Stupid Privileged White Kid Gets 6 Months for Rape, Father describes it as "20 minutes of action"

The BBQ Pit
601

Do you know who reiterates over and over that they want more rapes to be reported to police and properly investigated?

The police. District attorneys. Judges. Think any of them can be misogynist? Think there are any of those who are rape apologists? Heard any recent news stories that might lean that way, if you were to apply your vaunted reason and logic to the evidence? Do you think they think they’re misogynists?

You do not know a tenth of what you think you know. You have an opinion, and it’s rooted in misinformation and stubbornness and a deluded sense of clarity. I don’t know what’s actually in your heart about this stuff, but misogynist is as misogynist does. You are a person who, if there were more of you, the number of rapes would go up.

If you were a cop, you’d interrogate victims and decide they were falsely reporting because they didn’t look disheveled. You would close out the case as a false report because after an hour of your questioning, they declined to take a polygraph. You would ask what they were doing at the party, why they didn’t seem upset, why their story was changing, why they didn’t call right away, what were they wearing, why did they spend the night, why did their friends say they seemed into the guy earlier in the night.

And at the end of the day, you’d congratulate yourself for being rational and logical and smart and for giving a shit so fucking deeply about the truth and the cold hard evidence, and not buying into sob stories and morning after regrets. And you’d tell yourself that you care more, and more perfectly, about real victims than anyone you know. God damn it, you’d say, I wish more victims would come forward and tell their stories to me; they have a responsibility. I can’t do anything for you, as heroic as I am, if you don’t do the brave thing and tell me the truth as I imagine it to be.

And then 40% of women would report that they were assaulted in their lifetimes, and you would say ahh, it’s a sad thing, but there’s only so many men like me to fix the problem.

602

So you can falsely attribute verbiage to someone with regular quotes with impunity? That’s fucked up. It’s also a sign of how weak your position is if that’s what you feel you need to do to gain advantage.

And yes, I said I was done debating in this thread, but I will never stop defending myself against defamation.

603

Weird how you get defamed that frequently.

604

First, where exactly did I “quote” you or directly attribute this to you? :dubious:

Geez dude, I’ve had Shodan and a few others repeatedly attributing falsehoods to me in the Controversial LEO thread. If it was actionable and a ban-able offense, most of our, shall we say, more ardent board members would have been banned in their first week.

You’ll find the same thing in life. One of my asshole past supervisors (a retired cop, no surprise) just lived for “AHA! You said X, so I’m going to assume that you meant x,y and z and those things are actionable, so I’m going to punish you for saying X!” (Which he couldn’t get by HR because people hadn’t actually said anything of the kind.)

Hell, I’ve had any number of people pass through my life who seem to think the way to win any argument is to deliberately choose to assume something not said just so they can be offended and put you on the defensive.
The defendant’s father and his attorneys used the argument that it was just a bad decision that shouldn’t ruin his life. The judge apparently agreed. He was defended in the public forum by people who repeated the same idea, and I believe, within this thread.

I honestly don’t see a vast gulf between that and arguing that rape accusations shouldn’t be made public unless there are charges filed and the victims should only speak to police up to that point because you could ruin someone’s reputation.

605

Let me expand on the ‘Reputation’ problem.

The problem with false accusations and reputation is generally a problem with the media and the court of public opinion.

The problem on the legal side is that the court process is seen as protecting the reputation of the accused at the expense of doing everything possible to destroy the reputation of the accuser. This is seriously messed up.

Do false accusations and false convictions take place? Oh absolutely. With any crime. Just look at how many people are getting exonerated of Murder charges due to DNA evidence. There absolutely IS injustice in any legal system. We’re Human, we’re seriously fucked up, and we don’t (yet) have a foolproof method of determining guilt or innocence.

But if Betty suddenly walks in the lunch room at work and accuses her boss of rape, without a single shred of evidence at all, it seems unlikely that there will be any conviction. Would that probably ruin her boss’s reputation? Yup. So will accusations of child molestation or any number of things.

That being said, the focus on the reputation of the accused is something like voter fraud in the over-emphasis on a relatively small number of cases. Obviously a significantly larger number and % than voter fraud, but not to a point where we need to punish victims harder to prevent what most of them are not doing.

And I say that as someone who stood falsely accused of beating my wife.

606

Oh bullshit you’re being logical. You don’t know how to parse statistics and your premises are logically unsound. I cited the motherfucking CDC. Put up or shut up.

607

Maybe. If Betty were someone no one liked, who had a history of making drama, and her boss was a well liked ethical guy - she’d pretty much have to have a tape ala Lisbeth Salander for anything to happen other than people rolling their eyes and her getting fired.

If the boss were a class A jerk and Betty was a sweet person without a vindictive bone in her body - he might be tarred and feathered on the spot.

Many, many times a woman’s allegations of sexual harassment are not believed. I worked for a company years ago as a contractor - I was filling in for a woman who was on administrative leave while her sexual harassment claim was adjudicated. No one in the office believed her - the guy she was accusing was even promoted during the fiasco. Her attorneys apparently didn’t believe her - she went through three of them while I was there.

