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Ruth Moore: Twenty-Three Years of Denials, and the Error the VA Finally Admitted

Ruth Moore joined the Navy at eighteen, from a poor family, in her words because "college was not an option." Two and a half months into her first assignment, overseas in the Azores, she was raped by her supervisor — twice, she told Congress under oath. She sought help from a chaplain and got none. She contracted a sexually transmitted disease, attempted suicide, was medically evacuated to Bethesda, and was discharged with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder that she has always said she did not have. No one was ever charged. Then the second institution took its turn: the VA denied her PTSD claim, again and again, for twenty-three years — at one point on the stated ground that she had not proved a rape for which she had submitted eyewitness testimony and treatment records, in a file her own VA treatment team later found had been partially expunged. The VA ended the fight in stages: a 70 percent rating with individual unemployability, and then, on May 29, 2014, a phone call telling her the department had made a "clear and unmistakable error" in denying her in 1993, and owed her more than $405,000. This page is the record of the assault the Navy did not prosecute, the diagnosis that replaced it, and the quarter-century it took the government to admit it had been wrong.

The service and the promise

Moore’s service was short, and everything that followed came out of its brevity. She enlisted in the mid-1980s and, after training school, drew an overseas first assignment in Europe — the Azores, Portugal’s mid-Atlantic islands, where the Navy operated from Lajes Field. Pingree’s office, which later carried her case, records that she joined at eighteen and that the assaults were committed by her immediate supervisor. Her own sworn account, given to the House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Disability Assistance and Memorial Affairs on July 18, 2012, is the primary source for what happened, and this page follows it where accounts differ.

The promise in a case like hers runs in two directions, and both were broken in sequence. The first is the service’s: a sailor who reports a crime committed by the superior she must obey is owed an investigation of the accused, not an exit for the accuser. The second is the VA’s: a veteran claiming disability must prove a current condition, an in-service event, and a link between them — and for traumas that leave little paperwork, the regulations at 38 C.F.R. § 3.304(f)(5) were supposed to let adjudicators look for “markers,” the signs and behavioral changes that corroborate an assault no official record captured. Moore’s case is documented proof of what that system did instead, for twenty-three years, to a claimant whose file contained the markers the regulation describes.

What happened

“In 1987, I was a bright, vivacious 18-year-old, serving in the United States Navy,” Moore testified in 2012. “After my training school, my first assignment was to an overseas duty station in Europe. Two and a half months after I arrived, I was raped by my supervisor outside of the local club. Not once, but twice.” Pingree’s office adds the detail Moore’s prepared statement does not spell out: that when she reported the first attack, the same supervisor raped her again as retaliation. She sought help from the chaplain, she testified, “but did not receive any.”

What the record shows next is a sequence, not a single decision. She contracted a sexually transmitted disease — chlamydia, per the treatment history she later submitted to the VA. She attempted suicide. She was medically evacuated to Bethesda Naval Hospital. And at separation, the Navy psychiatrist diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder. “I did not have a personality disorder,” she testified; “this was the standard diagnosis that was given to all victims of MST at that time, to separate them from active duty and protect the military from any and all liability.” That last clause is her characterization, offered as a witness — but the mechanism is not hers alone. Personality-disorder labels were consequential paperwork: a condition treated as pre-existing service rather than caused by it, attached to a separation that ended the institution’s obligations. Representative Jackie Speier made the same point at the same hearing: when victims report sexual abuse, they are often diagnosed with personality disorders and phased out.

“No prosecution was ever made against the perpetrator,” Moore testified. “In hindsight, it was easier for the military to get rid of me, than admit to a rape.” Pingree’s office states the same fact without the hindsight: the attacker was never charged or disciplined. Moore also testified that on outprocessing she was counseled to waive all claims to the VA, on the assurance that she would get health care through her then-husband, who was on active duty.

The years after discharge are part of the wrong, because the VA fight cannot be understood without what it cost while it ran. By her testimony: from 1987 to 1993 she could not trust male supervisors or maintain employment; her marriage ended; in 1997 she fled her house and lived out of her van for two weeks before rebuilding her life with her present spouse; she developed night terrors, panic attacks, severe migraines, and insomnia, and, she told the subcommittee, miscarried nine children. These are her sworn statements of consequence, carried here as hers.

