Defense Uses Victim’s Friends To Try and Prove Drunk Girls are A-OK To Rape
As if the horrifying details of what allegedly happened to Jane Doe in the Steubenville gang rape trial weren’t bad enough. Now her “ex-friends” are testifying for the defense. I wonder if these young girls realize they’re being used as pawns in the tried-and-true strategy of dismantling a rape victims “credibility.”
Apparently, photographic evidence of a passed out Jane Doe isn’t enough to prove that she didn’t consent to being urinated on, digitally penetrated, and publicly humiliated. It seems the defense is trying to build an argument that having a few drinks and consenting to hang out with some football players is tantamount to Jane Doe agreeing to have sex acts performed on her while unconscious. Cleveland.com reports on the friend’s testimony:
She said the teen girl became very drunk at the first of three parties that night. Defense lawyer Walter Madison asked about the 16-year-old girl’s demeanor when she drinks.
“She wasn’t talking to me in the nicest way (that night),” the witness said.
The witness said she asked her friend to stop drinking, but the girl refused. When she tried to stop the teen from leaving with the two defendants, she said her friend pushed her way.
Okay, and that is relevant why? Bitchy, stubborn, and inclined to have a drink at a party – that describes me and pretty much every girlfriend I had in high school. Who cares?
The witness said that on the morning after the parties she went to pick her friend up. She found her laying on a couch in the basement of a Steubenville student’s home.
The witness drove the girl and two defendants, dropping off the two boys before returning to a house near where the first party began the night before.
Once the defendants were out of the car, she said she began yelling at her friend.
“I was upset with her actions the night before,” she testified.
The teen told the witness she didn’t have sex with the defendants, but then she said, “I don’t remember what happened.”
Madison repeatedly asked if the teen girl had a reputation for not telling the truth. After repeated objections, the witness answered, yes, to some people the girl would lie.
A teenager who lies on occasion? That’s shocking. But it’s actually neither here nor there. There’s photographic evidence and Twitter documentation of the whole night. Is anyone even questioning whether Jane Doe was conscious? In order to give consent, doesn’t one have to be conscious?
We’ve been led to believe it was because of her level of inebriation that Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond were able to drag her, unconscious, from house to house. She was seen vomiting in the street. She was obviously in no condition to give consent to anything that happened to her that night. But clearly the fact that her “friends” can testify that she had a few drinks is being used against her.
In her testimony this morning, Jane Doe claimed she was drugged. Even if it turns out she wasn’t, drinking to the point of unconsciousness doesn’t give someone carte-blanche to violate you. It just doesn’t. The fact that the defense is building a case around this is vile. As if the eyewitness testimony of “Mays trying to force his penis into the victim’s mouth while she was unconscious in order to get her to perform oral sex on him,” isn’t enough to prove that she wasn’t a willing participant.
Am I conscious right now – because I can’t even believe this isn’t an open and shut case.
(photo: Rob Byron/ Shutterstock)
