Part of my job is to read the newspapers every day for articles of interest to the milling industry. Sometimes a non-flour-related article catches my eye. Today I saw "If I were raped today, I would not report it" by Julie Bindel.

As you will have seen from a previous post, in 2004 I made an official complaint of sexual assault against my former supervisor. For the avoidance of doubt, in case anyone thinks I am implying this, although I was sexually assaulted, Josh Smith did NOT rape me. I will never know what might have happened if I had not fought so hard, and occasionally the "what-ifs" chill me to my core, but, to repeat, he categorically did not rape me. This article by Bindel, and the attitudes it exposes, worries me.

I gave my statement to Student Life in order to clear my own name and restore my reputation. For the nine months prior to leaving the Wash U, Josh maligned me to anyone who would listen. I was "high maintenance", I "couldn't hack it", I wouldn't attend any talks at SVP because I was too busy having sex with Paul. While other students were championed at faculty meetings, when I left, the professors were unaware that I had even presented at SVP and GSA, let alone that I had been visiting local schools on museum outreach programmes, that I had been featured on the BBC News, and that I worked as a volunteer in the prep lab at the St Louis Science Center. While some palaeontologists have been well aware of why I left Wash U, there were people who didn't know, who had wrongly assumed that I flunked out, or I got homesick. When the news broke, it was apparent that hardly anyone knew why I'd left. So I have convinced the community (at least the people who really matter) that I still have the potential to get my PhD and continue in palaeontological research.

But at what cost? It is now common knowledge that I made a complaint of sexual assault. If, god forbid, I am assaulted again (or worse), this fact will be brought up by the defence. I can expect to have my credibility called into question for this fact. There are already people in the vertebrate palaeontology community who think that what Josh did was some kind of "indiscretion", who no doubt think that I was either a willing participant or that I had baited him into assaulting me. According to Bindel's article, there is a "current media fixation on women bringing 'false allegations'". Evidently this extends beyond journalists. And to paraphrase her, what is the point of going to the police (or in my case the University) if we aren't going to be believed? I wish it weren't true. If he hadn't made my life so unbelievably miserable, I'd be well on my way to getting my PhD. I see the students from my year group at Wash U, progressing, publishing papers, receiving grants, while I'm in no better position than I was before I even set foot in St Louis.

I don't see Josh making any attempt to deny the claims. Surely a man who had never assaulted a female student, who had never had a consensual relationship with a woman over whom he held a supervisory role (incidentally, why is it okay for a professor to sleep with his student but not okay for a president to sleep with his intern?) and who never intimidated a soul would be proclaiming his innocence from the rooftops? I eventually found the courage to make my complaint, to go public, to be named, to risk being villified, and to spend hours on the phone to journalists reliving every single detail of what was done to me. But being brave and facing one's attacker is clearly now the wrong thing to do.

I guess I have a few more issues to put to rest. I've been reading the continuing discussions on the Vert Paleo Listserver about the Smith "resignation". I don't know the person who posted about it first, but it's been very upsetting watching it unfold. I haven't joined the discussion as I really don't want to add to it, I just want to get past it. Many people have already called for the thread to be stopped, and more e-mails just prolong the discussion. The Dinosaur Mailing List and PaleoNet both stopped the threads within hours of the initial post in each case, and for that I am grateful to the moderators. To members of the community reading this, please stop the thread and allow the wounds on both sides of the incident to heal.

I've just been sent this by my mother. She said "I saw this and thought of you".

Can't think what she means.

Of course this is all complete bollocks, but it's amusing. Plus it fairly accurately reflects how I'm feeling at the moment, even though I don't believe for one moment that wiggling my mouse around on the screen was influenced much by my overall mood.

This is the first Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference that I've missed since I started going in 2002. I planned to go - I submitted an abstract and everything. I was quite looking forward to going over there, even though Ottawa is perhaps not as exciting a location as Phoenix (2005), Denver (2004) or Austin (2007).

But by the time we'd got married and had a honeymoon (which really was the holiday of a lifetime), we just had no money left. I didn't even have enough cash to get a cheapo Globespan flight over to Ottawa and crash on someone's floor. Lorin and Justin are very disappointed. I'm disappointed too. Sorry guys. Have an extra tequila shot with Hans for me on Saturday night.

I have a load of friends whom I only see once a year - at SVP. Paul and I were also planning to have a party on the Thursday night (the "quiet" night of the conference) to celebrate our wedding with people who couldn't come over from the USA. Looks like that won't happen.