What the institution did afterward

Moore filed her first VA claim in Jacksonville. It was denied — Pingree’s office dates the first denial to 1993, the denial the VA would formally concede error in twenty-one years later — “despite having several markers for PTSD and gynecological problems,” as she put it. She refiled in 2003 and was denied again. With the Disabled American Veterans’ help she won 30 percent compensation for depression. The PTSD claim was still refused, and the stated reason goes to the center of this page: she was told she had not submitted enough evidence to prove she was raped — despite the letter she had submitted from her former spouse, an eyewitness who remembered the rape and her treatment for chlamydia. “Given this eyewitness testimony, the VA still denied this as credible proof.”

There was a reason the corroborating medical record was thin, and Moore’s own VA clinicians found it. She testified that there was no record of her sexually transmitted disease treatment from that duty station because her medical records “had been partially expunged.” In 2009, in her first comprehensive treatment at the VA hospital in White River Junction, Vermont, she met an MST coordinator who, in her words, “truly listened to me” and began a systemic review of all her records. The coordinator determined the records had been expunged “by noting the glaring inconsistencies between my lab work, treatment notes, and service record.” Her psychiatrist and counselor determined that she did not have borderline personality disorder, and that a later Togus VA coding of her as having a traumatic brain injury or “brain syndrome” was also inaccurate. Pingree’s office summarizes this episode more bluntly — that in 2009 “a VA investigator discovered her medical records had been tampered with.” The two accounts describe the same discovery; the sworn testimony is the more precise one, and it is the one this page relies on: the finding was made by her VA MST coordinator and treating clinicians in 2009, on the inconsistencies in the file itself, and Moore’s word for what had been done to the records was “expunged.”

With supportive records from those clinicians, her claim was readjudicated to 70 percent — but individual unemployability was denied, she testified, on the ground that she had not completed the necessary paperwork. She produced time- and date-stamped copies proving the VA had received it. “In my final effort, I called the Honorable Bernie Sanders,” she testified, “and his staff agreed to investigate why the VA was taking so long and denying part of my claim. Within two weeks, my claim was finally adjudicated to 70% with IU and it was a total and permanent decision.” Sanders’s office confirms the sequence from the other side. She added that she believed her rating should have been 100 percent under the VA’s own criteria, and was too grateful to pursue it further. By the count she gave Congress, the process had taken twenty-three years — “and I am one of the fortunate ones. It should not be this way.”

What remained unpaid was the past itself. Moore had contacted Pingree’s office in the summer of 2010, at first telling her story to a television reporter only with her identity concealed; she went public in 2012 and lent her name to Pingree’s bill. Pingree’s staff and VA Togus leadership then got the 1993 denial reopened. On May 29, 2014, VA officials called Moore to tell her they had made a “clear and unmistakable error” — the benefits system’s own legal term for a grave, outcome-determinative mistake in a final decision — in denying her benefits in 1993, and agreed to pay her over $405,000 in back benefits. “It’s really validating to know that the government was able to right a wrong that happened twenty-one years ago,” Moore said. “It makes me think I’ve finally won my battle.”

Her case then became the vehicle, as the strongest of these cases tend to. The evidence problem in her file — an assault with no prosecution, a missing treatment record, a former spouse’s letter ruled not credible — was the standard problem in military sexual trauma claims. The Service Women’s Action Network’s figures, presented at the 2012 hearing, put the grant rate for MST-related PTSD claims at 32 percent from 2008 to 2010, against 53 percent for other PTSD claims, even though the marker regulation had existed throughout. Beginning in 2011 — while Moore’s testimony, the SWAN and ACLU data fight, and Pingree’s campaign were all pressing the department — the VA ran special training for the staff who process MST claims, added specialized training for its medical examiners in 2012, and pledged to review previously denied claims. The VA’s own 2017 account reports the grant gap narrowing from nearly 24 points in fiscal 2011 (35.6 percent of MST-related PTSD issues granted, against 59.5 percent of non-MST) to under six points by fiscal 2014. That account credits “increased awareness of this problem,” not any single claimant; the honest statement is that Moore’s case was a named, sworn, congressional exhibit in the pressure that produced the change, not its sole cause.

