DeLisa Gilmore, a sophomore, was sexually assaulted at her workplace, Whataburger, on Jan. 22.
Gilmore was in the bathroom prior to beginning her shift when she heard rustling and a customer say “Get the [expletive] off of me.”
“There’s like never anyone in the Whataburger bathroom, so I thought they had come in a group,” Gilmore said. “I thought it was somebody she knew or was familiar with or whatever.”
She then waited for them to leave before exiting her stall and washed her hands, she said.
“I look over to my right and a really tall dude standing in the door,” she said.
The man, 26-year-old Adonnis O’Brian Bailey, was reported sleeping in the bathroom the previous week. She recognized Bailey from then.
“I just thought ‘Okay he’s just in here to sleep, like he realizes he’s in the wrong bathroom, he’s going to the door to leave,” Gilmore said. “So, I just go back to washing my hands and I’ll tell my manager when I get out.”
She said Bailey approached her and when she looked up from the mirror he was less than a foot from her reaching for her.
“I just started screaming at him,” she said. “I said, ‘Don’t touch me,’ ‘Get away from me.’”
Bailey had tried to undress the other woman, Gilmore said. He had pulled up her shirt and attempted to pull down her pants. The other woman then ran to get the manager and called her husband, who works with the Florence Police Department.
“She heard me scream and came back in while she was on the phone with 911,” she said.
Employees cornered the man and prevented him from leaving the premises while police were on the way.
The police subsequently showed up and arrested Bailey.
“I feel like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Gilmore said. “I am just very grateful I had [the other woman], the police, and everyone else who believed me. The man was six-foot-eight and it was very clear that he was on a lot of drugs. I did have my pepper spray, I didn’t have anything like that on me at the time.”
Gilmore said she still feels stressed out like her body hasn’t exited the “fight-or-flight” mode.
“Being around men, especially unfamiliar men, stressed me out,” she said. “It’s been hard this week to like just be around people. It’s like I have to force myself to get up and go about my day.”
The following Monday, Gilmore found out Bailey’s bond had been set for $75,000.
“Knowing that, at least for the short term, he will be in jail… that helps a lot knowing that I don’t have to keep looking over my shoulder for him specifically.”
Gilmore had advice for those who may ever be in that situation or who have been in that situation before.
“ I have always heard to scream, and I didn’t really know how important it was. That’s what saved me,” she said. “You’re not an inconvenience, you’re not a nuisance, let everybody around you know what’s happening, when it’s happening.”
“Your experience is a part of you, but not the whole you. It doesn’t makeup who you are, it doesn’t define you,” she said. “That’s something I’ve had to really hammer into myself. I’ve been telling myself, ‘Do not give that man any more power than what he’s already had over you.’ That’s what’s getting me through it.”
Bailey was booked into the Lauderdale County Detention Center for first-degree sex abuse.
