The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Posted on | June 9, 2016 | 60 Comments

 

The title of a once-famous Keats poem came to mind when I saw this headline at Memeorandum:

Stanford sexual assault: judge facing
recall campaign over light sentence

The victim of a sexual assault by a former Stanford University swimmer said on Monday she was “overwhelmed and speechless” at the deluge of support for her as the judge who gave her attacker a light sentence faced a recall campaign.
Brock Allen Turner, 20, who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman on campus, was sentenced to six months in county jail and probation — a punishment that is significantly less severe than the minimum prison time of two years prescribed by state law for his felony offenses. . . .
Further scrutiny on the judge’s remarks at sentencing appear to suggest he concluded the defendant had “less moral culpability” because he was drunk, and that a light sentence would be an “antidote” to the anxiety he had suffered from intense media attention on the case.
Michele Landis Dauber, a Stanford law professor who has been outspoken about sexual assault policies on campus, said she is launching the recall campaign against Aaron Persky, Santa Clara County superior court judge.
Persky, a Stanford alumnus, was captain of the lacrosse team when he was an undergraduate.
“He has made women at Stanford and across California less safe,” said Dauber, who attended the sentencing hearing and is also a family friend of the 23-year-old victim. “The judge bent over backwards in order to make an exception … and the message to women and students is ‘you’re on your own,’ and the message to potential perpetrators is, ‘I’ve got your back.’”

Is this a fair interpretation of the judge’s motives? Has he taken sides with rapists and against women?  Is Judge Persky objectively pro-rape?

No one would dare say a word in Judge Persky’s defense, now that feminists have targeted him for destruction, and he is to “rape culture” what Officer Darren Wilson was to “Black Lives Matter.” Everything that Judge Persky did prior to last Thursday suddenly becomes irrelevant.

“I became a criminal prosecutor for the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, where I now prosecute sex crimes and hate crimes,” Judge Persky wrote on his campaign website in 2002:

“I focus on the prosecution of sexually violent predators, working to keep the most dangerous sex offenders in custody in mental hospitals. I am also an Executive Committee member of the Santa Clara County Network for a Hate-Free Community, where I helped create a county-wide law enforcement policy on hate crimes. In addition, I serve as an Executive Committee Member of the Support Network for Battered Women.”

Judge Persky lost that 2002 election, but was subsequently appointed to the bench by Gov. Grey Davis — a liberal Democrat, which suggests Judge Persky is also a liberal Democrat — and I suppose it would behoove a right-winger like me to point and laugh: “Hahaha! Liberal judges in California are pro-rape!” But is that an accurate reading of the evidence?

‘No More Fun of Any Kind!’

 

Some of the commenters on my Monday post about this case pointed out that, perhaps, I was reading this whole story the wrong way. What critics of the current “campus rape epidemic” hysteria have focused on is the fact that sexual assault cases are being treated as school disciplinary matters in kangaroo court proceedings where the accused are denied their due-process rights. The Brock Turner case — a criminal prosecution in a court of law — is the appropriate way to deal with all sexual assault charges, according to critics of the campus kangaroo court process. Therefore, discussion of a criminal trial must never suggest that the convicted rapist didn’t get a fair trial. The point I made was this:

The leniency of Turner’s sentence has outraged feminists, and it would be the better part of valor not to further arouse their indignation. However, it is worth pointing out that (a) Turner was an 18-year-old freshman, (b) his blood-alcohol level was twice the legal limit, and (c) why does Stanford University allow fraternities to serve alcohol to teenagers?
This is the dirty little secret of so-called “rape culture” on our nation’s college campuses. The legal drinking age is 21, but teenagers want to get drunk, and so university administrations — and police in college towns — simply refuse to enforce the law. . . .
If drunk teenagers are committing rape at Stanford, doesn’t the university have an obligation to prevent its teenage students from getting drunk?

Lax enforcement of existing laws against underage drinking is deeply implicated in the “rape culture” discourse, and this is a risk factor that even Professor Dauber cannot avoid acknowledging:

In her letter to the judge, Dauber wrote that Stanford’s surveys have found that 43% of female undergraduates have experienced sexual assault or misconduct, and that more than two-thirds of them said perpetrators took advantage of intoxicated victims. But only 2.7% of students who experienced assault or nonconsensual sexual contact reported it to the university.