I worked with another woman at another place who went on a business trip and was subjected to some pretty inappropriate behavior. When she brought it up to HR - she just wanted someone to tell the guy it was inappropriate, not have him fired, she wasn’t believed. You see, she wasn’t attractive - why would anyone say those things to her. I knew her pretty well, and I don’t think she was lying - but HR said why would anyone harass an ugly woman? And then let her go. With no evidence, she just disappeared.

Now, when I made mine, the scope wasn’t believed, but the basics were. But I was an attractive (but not too slutty looking), nice young woman with a good reputation at the company and friends in high places. Their legal team and HR team knew me - because my job interfaced with them. And my harasser was a guy that had a reputation for being inappropriate.

608

By the standards people are suggesting we use here, the fact that she accused you of that means we should tell everybody that you are a wife-beater, and that you should be shunned.

609

Same with the guy who has, out of seemingly nowhere, been accused of sexual abuse despite years of apparently clean living. The accuser there is lying just as much as your accuser, from the perspective of anyone apart from the two directly involved.

You may know the truth of what happened, but as I said before that’s irrelevant. The truth about the past is not, in any practical sense, a fixed objective thing but a consensus based on evidence.

An amount of scepticism about any claim is healthy, uncritically believing anything is not.

610

No, again a gross distortion and direct contradiction of what I actually said. I said the problem lies with the media and the court of public opinion. In that I mean rushing to judgement and the justice of the mob. The very post before yours showed you’re wildly exaggerating what happens to most men accused of rape.

Did my ex-wife’s friends believe her? Oh shit yeah. I haven’t spoken to anyone from that time period outside of my own family since it happened. At the time it practically destroyed me.

But right now? I’m doing pretty darned good for myself, and she’s still playing disabled, still mired in poverty, still living in a house that was crumbling down around her 12 years ago. Very probably well over her head in debt again too. (She told me she was @$1500 in debt, I paid off over $40k in her debt after we married.)

611

Are you saying a woman should be skeptical about her own rape?

I’m really trying to understand this here. It seems to me there’s a very simple question underlying all of this.

  1. Do you think men who actually commit sexual assault deserve to have a reputation as someone who committed sexual assault? I’m not talking about picketing their house or sending death threats, I’m talking about the women who are around them (or men, or whoever) knowing that they have done this thing, so that future victims can protect themselves?

If your answer is ‘yes,’ then there’s really nothing worth arguing about here.

If your answer is ‘no,’ there’s something seriously wrong with your head or your heart.

612

This isn’t about your perspective, it’s about the perspective of the person who was raped. You want to privilege your own perspective over the direct experience of someone who has been sexual assaulted. Your perspective is irrelevant to the truth.

We are not talking about people who lie about sexual assault. That is a completely separate issue from this subject, as we’ve repeatedly pointed out. People who lie about sexual assault are terrible. That is a terrible crime that has absolutely nothing to do with people who tell the truth about sexual assault.

We are talking about people who are telling the truth about sexual assault. If you honestly believe an honest-to-god rape victim should STFU about her rape to protect the reputation of her rapist, then there is something seriously fucking wrong with your head.

Now you’re just reading what you want to read. Nobody has said anything of the kind. Nobody has claimed people have some responsibility to believe the woman who is sexually assaulted regardless of the circumstances or the evidence. We have repeatedly said people can make up their own minds about that, and often do.

What we’re arguing is that if Chimera actually beat his wife, his wife would be well within her rights to tell anyone she damned well pleased.

613

I think we are all at an impasse. It’s time to step away from this thread because I feel like I’m beating my head against a brick wall, and I sense that people with opposing viewpoints feel the same way. It is such views as expressed in this thread that lead me to proclaim ‘nobody gives a shit about sexual assault,’ but I’m fortunate enough to have evidence to the contrary every day of my life, because I work with 80 people who very much give a shit about sexual assault have made it their life’s mission to end it. I am one such person, and the irony is I didn’t even see what a profound connection I had to my own work until several months into the job.

Here’s the link to that CDC report on the prevalence of sexual violence if anybody gives a shit.

As a victim of repeated sexual assault as a toddler, pre-teen and teen, and someone deeply interested in behavioral and social psychology, I have spent the majority of my adult life trying to make sense of how my experience impacted me and how to ameliorate the damage. I have educated myself as to the nature of trauma, including predictive and protective factors for PTSD, through a thorough review of the literature, some of which I have shared in this very thread. I have presented solid peer-reviewed evidence, based on statistical meta-analysis of over 140 individual peer-reviewed studies, that one of the single most critical factors for sexual assault survivors is social support, something that is absolutely impossible to achieve if they are forced to remain silent in deference to their perpetrator. Indeed, Dr. Judith Herman, a renowned trauma psychologist who was on the advisory board for defining PTSD as a disorder in the DSM-IV, wrote in her landmark work, Trauma and Recovery, that a major key to healing is to speak that which is unspeakable, and to connect with other survivors. Silence is deadly. I can’t force anyone to open their minds to either my experience or my accumulated general knowledge, all I can do is offer it for consideration.

