Lavinia Masters was 13 years old when a stranger raped her at knifepoint in her Dallas bedroom. For more than two decades, her rape kit—the evidence collected in a hospital after the assault on July 31, 1985—sat untested. By the time her case was reopened in 2005, it was too late to press charges. Masters learned hers was one of hundreds of thousands of kits across the country that sat on shelves for years, sometimes—as in Masters’ case—as assailants went on to rape others. For more than 10 years, she’s advocated for reform in Texas, where a backlog of about 20,000 untested rape kits was identified in 2011. This year, Masters worked with Democratic state Representative Victoria Neave to pass a major law aimed at tracking rape kits, clearing the backlog, and extending the statute of limitations. Masters spoke with the Observer about the decades of trauma and work that led to the Lavinia Masters Act and what comes next.
House Bill 8, the Lavinia Masters Act, goes into effect in September. How are you feeling?
I am excited about it—it’s been a long time coming. It’s a fight that I’ve been fighting since 2005, to see a change in our rape kit backlog. It’s almost surreal.
