"Thank God I did the right thing": Jennifer Koonings on Arbaeen, confronting genocide, and the importance of speaking out against imperialism
Jennifer Koonings is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, registered nurse, New York State certified sexual assault forensic examiner and independent journalist. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Common Dreams and CovertAction Magazine. She also documents politics, war and life in New York through her own reporting . For four and a half years, Koonings worked for Mount Sinai in New York
City, carrying out forensic examinations in rape cases. She estimates she performed more than one hundred and fifty examinations and says she became the programme's busiest examiner. Then, in December 2023, The New York Times published "Screams Without Words," the article that carried Israel's mass rape allegations into the mainstream of American opinion. "I remember reading it and I was just
like, this is insane," she says. "Anyone who knows anything about rape and forensics and just anything in general would understand that this article and these allegations and this evidence, quote unquote evidence, that they're bringing forth is complete BS." Jen made a video identifying herself as a New York State certified sexual assault forensic examiner and explaining why, in her professional
view, the material presented would not survive a courtroom. "I didn't say that no women got raped," she says. "I just said, where's the evidence? There's no evidence. And that's what we know as forensic examiners. The evidence is the most important part." The cost of speaking Months later, while Koonings was in Palestine, the district attorney's office called her to testify for the first time in