I think your ideas about rape are asinine, but I don’t think they are in the mainstream, and it’s clear there’s no changing your minds, so knock yourself out. It takes a lot for me to hate someone, and I’m really good at compartmentalizing personality traits (another beneficial side-effect of managing abusive parents), so I truly have no hard feelings toward anyone in this thread.

Good night.

614

What I am saying, and will continue to say, is that your unsupported claim, no matter how often you repeat it, that someone is a criminal should not be something that should affect their reputation. You seem to think that the fact that you know the truth but can’t prove it is relevant. It isn’t.

You mention privilege, you are the one trying to claim that a victim should have the privilege to be believed without any evidence apart from their word. That can’t work, because people lie. I completely fail to understand why you don’t accept that people lie.

615

Slackerinc’s argument about proof beyond a reasonable doubt is quite wrong, as is his critique of Ascenray.

The requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt only applies in criminal matters, and only when the state is seeking to have someone convicted of a criminal offence. The state must prove it’s case beyond a reasonable doubt.

But, that is the only area where proof beyond a reasonable doubt applies. It doesn’t apply when it is a citizen making an allegation against another citizen, and it doesn’t apply in other types of court proceedings, like a civil action.

So suppose a woman, call her Jane, goes to the police and alleges that Joe assaulted we sexually. Suppose the police investigate,
and the prosecutor

616

Shoot. Hit “Reply” by accident.

617

No one has said that the victim should be believed. All we have said is that the victim is not wrong to speak, to tell her story. That if I am assaulted, I can tell people, and that telling people a true fact is acceptable.

I don’t expect people to uncritically believe me. I don’t uncritically believe other people about almost anything. I expect them to take into account how plausible the story is, how credible they consider me to be, and any other evidence/stories they may have heard.

You said it wasn’t a woman’s place to tell people what happened. That a victim should remain silent when she sees a woman she knows get in the car with a man she knows to be a sexual predator, because what happened to her isn’t real–the past is a subjective experience, with no objective truth except for public consensus.

If I know man is a sexual predator from personal, unambiguous experience, how is it wrong for me to warn other women away from him?

And how does me remaining silent on this actually prevent false accusations? How are these things even related?

618

To continue, suppose the police charge Joe, the prosecutor runs the trial, but the jury acquits. Evidence just didn’t meet the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Jurors afterwards are quoted as saying that they think Joe did something to Jane, but they just weren’t satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed a crime.

But Jane is determined and she goes to a lawyer who specialises in torts. He takes the case and begins a civil action, Jane v Joe. And this time the case is litigated on the civil standard of proof on a balance of probabilities. And this time, Jane’s evidence is enough: the jury finds Joe committed the tort of assault/battery on Jane and gives her a hefty award in monetary damages against Joe.

So

• the courts only require proof beyond a reasonable doubt when the state is prosecuting for a criminal offence;

• the courts use a lesser standard of proof in other types of proceedings;

So on what basis can it be argued that a private citizen, in their daily life, is bound to respect the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt?

Slackerink himself seems to recognise this point implicitly in his example of the nine guilty torturers. He’s talking about whether those people should go to jail. Clearly, the burden in that case is proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And yes, the criminal justice system says better nine guilty go free than one innocent be convicted. That’s nothing new or controversial - it goes back to Blackstone at least, more than two centuries ago.

But that principle does not apply outside the criminal courts, and certainly not to private citizens in their personal assessments of the conduct of other private citizens.

619

When two people are telling conflicting stories, you need to decide which one to believe. A victim doesn’t need to be quiet if her only evidence is her own story. He can counter with he story (usually “she’s a slut”). Its up to the people hearing the stories to decide who to believe. I’ll give you a hint - her accusation won’t go far if she is known to sleep around and drink a lot. His accusation won’t go far if he already has a reputation for treating women poorly and she doesn’t have a reputation as a slut. And when they both have reputations, most people are going to roll their eyes and say “drama” and anyone who doesn’t know them isn’t going to care.

In the U.S. our justice system don’t try people without some sort of evidence that is stronger than he said - she said. Finding that evidence might involve some inquiries that make the accused look guilty. But at the same time, that is one of the biggest reasons that rapes are unreported - a woman who was date raped - who has no bruises or whose bruises can be written off to “rough play” has no evidence. (“What can I say, officer, she wanted me to tie her up - then when I didn’t call her the next day, she went to the police and said I raped her. I can assure you, the bondage thing was her idea.”) If she has no evidence other than the evidence sex leaves - she has no case.

Sometimes our media tries the accused without evidence. This is especially true when the accused is famous. That’s a shame.

I personally thing falsely accusing someone of rape is a very similar behavior to and has similar consequences to the victim as revenge porn. It is horrible when either happens. Once again, when someone is famous, revenge porn gets media attention.

620

Please show me where anyone in this thread has said that.

Youn know that in a criminal trial, people can be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, convicted, and sentenced to the htshest punishments based only on the word of one person, right? Given that that’s the case in a court of law, why in our ordinary lives can we not find a single person’s word to be sufficiently credible to make up one’s mind?