An Open Letter to the DA in the Ben Roethlisberger Case
Hon. Fred D. Bright, District Attorney, Ocmulgee Judicial District, State of GeorgiaDear Mr. Bright:Ben Roethlisberger raped a 20 year-old college student in your jurisdiction.He committed a violent felony which you and you alone were responsible for pursuing. You are the elected District Attorney who was called upon to summon the vigilance, resources, legal theory, competence and simple courage to bring this man to justice. Justice, as you correctly stated, is your proper goal rather than a conviction. Instead of pursuing justice, however, you ran from it. In both substance and delivery, your decision not to pursue charges against this rapist is one of the clearest examples of prosecutorial incompetence I’ve witnessed in years.Normally I would withhold judgment on a charging decision in a case I wasn’t directly involved in. I’m aware that your rape statute is challenging. I’m not familiar with your jury pool, your legal culture or the limits of your resources. So while the decision looked timid and feckless to me, I was willing to extend the benefit of the doubt.And then I heard you speak.The news conference, where you laid out your reasons for not pursuing this case, to the extent that it accurately reflected your analysis, should stand as a training tool in how not to evaluate a sexual assault case. You note “quite candidly” that it was the victim’s friends who initially sought out a police officer to make a report. What’s your point? That she was clearly not victimized because she didn’t have the wherewithal to seek out a cop herself, just seconds after being raped by a professional football player twice her size?You note the victim’s statements changed over the night in question. Are you really surprised, given that she was intoxicated, confused, frightened and in shock over the period of time in which they were taken? What about the now resigned police sergeant who berated her for being drunk, spewed expletives about her and informed her and her friends that Roethlisberger had a lot of money, and that filing a police report against him would be futile? Did you think that would promote cooperation and stability with your victim? You note also the victim’s statement to medical professionals that night that she was “sort of raped” by a boy. Therefore, in your mind apparently, she really wasn’t. Because I guess it’s one shot, one kill in your jurisdiction. If a woman, because of shock, fear, mistreatment, intoxication, confusion, the weight of circumstances, the attacker's celebrity and the psychological punch of being raped, can’t recite facts flawlessly within hours of the attack, she’s done for. The case can’t be proven.I can’t say for certain whether you could have proven this case beyond a reasonable doubt and you can’t either. I can say for certain that the standard you invoked for whether charges should be brought is utterly false, in addition to being misleading and needlessly defeatist. The National District Attorneys Association, an organization I served for two years, promulgates Prosecution Standards which state that the prosecutor should file “only those charges which he reasonably believes can be substantiated by admissible evidence at trial.” You had plenty. You had motive, opportunity and zero delay in reporting the incident. You had eye- witness testimony from her sorority sisters, panicking at the thought of their friend’s condition and circumstances, and being coldly stonewalled by “bodyguards” and the bar management. You had physical findings consistent with sexual penetration. You had the gift of a rare evidentiary rule that would have allowed you to use Roethlisberger’s 2008 sexual attack as part of your case in chief had you developed it. You might have had the victim’s testimony had you chosen to establish a rapport with her from the beginning without judging her from a distance. In order to develop a rapport and promote cooperation, a competent prosecutor will reach out to the victim of a sexual assault immediately. Did you even speak to her before she was ensconced in legal protection of her own before April 2, nearly a month after the rape?Your responsibility includes a college town, Mr. Bright. If this is how you react to the extremely common scenario of alcohol facilitated sexual assault, then I fear greatly for the people you’re sworn to protect. I understand the victim’s eventual desire that the case be dropped, and I respect the fact that you took her wishes into consideration. Regardless, my guess is that treating her and this case with more respect from the very beginning might have yielded a different outcome with regard to her willingness to cooperate. Instead you pointed to her failings as a 20 year-old college student and perversely equated her behavior with Roethlisberger’s that night in some inappropriate scolding session you had no reason or authority to engage in.I don’t believe you dropped this case in any sort of deference to a celebrity. I think you ran from it because you’re thoroughly unschooled on how to prosecute anything like it. Thus, you have failed this woman, the citizens of your jurisdiction, and the wider world beyond it. You have allowed a repeat sex offender to escape, let loose to rape again, which he almost surely will, despite your admonitions to him to “grow up.” Ben Roethlisberger is grown up, Mr. Bright. He’s a grown up rapist, and he has permanently altered and forever scarred the life of more than one woman. If he does so again and his next victim chooses to report him, I pray that her courage is this time equaled by that of the DA responsible for doing justice.Very Truly Yours,Roger A. Canaff, JD