Whoa! Forty-three percent? But never mind that startling statistic. If more than two-thirds of all sexual assault victims at Stanford (“Campus Rape Capital of the World”) are intoxicated, how many perpetrators of these crimes are also intoxicated, as was the case with Brock Turner? Why aren’t activists focusing on “drunk culture”? And the answer, if you carefully scrutinize feminist rhetoric, is that criticism of binge drinking implicates male and female students alike, whereas campus “rape culture” discourse is about demonizing heterosexual males — especially “privileged” middle-class white heterosexual males.

“White Privilege Is Convicted Rapist Brock Turner’s Mug Shot Not Being Released Until Now” — that’s the headline at Teen Vogue, and the fact that editors believe the readers of Teen Vogue need lectures about “white privilege” is a cultural dye-marker of the kind of “social justice” insanity we are dealing with here. Feminist hate propaganda promotes a paranoid worldview, expressed by Vanessa Diaz, executive director of the USC Women’s Student Assembly, who calls for “dismantling of our capitalist imperialist white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy.” College students are oppressed, according to feminists, and the perpetrators of this systematic injustice are heterosexual white males, all of whom are beneficiaries of “privilege” and therefore complicit in “rape culture.” Brock Turner is all white males, feminist rhetoric implies, and all white males are Brock Turner.

La Belle Dame sans Merci (“The beautiful lady without mercy”) has become La Dame Folle sans Raison, the crazy lady without sanity.

Somewhere between February 2012, when Rush Limbaugh’s criticism of Sandra Fluke gave rise to the “Republican War on Women” meme, and December 2014, when the University of Virginia gang-rape hoax imploded, a majority of feminists finally lost whatever tenuous grip on reality they ever previously may have managed to maintain. The tipping point, perhaps, was when Amanda Marcotte denounced as “rape truthers” those who had exposed the fraud at UVA perpetrated by Jackie Coakley and Rolling Stone‘s Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

“It is estimated that 1 in 5 women on college campuses has been sexually assaulted during their time there — 1 in 5.”
Barack Obama, Jan. 22, 2014

“We know the numbers: one in five of every one of those young women who is dropped off for that first day of school, before they finish school, will be assaulted, will be assaulted in her college years.”
Joe Biden, April 29, 2014

These claims are either true or false. Because the feminist movement is led by partisan supporters of Democrats, the 1-in-5 statistic became a sort of loyalty test — any skepticism was a betrayal of the movement. If Obama and Biden said it was true, therefore it must be true. And thus began the relentless hunt for evidence to support this narrative. In a nation where there are about 12 million college students ages 18-24, there are many hundreds of such cases each year. It was therefore inevitable that the campaign against “rape culture” would eventually find The Perfect Case — a privileged white male athlete at an elite university (annual tuition $46,320) who had committed an egregious assault.

Dan and Carleen Turner with their son Brock, the rapist.

What was Brock Turner thinking?

This is really the most astonishing aspect of the case. Stanford University had undertaken extra training aimed at preventing sexual assault. “As incoming undergraduates settle into their new homes at Stanford this week,” the university news service reported in September 2014, “they are becoming familiar with the expanded educational activities the university will be doing on a critical topic: sexual assault”:

A broad range of activities will occur this year, with the aim of empowering students to play a personal role in fostering a respectful campus climate and preventing acts of sexual violence.
Provost John Etchemendy addressed the topic head-on in his annual talk with the incoming class Wednesday. As part of a presentation on Stanford’s expectations for student conduct under the Fundamental Standard and Honor Code, Etchemendy emphasized the responsibility of individuals to act in accord with Stanford’s values and to reject behaviors and attitudes that, left unchallenged, can create an environment for sexual misconduct.
He also screened a new video featuring Stanford student-athletes talking about sexual assault as something “It’s On Us”– all of us — to help prevent at Stanford.

How could Brock Turner have failed to heed these warnings? And keep in mind that the hysteria surrounding the Rolling Stone UVA story had continued for several weeks in November and December 2014. Certainly in January 2015, Brock Turner had no excuse for believing that he could get sloppy drunk at a frat party and molest women without consequence.

The Intersection of Stupid and Unlucky

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Brock Turner was a time bomb, a sexual predator just waiting for the right opportunity to strike. If so, why did he choose a fraternity party in January 2015 as the time and place to commit such a crime? The heightened awareness in the wake of the UVA story certainly should have been a warning signal to any would-be campus rapist. One especially frightening aspect of this case is that, had it not been for two bicyclists riding through the alley where Brock Turner was assaulting his unconscious victim behind a dumpster, he might have gotten away with it. Had those witnesses arrived on the scene just five or 10 minutes later, Turner probably would have been gone, leaving behind this half-naked drunk woman, completely passed out and with no memory of how she got there. The question of who had assaulted her might have remained a mystery forever, were it not for the fact that Brock Turner was not only a stupid criminal, but also an unlucky criminal.

