This is the second story in a two-part report about sexual assault of agricultural workers in the U.S. Read part one.
It started with a missing paycheck.
In 2006, Guadalupe Chavez, a farm worker in California's Central Valley, was supposed to earn $245 for a week of picking pomegranates. It was money the widowed mother of two needed urgently to pay her bills. When she went to track down the check, a supervisor she'd never met before told her someone had it out in the fields. He said to follow him there in her car.
He stopped in an isolated pistachio orchard, she says. Then, she says, he got out of his truck and demanded her underpants in exchange for her paycheck.
"He said, 'I'm the supervisor, I'm in charge here.' And I remembered that he had told me that he had a gun in his truck," Chavez says in Spanish. "And so when he said that, and he banged hard on the car with his hand, I thought, 'He's serious. If I don't do what he says, he can kill me.' "
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Silenced By Status, Farm Workers Face Rape, Sexual Abuse