OMG. The woman said repeatedly that she wasn’t raped, and she had clearly consensual sex with him afterwards. She didn’t report it, someone else did. She said that she was trying to stop the process. Maybe she felt “wronged” by the prosecution against her will. Even she said that he withdrew and put on a condom and she said that was fine. Are you willing to grant her any agency at all, or are you determined to maintain that she is a completely passive victim who doesn’t know what she felt or did?
For doG’s sake, sexual relationships can be messy. Can you be serious in maintaining that this was a righteous prosecution? Really??
I recall a completely consensual sexual encounter in which we were proceeding until I said something about birth control. He stopped and put on a condom. Things continued. According to you I was the victim of sexual assault or rape or something. This is simply insane.
Yes, Consolation, if Grant actually penetrated the woman without protection and against her objection, as she stated. Based on the article, she was apparently concerned about pregnancy. But she might well have been concerned about HIV, herpes, syphilis, and antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. A condom offers at least partial protection against all of these.
For the university to bring a complaint against Grant was right, in my view. A woman’s agreeing to intercourse with a condom is not the same as agreeing to any variety of intercourse without a condom.
Obviously, I agree that the subsequent sex was consensual.
The outcome may have been overly harsh. Apparently, a court bought into the idea that it was too harsh.
All I can say is that I am very glad that my S is no longer in college and thus no longer subject to the opinions of people like you. I’m sorry, I have respected you for a long time, but this is just too much.
This is a level of detail in a sexual encounter that outsiders simply should not be involved in, IMHO.
I absolutely disagree and think if she doesn’t feel she was assaulted end of story. IMO the college had zero business getting involved other than to inquire as to her wellbeing and listen to what she says and lay out the options…even then in my mind it is questionable to do even that on hearsay. Sounds to me like they had a pretty healthy situation and navigated it to conclusion that was amenable to both only for the uni to attempt to reframe it for her after the fact.
It is odd that you raise the issue of granting the woman agency, Consolation. She claims she said no to unprotected sex and he penetrated her anyway. Are you okay with that?
Also, there is a reason that criminal cases where there is an identifiable victim (Smith) and an alleged perpetrator (Jones) are “The State vs. Jones” and not “Smith vs. Jones.”
Where I think this may have gone wrong was at the stage where the consequences of the act were determined (again, assuming that the woman’s representation of what happened is correct).
But she says that she said no first, and he penetrated her anyway. If he didn’t, then fine, he is innocent. If he did, he is guilty. I don’t see how you can say it grants the woman agency, if her objections to unprotected intercourse can be ignored until she raises them a second time.
Maybe one of the lawyers on the thread could weigh in?
I could see this as a case for “prosecutorial discretion” within the university–charging the man with something less serious.
Oh, for god’s sake. Have you ever had sex? This is just ridiculous. He obviously did not proceed anywhere near ejaculation before putting on the condom. I feel like I am in the proverbial funhouse. Is this the reality experienced by most people these days?
Perhaps other posters on this thread are too young to recall the incident of the USS Pueblo, which was captured by the North Koreans. The sailors’ statement to the media included the words “Penetration completes the act.” That’s what they were taught by the Navy, and it did not originally refer to the North Korean waters.
Grant just mentions “sexual contact” in the quotation in the news article. Whether the woman’s description is correct or not, I obviously have no way of knowing. However, she certainly had the option of saying “It was private. It was consensual,” if she had no ambivalence about the situation.
Again, I hope someone with actual legal training will weigh in on this.
If she told the university–as the article says, ""Grant was lying on top of me and I told him that I did not want to have sexual intercourse with him that is unprotected because I am not on any birth control. Although I told Grant no, Grant ended up penetrating me … and I told him to stop. He stopped and pulled out from me immediately. Grant then said to me that if he used a condom, would I be okay with that. I told Grant yes to the condom. Grant placed on the condom and we began to have protected sex at this point which I was okay with it,” then I believe that fits the legal definition of rape (due to the initial, unprotected act), despite the fact that the woman consented subsequently.
All the woman had to do was to avoid providing this level of detail, and there would have been no problem. If she told this to someone outside of the investigatory group, their evidence would have been hearsay. A problem arises if she provided this level of detail to a university official connected with the investigation.