Peter Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, who apprehended Brock Turner.

It’s like those dudes you see on C*O*P*S sometimes. The patrol officer notices a driver fail to signal a turn, so he blue-lights him and — zoom! — off we go on a high-speed pursuit. Eventually, the suspect bails out of the car and takes off on foot, but the police chase him down, tackle him and, after he’s handcuffed, the cops are like, “Why did you run, man?” Turns out, the guy’s got prior felony convictions, he’s on probation and was carrying a large quantity of dope in the car. Cops search the car and also find a loaded pistol. Felon with a firearm? Reckless endangerment? Possession with intent to distribute? Resisting arrest? Gonna be a long time before he gets out of prison, and why? Because (a) he didn’t notice the cop behind him, and (b) he forgot to use his turn signal.

Stupid and unlucky is a bad combination, whether you’re a ghetto dope dealer or a varsity athlete at Stanford University. Well, you may say, Brock Turner was an honor student with a near-perfect GPA and excellent SAT scores. True, but with a blood-alcohol level of .16, even an honor student is prone to become afflicted with criminal stupidity.

Probably we should feel no more pity for Brock Turner than we feel for any ordinary teenage hoodlum, and perhaps he deserves no pity at all. People who exhibited furious rage about the shooting of Michael Brown are now demanding that Judge Persky resign from office, and I don’t give more of a damn about Judge Persky than I did about Michael Brown.

Not my problem. However, when the Michael Brown shooting became a pretext to demonize cops and white people, this was my problem — and it’s everybody’s problem, really. Fomenting racial hatred and encouraging contempt for law enforcement endangers the lives of innocent people. The rampant violence in Chicago (where there have been more than 1,600 shootings so far this year, including 244 fatal shootings) shows where this lawless mentality can lead. Likewise, when the Brock Turner case becomes an excuse to incite irrational fear — “Oh my God! A white college boy! Run for your life!” — the danger should be obvious. Exaggerated statistics about rape on college campuses are like exaggerated accounts of police racism in that both create an unrealistic sense of fear that encourages irrational behavior. Atrocity tales are exploited for a propaganda narrative, and irresponsible media coverage creates a climate of paranoia.

Feminism’s anti-male propaganda uses atrocity narratives to present highly unusual incidents as typical of a widespread problem. However, if two-thirds of sexual assaults at Stanford involve “intoxicated victims” — and, as with Brock Turner, the perpetrators are intoxicated, too — why is there not more focus on the role alcohol plays in the problem? Because feminists want to exploit these cases to demonize men, while defending a culture in which getting passed-out drunk is entirely acceptable.

‘Enough Fear to Exercise Good Judgment’

Australian feminist Clementine Ford pounced on the Brock Turner case to argue that his “privileged white background” illustrates a “complicated reality of rapists being ‘normal’ people who we may be friends with, work with, go to school with and . . . share blood ties with.” In other words, rape is so commonplace that every man is a suspect, and nothing women do can protect them from the pervasive menace. Urging women to take ordinary precautions is “victim blaming,” according to feminists, because rapists are everywhere and the fact that Brock Turner’s victim drank herself unconscious at a frat party is therefore irrelevant:

The 22-year-old had recently graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara and moved back in with her parents. She had a serious boyfriend in Philadelphia and planned to stay home.
But she changed her mind when her younger sister and her friends began to drink whiskey and champagne, she told the jury, according to the Mercury News.
After having four whiskey drinks at home, the woman and her sister were driven to Stanford to meet female friends. From there, the young women went to the party.

She was a college graduate, Brock Turner was an 18-year-old freshman, and she was already too drunk to drive when she arrived at the party. No one can be permitted to mention this, however, nor are we supposed to notice the ironic lack of self-awareness in the victim’s statement:

The seriousness of rape has to be communicated clearly, we should not create a culture that suggests we learn that rape is wrong through trial and error. The consequences of sexual assault needs to be severe enough that people feel enough fear to exercise good judgment even if they are drunk, severe enough to be preventative.”

