Won’t somebody please think of the rapist?
Again.
A judge suggested that a teenage boy accused of raping a drunk girl at a party should be treated leniently because he came from “a good family”, and cast doubt on whether such an attack amounted to rape at all.
Judge James Troiano in New Jersey made the remarks while ruling that the boy, who was identified only as “GMC”, should not face trial as an adult for allegedly raping a 16-year-old girl while recording the incident on his mobile phone.
“This young man comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well,” Troiano said. “He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for a good college. His scores for college entry were very high.” Troiano, 69, also noted that the boy was an Eagle Scout.
Trying minors as adults is one thing, and claiming that coming from a good family is a reason to brush off rape is quite quite another.
We saw the same thing with Brock Turner; we saw it with Steubenville; we see it regularly. Judges, and sometimes juries, worry about the waste of these valuable boys while the raped girl becomes just some annoying accident that happened to a boy.
Investigators said GMC sent a clip of the alleged rape to seven of his friends, and later sent a text adding: “When your first time having sex is rape.” Yet Troiano suggested that, in his view, the alleged incident was a sexual assault rather than a rape.
Sending a clip to friends is so beyond despicable I can’t deal with it. I get so sick of the depth and energy with which too many male people hate female people. “Haiy doodz look at this slag I raped while she was drunk hurr hurr.” Pathetic that one of them is a Supreme Court justice now, isn’t it.
Prosecutors had alleged that GMC’s attack had been “sophisticated and predatory” and that he showed “calculated and cruel” behaviour by filming the incident, sharing the footage and then lying about it.
Damn right.
But Troiano refused, pointing to GMC’s background and saying that, in his view, a “traditional case of rape” involved more than one attacker using a weapon to take advantage of a victim in a remote location.
All those other rapes that are so commonplace are thus just a bit of fun among the boys, while genuine rape hardly ever happens. Convenient for some.
Updating to add an informative comment by Screechy Monkey at Miscellany Room that I hadn’t seen:
“And there’s a big problem I can see: initially the victim and her parents weren’t asking for charges, they just wanted the perpetrator and his friends to stop circulating the video of it. (Yes, that’s right, he was dumb enough to video it — and text it to his friends with the message “when your first time having sex was rape.” But hey, Eagle Scout honor student!) So the police actually instructed the kids to delete the video, and now nobody has a copy of it. I don’t know enough about criminal law to say how that’s going to play out — the state actually directed the destruction of potentially exculpatory evidence, but on the other hand, the defendant himself had a copy too that he also chose to delete so maybe it’s not Brady material.”