Not exactly well known, but in The Poseidon Adventure (the book, not the movie), there’s a young British crewman who, during the journey from overturned ship to escape, rapes the wife of the Grosse Point businessman (I can’t remember any of their names). It’s definitely rape; she had gone off somewhere to go to the bathroom, I think, and he overpowers her from behind and rapes her.
He is then stunned to recognize her as a passenger and says he’s done this lots of times but never to a passenger and they’ll have his balls over it; and although she tries to calm him and get him to join their escape group and says it’s okay and she won’t tell anyone, he runs off in a panic crying, “Oh my god, I done it to a passenger, a passenger! Me mum will kill me” … and I think, if I recall correctly, the woman then hears him fall or run into something, scream, and then nothing.
You do feel sorry for him, and he was a serial rapist.
I wouldn’t count him as sympathetic, since the reader is clearly meant to despise him every bit as much as Yossarian does. The wole “Not good old Aarfy” thing is about class prejudice: he gets away with it because he’s a wealthy white American from a “good” family, and she’s just some random Italian peasant.
Anyway, I was going to mention Thomas Covenant, but since he’s been taken, I’ll go with Angus Thermopyle from Donaldson’s Gap series. He’s a pirate and mass-murderer who kidnaps the main character and holds her captive for several months while raping her repeatedly. And that’s just in the first book. But by the end of the series, after he’s been pitted against all manner of vastly more evil and inhuman forces, he comes off as the closest thing to a genuine hero in the entire book.
Theodore Bagwell from “Prison Break.” Season 2 had an episode where he went to his childhood home and presented flashbacks about the hell he was raised in.
I’m quite comfortable calling him a rapist. These women were desperate to get to the U.S., and had enough firsthand knowledge of Nazis to believe their lives depended on it. So in a sense Louis was trading sex with them for their very lives.
IIRC. in Friday by Robert A. Heinlein, Friday is gang raped at the beginning of the story. Later she finds one of her rapists and after he apologizes, she lets him live and ultimately he becomes part of her group marriage. I can’t remember the character name, though, sorry.
Percival. She let him live because he let her go to the bathroom during the rape. It was professional, not personal. The rape, that is.
“One last word: Do you know why you are still breathing? Not dead?”
“No.”
"Because you let me pee. Thank you for letting me pee before handcuffing me to that bed.
“I got chewed out for that. The Major intended to force you to wet the bed. He figured that it would help to make you crack.”
“So? The bloody amateur. Pete, it was at that point at which I decided that you were not totally beyond hope.”
The James Russo chartacter from Extremities definitely has a pathetic sympathy thing going on by the end.
Terence Knox’s character on St. Elsewhere was made sympathetic before he started raping. There was a scene after a particularly rough day where he comes home to his wife and says sadly, “I wish people liked me.”
I suppose one could argue that both Spike and Angel (Buffy) were sympathetic rapists. Although you never actually see them do it, there’s enough said to let you know that they engaged in plenty of rape during their pre-soul/pre-chip days.
Just remembered Bruce Davison in Short Eyes. He plays a convicted child molestor who is sent to prison and is brutally picked on by just about everyone. Yet you still can’t help feeling bad for the guy.
Johnny in Mike Leigh’s Naked is on the run for having raped a woman and engendered the fury of her family. He’s a relentless prick who hates himself and treats almost everyone like shit, spewing rants of hyperintellectual theories and streams of funny but cruel invective – but damned if by the end of the film you don’t feel sympathy and affection for him. All thanks to some wizardlike genius by director Leigh – and by David Thewlis, who portrayed the character and wrote/improvised his lines.
Continuing with soap opera mentions, there’s my favorite example (and IMHO the only rapist-turned-sympathetic character who earned the changeover) of Jack Deveraux from Days of Our Lives. Back in the late 1980s he raped his wife when he discovered she was in love with his brother (whom he didn’t know was his brother at the time … it’s a long story, natch). Due to his father’s political position and wealth Jack avoided prison, but he was hated by the entire town, and justly so. He hated himself too but couldn’t stop behaving like a jerk when he felt others weren’t being fair to him. Finally he slowly began to crawl out of the pit he’d dug and improved his behavior. Soap opera irony being what it is, he ended up falling in love with Jennifer, a young, innocent, wide-eyed virgin, and she fell hard for him too. But he never felt he deserved her and pushed her away, and the rest of the town pretty much agreed with him. Jack was afraid of himself and feared he’d hurt Jennifer. It took a couple of years before Jack rehabilitated himself in everyone’s eyes, and before Jack and Jennifer consummated the relationship.
Even once he’d turned into a sympathetic character, to DOOL’s vast credit (and portrayer Matt Ashford’s insistence) Jack never forgot what he’d done. Great story back when soap writers were allowed to pursue longterm character development. Nowadays soap opera guys can go from rapists to lovers merely by reframing the rape as “not necessarily the best sex the woman had but certainly not rape!” And the audience buys it! (c.f. E.J. and Sami on DOOL now.)
So I never read the Thomas Covenant books. I’d always heard of him as an “unsympathetic character” but everything I read about him made me think he was just ugly and grouchy. This is the first I’ve heard that he’s a rapist.
What’s the story there? Is it something that happens during the course of the novels? Or is it something from his past? Or what?
Sean Penn’s character in Dead Man Walking. Not forgiven but you are supposed to sympathize with him.
Keller from Oz was a sex killer but I’m not 100% sure that’s the same as rapist. I think when you start murdering someone consent is withdrawn though so I guess he was. He was just portrayed as a screwed up but lovable little rascal though.