This story contains references to sexual assault.
It all started – again – because Shannon Keeler left her credit card at a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia.
She was on vacation with her now-husband in the spring of 2020 when she got a message request on Facebook. It was the waiter, letting her know the card was there waiting to be picked up. But beneath that message, in an inbox Keeler almost never checked, were others. They had been there, unread, for nearly six months, and the name on them made Keeler’s blood run cold.
They were from Ian Cleary, the man who, seven years earlier, had forced his way into her dorm room at Gettysburg College and sexually assaulted her.
The messages said a lot of things, Keeler says, most of it “really disturbing. But the main thing was, ‘So, I raped you.’”
At first, reading the messages brought back a flood of traumatic memories. But they were soon followed by a steely resolve.
“I remember feeling like, ok, this is the sign. I have a job to do. God has given me a job,” Keeler says, “and I’m not letting this go this time.”
Winter, 2013
On the last day of finals in December, 2013, Gettysburg College was blanketed in snow. Most of the student body had already headed home for the holidays, and Keeler, an 18-year-old freshman, finished her last exam and then celebrated by going to a fraternity party.
She hadn’t been there long before Cleary, a fellow Gettysburg student who was not a member of the fraternity, began to bother her. He even tried to kiss her, Keeler says. Feeling uncomfortable, she asked a friend to walk her home. But Cleary followed, even offering the friend $20 to let him accompany Keeler instead.
Later that night, after Keeler had made it safely back to her dorm room and was getting ready for bed, there was a knock on the door. She opened it, expecting a friend, and found Cleary standing there. He forced his way into the room, then forced himself on Keeler.
“I texted my friends to help me when he was in my room,” she recalls, “and they did show up, but just after it happened and he had left.”
Keeler spent the rest of the night on a friend’s futon, stunned and victimized. “I remember during orientation, when they did the part on, like, sexual assault awareness, and I was just thinking, yeah, that doesn’t really happen,” Keeler says. “I remember rolling my eyes at it, which is crazy.”
In fact, more than a quarter of all female undergraduates will experience rape or sexual assault. Only 2 percent of perpetrators are ever convicted.
“I was very naive, not just about sexual assault but about the justice system,” Keeler says. “In ‘Law & Order,’ someone gets raped and Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni go talk to someone who tells them about someone, there’s a chase through Central Park and they tackle a guy, and they end up in court getting convicted, all in like 45 minutes. That was my interpretation of the system. But I can tell you now, that is not how it actually works.”
Keeler reported the crime to campus authorities and to police, who collected a rape kit and questioned her for hours. “It was like something out of a movie – they put me in this sterile room that’s usually for criminals, and had me explain everything in detail eight different times on a recording. It was a really horrible experience, but I was still thinking to myself that they had to believe me. I believed in the system.”
As Keeler and her mom were leaving the police station, she says, an officer mentioned that “rape kits are really expensive to analyze…so don’t get your hopes up.”
A year after the assault, charges had not been filed. The college’s investigation had ended when Cleary dropped out, and Keeler met with an assistant district attorney for an update.
“I get in there and she said, ‘Unfortunately, we can’t pursue your case,’” Keeler says. “And it became very clear she hasn’t even read it, and didn’t realize I had all this evidence. And I wondered, ‘if you’re not going to help me, who are you going to help?’ I think looking back on this she’d feel bad, but what she said I’ll never forget: ‘You’re a really pretty girl and you have a lot going for you. Are you sure you really want to go through this?’”
Keeler was sure, and she fought for another year to get charges brought against Cleary. It cast a pall over her years in college, but at the same time she was determined to go on living. “I really just wanted to keep my life,” she says. “And I still had a good college experience. I joined a sorority, I studied abroad. I won a lacrosse national championship.”
In 2015, two years and one day after her assault, Keeler heard from the district attorney that her case would not be prosecuted.
“I thought to myself, ‘You know what, Shannon, you did what you could do. You tried,’” Keeler says. “And I thought, now it’s time to move on. I graduated, got a job, moved to Charlotte, met a guy, fell in love and was still always a little bit bothered that this never went anywhere, but it didn’t consume me. I had by all means moved on.”