Yes, people should “feel enough fear to exercise good judgment,” and getting helplessly drunk at a fraternity party is not “good judgment,” whether you are male or female, 18 or 22, but feminists insist that that Brock Turner’s drunkenness — .16 blood-alcohol content, twice the legal limit — does not mitigate his responsibility, whereas the victim’s .24 blood-alcohol content does not make her own failure to “exercise good judgment” relevant. Obviously, the victim is correct that we should not “learn that rape is wrong through trial and error,” but how do we learn that getting drunk is wrong? No matter how many times we have “communicated clearly” the seriousness of driving while intoxicated, for example, women continue doing it:

  • LIMA, N.Y., April 21 — Amy Patterson, 44, was sentenced to prison for vehicular manslaughter in an October 2015 crash that killed Jeannine Frisbie, 60, and seriously injured Wayne Frisbie. Patterson had been drinking in a bar before the bartender cut her off. She was driving home about 10 p.m. when her car crossed the center line and struck the Frisbie’s car head-on. Patterson’s blood-alcohol level was measured at .23 an hour after the crash.
  • SANTA ANA, California, April 15 — Jessicah Louise Cowan, 37, was convicted of murder, vehicular manslaughter, hit and run with permanent injury or death, two felony counts of driving under the influence and possession of marijuana for a crash that killed a 6-year-old girl and severely injured the child’s sister and mother in Santa Ana in 2012. Cowan had a blood-alcohol content over .20 on the morning in June 2012 when she ran a red light and struck 6-year-old Osmara Meza, her 7-year-old sister Gresia, and their mother Eloisa in the crosswalk. The victims were holding hands as they were crossing the street to a restaurant where they had planned to have a pancake breakfast.
  • BATAVIA, N.Y., April 4 — Hannah Dibble, 23, was sentenced to six months in jail and five years probation for a drunken-driving accident that claimed the life of her friend Alyson D. Krzanak, 18. Dibble was supposed to have been the designated driver for her fellow Genesee Community College students when they attended a Friday night party in February 2015. Instead, shortly before 2 a.m., Dibble was drunk and had five passengers in her 1997 Chevrolet Geo when she ran through a stop sign and collided with a semi-trailer truck. Three other passengers in Dibble’s car were seriously injured in the crash that killed Krzanak.
  • WASHINGTON, Illinois, March 29 — Michelle Paranto, 54, pleaded no contest to aggravated DUI for a high-speed crash that killed a woman in October 2014. Paranto was under the influence of marijuana and a sedative when she ran a red light at 75 mph and slammed broadside into a car driven by Amy Hardin, 24, who was killed instantly. Two other drivers suffered injuries in the four-car collision, and Paranto’s passenger was also severely injured.
  • SAN DIEGO, March 18 — Paulina Munoz, 27, was sentenced to a year in jail after she pleaded guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated in a car crash that killed her own mother, Maria Isabel Villareal, 50. Munoz, who had been drinking all night Sept. 25, 2015, and had a blood-alcohol content over .20, ignored a text message warning her not to drive before her vehicle slammed into two parked cars and a dumpster at 2:20 a.m.
  • SAN DIEGO, March 16 — Brandy Teague, 32, was found guilty of vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, driving under the influence of drugs, three counts of child abuse and possession of methamphetamine. Teague behind the wheel of her Hyundai Electra in an April 15 crash that killed her 3-year-old daughter, Carlee Ramirez, who was not buckled into her car seat properly.
  • ORLANDO, Feb. 26 — Jessica McQueen, 27, was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges of driving under the influence and DUI manslaughter in a June 2012 crash that killed her passenger. McQueen and Shaun Pleima, 22, had gone to Cocoa Beach, where both of them drank heavily all day. McQueen had a .14 blood-alcohol content and was at the wheel of Pleima’s Jeep about 11:30 p.m. when she lost control. The vehicle rolled several times. Pleima was wearing his seatbelt, but suffered fatal injuries.
  • JACKSONVILLE, Florida, Jan. 4 — Alexandria Powers, 21, was sentenced to eight years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of DUI manslaughter and one count of DUI serious bodily injury. Powers was driving two of her friends home in November 2014, when she ran off the road and slammed into a tree. The crash killed Powers’ passenger Chasity Taylor, 20, while the other passenger, Paige Hampton, 23, was thrown from the vehicle, seriously injured and lost her unborn child. Powers’ blood alcohol level was 0.25.
  • COLORADO SPRINGS, Nov. 6, 2015 — Erin Lanosga, 19, was sentenced to five years probation after she pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide in a crash that killed her 16-year-old brother Ryan. Lanosga’s blood-alcohol content was more than .08 percent and tests showed she also had marijuana in her system when she crashed her pickup truck in May 2015. The vehicle rolled several times and came to rest on top of her brother, who had not been wearing a seat belt and was pronounced dead at the scene. At her sentencing, Lanosga’s family pleaded for leniency, as did her high-school principal, who told the judge: “A momentary lapse in judgment may have derailed her hopes for the future, but I don’t think it defines her.”

