According to the article, they had dinner beforehand. Its not unreasonable to assume some alcoholic drinks were consumed at dinner. Its also entirely possible that his drinking that night caught up with him then.
Not that it excuses Takei’s behaviour in any way, if true.
There are many ways that drunken dates can end badly, including vomiting episodes and embarrassing attempts at karaoke. Sexually assaulting an unconscious person is in a different category of “bad ending”.
I agree that not all incidents of sexual assault are equally reprehensible in their impact, and if this story is true, I’m glad that Takei (somewhat belatedly) stopped and apologized.
But that doesn’t mean that the incident doesn’t count as anything worse than, say, throwing up on your date’s carpet or forgetting that they’re waiting for you while you wander off for a half-hour to catch some Pokemon. Sexual assault should not be trivialized as just another type of bad-date awkwardness.
Sure, there are such things as alcohol-induced blackouts, which it sounds like you experienced. But someone in an alcohol-induced blackout can’t necessarily give consent to sex either.
I think as a society we need to remember that constantly searching for “loopholes” isn’t a good approach to sexual-assault issues. Preventing sexual assault is ultimately not about coming up with exceptions and escape clauses to “disqualify” complaints about unwanted sexual actions. It’s about people learning to resist their sexual impulses unless they’re honestly and rationally sure that sexual actions are wanted.
It’s not wrong to show what you believe.
Perhaps you’ll consider not prejudging a person based on a single 25 year old incident that the accused no longer remembers.
Just for once put yourself in the shoes of the accused celebrity and consider how vulnerable they are to these vile allegations. George Takei was a closeted gay man for decades. Living in fear of being discovered, held up for ridicule, and always at risk of losing his career. He’s spoken up and represented the LGBT community for many years.
I feel compelled to speak up in his early defense.
It may be that more people will come forward with new allegations. I wouldn’t even try to defend him then. We aren’t there yet.
Frankly, this accusation—actually trying to undress an unconscious person—looks far worse to me than what Louis C.K. has been accused of.
Apparently not. Nothing that’s been discussed anywhere in this thread, other than throwing all men in jail and shooting them, which seems redundant and also which nobody in this thread has advocated, has any damn thing at all to do with due process.
How’s this for a conspiracy theory: most of these people are telling the truth, including when they say they never said anything about these events in the past because it seemed like nothing good could come of it, but the balance seems to have shifted lately, so they’re coming forward.
Sure is easy to be sanctimonious and write it off when you’re not the one who has to deal with it. Exhibit A, aceplace, but lots of others present. So much offense being taken in this thread, and almost none of it directed at George Takei.
What a funny place, full of delightful, funny people.
Fair enough. I am sorry you have those memories.
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…hey. If you want to have a passive aggressive go at me, then have at it. Please join me in the Louis CK thread and I’d be happy to debate my position there. (and I’m a he, not a she.)
But please do not use my position to attack another poster: especially someone who has both admitted they posted in anger, and that they posted in anger because this thread (and others like this one) have bought up some very bad memories. Lets not hold Cub Mistress to the same standard that we hold Louis CK. Lets not hold somebody who posted once in anger to the same standard as someone who has done what Louis CK (has admitted) he has done. Cub Mistress has done nothing to make you a victim. Cub Mistress doesn’t owe every man on this message board an apology. You should be apologizing to Cub Mistress. They are not responsible for my posts. And if you have the courage of your convictions I’ll see you in the other thread.
Its pretty good way to get yourself convicted. Rape and sexual assault just need recklessness as the mental element and intoxication does not vitiate it. You have admitted to one element; recklessness and made yourself unable to properly defend yourself against the other.
Also a good way to get yourself convicted; say that “she never said no”, “she wanted it” and “she is a slut”. Wait, did I just blast a hole in half of the feminist literature on the subject?
First rule if you are accused of a sex crime. Or money laundering. Or cutting a bad cheque. Or overspeeding. Shut the fuck up and talk to a lawyer.
