April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month.
Last year, Phoenix Johnson came across a news article that made her feel faint.
“It was jarring for me,” she told Native News Online. “I cried. I felt angry. I also felt vindicated.”
The article announced Dr. Richard McGrath’s sentencing for multiple sexual assault convictions. Seven years earlier, Johnson reported that McGrath assaulted her at work, an incident in which he was cleared of any wrongdoing and she lost her job. Now she stared at his guilty face in the news, a consequence for the harm he caused other women.
“Seeing his face was a lot harder for me than I had expected,” she said. “It just kind of sent chills through me.”
In 2011, Johnson returned to her homeland of Ketchikan, Alaska, to do what many Native people do after spending years away from their community: give back to their tribe.
Johnson spent her childhood in Southeast Alaska. She loved hunting, fishing, and being close to her culture.
After high school, she served in the Air Force as an aerial combat technician and aerial surveillance instructor and later taught suicide intervention skills. In 2011, she moved with her daughter to Ketchikan.
“I felt like I’m going home to what I know is safe,” she said. “Home is safe.”
Ketchikan is located on Revillagigedo on the Alexander Archipelago in the lower curve of Alaska’s panhandle. The town is enveloped by the temperate rainforest of the Tongass National Forest and hugs the shore of the Tongass Narrows. Its population of about 8,000 residents depends largely on tourism dollars, with more than a million tourists visiting each year via cruise ships to take in the area’s Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian cultures and the world-renowned salmon industry.
Johnson was thrilled at the prospect of building a cultural foundation for her daughter. In 2012, she started work as a lab technician, the first step toward a career in medicine. What was supposed to be a new beginning turned into a nightmare that drove her away from her tribal home.
The Lab
According to documents obtained by Native News Online, in 2010, Dr. Richard McGrath was issued a license to practice Osteopathic medicine in the state of Alaska. By 2012, he was supervising the tribal health clinic lab in the Ketchikan Indian Community.
Johnson worked in the lab for a couple of weeks when McGrath began touching her: grazing her with his pelvis as he walked by, touching her breast for a moment when reaching for supplies, playing with her hair, lingering his hands on her neck and shoulders.
Like many women in her situation, Johnson initially doubted the instincts that told her the behavior was inappropriate.
In March 2012, during a conversation, McGrath slapped Johnson’s buttocks. Later that day, she filed a complaint with the tribal human resources department, then submitted more documentation of inappropriate conduct. HR said they would investigate, so Johnson waited.
A month later, Johnson received an official notification that the investigation determined no verifiable sexual harassment occurred. The notification brushed off the butt slap as intended for her back. Johnson immediately filed a grievance in response.
Days later, she was fired and escorted from the lab.
“It was an almost indescribable, horrific feeling of being treated like a criminal, after being traumatized sexually,” she said.
Now out of work, she faced a loss of income as a single mom.
“My dread, my sadness is hard to put into words,” she said.
And then came the rumors.
Rumors
Native American women experience the highest rates of sexual assault of any other demographic.
One in three victims reports their assaults, with Native victims, the number is likely less, according to StrongHearts Native Helpline, a domestic violence hotline for Native Americans.
“There is this perception that nothing will happen,” Rachel Carr-Shunk (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians), StrongHearts deputy executive officer, told Native News Online.
According to the Department of Justice, 98% of sexual assaults reported to law enforcement don’t result in arrests, convictions, or any level of accountability. Met with the jurisdictional confusion and apathy that drives low convictions in Indian Country, Native American survivors might feel especially discouraged.
After Johnson was fired, word quickly spread through town that she had had a romantic relationship with McGrath.
“The rumor was that I was a harlot, “ she said. “I was a 26-year-old single mom, honorably discharged. I came home to be part of my own culture as part of my identity reclamation journey. The only thing that came out [of it] was gossip that I had a thing with a 60-plus-year-old white man who is a predator. It was so destabilizing.”
The cost of living in Ketchikan is nearly 20% higher than the national average, and Johnson was facing a total loss of income. She worked odd jobs to make ends meet. She assisted an elderly man with daily tasks, helped renovate a house, and drove a van for a tour company. After she scrimped and saved her earnings for months, Johnsonshe had enough to leave Ketchikan, the homeland she once longed for.
“I was depleted on every level, emotionally, mentally, spiritually,” she said. “It really rocked my trust and humanity. And I think the hardest, hardest part is it, it really degraded, even broke, you know, a lot of my relationship and my trust in my own people.”
Until this year, Johnson only told a few close friends what happened to her in Ketchikan.
Sentencing
In April 2019, six years after Johnson left, McGrath was arrested at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport on eight counts of sexual assault. A month later, more victims came forward, bringing the total criminal charges against him to 13.
The assaults were committed against patients in 2018 while McGrath was working as a physician at Sitka Community Hospital. In 2023, he pleaded guilty to third-degree sexual assault and was sentenced to two years in prison.
Johnson says it’s fortunate that McGrath was arrested to stop his violent behavior. She pointed to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Peoples crisis as a symptom of what happens when justice is ignored.
“How we value Indigenous women can determine safety outcomes, life or death,” she said. “What stopped this man from progressing even further to potentially killing somebody?”
Today, Johnson lives in Seattle with her daughter. She said her experience in Ketchikan reverberated through her life. She’s hesitant to tie herself to a workplace and works as a consultant. Years of hyper vigilance stemming from the trauma left her wishing she was more present for the joys of motherhood, instead of constantly worrying about how to keep the same thing from happening to her daughter.
“I could have spent so many more years just being present for my baby girl,” she said. “Not having to be a survivor, a fighter, and I could teach her about new places and people without this whole other lens of assessing for threat.”
She hopes that telling her story will help prompt systemic changes to hold abusers accountable, regardless of their status in a community.
“I want to make this world a better place,” she said. “It might be helping to change minds. It might be, hopefully, one day, changing policy.’
At StrongHearts, resources are available to encourage survivors to tell their stories and for others to believe them. Carr-Shunk said.
“It feels almost impossible to seek justice and accountability,” Carr-Shunk said. “But there is power in telling your story, whether to law enforcement, a trusted friend or relative, or to an advocate. It’s so important to speak truth into your experiences. For survivors to trust that they’ll be believed, it takes all of us to do better.”
