The Claimant

When Rachel Weinhaus was five years old, a sixteen-year-old boy sexually assaulted her in the woods near her home. She never spoke of her violation, not to her parents, not to her siblings, not even, decades later, to her spouse—she wouldn't speak a word of it for thirty-eight years until an envelope arrived from her graduate school alma mater, informing her she was a part of a two-hundred-fifteen-million-dollar settlement claim against the University of Southern California and sexual predator George Tyndall. The Claimant is Rachel's story of being a class member in this historic lawsuit and how being a Claimant shattered her life, and then saved it.

ORDER YOUR COPY

Rachel Weinhaus

Rachel Weinhaus is a screenwriter and memoirist. She earned an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television and a BA in English and creative writing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She has been published in Newsweek, the Huffington Post, Insider, The Today Show, Kveller, Brevity Blog, and the Jewish Literary Journal. Her work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Flash Fiction Magazine, Micro Fiction Monday Magazine, Five Minutes and is forthcoming in MoonPark Review and Moon City Press. She sold her original screenplay, The Prince Test, to Serendipity Productions, Inc in 2015. She has worked with producers and studios such as Dolphin Entertainment, Arthur Sarkissian Productions, and many others. She was awarded the Women in Film Scholarship, sponsored by Ron Howard of Imagine Entertainment. Rachel has been teaching undergraduate and graduate screenwriting and creative writing classes for over fifteen years.