Two women say were raped, punished at US military academies

The two women, identified as Leah Marquet, 20, and Anne Kendzior, 22, sued US military officials in a lawsuit filed in the Manhattan federal court on Friday, and accused them of failing to address widespread problems of sexual assault at the schools, Reuters reported.

They said the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and the Army's United States Military Academy in West Point, New York, tolerate sexual assault and discourage victims of attacks from reporting them.

"Both institutions systematically and repeatedly ignore rampant sexual harassment. Both institutions have a history of failing to prosecute and punish those students found to have sexually assaulted and raped their fellow students,” the lawsuit stated.

Marquet, a former West Point cadet, said in the lawsuit that she was forced by upperclassmen to get drunk, and was raped by a fellow student while she was intoxicated.

Other students taunted her after she reported the assault, and the school punished her for reporting the incident by forcing her to take out her attacker's trash. She quit West Point after becoming suicidal, the lawsuit said.

Kendzior, who entered the Naval Academy in 2008, said she was raped twice by two different fellow students, both times while she was drunk.

She accused the Naval Academy of forcing her to drop out after she reported the rapes to an academy counselor.

In January, eight current and former female members of the US military said in a lawsuit that that they had been raped and punished after reporting their ordeals.

The lawsuit accused the military leaders of having a "high tolerance for sexual predators in their ranks" and failing to take steps to deal with the problem despite avowals to do so.

The eight women included a Marine on active duty and seven veterans of the Marine Corps and Navy. Seven asserted that a fellow service member raped or tried to sexually assault them, and an eighth said she was harassed while deployed in Iraq.