Elsie Dominguez reads the comments on Reddit threads and news articles about her story. She hasn’t responded to every text message, email and LinkedIn comment addressed to her, but she’s read them all.
While she knows many would advise her to tune out the chatter and protect her wellbeing, she doesn’t want to miss the personal stories that come her way — stories like her own, about being sexually assaulted and victimized, with little recourse, while on duty at sea.
“It solidified my fight, reading their stories,” Dominguez, 34, told Military Times in December. “Here I am, coming forward like, ‘I’m doing this for you guys. … This isn’t a solo fight. I just happen to be spearheading the fight.”
Dominguez, a Cuban-American native of Queens, New York, filed suit against the Navy’s Military Sealift Command in November 2023, alleging she was raped in her cabin aboard the Expeditionary Fast Transport Carson City in December 2021 by the ship’s civilian captain. She also says she was subsequently offered little in the way of protections or recourse.
Since then, Dominguez has found herself embroiled in a legal fight over worker’s compensation, underscoring the strange gray area in which civilian mariners serving on MSC ships are immersed.
Dominguez has been told by a judge, at the request of the government, that she must petition the U.S. Department of Labor for worker’s comp before moving forward with her case. She and her lawyers maintain that rape does not belong on a list of job-related risks.
As that fight wore on, Dominguez found herself at a crossroads.
Both she and her alleged assailant, who neither she nor the Navy have named, remain in the employment of Military Sealift Command. He is still on paid leave pending the completion of a Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation, Navy officials say.
Dominguez, after a period of leave, opted to go back to sea. She’s now assigned to the Expeditionary Mobile Base Lewis B. Puller as its first officer.
She came to the ship for an initial three-week contract, which she viewed as a trial period.
“At the end of the three weeks, I realized, I loved what I do, and I still love what I do,” Dominguez said.
She introduced herself to the ship’s captain, providing all the details about her past experiences and the continuing lawsuit. The captain, and later the chief engineer, expressed support and welcomed her, she said.
While she’s not optimistic that the greater industry is undergoing cultural change, it’s a relief, she said, to have understanding coworkers.
“Nothing out of the ordinary is done for me — it’s just a normal work environment,” Dominguez said. “But to know that people can know your story and still stand by you, it feels safe.”
Though Dominguez is back in a career field she loves, the sacrifices she’s made to come forward with her story are real.
She once hoped to become her company’s first female chief engineer; but in the year she had to take off to recover from her alleged ordeal and seek legal recourse, another woman hit that milestone. While Dominguez said the woman, who she knows, was “more than deserving,” her feeling that her own career has been “derailed” has increased her resolve to push for legal change.
“Knowing that I can still make a difference in this industry really motivates me to keep going with the lawsuit,” she said.
It’s likely a long road. While uniformed members of the Navy have a well-established path, if desired, for reporting sexual assault and seeking recourse in the form of prosecution and reassignment, civilian mariners don’t have access to the same resources.
According to Dominguez, the civilian skipper of the Carson City used a master code to enter her stateroom following a night of drinking while the ship was docked in Brindisi, Italy.
She believes she was drugged, having woken up from an incapacitated state to find the man on top of her, assaulting her, she said.
The next day, when she sought to report the assault and obtain a drug test, she says she was discouraged by the ship’s chief engineer and threatened by the captain.
A civilian sexual assault advocate later told her she could not make an anonymous sexual assault report, she said, and warned her that making an unrestricted report, her only option, would result in her removal from the ship.
Dominguez would continue to serve aboard the Carson City for 10 more months, sleeping for most of that time with a chair wedged against her door for protection. She said it took eight months for the ship to fulfill her request for a deadbolt lock.
Now, according to Christine Dunn, Dominguez’s attorney with the firm Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, the mariner finds her case “between a rock and a hard place.
She’s challenging a 1952 Supreme Court decision that set a precedent that established the Department of Labor’s Federal Employees Compensation Act, or FECA, program as the available recourse for job-related injuries, which the government maintains her assault was.
Recently, Dunn said, Dominguez had to secure permission from the government to sign an oath saying the harm she sustained occurred in the course of duties, a necessary step to receiving a finding from the Labor department, even though she maintains rape could never be duty-related.
“We hope that they will deny [the claim], and we can go back to court and pursue this case where it should be — in federal court,” Dunn said.
The timeline for receiving a decision back from the Labor department, she said, could be anywhere from 75 days to 10 months or more.
As Dominguez continues to deal with the aftermath of her alleged assault — she says she still double- and triple-checks the lock on her door every night before she falls asleep — her choice to be visible and speak out under her own name creates another layer of vulnerability. But despite the discomfort at times, she remains unwavering.
“It’s completely unfortunate that this happened to me, but if people are able to pinpoint, ‘Hey, that’s the first engineer on this specific shift,’ I’m okay with that,” Dominguez said.
“I want people to feel comfortable coming up to me and talking about this, and the more that we normalize speaking about things like this and not keeping it taboo, I think it will really help the industry as a whole in eliminating cases like this.”
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