Holy Week and the Nonsense Continues
It continues from the Church and its defenders, desperately trying to alienate further multitudes. And it continues from anti-Catholics and the anti-religious who want the institution brought to its knees, some justified because of personal betrayal but many out of sheer, gleeful contempt.Ross Douthat, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, blames the crisis, in part, on the sexual revolution of the 60’s and 70’s. The insinuation is that some of the abuse, particularly long term abuse against post-pubescent boys by priests, is explainable by the (literally) “revolutionary” effects of that era. Douthat, in a blog post, attempts to shore up his argument by citing the formidable John Jay study that I’ve referred to here previously. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, makes the oft-heard but no less despicable argument that homosexuality is to blame, since most of the boys abused were post-pubescent. Donohue doesn’t even attempt to cite the John Jay study (which belies his central claim) or anything else. He’s got his scapegoat and an army of the uninformed applauding his analysis. Finally, many liberal Catholics and anti-Catholics continue to see the roots of the crisis in priestly celibacy, which has clearly “warped” so many of these priests and turned them, through repression and obsession with the forbidden, into predators.Nonsense, all of it.The Church has a problem with predators because predators have found in it a haven, period. Whether these predators prefer boys or girls, pre-pubescent or adolescent, has nothing to do with society’s temperature on sexual expression or the sexual preference of the predators. They prey where they can, like any hunter does. Non sex-offender priests with homosexual urges, throughout the ages, have taken adult lovers within the priesthood or without. Were they emboldened to do so more during the post Vatican II sexual revolution? Probably. Nevertheless, they did not and have not feasted on the emerging, volatile sexuality of adolescents by betraying their trust, destroying their faith, and using as a weapon the very thing the child was brought up to turn to in times of crisis and discomfort. That’s what a predator does. And what they have done over the centuries, let alone in the decade and a half of the sexual revolution, should never be dismissed or excused as free-love experimentation between otherwise “well meaning” or “normal” priests and minor children. Well meaning priests, gay or straight, who struggle and fail with celibacy turn to adult lovers, period. Priests who manipulate, con, groom and then molest even older adolescents are sex offenders, period. The Church has more than its fair share not because she is manufacturing them but because she has proven to be the best and largest hunting ground of perhaps any institution known to man.If the current Pope or anyone else involved in the shame and tragedy of this cover-up can be forgiven at all, it’s perhaps because of three things: The fear and distrust of outside, civil authority because of past persecution, an over-reliance on the power of psychotherapy and treatment to “cure” the problem, and the doctrine of reconciliation through confession that the Church values so highly.Let’s be clear: None of these things excuses the ocean of evil and resultant misery. Even the lofty and still appealing idea that a person can enter a confessional and come out clean and ready to do better does not excuse the reckless judgment calls the Church hierarchy made over the years, at the expense of her most vulnerable followers. But these points, when fairly considered, provide a slightly less cynical view than that peddled by anti-religion enthusiasts like Christopher Hitchens (although he does make some fair points in a recent Slate article). Still, the Pope is not, as Hitchens claims, a “mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat.” He is in fact a remarkably intellectually disciplined and erudite man as was his predecessor. But this makes his missteps and continued ignorance on this subject harder to accept, not easier. I don’t fault the Church for not understanding sexual predators earlier. Our understanding of them now is still emerging, and good research is only decades old, if that. The Church has been victimized by predators also. But now she is gambling with her future by looking for a scapegoat in homosexuality and refusing to come to terms with the countless victims whose lives these infiltrators have stained forever.This crisis has been the spiritual heartbreak of my lifetime. Armed with the professional knowledge I’ve been blessed with from working with the finest minds in the business, and being utterly powerless to affect any change from the pew I kneel in, makes it that much worse. And the nonsense continues.
