CRUDE hands choked me. I struggled to scream.

“Stop it! Stop your screaming and I won’t hurt you,” he demanded, squeezing my throat harder.

But I didn’t believe him and I didn’t obey him. I kept trying to scream. I clawed at his face, knocking off his glasses and wrenching the false teeth out of his mouth. As he struggled to touch and control me, I jammed my fingernails deep into his eye sockets. And I screamed. When his fingers got near my mouth, I bit with all my might.

Believe it or not, I was not afraid​—the fear came later. Right now I was angry! This fiend wasn’t going to force his way into our house and rape me, not here or anywhere else!

But he kept trying. He grabbed a nearby belt and tied my hands behind my back​—the first of several times, since I was repeatedly able to work them free. With one arm around my neck, he groped for his teeth and glasses on the floor. Suddenly I broke free and, inexplicably, began hurling things in the room and shrieking incoherently, as though I had gone out of my mind.

He clearly planned to catch me off guard. He must have expected me to freeze and cooperate mindlessly, in a state of shock. Well, I was shocked when he lunged for me, but I did not cower. I didn’t stop to think about it either. I just reacted, instantly erupting in a frenzy of yelling and clawing and kicking and biting. It was the best thing I could have done, for my intense counterattack surprised him. It gave me an important psychological lift right from the start to know that he was not in full control of himself or me. It made me more determined to fight and reinforced the hope that I could win.

Probably the single greatest help to my recovery was knowing that with Jehovah God’s help I had done the right thing to the best of my ability. In my brighter moments I even found a little reason to rejoice. Time and again these Bible verses were my soft blanket:

“In case there happened to be a virgin girl engaged to a man, and a man actually found her in the city and lay down with her, you must also bring them both out to the gate of that city and pelt them with stones, and they must die, the girl for the reason that she did not scream in the city, and the man for the reason that he humiliated the wife of his fellowman. So you must clear away what is evil from your midst. If, however, it is in the field that the man found the girl who was engaged, and the man grabbed hold of her and lay down with her, the man who lay down with her must also die by himself, and to the girl you must do nothing. The girl has no sin deserving of death, because just as when a man rises up against his fellowman and indeed murders him, even a soul, so it is with this case. For it was in the field that he found her. The girl who was engaged screamed, but there was no one to rescue her.”​—Deuteronomy 22:23-27.

I was profoundly thankful to know these simple words. They had taught me my moral duty. They had prevented confusion and uncertainty. Because of them, I had known exactly what to do. I screamed, besides which I also fought back. I had trusted the Bible’s instructions and found them to be bedrock. My husband and I prayed often; my strength and stability returned.

I wish that no other woman would ever have to go through an attempted rape​—let alone a rape. But a rape takes place every 7 minutes in the United States, according to Uniform Crime Reports​—Crime in the United States, 1983 edition, page 5, published by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. In my case, I relied on Jehovah, I remembered his words, I screamed. Besides that, I fought back.