Did the woman press charges immediately? Or just “remember” it was rape, later.
FWIW, my understanding is nobody was naked when Nathan’s phone rang. They were still only “messing around”, according to Nathan.
Baloney. Inside of a courtroom, words mean what the law says, subject to judicial interpretation. Everywhere else, they mean whatever people have taken them to mean. Language evolves constantly; statutes change only when legislators change them.
I accept your baloney and raise it to the level of sausage: an inseparable mélange of unidentifiable ingredients.
As soon as we do as you suggest and open the question to mean “hey everybody, does this half-explained set of half-truths arise to your personal definition of ‘rape’?” well, then we’ll have about 300 million distinct answers among just the US citizens. Sausage indeed. We’ll certainly have at least one opinion per Doper who stops by.
That might be a fun discussion to have, but I don’t think it’s an answerable question.
Here’s what I thought the OP meant: “Does the interloper have a cause for concern about going to jail?” And I’ve been proceeding from that POV ever since. Could I be misreading it? Sure. Is my version at least more plausibly handle-able in the confines of a Dope thread? IMO, yes.
YMMV.
To get back around to your OP this vignette has evolved from “he came to me in the dark pretending to be you” to in a later post another person a the party observing that friend and drunk wife went upstairs together for obvious sexy times. These are wildly opposed scenarios and the fact that wife refuses to prosecute the “I was surprised and fooled in the dark” rape charge she originally alleged makes it probable that the friends version is closer to the mark.
So, assuming the friend’s observation of their behavior is correct it would be a huge stretch to prove this was rape and not simply bad decision making while drunk.
If so, the answer is, very little, even if it was pretty blatantly rape by just about anyone’s definition.
If a woman is raped in the U.S., she’s probably not going to press charges. And if she does, odds are against a prosecutor concluding he’s got enough evidence to go to trial. And if it goes to trial, chances are slim of getting a conviction.
I wish it were not the case, but it is. And this is why it’s useless to define the question in terms of “concern about going to jail.” Rapists rarely go to prison, and that’s that. So let’s use something that makes sense, rather than something that doesn’t.
The correct answer is “there is no way to know, it depends on who’s story you believe”. Any other answer only shows your own inherent bias.
Then: no, it wasn’t rape, since I don’t take ‘rape’ to describe this circumstance.
If the word means whatever each person wishes it to mean, then …
If she didn’t know whom she was fucking, I find it hard to say she was fucking the person she was fucking “willingly.”
That said, if she didn’t realize the dude she was fucking wasn’t her husband, but didn’t make any real effort to find out, that suggests a willingness to wrap herself around any adequately attractive dude who presented himself.
Either way, it seems to me that the answers to “was she raped?”* and “was she unfaithful?”** are opposite.
I’m not sure the question is answerable; it’s about what was happening in Denise’s head at the time, and she doesn’t seem to be too clear on that at this point, and the rest of us certainly aren’t.
*Looked at ethically, at least, whatever the law says.
**I don’t know that I would characterize a one-off episode as “infidelity”, but a breach of strict monogamy, at any rate.
I would say that if you’re sober enough to initiate, you’re sober enough to consent. So if both parties are too drunk to consent, sex isn’t going to happen.
That’s a gap in the word stock that I really want some way to fill in, because it implies that anything not prohibited by law is actually ok, and rape is malum prohibitum and not a real thing.
Unless you are trying to say rape is malum prohibitum and not a real thing.
Thanks for calling in the Rev. Charles Dodgson to support my point: even when word meanings aren’t controlled by statute, you still can’t make words mean whatever you damn well please. They still have coherent meanings that enable people to carry on conversations with one another with little confusion.
And even if a particular profession defines a term or expression in a precise manner for its own benefit, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the world has to follow. The law doesn’t have any more authority to define the meanings of words outside the courtroom than mathematics has to define them outside the college classroom.
Since this piece was directed at me …
I agree completely there’s a huge difference between legality and morality or ethics. The man who stole my and 25,000 fellow employees’ pensions and ran our employing corporation into the ground while pocketing all the assets committed no crime. His (lack of) morals and ethics are another matter altogether.