Going back to the OP’s “I thought he was one of the good guys”. Well, with ONE claim so far, where the person affected says can’t remember the other party to the claim (alas, AK84, in this day and age the wise counsel of “resist the temptation to say something” will just strengthen the online feeding frenzy), this seems to be some premature despair. More later.
Which is something we have to deal with, how do we make the distinction. Though there are those who will counter-argue that yourself is not the one to make the judgment if there was a crime.
(To borrow the legalese from a different context, you may have faced something like assault WITHOUT battery, in the old sense of the terms where assault meant putting you under threat of harm and battery was actually inflicting it. In some contexts creating a risk is still a crime, if not as big as having it come to pass – someone waving around a gun or a flask of toxic chemicals, who when told “put that thing down, idiot” complies, can still be guilty of reckless endangerment.)
Very well put.
Part of the problem is the social culture is suffused, permeated deeply, with racist, sexist, classist, victim-blaming, etc. role-attitudes. These include in the sexual arena “You are a man who wants sex? Make aggressive moves to get it! It’s up to the other party to tell you to stop!” and “Well, if (s)he got wasted, (s)he must have known what (s)he was taking a chance on” We have only recently made some progress against these.
People including myself have written before “‘Being creepy’ is not a crime”. But it is moving in the direction of being socially intolerable even beyond the category of crime it would be.
So as far as “I thought he was one of the good guys”… Well, what does being “one of the good guys” mean? I prefer to judge people’s good-guy-ness in the context of the totality of their life and work. If being one of the good guys required that *nobody *can *ever *point to *any *incident of immoral conduct, we are going to run out of good guys fast. EVERY idol has feet of clay.
I don’t know what this means.
No, its not. The number of accusors might be important or might not. Please review the McMartin trial. False allegations can destroy lives.
So very much this. If our culture’s main concern is about whether something is legal or not, rather than whether it is coercive or inappropriate, there is a problem. Consent isn’t about staying within the bounds of the law, it’s about recognizing the person on the other side of your dick (or pussy, as it were) is a human being.
I like George Takei a lot and don’t want him to have done this any more than you do. It’s probably something we’ll never know for sure. I think you have some deeply problematic attitudes toward sexual assault in particular but after two or three days of continued posting here and rehashing allegation after allegation I think I’m losing my sense of grounding and whatever shred of objectivity I had to begin with. I do not currently know what we should do about any of this.
This doesn’t sound to me like a blackout. Brunton says he remembers sitting in the beanbag chair, and remembers waking up shortly after that. From what I’ve read about alcohol-induced blackouts, they usually aren’t so short-lived.
He is awaiting trial.
She apologized. Why and to whom? I didn’t ask for an apology. I’m just holding her to your clearly stated law that an apology is valid in your mind only if everybody affected accepts it. If that’s legit in your mind, why would you object if I appropriate it? I didn’t attack her, I’m holding her accountable to the law you laid down. And I did it here because this is where the comment was.
“Why don’t you come over here and say that?” Sheesh.
Maybe she’s getting off easy, technically she insulted every man on earth. Maybe your law for insults is that if one person accepts your apology or someone throws in a {{HUGS}}, you’re good to go.
People, myself included, are being jerks all over the place in this thread today, but I think this one actually rises to the level of threadshitting. It is beyond bizarre to drag Banquet Bear’s comment into a separate thread because of the behavior of another poster.
I believe that he is saying feminists don’t acknowledge the “reality” that victim-blaming and rape culture are things of the past, because anybody who suggested something like “she deserved it” would have the book thrown at them. He’s not right, but that’s what he’s going with.
To come back to the easy part of the original question: no, you can’t be too drunk to be guilty of the assault, if it’s voluntary drunkenness. We’re talking New Jersey law here, so The New Jersey Code of Criminal Justice 2C § 2-8 is where we turn:
In this case, the statute we’re concerned about has “known or should have known” as one of the elements of the offense. Intoxication does not negate that element: if I should have known that the victim was incapacitated, but I didn’t know that because I put myself in a condition where I was unable to tell, I don’t get off the hook for that.