It's not all bad news though - we're DEFINITELY going to Austin next year. Wouldn't miss it for the world. Even if I have to sell myself down the Pentonville Road. Hoping the Longhorns will have a home game that Saturday because I reckon Justin could score us some tickets to the game. The conference is being held in the Hilton, and Paul and I have designs on one of the suites. Good delayed first-anniversary present to us from us, and a great party location!

Have fun this year, let me know all the usual gossip, and I'll see you next year!

I'd like to draw your attention to an article by the Washington University student newspaper, Student Life. When I first found out that Josh Smith had resigned, and once I heard from friends that it was related to sexual misconduct, I contacted Student Life and informed them of what had happened to me as one of Smith's students. I do not intend to go into details here - it is all reported in the news article.

I am relieved that Smith has been exposed. I just wish more people had listened to me and believed me back in 2004. I don't know the details of the recent incident, but if he assaulted another student, then they suffered unnecessarily, and purely because the University chose to keep him in post.

I would love to be gloating right now. I thought nothing would give me more pleasure than sticking two fingers up at Smith. But I'm actually drained. Now that the story has broken, I want to see if this will, in conjunction with getting my PhD going again, give me the closure I have wanted desperately. I don't really want to think too hard about what happened, about all the could'ves, would'ves and should'ves. A lot of people said some very hurtful things to me in the immediate aftermath. I want to be able to forgive and forget.

More will come out with time, I am sure. There is more to the story than Student Life could publish. Smith's behaviour towards me and the other student who complained can surely be defined as psychopathic. At least now he will never be able to hold that sort of power over another human being - I doubt he will ever get another academic position after this.

Time to move on.

When I first set up this blog I referred to it as an Ediacaran animal. Well, it's figured out that its existing bauplan didn't work and it's worked out an external skeleton as a good way to proceed with the whole evolution thing. Woo yay for preservation in the fossil record.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I now have HaloScan comments and tracking on the blog. So go on, knock yourselves out and leave me a comment. All comments are welcome unless you swear. I will remove obscene language. I have not used it in my posts here and I don't expect you to use it in response to me. If you disagree with anything I've said then at least have the decency to construct a coherent argument using the many and varied words the English language has to offer without resorting to profanity.

Other than that, I'd love to hear from you. Especially if you're an old friend that I haven't heard from in ages. I miss you all.

With the various bits of cool software my excellent webhost Ziltech provides I can see all the visit statistics for my website. I've been able to trace where my visitors come from - at the moment the furthest-flung visitors are in Singapore, China (dead impressed this site gets through Google China!), Nigeria and the USA. Very interested to see my two visitors from Gibraltar and Greece though. When I get comment forms or a guestbook set up on here I'd love to hear from you all and what brought you here - my webstats will tell me the IP addresses and they'll tell me which search engine and which terms you used but they don't put the two together.

To the searcher who found me through Stony Brook's morphometric website, I'm not at Wash U anymore but my e-mail address can be found on the front page. I do however have a repeat visitor or two from Wash U. Hi there - I expect I know you. Go Bears! Hi to Ben and/or Rachel up in Durham. Do some work- Big Sister is watching you! To my visitor from the High Energy Physics Dept from Southampton University, if you're who I think you are then I'm delighted to that you've left your calling-card (if inadvertently) and pleased to see you doing so well (can't believe it's been five years).

To the recruitment companies, I'm really glad you've found me but I have a job. Yes, I'll take my CV off Monster. I just haven't got round to it. Thank you for your interest and do come back in a year's time when my contract ends.

And to Luton, Woking, Liverpool, Wolverhampton, Gloucester, Coventry, Bradford and Sarf London, I'm so pleased to see you here, finally taking some notice of what's going on in my life.

The search engine keywords are rather mundane - as I'm the top hit for Julia Heathcote it's not overly surprising. But the person who searched for "julia heathcote dinosaur blog" - my, that's thorough! Really only one person you could have been looking for there mate.

Last week, as part of my new job, I took part in a mill visit to the only flour mill in London - Wright's. The organisers had worked so hard to make it a really fascinating and fun day. As part of the experience, we were given a bread-making lesson by Paul Hollywood, the celebrity baker.

Now, with the exception of a woeful attempt during a school Home Economics lesson I had never baked bread before, so I was more than a little nervous. But Hollywood was an excellent teacher, and it was actually really easy. I took out a lot of frustration on that dough... I was so thrilled with my loaf, and Hollywood said it was perfect. It tasted pretty good too!

All the way back home I was surrounded by the smell of freshly baked bread, and Paul couldn't help but tuck in when I met him at Waterloo. We were given a couple of Wright's bread and cake mix packs, so I'll have to start making bread more often. And if I use rye flour and lots of seeds it'll be better for us both.