She joined the police to make a difference. But McDonald’s work on rape and domestic violence cases left her with PTSD and the determination to speak out
Jess McDonald was still on probation as a trainee police detective when she encountered her first alleged rapist. Like much else she describes in her memoir, No Comment, the interview didn’t go at all as expected.
Like the vast majority of the rape cases she would work on later, it boiled down to a woman’s word against a man’s. Their stories broadly matched, except that he said the sex was consensual and she that it wasn’t. “I’ve read all the statements and I’m thinking: ‘OK, first of all, this is not clearcut.’ It kind of messes with your head a bit, because you just don’t know for certain,” says McDonald, a 36-year-old former tech salesperson who joined the Metropolitan police via an experimental direct-entry scheme that fast-tracked graduates into the criminal investigation department, allowing them to eschew years spent pounding the beat in uniform.
