Common Sense Political Thought

I had thought that our liberal friends were all pretty much keeping their mouths shut on this one, now that the state has concluded that the three members of the Duke lacrosse team accused of rape by Crystal Gayle Mangum have been cleared. Pandagon, The Liberal Avenger, and The Lost Kos all kept quiet.

But, thanks to Amanda Marcotte, I discovered that Jill of Feministe wasn’t keeping quiet, so I made my first visit to her fine site.

About that Duke lacrosse thing
Posted by Jill @ 11:32 am
UPDATE: In light of comments on the AutoAdmit/XOXO message board in response to this post (”I want to brutally rape that Jill slut,” “I’m 98% sure that she should be raped (even if only in Internet Land),” “So seriously, I think we should start another war with this cunt. She clearly deserves anything XOXO might inflict on her”), I’m going to be moderating it very heavily. I’m not going to link to the AutoAdmit board; you can google it if you’re curious. Those of you who post comments that are deleted can whine about censorship and echo chambers all you want, but we’re more than 200 comments in and I’ve only deleted a handful (fewer than 5) of truly outrageous ones. Now that a group of people are making rape comments (hilarious as always) and threatening to “start another war with this cunt” because I clearly deserve “anything XOXO might inflict on her,” I’m not feeling the need to be particularly generous with my online space. So here are my rules:
• You throw out insults, you’re gone.
• You’re rude and/or clearly not interested in reasoned discussion, you’re gone.
• You’re clearly one of the people who posted nasty things on the AutoAdmit board, you’re gone. And your IP address very well may be going up in a subsequent post.
• You continue to take the thread off-topic, you’re gone. As a reminder, the post is about posting the woman’s pictures and personal information all over the internet. I did not weigh in on whether I think the three men are guilty or not, because we’ve had that conversation and another flamewar is not going to change anyone’s mind (also, please stop assuming that I think they’re guilty). This post is also not about the women’s sexual history or her line of work, so drop that, too. On this thread, we are discussing the posting of her picture, whether the posting was fair, and the posting’s effects on rape survivors. The internet is a big place, and I’m sure there are hundreds of blogs where you can discuss the guilt/not guilt of the men in question, or of some unidentified man. This is not that blog.
• Because we are talking about rape survivors, I am not going to accept comments that attack or blame survivors of sexual assault.

Also, I’m not going to be sitting at my computer all evening checking the moderation queue. I won’t be at my computer much at all tonight. I imagine that Zuzu and Piny are also fairly busy, and we generally have a policy of not moderating comments each others’ posts, unless they’re so benign that the poster would clearly have no problem letting them through. That means that, out of respect for me, Zuzu and Piny will probably not been approving comments from people who aren’t regular posters here. So if you’ve played by the rules and your comments still go into moderation and stay there for a while, it’s not because I’m trying to censor you, it’s because I’m out. If you think your comment was deleted unfairly, you are welcome to email me and contest the decision.

UPDATE TWO: A few clarifying points:

• I am in no way saying that I think these three lacrosse players are guilty. My opinion on their guilt or not isn’t really relevant since I wasn’t there and I don’t know all the facts of the case, but if you’re interested, I don’t think that they raped her. That’s neither here nor there, but there it is.
• I do, however, think that something happened in that house — I’m not sure what else explains her fingernails on the bathroom floor, her leaving her cellphone and wallet at the house (especially if she’s a greedy whore, as many people seem to be arguing), and the medical examination which showed trauma consistent with sexual assault.
• I think that the criminally accused deserve far more protections than they currently have. I think rape survivors do, too.
• I don’t have a whole lot of faith in the criminal justice system. I think it is fundamentally flawed, and broken at its very base. I think there are some good things about it, but as a general rule I cannot throw my support behind a retributive system, and I’d rather see us go the rehabilitation route. I’d rather our prisons weren’t holding pens for War on Drugs offenders. I’d rather our prisons were not major money-makers, and I’d rather they were not traded on Wall Street. I think prison rape is a huge problem, and that it’s inadequately dealt with. I don’t think that the solution to crime is to simply lock everyone up. I think it’s unfortunate that a retributive system is our only option when it comes to criminal “justice.”
• I am not interested in determining whether or not the Duke lacrosse team had anything to do with the alleged assault. I am interested in the ethical decisions to post the woman’s picture and personal information on The Smoking Gun, on the cover of the New York Post, and on dozens of websites.

OK, that was a long part of her post, but I wanted to reproduce it anyway, because the updates adress Jill’s mindset.

Now back to the post:

Unless you’ve spent the past 48 hours hiding under a rock, you’ve probably heard the news that prosecutors have dropped charges against the three Duke lacrosse players accused of sexually assaulting a stripper. The backlash has been stunning: The woman’s face as plastered across the cover of the New York Post yesterday along with the words THE DUKE LIAR, and The Smoking Gun has posted her personal information. I’m not linking to either.

