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Apparently Batman reads the Denver Post.
On July 10, an anonymous donor contributed $52,500 to a GoFundMe raising money to help the state of Colorado clear its backlog of more than 1,400 sexual assault kits—just three weeks after first reading about the fundraiser in the Post.
“We got contacted by a mystery person online, and he was like, ‘As long as I can be anonymous, I’d like to donate,’ ” says Kelsey Harbert, a co-organizer of the GoFundMe and sexual assault survivor. “I call him Batman.”
Harbert first learned about the backlog last summer after a friend and sexual assault survivor said she’d been waiting more than 400 days for the results of her rape kit, a forensic exam done following a sexual assault to collect potential DNA evidence. In January, the duo brought their concerns about the lengthy wait times to lawmakers during a Joint Budget Committee meeting. Not only can the lack of closure be mentally and emotionally taxing on survivors, but slow turnaround times can prolong prosecution since attorneys rely on the results in court. In a report done by the Common Sense Institute, researchers found that if Colorado cleared all of the rape kits in its backlog, it could result in up to 200 convictions. “These people have been waiting, some of them, over a year, for answers,” Harbert says. “Some of them are children with families who are also waiting for those answers. This is completely insane and inhumane.”
During the Joint Budget Committee meeting, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) revealed that the average turnaround time for a sexual assault kit was more than 500 days. The CBI attributes the initial accumulation of untested kits to staffing shortages in 2022, and the issue was exacerbated by the Missy Woods scandal in late 2023. The bureau says it costs about $2,000 to process one rape kit.
At first, Harbert attempted to address the backlog in tandem with CBI through legislative channels. But when her efforts to get every kit fully funded and establish more oversight for the bureau fell short, Harbert and fellow sexual assault survivor Angelique Perrin turned to the general public for help.
The duo launched their GoFundMe—titled “Tell Governor Polis to Clear Colorado’s Rape Kit Backlog!”—on March 24. “We were doing it more so to just make a point at the time,” Harbert says. “Immediately, I got contacts from legislators asking me to take it down, telling me the strategy wasn’t correct.” But the campaign gained traction.
By late June, the campaign had raised more than $10,000. Harbert wired $6,000 of that to the CBI to put toward the rape kit backlog, which made headlines in the Denver Post—and caught the attention of a generous philanthropist.
The anonymous donor didn’t initially say how much he wanted to contribute, but when a check for $52,500 arrived on July 10, Harbert was floored. “I thought the decimal was in the wrong place,” she says.
Rather than give the money to CBI, which would clear roughly 26 kits with the cash, Harbert intends to give Batman’s donation to the Denver Crime Lab. “They have 100 of the backlog kits from CBI, which also contains some of the oldest kits (from March 2024) in the state,” she says. The Denver Crime Lab can process the kits in-house for about $1,000, meaning the donation would help clear about 52 kits.
Harbert plans to keep the GoFundMe running until every single rape kit on the backlog is fully funded. “The whole thing was born out of a frustration with the system, and the politics, and protecting this system that has been in place for decades that has let survivors down in our state every single time,” she says.
As of June 30, there were 1,236 untested kits in the backlog, according to the CBI’s sex assault turnaround dashboard (though Harbert suspects there could be more). With the help of a private lab and 15 additional forensic scientists coming on staff, the CBI plans to have the backlog cleared by the end of this year and to achieve its 90-day turnaround goal for all submitted kits by the end of 2026.
