Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation

An interview with the author

I was lucky enough to meet Erika Krouse at a writing conference last year where I participated in a workshop she led. Aside from being a fantastic writer, Erika is one of the most profound, kind, and understated individuals I have met.

So I was very eager to read her memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, the winner of the 2023 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime, the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction. 

The list goes on.

Described as, “Part memoir and part literary true crime, Tell Me Everything is the mesmerizing story of a landmark sexual assault investigation and the female private investigator who helped crack it open.”

And mesmerizing it is.

Through succinct storytelling, Erika chronicles her experience working as a part-time investigator in Denver, Colorado on a lawsuit that would become a historic civil rights case that revolutionized Title IX law.

For background, Title IX of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Amendments of 1972 protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance.

Throughout the book, Erika skillfully weaves her own personal story of sexual abuse and family.

As someone who attended an SEC (Southeastern Conference) university where football reigned supreme, Erika’s descriptive narrative of college football culture within the University of Colorado Boulder felt eerily familiar to me.

It made me reflect on my days as a tutor to student athletes where I observed football culture on campus and the Southern town which it dominated. Something about the entire ecosystem felt terribly off to me.

Lacking cognitive maturity and unable to articulate what I instinctively felt at that time, reading Erika’s book nearly two decades later was both affirming and informative for me.

All that aside, it is a powerful story. I am delighted to share with you my first author interview with Erika Krouse.

You open this brilliant story by saying you have a face that makes people open up to you. Does that still happen to you nowadays? And if so, how do you manage that in everyday life?

Yes, it happens all the time. My mammographer tells me about her mom’s death from breast cancer. I’ll be in a dental hygienist chair and not even saying anything but I’m hearing everything. It happens constantly. While ordering a meal, or picking up takeout. It’s a thing.

I thought during the pandemic it would change, because we were masked, but it actually happened more. I think most people really want to talk to somebody, and not many people really listen.

I actually like it to be honest. I probably cultivate that. I probably ask inappropriate questions. I think it’s a writer’s thing. We want to know everything about other people.

Do you ever find yourself losing track of time in these moments amidst everyday life?

Constantly. There are times when I am late or I get caught in a confession. You can’t really leave someone when they’re crying. That’s not healthy for anyone. But I do look at the balance of it. Do I get more out of it than I am giving? Absolutely. It’s part of connecting with the world. If you’re too busy to connect with the world, because you have so many things to do, then it’s time to re-evaluate your relationship with other people.

You weave together the story of your family and this larger case so skillfully. What was the biggest challenge for you in writing this story?

Definitely writing my personal story. I am a fiction writer by trade and probably by nature, and I am not used to writing about my own life at all. That was a big hurdle for me. What made it easier is once I got really organized about the book, I decided that it was going to be a hierarchy. There was going to be a plot, and there would be sub plots serving that plot. I decided that the case was the plot.

After that point, I looked at my life and my past experience with childhood sexual abuse, my family, and my love life - all of those things - and decided that they were going to serve points on the plot that I would double down on. It’s almost like when you’re writing a research paper and you need three examples for everything. That made it really easy for me to decide which aspects of my life to include because they were all serving a goal. 

I was also committed to not going into graphic detail about my own abuse because I myself have gone to books searching for some kind of community and found myself screaming and running away from the book because I couldn’t stand the graphic nature of the content.

I also knew that because I was writing about such a difficult subject it was going to feel graphic even if I told all the stories in the most journalistic of terms. That helped me realize what I really wanted to say. I didn’t want a book that filled the reader with horror. I wanted a book that tries to talk about it from a retrospective place. 

Once I got clear about what I needed and wanted from all the material, that helped a lot to curate the story in a direction that would feel easier to read and wouldn’t get in the way of what I was trying to see. 

You wrote an essay about your experience with the case. At what point did you know you wanted to write this book?

The essay came out of rejection letters. I wanted to publish in Granta magazine since I was 19, so I had been sending there for a very very long time and they kept saying no and no and no. Finally I got a note back from someone that said - still no - but he said send to him in the future directly. 

But he was still saying no. But at one point he said I saw in your cover letter (that I read 400 times) that you were a PI. Would you like to write a piece? He said give me 3,000 words. I gave him 6,000 and Granta published it anyway.

But as I was writing it, I knew that I was leaving everything out and I wasn’t really doing justice to the topic. It’s hard for non-fiction writers to know what’s interesting about themselves but it gave me an opportunity to look back and say wait a second, I was part of a groundbreaking case and I hadn’t really seen that case written about in the way that it deserved. 

I asked the attorney that I name Grayson in the book, if he wanted to write the book. I said, “are you going to write this ever?” And he said “No, never, never.” And I asked him if he minded if I did. And he said, I’ll help you. He sent me court documents and helped me edit the inaccuracies out. He helped me a lot. With him in my corner, I felt like okay, I can do this. I can write this story.  And Oh my Gosh!, now I have to write this story. It was a lot of journalism and I’m not trained as a journalist at all. The whole book had nothing but challenges.

I can’t imagine how daunting that must have felt for you. As a reader you sit down with this finished product and it’s so seamless and compelling, but the whole time while I’m reading I’m thinking, Gosh, I can’t imagine what it took just to get this piece of paper, or this document, or this name, especially with my background as a journalist.

My outline alone was 100,000 words which was as long as my book ended up being. Just outlining it with all my sources, the newspaper articles, the court documents, my own blabbing about it, my notes, that was 100,000 words alone.

After I finished reading the book, I went digging to read more articles about the story and I was very surprised to see there was not much written about it.