Yes, a 19-year-old’s “momentary lapse in judgment” killed her 16-year-old brother, and perhaps no one would consider it fair to compare rape to vehicular manslaughter, but these are both crimes that frequently involve excessive use of alcohol. Feminists continue to insist that the solution is to “teach men not to rape” — as if Brock Turner’s problem was that he didn’t realize rape is a felony — whereas nobody says “teach women not to commit vehicular manslaughter,” despite the loss of innocent lives.

What we must understand, however, is that when feminists decide we need to have a “national conversation” about rape, this means we are going to subjected to a lecture about male evil and female victimhood. However, drunk driving may be more common than rape, and frequently results in the death of innocents. Every week, about 190 Americans die in alcohol-related auto accidents. In 2014, nearly 10,000 Americans are killed in DUI-related automobile accidents, most of whom were drunk drivers, but about 3,500 of those killed were innocent passengers or drivers of other cars. Meanwhile, there were more than 10,000 deaths from heroin overdoses in 2014 in the United States and another 5,000 deaths from cocaine overdoses. Every day, about 40 Americans suffer a fatal overdose of either heroin or cocaine, and an even larger number die from overdoses of prescription pain relievers. Yet we are expected to ignore the daily death toll from drugs and alcohol in order to have a “national conversation” about rape, and why? Because with Brock Turner, feminists found the Poster Boy for the Campus Rape Epidemic, an athlete at an elite university from a “privileged white background.”

‘A Wonderful Moment for the Movement’

This is not a story about one rape in California — a state where about 9,500 rapes or attempted rapes were reported in 2014 — but is instead a propaganda campaign about “white male privilege.” Meanwhile . . .

 

A 22-year-old San Jose man was arraigned [Jan. 28] on charges he raped, beat and suffocated a 2-year-old boy earlier this month as the child’s mother slept in another room.
Anthony Lopez has been charged with murder while committing a lewd and lascivious act on a child under the age of 14, in the Jan. 16 death of his girlfriend’s son at a home on El Cajon Drive in the Seven Trees neighborhood. . . .
A police statement of facts submitted to prosecutors asserts that a preliminary examination of the child’s body by a Santa Clara County medical examiner revealed facial bruising and trauma to the victim’s genitals and rectum, leading the medical examiner to conclude the boy was the victim of a homicide and sexual assault.

That horrific crime happened in the same California county as the Brock Turner trial and yet, for some reason, the death of this 2-year-old boy didn’t cause feminists to demand a “national conversation” about rape. Instead, “we’re witnessing is really a watershed pivotal moment,” Amy Ziering, producer of the anti-male propaganda film The Hunting Ground, said in an interview this week about the Stanford case. The Brock Turner story “exploded in this viral way, which is . . . a wonderful moment for the movement,” Ziering told Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now”:

I think it’s now 13 million people have read the [statement by Turner’s victim], and there’s just been this outpouring of support for survivors and outrage about, you know, the way these crimes are treated with ubiquity in this country, and especially on college campuses, which is . . . to ignore them and not do anything to prosecute the people perpetrating them.

Yes, it’s “a wonderful moment for the movement,” i.e., the movement to expel male students from universities on the basis of campus proceedings where accused students are denied due-process rights.

What feminists like Amy Ziering want us to believe is that the typical rapist is a college student, a beneficiary of “privilege.” Ziering’s hate propaganda campaign is about encouraging young women to view all male students as rape suspects. According to feminists, the only reason boys go to college is to rape the girls who go to college, and these rapists get away with their crimes because college officials ignore rape and never “do anything to prosecute the people perpetrating” rape on campus.

A major goal of the feminist movement is to incite hatred against males, but the actual effect is often to create a crippling attitude of sexual paranoia in the minds of young women, as Claire Fox explains:

An ever-widening definition of abuse can incite a culture of fear and complaint: encouraging teachers and girls to name and shame could mean labelling sexually awkward teenage boys as sex pests. . . .
I am particularly concerned we are teaching girls to see themselves as victims.

