‘It’s Always a Long Game’: Inside Kirsten Gillibrand’s Campaign to Overhaul Military Justice – By Steve Beynon (Military.com) / June 27 2021
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has a large whiteboard in her office displaying the name of every U.S. senator and whether they support the Military Justice Improvement and Increasing Prevention Act, a bill that would shift the decision to prosecute rape, sexual assault and many other felonies from the chain of command to actual prosecutors.
The New York Democrat originally introduced the effort in 2013, but it failed to gain significant traction. She faced an uphill battle against the Pentagon and even her own party to remove commanders, who often have little to no legal training, from legal decisions.
She largely credits a 2012 documentary on sex crimes in the military and the retaliation survivors face as her original inspiration in launching the effort.
“One of my constituents handed me a copy of ‘The Invisible War.’ [It had] these stories about sexual violence and being retaliated against; I was outraged. That’s what propelled me to ask to be on the personnel committee and be the chair when I had a choice of which subcommittee I wanted to chair. … I’ve met survivors at Fort Drum [New York] and across the country; each story fuels my fire.”
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