Rape / sexual misconduct remains a controversial topic in ways that, say, armed robbery, isn’t precisely because ethics, human reptile-brained sexuality, and the law are pulling in several directions at once. We here, and society at large, can profitably discuss any one of those three topics.
What I hold doesn’t work is mixing them up willy-nilly where different actors are unwittingly discussing different items. Or worse, where somebody deliberately chooses to not see them as being different at all.
That way lies chaos.
A lot of ill-advised sex happens in the world. Criminalizing either all of it or none of it are both mistakes. And you’re right we lack an agreed vocabulary for labeling those shades of (mis-)conduct.
While that may be true of many words, it’s not true of ‘rape.’ The word is the subject of a great deal of discussion as to its exact meaning in this thread, in other threads on the SDMB, and in real life.
Nathan was arrested yesterday. The charges were assault, aggravated assault, and interference with a 911 call.
Apparently he (stupidly) confronted Joey in a parking lot, and the police got called. They hired a bail bondsman, and Nathan’s expected to get out sometime today. They also took Joey to the station, but he was not arrested.
Denise called the police to report the sexual assault. They said they’re already investigating it, and asked her to come in to make a statement.
I find myself puzzled by the question in the OP. Is it whether, if Denise’s story is true, this is against the law, or is it whether, if Denise’s story is true, she has been violated (or victimized if you prefer)?
I missed the assumption Denise is telling the truth when I called the question unanswerable; taking her version of events as set out in the OP at face value, she was violated*, and is not morally culpable for a breach of monogamy, but I don’t know Texas law well enough to know if she is the victim of a crime.
*I consider rape a violation of autonomy
Whatever you do, keep a safe distance from this rapidly growing vortex of Jerry Springerism lest you be sucked in.
But do keep us posted; we love’s us some good Springerisms. Exspeshully involving Texans.
I hear you. I’m probably an idiot for putting this online.
Anyway, my own opinion, fwiw, is that Joey won’t be arrested if she says (what I was told) she said, the night of the party.
On the other hand, if she says something like, “I was black-out drunk. My husband took me upstairs, and the next thing I knew he was pulling a stranger off me,” the chances of Joey seeing the inside of a jail cell go up.
You indicated there was a person (or persons) who saw them both go upstairs together and based on their mutual behavior it was obvious they were intending to get intimate. What happens to Denise’s story when the observers testify?
I don’t know. Her first story was, “I didn’t know you weren’t him.”
Her second story was, “I don’t remember much about that night.”
I don’t know they’re inconsistent.
Update: Nathan’s out of jail, but he lost his job. Denise may have to go back to work, but if she does, it won’t begin to cover their bills. Nathan has a court date coming up, and they’re talking to lawyers. One says he may be able to get the DA to not indict Nathan, and they’re thinking about going with him.
It’s illegal around here. If the guy was pretending to be her husband. It’s called “sneaky sex” and has its own set of paragraphs, although very seldom used. (And some girls in France are very upset: Rape charges as ‘male model’ offering sex in dark turns out to be balding 68-year-old Frenchman)
Man … lawyers. 
-
My ability to categorize behavior and make ethical distinctions really does not depend on the professional conclusions of lawyers and politicians.
-
You’re right that discussions can get a bit confused when there are simultaneous legal and social/ethical discussions going on that both rely on the word “rape,” and when people have different understandings of the act but don’t make them explicit. Still, it helps if you keep in mind that it’s actually just shorthand for a slightly different argument.
Outside of a specific legal question, when people talk about “rape,” what they tend to mean is something like “a heinous sexual violation.” So, when someone who’s not just looking for a legal opinion asks “was this rape?”, what he’s actually asking is: “Was this bad? How bad was it? Is it deserving of very strong condemnation, or something less than that?”
That said, I do wish people would spell out that sort of thing more often, because it’s easy for them to get sidetracked and start debating semantics accidentally.