The Other McCain

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

A Blast From the Past

Posted on | December 12, 2021 | Comments Off on A Blast From the Past

“They are teenagers in high school experimenting with their sexuality, all teens do it in one form or another. They are teens, it’s healthy and normal.”
— Kelley Hunt Smith (Kaitlyn Hunt’s mother)

“The state is further in possession of lewd and lascivious videos the defendant sent the child victim. At least one video explicitly depicts the defendant masturbating by rubbing her vagina with her fingers while moaning.”
— Christopher Taylor, Assistant State Attorney

How long has it been since I even thought about Kaitlyn Hunt? You remember her? The teenage Florida lesbian who briefly became a liberal media cause célèbre after she was arrested in 2013 for having sex with a 14-year-old girl? The media bought into a #FreeKate narrative — promoted by Hunt’s parents — that she was a victim of homophobia, but Florida’s age of consent law was very clear and plenty of heterosexuals had been prosecuted for sex with minors. Furthermore, as more facts about the case came to light, it became evident that this allegedly innocent “romance” (as some in the media tried to paint it) was rather sordid, including meeting up for sex in the school restroom. The victim’s parents had tried to get Hunt to leave their daughter alone, but Hunt was obsessed with the girl. The #FreeKate movement, such as it was, relied on misrepresentations of the case made by Kaitlyn Hunt’s father:

In the online petition, which garnered more than 300,00 signatures, Steve Hunt described his daughter’s involvement with the 14-year-old as an innocent “high school romance,” and did not mention an incident in January where the younger girl ran away from home to have sex with his Kaitlyn. The parents of the 14-year-old told a local TV station that they feared their daughter had been abducted, but later learned she had been picked up by Kaitlyn and taken to the Hunt family’s home for a night of sex. The younger girl’s parents said they twice asked Kaitlyn to leave their daughter alone, and only in February reported the case to authorities.
When more facts about the case became public — the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office released the arrest affidavit on May 20 — some of Hunt’s original supporters repudiated the “Free Kate” campaign. On May 23, Joan McCarter of the progressive Daily Kos site said that “the initial dishonesty of Hunt’s parents” made the story “problematic,” and deactivated a Daily Kos petition on Hunt’s behalf.

People who bought into the false narrative failed to understand what was actually at stake in the case, i.e., that Hunt’s supporters were essentially trying to render age-of-consent laws null and void. Ninety-nine times out of 100, cases of statutory rape are settled by a plea bargain, because prosecutors don’t want to go to trial and have to put the victim on the witness stand. Kaitlyn Hunt was offered a plea bargain but rejected it, because her parents didn’t think she should have to plead guilty to a felony. The #FreeKate crusade was an attempt to use political pressure to force prosecutors into dropping the case, which they refused to do.

This 2013 case exasperated me because so many people refused to acknowledge the danger inherent in making Kaitlyn Hunt into a sort of “civil rights” hero — the Rosa Parks of jailbait dildo sex — as if it were some kind of injustice to enforce age-of-consent laws. In the end, the #FreeKate movement collapsed in failure after prosecutors discovered that Hunt had violated her bail terms by surreptitiously communicating with her victim (including sending her masturbation “selfie” videos) and Hunt eventually accepted the plea deal. So the whole obscene carnival of publicity which, as I said at the time, had turned Kaitlyn Hunt into the World’s Most Famous Sex Offender™ was utterly futile.

My habit of working in “file it and forget it” mode — it’s just another story I covered, forgotten as soon as it ended — means that I don’t keep track of what happens to people after they’ve finished their 15 minutes of fame (or infamy, as may be the case). In 2014, Kaitlyn Hunt announced her engagement to an older woman (Latasha Thomas), followed a year later by the birth of a baby son (Kingston) and in 2017, there was an item reporting that she had completed her probation, but since then she’s disappeared. Meanwhile, however . . .

Whatever happened to the victim in that case? Well, a longtime friend of the blog reports that the victim’s mother posted to Facebook bragging about her daughter. After graduating from Cornell University (!!!), she is now district manager for a tech company while working to complete her MBA from Florida International University. “God has His arms around you,” the mother wrote in a birthday greeting to her daughter. “Continue to keep Him first and there’s no limit to what you can accomplish.”

“But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.”
— Genesis 50:20 (KJV)

Never doubt that God answers prayers. Selah.




 

Category: Kaitlyn Hunt

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