The psychological trauma of this “culture of fear” is being inflicted deliberately. It is the result of a propaganda campaign by feminists who understand that an emotionally damaged young woman — one who recoils in horror at the thought that a man might “objectify” her with the “male gaze” — is a potential recruit to their anti-male movement:

Everything men say or do about sex is bad and wrong, according to feminist theory, which condemns heterosexuality as an oppressive “institution” forcibly imposed on women by the social system of male domination known as patriarchy.
According to feminist theory, all social and behavioral differences between male and female (i.e., “gender”) are artificially created by patriarchy in order to oppress women, to subjugate them under a systemic hierarchy of injustice enforced by male power.

“It is the system of heterosexuality that characterises the oppression of women and gives it a different shape from other forms of exploitative oppression. . . .
“Sex roles originate from heterosexuality. . . . Sex roles must be created so that no human being of either gender is fully capable of independent functioning and heterosexual coupling then seems natural and inevitable.”

Sheila JeffreysAnticlimax: A Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (1990)

“Male sexual violence against women and ‘normal’ heterosexual intercourse are essential to patriarchy because they establish the dominance of the penis over the vagina, and thus the power relations between the sexes. . . . Men’s sexual violence against women is the primary vehicle through which the dominance of the penis over the vagina is established.”
Dee Graham, Loving to Survive: Sexual Terror, Men’s Violence, and Women’s Lives (1994)

“Heterosexuality and masculinity . . . are made manifest through patriarchy, which normalizes men as dominant over women. . . .
“This tenet of patriarchy is thus deeply connected to acts of sexual violence, which have been theorized as a physical reaffirmation of patriarchal power by men over women.”

Sara Carrigan Wooten, The Crisis of Campus Sexual Violence: Critical Perspectives on Prevention and Response (2015)

Feminists seek to abolish “the system of heterosexuality” which they view as a mechanism of “exploitative oppression,” where “acts of sexual violence” enforce the “patriarchal power by men over women.”

Teaching girls to fear all men as rapists is necessary to feminist success. Any attempt to oppose this hate campaign — to point out facts that contradict the irrational fears incited by feminism’s anti-male rhetoric — will be cited as proof that the opponent is a sexist.

* * * * *

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Comments

60 Responses to “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

  1. darleenclick
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:29 pm

    My 2cents — I don’t find this article by Stacy as excusing the rapist at all. My take away is the examination of the glee from the SJWs at FINALLY finding their posterboy to “prove” every one of their shibboleths.

    Which is actually a disservice to the higher percentage of victims of rape that happen NOT in a campus setting.

    Obama was quoted as saying he was “outraged” by this case; but if he said anything about Chicago’s bloodiest holiday weekend yet with shootings off the chart, I didn’t catch it.

  2. darleenclick
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:37 pm

    It may not have been publicized but putting offers to the defense, first at pre-pre, is SOP in CA district attorney offices. If defense doesn’t want it, it is usually withdrawn prior to Prelim. There may be some negotiation before going to trial, but it depends on the defense at that point

  3. Dianna Deeley
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:47 pm

    I don’t believe you’re condoning or excusing rape, nor do I advocate the position you outline. If one chooses to drink, one has accepted certain responsibilities, such as knowing one’s limits, and (if one tumbles into bed with a stranger), one does not get to call it rape or undying love.

    However, this case bugs me.

    Forget the feminist narrative. Stacy has covered it and the ugly implications and ramifications. From the facts laid out, he bloody well knew he was doing wrong, and the judge somehow managed not to see it.

    It’s the “got up and ran away” part that’s sticking in my craw.

  4. Dianna Deeley
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:48 pm

    Er, not this particular slice of the female population.

  5. Dianna Deeley
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:49 pm

    Good.

  6. Dianna Deeley
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:52 pm

    Rape generally mystifies me. There’s almost always a more pleasant means to the end of sex. But rapes occur.

  7. DeadMessenger
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:54 pm

    HAHAHAHAHAHA!

  8. Dianna Deeley
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:58 pm

    Not at the moment, anyway.

  9. Dianna Deeley
    June 10th, 2016 @ 8:59 pm

    Not leaving a semen sample might have played a part, too.

  10. Joan Of Argghh!
    June 13th, 2016 @ 7:14 am

    ^^^ Why I lurve Darleen Click!