The overwhelming response, from liberals and conservatives alike (but mostly conservatives), has been to brand the accuser a liar. I’ve already had to delete a series of “gotcha!” comments from the moderation queue. Anti-feminists in particular are overjoyed with the players’ exoneration — not because they particularly care about justice, but because they think this is a good way to stick it to the feminists who support rape survivors, sometimes to the detriment of white men. These are the same people who regularly lectured us not to jump to conclusions, and to wait until the “boys” had their day in court.

“To the detriment of white men?” What has race to do with whether a person is falsely accused of a crime or not?

Last I checked, the woman has not recanted her story. Last I checked, she isn’t being prosecuted for filing false charges. Last I checked, there is no evidence that she lied about a rape occurring.

At this point, what’s obvious is that there was not a strong enough case against Reade W. Seligmann, David F. Evans, and Collin Finnerty to take it to trial. That doesn’t mean that they’re upstanding citizens — after all, they hired a stripper for a team party, harassed her, etc etc — but that doesn’t make them rapists. On the other hand, they may very well be rapists, and there was simply not enough evidence to make a case. I hope we can all agree that, if they are in fact innocent, then it’s terrible that they had to go through this whole ordeal. I hope we can all agree that the DA screwed up this case royally.

This is the part that really gets to me. Jill wants to discuss people “posting the woman’s pictures and personal information all over the internet,” but then proceeds to post the names of the three men who were wrongly accused of rape. She had even said above (the first item in the second update) that she does not believe that the three men accused of rape did rape Miss Mangum.

Maybe Jill simply had their names copied, and it was easier to use the [CTRL][v] paste command, but once again, in the very next paragraph, she names them. I guess that’s not terribly surprising, since, despite the fact there was no “genetic material” from either the three accused or any of the other players on the lacrosse team, Jill just had to speculate: “On the other hand, they may very well be rapists, and there was simply not enough evidence to make a case.”

But this post isn’t about guessing whether or not they did it. As far as the courts go, that issue has been pretty much settled, and we can argue until we’re blue in the face about whether or not we think they did it. I have no idea. I do think that the DA made a hasty indictment and had a shoddy case. But just because Reade W. Seligmann, David F. Evans, and Collin Finnerty may not have raped the woman in question does not mean that there was no rape, or that the woman is a liar. A guilty conviction is not the standard for determining whether or not a crime occurred, or whether or not someone who files a criminal report is telling the truth. OJ wasn’t convicted of murdering Nicole, but she’s still dead. If your car is stolen and the police never find it, it doesn’t mean that the theft never happened.

Women do not lie about rape any more than people lie about being victims of other crimes — but yet we look at rape charges with far more skepticism than we do crimes like theft or other kinds of assault. Could it be that she completely made up the assault? Yeah, it could be, but there’s about a 98% chance that she’s telling the truth.

This isn’t a choice between the three Duke lacrosse players being guilty OR her being a liar. They can be innocent, and she can still be raped. There were a lot of people in that house that night, and the three indictees are not the only possible perpetrators.

What part of there was no genetic material from anyone on the lacrosse team in her body or on her clothing doesn’t Jill understand? The whole team was tested! That information has been out there, ever since the revelations of the test results became public.

Sadly, what Jill’s story is really about is the preservation of the notion that women do not lie about rape. Jill held herself, above, to the notion that, despite the ever-changing story Miss Mangum has told, “there’s about a 98% chance that she’s telling the truth.”

Well, no, there isn’t. Even if we assume that in the vast majority of cases, women who say that they were raped really were raped, there is a 0% chance that Miss Mangum was telling the truth, not only because the DNA tests exonerated the entire team, but because she hasn’t even told the same story consistently. But we have Jill, who is apparently so wedded to the notion that Women Never Lie About Rape, claiming that even with all of the evidence pointing against it, there’s still “about a 98% chance that she’s telling the truth.”

The DA dropped the ball on this one, not the woman, which is why I don’t understand the desire to post her picture and her personal information online. She was taken to the hospital an examination supported her claim of sexual assault. Several of her fingernails were left behind on the bathroom floor, along with her cell phone and her purse. She fled the house without collecting her money. She called 911. Is that definitive evidence that she was raped? No. But it lends itself to the contention that something out of the ordinary happened in that house.

From the reports I’ve read, even the law enforcement officials who don’t believe she was raped believe that she’s mentally unstable, and that she honestly thinks she was raped. The “nut or slut” defense is too often used by defense lawyers to discredit rape survivors, and these prosecutors obviously have much to gain by blaming her for their inability to make a proper case, but at the very least it’s worth noting that even the people who don’t think she was raped believe that she thought she was being honest. If that’s true, it doesn’t make her a liar; it makes her traumatized, troubled, and possibly mentally ill.

It’s deeply troubling that so many people have no qualms about posting the picture and personal information of a woman who, thus far, has not been formally accused of a crime. Of a woman who very well may be a rape survivor. Of a woman who, at the very least, believes herself to be a rape survivor. Of a woman who has not been accused nor proven to have done anything wrong.

