Last week’s Doonesbury storyline depicted B.D. meeting a female soldier who was seeking counseling for sexual trauma. The story (as well as the drawing of the young woman) hit close to home for one female soldier in Oregon who went AWOL to avoid a second deployment in Iraq where she has accused her supervising sergeants of sexual harassment and coercion during her first deployment.
Trudeau did not respond to a request for comment on his inspiration for this week’s plot, but Swift has been the subject of an extraordinary amount of media exposure, most recently in The New York Times Magazine, which focused extensively on her in a March 18 piece titled “Women at War.”
Trudeau has been called an investigative cartoonist and, according to a Washington Post profile published last year, has been given extraordinary access to injured soldiers by the Pentagon for his B.D. story line.
Rich said Trudeau had not contacted her or her daughter.
Swift’s battle with the Army – from its investigation of her allegations through to her court-martial – has been the subject of national and international news reports.