There were articles at the time and the journalism at the time was great, but the problem was that no one could understand this idea of Title XI being sexual assault. It was the first case of its kind. So people kept saying I don’t get it. Why are they suing the university? What does the university have to do with that? The case itself was so convoluted. There were prostitutes and weird money and people trying to simplify the argument into, “They’re trying to take down football.” 

So I think it was hard for even the press to quite understand the implications of the case. And each article was almost like a puzzle piece but people didn’t have the whole rest of the puzzle. 

I wrote to you to tell you that so much had become clear to me while reading this book, as it relates to my own observations about college football culture when I was an undergraduate student at LSU. I was in awe reading your pages. 

The thing is football in our culture is treated as an automatic good and part of that is because they have so much money - even in college football - that TV networks won’t even broach the subject of misconduct because they don’t want to be seen as football unfriendly. They don’t want to not get that football money when contract time comes around. Streamers are trying to lure live broadcasts away from the networks so there is almost like this censorship around football and misdeeds and corruption within the sport. 

Also football players are treated like they are saints and Gods, especially on campus. One of the rapists from the book I wrote about just died six days ago from CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is a progressive degenerative disease affecting people who have suffered repeated concussions and traumatic brain injuries), and he was 41-years-old. He had a stroke 5 or 6 years prior to that I think. 

They're not Gods. They are people being used at the time in ways that I believe create incredible brain damage, psychological problems, and aggressive behavior and they are taught every day to be aggressive. I don’t see the perpetrators as victims. They had decisions that they made and most players don’t make those decisions.

However, it’s not in a vacuum. This whole system creates a culture of rape and physical abuse and it’s clearly documented, but people are instead very willing to step behind this screen of fantasy, and say no, “Football is noble, and it’s a sport, it’s American,” -  all these things, but there is a very difficult side to this sport that no one is fixing and people would much rather profit off the problem then change it. 

Do you feel that the toll this book took on you was worth it for you? Did the benefit outweigh the cost? 

The toll was high. This book was shut down for seven months because of legal bullying and harassment which is a whole other story. I’ve also had a fair amount of that since the book came out.

But I also get emails from people and others talk to me in person and say things like I never saw my story in a book before. Or they will want me to know that the same thing happened to them. There’s sort of a coded language that people use. It consists of long looks, or silences, or nodding a lot. Or sometimes people will tell me directly, this happened to me, and your book helped me. And I think this is the power of non-fiction.

Fiction does have immense power but non-fiction has this kind of power to really reach people. If you see someone using their voice despite all the risks and problems they are going to have - and we all know, women always know - that using our voice will be punished. But if you see another person doing that, especially another woman, it can help give you just enough courage so feel that I can do that maybe and my story deserves to be told and to be heard. And the more of us that do that, the more of a community it creates. 

The interesting thing I found is that I thought I would walk into rooms and have football fans throwing things at me, or people getting very angry at me for talking about my family because that’s not what you’re supposed to be. You’re “supposed to be loyal, good, silent daughter,” however I found the opposite. I think because 1 out of 3 women and 1 out of 5 men have been sexually abused in some way, I feel that the reception this book has gotten has been much warmer than I ever anticipated it would be. 

I found support in amazing places from people that I would have never expected to be in my corner and they solidly are because of either their experiences or because they love someone who has been abused or raped or sexually harassed and they care about that changing.

I think telling the truth has consequences and risks, and if you can think through them, and reason through them, and do it anyway, there is a power in that. I think secrets are more powerful when they’re kept secret. Once you’re open with a secret, well then it’s the cards are on the table now, let’s look at them. And if you don’t want to, you don’t have to, but then let the rest of us do what we need to do.

You shared very traumatic intimate parts of your life. Do you feel that after writing the book that you have recovered as an individual?

Recovery is an interesting thing. I don’t think it’s something that you achieve and you’re done. I think it’s a daily process. I think everyone has something that they need to recover from or that they are in recovery for. I think it’s a million little choices you make every day. And sometimes things are better and sometimes things are worse. 

The hard thing with recovery is when it’s passive. When people are just waiting for recovery to happen to them. And this is where I think writing comes in. It’s something you can do. You can change the way you feel about your own life and the way you process it and where it sits in your brain. When you write, you’re changing it to something that was done to you to something you are doing. It’s going from passive and helpless to powerful and active. 

Also it’s helping other people. Writing can do that. And for me, I feel the case did that. People use the benefits from this case everyday. I wasn’t the lawyer who did it and I wasn’t the plaintiffs who had the courage to do this, but I did help and being able to help something you care about, or help right a wrong, or stick up for someone on a given day, or even if you just listen to someone who needs listening, that’s helping, and that is a part of recovery. 

I don’t think recovery is about sitting there and licking your own wounds. It’s about trying to solve the overall problem. For me it is, I hope it is for other people too.

Recovery is collective. 

Yes.

What do you hope that readers might take away from Tell Me Everything?

I really do hope that readers take away the importance of using your voice. You can speak in many ways. You can speak through actions, and writing, and art and being in your community. But I do hope that is something that people take away. Not everything turns to despair. Not all lawsuits are lost. Not all situations turn to their worst corrupt possibilities. Sometimes you actually win. It’s rare but it does happen and wouldn’t you like to be a part of that?

I also do hope more than all that the people who need to read the book have access to it. I didn’t write this book for ‘Oh I hope the whole world reads this!’ I really wrote it hoping that the people who needed it would read it. And that’s my dearest hope - that it reaches those people.

You can learn more about Erika Krouse’s work and writing, here.