She probably did not realize the difficulty that her statement would cause. If one believes it as printed in the article, the conclusion is foregone.
Of course, she probably did not define herself as “abused” and it should have immediately been no business of the university to define that sexual relationship on her behalf and deprive that kid of his earned education for years. Gross over reach. How many times do universities need to fail at this stuff? CAn you imagine how this poor woman feels that she couldn’t stop this train wreck…she will also have to live with that.
Sorry, I don’t see it that way. The woman told the man, “not without a condom,” and he penetrated her anyway, according to her statement, quoted in the article. She apparently told someone other than a friend the same thing.
I see the lawyers are avoiding this thread like the plague at the current time! But I would really like to know what the legal reality is.
The reality is that no court anywhere would hear a case like this, even if you could find a true believer DA to try and charge it. First, no one who would ever get seated on a jury would believe this was rape or even civil battery, and any lawyer or judge would know that. Second, it is not about trying to find an arguable technical violation of a statute and then burning the witch. The legal system depends on the vast majority of people acting rationally the vast majority of time. Here, even with the most charitable reading of the article possible, that is what happened.
You have to remember that the criminal law is designed to punish conduct society finds detrimental and the civil law is designed to allocate the risk of harm (not search for “truth”). The burden of proof and standards of evidence applied in each is really an expression of the level of inefficiency the society will tolerate to achieve each goal. The tribunal system though is designed to empower women, and the people who established it have a much higher tolerance for inefficiency then we see in the larger society. Those are very big differences.
When a woman says “I was not assaulted or abused,” to tell her that she was and impact her life in a terrible way is the opposite of respecting her agency.
Her statements could be construed as praising the young man “he started, I asked him to put on a condom, and he did, what a great guy!”
It’s beyond sick that this disciplinary process was pursued, and the fact that people who think like this have so much power shows that that sickness has permeated certain institutions.
Well, that is interesting and somewhat sad, Ohiodad51. I have not called for the young man to be tried in a court of law. However, I stick by my belief that according to the plain definition of rape, if the statement of the young woman reported in the article is true, this was rape.
The news report says that the woman said “not without a condom” and he penetrated her anyway. In my view, that’s reprehensible. If it had occurred in the order that he started, then she said you need to use a condom, and he did, then he is blameless. But that is not the sequence that is reported to have occurred, according to her statement in the article.
If she had said “not with your socks on,” then, fine, that’s really immaterial. But condom/no condom is not immaterial.
I’m not out on any kind of a witch hunt. I have no involvement in this sort of case at the university, other than to talk with distraught women from time to time.
You may find the definition unduly harsh. But the plain facts of the case do not make it an instance of university over-reach.
The woman also remarked (according to the article) that she told the young man that although she was acting like a typical rape victim, she did not believe she had been raped. What is that about?
You can say that the university did not respect her wishes. The article supports that. But if it is true that the young man penetrated her (as the article reports), after she had said “not without a condom,” then the young man not only did not respect her agency, he did worse. And additionally, if she had not shown up for the university hearing, I don’t think that any charge could have stuck.
Unless she said that simultaneously and he immediately pulled out. It really is up to the woman to decide. I can’t get over infantilizing a woman by implying that she can’t decide for herself whether she was the victim of assault.
Sure, simultaneously, no fault, no problem. The report says that she said not without a condom first. It could be wrong. If the woman had said that she was uncertain about the exact sequence of events, that too would be exculpatory.
Is there a report that the woman did not show up for the university hearing? I do not think that the university could have found the man responsible if she did not show up. My university certainly would not have found the man responsible in such a case. We leave it up to the woman to decide whether to bring a complaint within the university, or not.
In either of those circumstances (sequence issues, no-show), there would have been no case at all here. I have to assume that the woman did not understand that. Her comment that she might be acting like a typical victim of rape still troubles me, though–how do you interpret that?
It doesn’t necessarily have to be wrong for it to be a changing situation as it unfolded. I really do think the adult woman knows better, and as a woman and mother of daughters, it offends me greatly that others imposed their views and agendas on this woman, marginalized and infantilized her.