Is this rape?

Great Debates
41

Oh for cryin’ out loud, the answer is simple and is taught in every Criminal Law class. The situation described by the OP is not rape. Not. Period.

“But he lied!” So what? It doesn’t matter that “she consented to have sex with Brad Pitt”. What matters is, she knew the act that she was consenting to, knew that the person standing before her would be performing the act, and that is that. It doesn’t matter that he claimed he was Pitt, or Patrick Dempsey, or Jesus Christ Superstar. Consent to sexual intercourse is valid even if the consent is procured by fraud.

42

Hey, that goes for women, too! I don’t give a shit about your Jag.

I think Lamia’s got it. And the impersonator’s still got a lawsuit coming to him or her– from Pitt or Fox.

43

Her: …Ooooh God I’m coming"

Him: …“No I’m Brad Pitt”

Her:…“Whatever, just don’t stop”

44

I don’t buy this. Under your theory, if you were at a party and a girl passed out/went to sleep in the other room, you could have your way with her and face no legal consequences.

What about the thread we had a little while back about the husband who was having sex with his comatose wife in the hospital? They charged him with rape.

45

There was a case in Mass. that the Mass Supreme Court ruled on last year, saying that Mass. law doesn’t recognize sex by fraud. The background of the case…

There’s a woman who lives with her boyfriend in the basement of his father’s home. Also living in the home is the boyfriend’s brother. One night, she was awakened at about 3 in the morning by a man coming into her room. It was dark, so she couldn’t see him, but assumed it was her boyfriend, who was working a graveyard shift, and called out his name. He didn’t answer, but instead climbed into bed with her, removed his clothes, and had sex with her. He then got up to leave, and when he opened the door, she realized it wasn’t her boyfriend but instead his brother.

In another case, a pharmacist pretended to be a gynecologist and gave two women gynecological exams.

Anyway, the decisions that neither of these were rape under the definition obviously sparked some outrage, and there are efforts to change the definition.

46

I’d pretty much be willing to bang any chick who even sort of looks like Meghan Fox. Just make sure it’s a chick and not a dude.

47

It depends. Here’s a copy of an article from the 1998 Brooklyn Law review looking at the status of rape by fraud, as it existed at at the time of the article (in PDF):

http://www.justdetention.org/pdf/Rape%20by%20Fraud.pdf

48

It’s not “my theory”, and you obviously did not read my entire post because I directly addressed the issue of a mentally/physically incapacitated victim. That doesn’t have anything to do with the OP’s scenario, though. If the 18 year old girl were unconscious, it would be rape regardless of whether the man having sex with her were a Brad Pitt impersonator or the actual Brad Pitt.

49

To be fair, the added conditions of physical, mental, or statutory impairment to the giving of valid consent should not be a parenthetical note, they are an integral part of the legal definition of rape and should be in the body of the statement – it could have been better phrased as “not rape because X was neither subjected to threats, intimidation, or force nor in a position of impaired capacity to consent”, rather than the asterisk. But FWIW I got what you meant.

I think the key detail in this hypothetical is that last part: the subject involved is not experiencing an* impaired capacity *for consent. S/he is exercising that capacity, but on the basis of incomplete or misleading information. Is the consent still valid?

As the article linked by Captain Amazing shows, there are a number of jurisdicitons moving into “deceit” as a category of element of the crime of Sexual Assault, and quite a few courts have over time wrestled with the idea.

50

I’m not qualified to answer the legal question, but I’ll give an opinion on the ethics of the matter.

Deceiving someone about your identity is different than deceiving someone more generally. I’m not saying telling lies is a good thing. It isn’t. But simply telling someone a lie that leads them to have sex with you when they otherwise wouldn’t isn’t the moral equivalent of rape.

E.g., Suppose my wife and I are about to have sex, and she says “Wait, I think I left the stove on.” If I lie and say “No, I turned it off,” so that she will proceed to have sex with me, this doesn’t make me a rapist. It’s not honest and it’s a potential fire hazard, but it’s not rape or the moral equivalent of rape. She either consented to have sex with me or not, regardless of whether I’d been telling her lies.

Another example: Imagine a man who’d been cheating on his wife. If he told her he was cheating, she would leave him and no longer ever have sex with him. So every single time she has sex with him, it is only because he is deceiving her. Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem reasonable to say he’s raping her. Cheating is morally wrong too, but they’re not the same.

The point is, a person either consents to have sex with you or they don’t. I don’t give any ethical standing to the idea of “consent contingent on you never having lied to me”. If so, the above examples would be rape, when I think they pretty clearly shouldn’t be.

