Yeah, that's what made the rape all the more exploitative.
That, and how the scene was stretched for two pages while a narrator that wasn't there when it happened relayed the story.
A story that was just then being brought to light, with Sue never before having shown any indication that it could have ever happened previously.
Something like that isn't just forgotten about. So it's kinda forced to interject it into a character's past. Especially when you simultaneously kill off the character so there's no further exploration of how she dealt with it to get back to being the fun-loving Sue we all knew by the time JLDetroit rolled around.