credit: Bret Hartman/The Greeley Tribune
It took a jury only about an hour to come back with a guilty verdict on June 8, 2007. Corban had testified against Pieros but remained anonymous.
On the day of his conviction, she decided to go public in the local newspaper. “It changed the entire trajectory of my life,” she says. “I released my name and took my power back.”
She soon returned to college, switched majors and eventually earned a master’s degree in criminal justice before training to become a victim advocate for the Greeley Police Department, putting her experience to work helping other women.
Come Full Circle
Rourke and Corban lost touch but occasionally ran into each other at community rallies and events where she spoke about her case.
By 2012 she was hired to help create a new adult diversion program for low-level offenders in the Weld County District Attorney’s Office, and the pair, who were both in relationships at the time, reconnected—eventually sparking a deeper bond. “Seeing her come full circle,” Rourke says, “was really kind of a neat moment.”
On the 10th anniversary of her attack in 2016, Corban, who was gaining a reputation as a public speaker, decided to live-tweet a minute-by-minute account of what she endured and reached a new audience in the process.
Still, her goal has remained the same, and she speaks frankly about the long-lasting impact of that terrible morning. “It stays with you for your entire life,” says Corban, who is determined to use her story to improve how police and the judicial system respond to sexual assault cases and to empower survivors.
Credit: Krista Noelle Photography
Her 2018 marriage to Rourke, 54 — her “voice before I had one,” she says — marked a turning point in both of their lives. And in between their work and parenting their four kids from their first marriages (three sons and a daughter, ages 11 to 18), they still find time to gush about each other.
“Her life could have taken two very different directions,” says Rourke. “She has taken something unimaginable and turned it into opportunity.”
Corban says her husband, now the Weld County district attorney, “understands” like few others what sexual abuse survivors grapple with on a daily basis: “Not everybody gets to say that they married their hero, but I do.”
If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text "STRENGTH" to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.
Read the full article here