You were also, I think, wondering about the messier part of this, which is that if both parties are drunk to the point of near incapacity, or at least drunk enough not to remember any details about what exactly happened, then what’s the rule? I think that’s where Loach’s point out taking a case to trial kicks in. If you can’t prove the elements beyond a reasonable doubt, that’s the opposite of drunkenness as a defense; that’s an absence of enough evidence to establish that a crime occurred. So, if what you’ve got is literally only that these two people went into a room and had sexual contact, and one person’s word that they themselves were too drunk to recall how, and the other person’s word that they too were too drunk to recall how, you can’t establish that one person was criminally responsible for “having sexual contact” with the other within the meaning of the law. This is the uncomfortably-kludgy result of the state of the law on this, and why people with varying degrees of derision often ask whether every one of their own drunken romps was an example of two people raping each other. It’s kiiiiinda theoretically attractive, if you ignore how the law works generally and focus on the implications of the statute in a vacuum, but the way the law deals with that theoretical impossibility is: reasonable doubt, no crime. There are people who believe that this is a sort of paradox that somehow vindicates the position that none of these offenses are “actual” assault. I am not one of them. I’m of the belief that in some of those cases, somebody is assaulting someone, and in some of those cases, nobody’s assaulting anyone, and we don’t have enough information to say, and that’s all right.
So the distinction comes down to what the allegations and what the facts are. If there’s enough of an evidentiary basis to conclude that A was initiating sexual contact with B, i.e. that A was causing the contact to occur, then the drunkenness of B can be evidence of their incapacity to consent, but the drunkenness of A can’t be evidence of their inability to determine consent. If there’s only evidence of sexual contact between A and B, but nothing to establish factually who did what, then you have an untryable case, even if what really happened was an assault.
…if you are going to apply “my law” then at the very least make an effort to understand what “my law” actually is, then you would clearly see that “my law” does not apply here. I’m here, in this thread, telling you that you have “my law” absolutely completely fucking wrong. If you want to debate “my law” then take it to the other thread and stop hijacking this one because I will gladly take the time to show you how wrong you are in the appropriate place.
Stop using a strawman version of what I said in another thread as an excuse to attack another poster. Don’t use me to hold someone else accountable to **your **standards. What Cub Mistress did in this thread is in no way comparable to masturbating in front of somebody without their consent, lying about that ever happening, using your resources to silence those he harassed, and then offering a disingenuous apology when left with no other choice.
Bad analogy in general.
Aceplace57’s argument has a hole in it, yes, which is as Loach pointed out: aceplace57 ‘hopes it’s a misunderstanding’, the alleged victim’s account that is. But as of now Takei says he never met the guy at all. That’s not a misunderstanding.
OTOH aceplace57 does point out a puzzling aspect of the alleged victim’s story, that he was passed out when Takei started undressing him, but then drove home not much later. That’s not impossible, but still somewhat puzzling IMO.
Anyway back to general, if somebody takes your stuff out of your house without ever talking to you at all, they stole. Rape and sexual assault are not as easily defined. This is illustrated as I mentioned on another recent thread by comparing the Justice Dept’s National Crime Vicitimization Survey with the CDC’s study of sexual abuse. Both federal govt orgs, under the same admin at any given time. But the CDC’s stats on lifetime frequency of rape victimization of women imply a national number of rapes around 10 times as many as NCVS. NCVS in turn estimates the number at around 3 times the FBI’s statistics show for reported rapes. But NCVS victim responses indicate a little less than 1/3 of rapes are reported. So those two are roughly consistent. CDC is way higher.
Again, assuming there isn’t a conspiracy in one or other federal govt bureau to over/understate rape, there must be a serious definition issue*. It would be all the more true for sexual assault other than rape, presumably, heterosexual or not. That doesn’t exist in case of somebody sneaking into somebody else’s house and taking stuff, which is stealing by everyone’s definition.
*which has been discussed in some media accounts like this, can find lots more