Rape is one of the least successfully prosecuted crimes out there. It has the lowest reporting rate of all violent crimes. Women who survive sexual assault are too often silenced, and too often keep the crime a secret because they don’t think anyone will believe them. This case has been extremely harmful to rape survivors — who wants to report a rape if you think that, should prosecutors fail to successfully prosecute anyone, your face is going to be plastered all over the Post with the word “LIAR” next to it?

I don’t challenge the right of individuals to weigh in on this case. After all, the “innocent until proven guilty” standard is a legal one, not a social one, and if we’re permitted to speculate on whether the Duke lacrosse team was involved in an assault, then we’re permitted to speculate on whether she was telling the truth. But just because we’re permitted to doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And speculation goes about 10 steps too far when it turns into publishing her picture, her name, her address and other personal information.

Why isn’t it a good idea to speculate whether “she was telling the truth” when Jill clearly thought it was a good idea to speculate that the Messrs Seligmann, Evans and Finnerty “may very well be rapists, and there was simply not enough evidence to make a case?” Why the double standard?

The fact is that the three Duke men will go on leading lives of relative privilege. I’m not trying to downplay the trauma of being falsely accused of a crime, but these men have hordes of support. They are roundly perceived as innocent white victims of an evil black hypersexed slut. They had some of the best lawyers available. They will graduate from a top-tier university, and they will go on to have well-paying jobs.

She will forever be branded a lying whore. She will go back to her home in Durham — not her pricey dorm room, not the house her parents pay for her to live and party in — and she’ll try to move on with her life. She’ll have survived assault, and she’ll have survived being used as pawn by the media and her local legal establishment. She isn’t coming out unscathed. Further attempts to cause her harm — posting her pictures, calling her a liar — strike me as unbelievably cruel (not to mention usually hypocritical).

Here we come to it. Messrs Seligmann, Evans and Finnerty “will go on leading lives of relative privilege,” while Miss Mangum will be living in relative poverty. But the Duke players and their families are out many, many thousands of dollars in legal bills. Two of them were kicked out of college, and although Duke has since said that they can return, they have not. The third man had just been graduated, and had landed a plum Wall Street job — a job which was suspended pending the outcome of the legal case. He has lost about a year’s salary. Jill thinks that they “will go on leading lives of relative privilege,” but the fact is that they have suffered measurable harm from this.

And immeasurable harm will certainly follow; how many human resources managers, getting a résumé with Collin Finnerty’s name on it are going to give him unbiased consideration — and how many are going to figure that there are plenty of other qualified candidates, and that their companies don’t need any potentially bad publicity, or perhaps believe, like Jill, that “they may very well be rapists, and there was simply not enough evidence to make a case.”

Even if you believe that the attacks on this individual woman are warranted, consider the effects that they will have on rape survivors. Consider what rape survivors feel every time they hear her called a liar. Consider what women will internalize about rape from this incident. Consider how that will effect them in the future — how it will effect their own reporting, or their belief that their friend, their daughter, their mother is telling the truth.

Accusations of lying about rape have far-reaching consequences. Lauren wrote an incredibly moving post about this a while back. I hope you’ll all read it, and re-consider the Duke case through that lens.

I followed the link and read the story. Rape is a horrible crime, and I’d like to see the people who are guilty of rape sent to prison for the rest of their miserable lives. And it’s clear that most women who say they have been raped are telling the truth about it. But the notion that Jill is trying to sell, that all women who claim to have been raped are telling the truth, that men accused of rape are guilty until proven innocent (and even then,”they may very well be rapists, and there was simply not enough evidence to make a case”) is unacceptable. That so many of our friends on the left jumped on this case, with both feet, assuming that the accused were guilty because they were wealthy white boys and the victim was a poor black woman, was repugnant. That race-hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton immediately set out to Tawana Brawley this case, was repugnant. (Had the accused been black and the alleged victim been white, it would have remained a local story.)

Jill wrote about the alleged victim, “She’ll have survived assault, and she’ll have survived being used as pawn by the media and her local legal establishment.” Well, we don’t know that she has actually been assaulted, but we certainly do know that she has been “used as pawn by the media” — and it is our friends on the left who have done the using. Jill herself was doing so, with her articles assuming that she had, in fact been raped, here, here, and here. Pandagon had its go at it as well, and our own Jesurgislac is one of the frequent commenters on it. Some conservative sites jumped in as well, many taking the position that there was something wrong with the story and that the players were being railroaded; Sister Toldjah, who writes from nearby Charlotte, North Carolina, did some of the best work on that end.

But most of all, the media jumped on it, using both the purported victim and the alleged assailants, and they did so solely because of the demographics: poor, working black mother allegedly raped by wealthy white jocks. There was an immediate circus, and if some of our friends on the left turned it into an episode for political gain, they would have been unable to do so if it had remained what it should have been, a local story.