Lying about who you are is different, though, because here the issue is not that they their consent is contingent on you telling the truth. The issue is that you aren’t the person they consented to have sex with. Tricking someone into believing you’re her husband so you can have sex with her is clearly rape in my view. She’s consenting to have sex with her husband, not with you. Likewise, blindfolding her and then trading places with another man without her consent is rape.

I admit that I don’t feel as strongly about the case where you trick someone into thinking you’re Brad Pitt as I do about the case where you trick someone into thinking you’re their husband. But the only thing I can identify that separates the two is my impression that the woman who’d sleep with someone she’s never met just because he’s a famous actor is, well, “slutty.” (I’m not endorsing the word, which clearly has sexist connotations, I’m just trying to give a name to my own biases.) While emotionally the idea of this woman being deceived into having sex with someone else doesn’t disturb me as much as the idea of the woman who thought she was having sex with her husband being deceived, I realize that’s an unfair emotional bias on my part. Really, both women have just as much right to know who it is they’re sleeping with. If it’s rape in one case, it’s rape in the other. And the one woman’s promiscuous behavior in being willing to sleep with an actor she’s never met is absolutely no excuse for rape.

51

Yeah really, in this case looking like Megan Fox is the main appeal the fact that shes not might actually be a plus.

52

What if someone deceived someone else about their gender and had sex with them (think Brandon Teena– prosthetics, a dark room, booze and maybe just a hint of willful ignorance)?

53

I think there are fair reasons to find the fake husband more disturbing than the fake Brad Pitt. Both impersonations would be sleazy and immoral, but there’s a different level of deception is involved. The former is taking advantage of someone’s trust in their own spouse, not just their admiration for a movie star, and is also tricking/forcing them to “cheat” on their partner.

I use scare quotes because the victim of the deception would be innocent of any intent to commit adultery, but I’m sure they’d still feel bad about it once they realized the truth. The real husband/wife might understandably be upset as well, causing strain on their relationship. Pretending to be someone else’s spouse (or even their boy/girlfriend) has the potential to do a lot more emotional harm to the victim than pretending to be a celebrity.

That said, someone pretending to be a celebrity can do a lot of harm too. I finally found the old article this thread reminded me of, about a con artist and art fraud who also pretended to be the guitar player for Pearl Jam. I wouldn’t consider his victim to have been raped, but she was definitely a victim. She even wound up in jail for “harboring a fugitive”.

54

I just wanted to share this amusing video of Japanese schoolgirls who think they see Brad Pitt.

55

My problem is the girl never actually agreed to have sex with Brad Pitt. She agreed to have sex with the guy in front of her.

Now if she said “I’m only willing to have sex with Brad Pitt. I’ll need to see some ID to prove you’re Brad Pitt.” etc… Then the offendee provided false documentation; Well OK now you’ve raped some one.
As an adult male, if I were to have sex with a girl who looked 18 and she tells me she’s 18 before she agrees to have sex with me; I’m going to need to see some ID. -Because I can’t tell the Judge “She told me she was 18!” The Judge isn’t going to give a damn. My ass is going to jail.

It’s only fair that conversely the same should be true.

56

I wouldn’t put it that way: A slut is a woman who has very low standards. A woman who’s willing to sleep with Brad Pitt, by contrast, might well have very high standards-- I understand that he’s considered highly desirable by a significant portion of the population. They just probably aren’t standards based on things like personality, since she probably doesn’t know Mr. Pitt well enough to judge his personality. Most of the things she could realistically know about Mr. Pitt, she could also determine about the hypothetical fellow trying to bed her, and so if he succeeds in convincing her that he’s Brad Pitt, then he’s also succeeded in convincing her that he meets her standards.

By contrast, a woman who’s willing to sleep with her husband probably has made that decision based on things which aren’t apparent at a moment’s, or even an evening’s, glance. So a man who manages to fool her for an evening into thinking that he’s her husband probably hasn’t actually met the standards that she holds her real husband to.

57

Nah…a slut is a woman that sleeps with every guy in the bar / company / class…a bitch on the other hand is the girl who sleeps with everyguy except me

58

I tend to agree,its just the same as a woman fucking a bloke because she thinks he’s rich on the off chance that she might become good friends with him and make some money out of it.
If it turns out that he isn’t then its tough titty for the golddigger,he’s still the same man thats she’s had sex with just as the Brad Pitt lookalike is still the same man that the hypothetical woman consentually had sex with.

And before anyone asks no I haven’t tried this subterfuge to get sex myself…yet.