Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz has pledged to carry her dorm room mattress with her wherever she goes until her alleged rapist is expelled from the same school.
The visual arts senior says she was raped two years ago by a fellow student at the college.
She filed a police report against her attacker in May and has spoken out about the difficulty rape victims face convincing authorities about the validity of their claims.
In her own personal protest against the university’s sexual assault policies, Ms Sulkowicz will carry her mattress with her as part of her senior thesis in the hope that her attacker will be expelled.
“Rape can happen anywhere - for me, it happened in my own bed,” she said.
“Since then it’s basically become fraught for me, and I feel like I’ve carried the weight of what happened there with me since then.”
Ms Sulkowicz started the protest on September 2 and posted on her Facebook page that she was “humbled” by all of the support from anti-rape campaigners.
“Thank you to everyone who has helped me develop the piece and supported me along the way,” she said.
“For my senior thesis, I will be doing a piece called mattress performance, or Carry that Weight, where I will be carrying this dorm room mattress with me everywhere I go for as long as I attend the same school as my rapist.”
Ms Sulkowicz was one of 23 students who jointly filed a federal complaint against the university in April for mishandling sexual-assault cases and said she has lived in fear since her case was disregarded.
In a desperate bid to be heard, she described her protest as an “endurance performance art piece”.
“I think the thing about a mattress is that we keep them in our bedroom, in our intimate space,” Ms Sulkowicz said.
“The past year or so of my life has been really marked by telling people what happened in that most intimate private space and bringing it into the light.”
Video source: Columbia University