On February 13, 2013, Pingree introduced the Ruth Moore Act, H.R. 671 in the 113th Congress, with Senator Jon Tester carrying the Senate companion. As introduced, the bill would have written the fix into statute at 38 U.S.C. § 1154: the VA would have to accept a mental health professional’s diagnosis, satisfactory lay or other evidence of the trauma, and the professional’s opinion linking the two as sufficient proof of service connection — every reasonable doubt resolved in the veteran’s favor, lay testimony alone able to establish that the assault occurred, rebuttable only by clear and convincing evidence. It is important to be exact about what the House then did, because the bill is often described by its introduction rather than its passage. As reported and passed, H.R. 671 had been amended down: the Congressional Research Service summary of the passed measure describes annual VA reporting on MST claims for 2014 through 2018 and a sense of Congress that VA update its regulations — pressure and accountability, Pingree’s office said, in place of the statutory standard. In that form it passed the House by voice vote on June 4, 2013. It was not taken up in the Senate. Pingree reintroduced it in 2015 as H.R. 1607; the House passed it again that July, unanimously; it again received no Senate vote, and no version of the Ruth Moore Act has become law.

Where it stands now

Moore’s own fight is closed as to the rating and the money: 70 percent, total and permanent, with individual unemployability, and the back benefits to 1993 paid in 2014 after the department’s admission of clear and unmistakable error. She went on to earn a doctorate — the American Legion, whose Be the One podcast hosted her in November 2023, identifies her as Dr. Ruth Moore, a trauma-response practitioner in Maine who completed the Legion’s service-officer training and helps other veterans reach VA care and benefits. The sailor who was counseled to waive her claims on her way out of the Navy now works the claims system from the other side.

The system she fought has been audited since, and the audits are the standing context for every MST claimant who came after her. In August 2018, the VA Office of Inspector General reported that the Veterans Benefits Administration had incorrectly processed 82 of 169 sampled denied MST-related PTSD claims — an estimated 49 percent, roughly 1,300 of some 2,700 denials from April through September 2017 — failing to order examinations, missing trauma markers, and relying on insufficient medical opinions. The VA concurred with the OIG’s six recommendations and agreed to re-review denials. In its follow-up of August 5, 2021, the OIG found the recommendations had not been effectively implemented — an estimated 80 percent of claims denied in late 2019 had not been handled by the designated, specially trained MST processors — and the error rate on denied claims had risen to an estimated 57 percent. Grant rates have improved on a different measure the VBA cites — MST-PTSD grants rising from 57 percent in fiscal 2018 to 72 percent in fiscal 2021 — but a denied claim still stands, on the OIG’s most recent full accounting, at better than even odds of having been processed incorrectly.

And the statutory standard Moore’s name is attached to remains exactly where the Senate left it in 2013. The lay-testimony standard exists for combat PTSD; for MST it still rests on the marker framework of § 3.304(f)(5), applied — per the OIG — inconsistently by the very system that wrote it. Successor legislation has carried the same ask forward, including Pingree’s Servicemember and Veterans’ Empowerment and Support Act, which would extend the relaxed evidentiary standard beyond PTSD to the other mental health conditions MST causes and codify the lower burden of proof; it has been heard, and not enacted. If you or a veteran you know is in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is available around the clock: dial 988 and press 1, or text 838255.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

Moore’s case entered the record in her own voice first — sworn testimony in 2012 — and has been argued in hearing rooms ever since. Six films: Moore telling her own story in 2023, the 2013 and 2015 hearings on her bill, Pingree pressing the VA Secretary on the error rates in 2022, and two explainers — the VA’s own account of what MST is, and a veterans law firm’s walk-through of how these claims are supposed to be evaluated.

In her own voice. Moore — by then Dr. Ruth Moore — tells the American Legion's Be the One podcast her journey from the MST assaults and suicide attempts through homelessness to her doctorate and her work with veterans in crisis, November 2023. (The American Legion National Headquarters.)

The bill hearing, 2013. Pingree testifies for H.R. 671, the Ruth Moore Act, at the April 2013 legislative hearing, with Moore — the bill's namesake — looking on. (Congresswoman Pingree.)

The reintroduction, 2015. Pingree testifies before the House Veterans' Affairs Committee for the Ruth Moore Act of 2015 — the second House passage, and the second Senate silence. (Congresswoman Pingree.)

The error rate, put to the Secretary. In April 2022, Pingree presses VA Secretary Denis McDonough on MST claims processing — the standing fight, a decade after Moore's testimony, over the denials the OIG keeps finding mishandled. (Congresswoman Pingree.)

The term, defined by the VA. The Veterans Health Administration explains what military sexual trauma is, what it does to survivors, and what services exist for veterans who experienced it. (Veterans Health Administration.)

The claims standard, explained. Attorneys at Chisholm Chisholm & Kilpatrick walk through how the VA is supposed to evaluate MST claims — the markers, the relaxed evidence rules, and where adjudication still breaks down. (Chisholm Chisholm & Kilpatrick LTD.)

Sources

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.