Last month, Shannon Keeler shared her story during a PCAR event at the PA State Capitol to demand increased funding for rape crisis centers. Photo: Pennsylvania Coalition to Advance Respect (PCAR)
Spring, 2020
After Keeler read the messages from Cleary which were, in effect, a written confession, she geared up for another fight. This time, she did not intend to back down.
“We spent the first year pushing every angle to pressure them to press charges,” she says. But the hits kept coming: Keeler learned that her rape kit was not only never analyzed, but it had since been destroyed. Police, feeling that the messages weren’t enough, asked Keeler to come in for a “controlled call,” where they attempted to get Cleary on the phone to get another confession. He did not answer.
Keeler teamed up with PCAR, the Pennsylvania Coalition to Advance Respect, which provides support and legal help to survivors. Andrea Levy, the project’s legal director, says it’s shockingly normal for people reporting assaults to hear their case won’t be moving ahead, if they hear back from police at all.
“I can’t tell you how many calls my legal project gets from individuals who have reported their rape, may have had a rape kit, have spent a couple hours with law enforcement describing what occurred, and then they call us saying, ‘I’ve never heard anything back, I don’t know what’s going on with my case,” Levy says. “That would never happen in other types of crimes.”
But Keeler was not about to let that be her story.
Spring, 2021
After another year passed with no charges filed, Keeler and her legal team decided it was time to draw more attention to the case. “No survivor should have to go public with their story in order to increase pressure on a prosecutor’s office, especially when they’re holding that amount of evidence,” Levy says, but that’s just what Keeler did.
She told her story to a reporter at The Associated Press, and it was picked up by People, ABC and others. In May of 2021, she told it on “Good Morning America.” (Last month, her ABC interview, “So I Raped You,” was nominated for an Emmy.)
“Ultimately, a big part of my motivation was wanting justice. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and this was wrong,” she says. “I wanted to force the system to work for me and do what it was supposed to do.”
After a great deal of media coverage, Cleary was indicted in 2021. Authorities couldn’t find him – they told Keeler they believed he’d fled to Europe – but she wasn’t stopping. Her lawyers worked with private investigators and Interpol to find him in France, and he was extradited in 2025.
Fall, 2025
At a hearing in Gettysburg in October, Keeler, with her husband and family there to support her, told the story one more time. She gave a powerful 10-minute statement, telling the court, “This isn’t just my story, it’s the story of countless women.”
Cleary pled guilty, and faced 10 years in prison. Attorneys for the two sides had agreed to seek a four- to eight-year sentence, but the judge, citing Cleary’s “hope for some kind of forgiveness and contrition,” sentenced him to two to four.
It was a much more lenient sentence than Keeler had hoped for, but it was a prison sentence nonetheless. “If there’s ever such a thing as closure, or justice, or empowerment, that was it,” she says. “It was a weight I didn’t even know I’d been carrying, and I’ve had a lightness since then.” After the sentencing, she told a reporter from ABC that she forgave Cleary.
“Forgiveness doesn’t just set him free, it sets me free too,” she said. “And I don’t want to live with anger, and I believe in redemption as well. He still has the power to live a good life and become a good person…do the right thing, and I hope he does.”
She hopes her story will spark change within the legal system and make it more likely that other victims of assault can face their assailants in court.
“The system is only as good as how it’s enforced,” she says. “In my case, it took a written confession, going on national television, hundreds of thousands in legal fees, a private detective, a three-year international manhunt, and the goodwill of a lot of people that chose to do the right thing within a broken system. But the outcome is a testament to how incredibly powerful the justice system is when it does work.”
Reading about sexual assault can be difficult. The following organizations offer confidential support and resources.
New Jersey Coalition Against Sexual Assault (NJCASA) offers support to survivors. 24-hour hotline: 800-601-7200.
Services Empowering Rights of Victims (SERV) provides free counseling, victim advocacy and witnesses to court appearances. 24/7 hotline: 866-295-7378.