Blind Still to the Clarity of Rape
Like millions, I’ve become a big fan of “Mad Men,” AMC’s stylish, brooding and sexy drama series focused on Kennedy-era New York City and its anti-hero Don Draper, the ad man with the bizarrely complicated and purposefully unexamined life. The treatment of women and minorities (Jews, African-Americans and homosexuals most prominently) provide a tragic and illuminating undercurrent for the entire series. Many of its brilliant plotlines focus on the struggles of these individuals to reconcile their circumstances with the hyper white-male dominated world they navigate.Given this important backdrop, I was happy to see the show focus on sexual assault as well, particularly intimate partner sexual violence. The players are the head of the secretarial pool, Joan Holloway (played brilliantly by Christina Hendricks) and her fiancé, a handsome, young doctor who rapes her in an office while visiting her workplace before a dinner date. I was then promptly disheartened, although not surprised, by viewer reactions, many of whom put quotes around the word ‘rape’ when discussing the scene online, as if what happened to Joan was somehow unclear or arguable. It was neither.In fact, the scene is extremely well done and remarkably realistic, based on my experience with survivors of this most prevalent kind of sexual assault. Joan’s fiancé wants to see one of the ad men’s offices and have her make him a drink. She reluctantly agrees and leads him to the small bar. Once there, he gropes her from behind, innocently enough at first for a betrothed couple, but she reminds him that its not her office and they can’t get physical. He continues to grope her, not taking ‘no’ for an answer, and then grabs her forcefully when she turns to him, pushing her against the bar table. Bottles shake and Joan’s eyes grow wide. It’s at this moment she realizes she’s no longer in control of her body. He turns her, his arms grasping hers, and pushes her to the floor while she protests. He quickly overpowers her, forces her arms away from her body, spreads her legs, works himself out of his pants and rapes her. With his right hand he turns her face away from him and she stares silently at a couch and a coffee table in her line of sight. The next scene is of him waiting outside the office for her, presumably as she’s straightening her clothing and composing herself again. She emerges and they leave together.I sometimes show this scene when teaching sex assault dynamics to cops and prosecutors. Just about all of them readily recognize what they see as rape, and can pinpoint the moment at which Joan’s choices and physical security evaporate. The general public, however, seems to be behind the curve. As Hendricks herself reports in a New York magazine article from last fall, many viewers (blogging on the show or commenting on it online) either didn’t see this incident as rape (not “real” rape, anyway), or were dubious about Joan’s reaction to it. Many also seemed to believe that, because she didn’t cry out and was willing to continue on with their evening, whatever her fiancé did to her, it was obviously something less than rape. This is particularly disturbing to me because what is depicted is unequivocally a sexual attack. During it, what Joan’s character experiences is every bit as brutal, terrifying and life-altering as any other form of sexual assault. It’s also far, far more common than the “guy-in-the-bushes” stranger rape that too many people believe is the only kind worth seriously addressing. Her reactions to being raped, both during and after, aren’t evidence of a less serious crime; they simply bespeak her reasonable reaction to the assault given the shock of it, and also given her options, in 1962, for dealing with it. They also demonstrate the steely strength of the character, for better or for worse, in composing herself so completely and continuing on with her night, and whatever lies beyond it. This isn’t to say that Joan didn’t have choices after she was raped. She makes the choice to remain in the relationship, and to maintain the façade of a happy engagement with an enviable catch. Feminist friends of mine would correctly remind me that the point isn’t to relieve her of any responsibility for those choices, as long as they are understood in the context of her reality. Rather, what desperately needs to be clear is that the choices she makes and the context in which she makes them don’t speak to the gravity of what he does to her. She was raped. Forcibly. The fact that the rapist is someone she’s been intimate with before doesn’t make it less traumatic; if anything it’s more so because of the betrayal of trust involved and the pure shock and terror of such a thing done by a loved one and in a mundane, presumably safe place like one’s own offices.It’s now nearly 50 years later. For an American woman in Joan’s position, the options are less bleak and the path forward more hopeful, but not nearly enough. Sexual assault by men against the women they share a life with is still rampant, and rarely successfully prosecuted or even reported. It’s remarkable how recently we’ve begun to attempt to deal with intimate partner sexual assault; in large part it’s been a welcome outgrowth of the valiant effort to deal with domestic violence. But in many ways sexual violence is the final frontier. Violence is one thing. Sex, the most private, compromising, titillating and repressed aspect of human interaction, is another. Because of our discomfort with the subject, the mysteries our own bodies present us with, and 1000 other cultural implications, we tend to paint gray actions by men (and some women, particularly in same-sex relationships) that are very clearly black and white.Witness, then, how millions still confuse an utterly clear-cut example of a violent, vicious act with something vaguely unwanted or unpleasant. A tiff between lovers best left between them. An event for which a bouquet of roses appropriately makes amends. It’s been a long 50 years.
Angel Band Project: Nudging Me When I Needed It Most
There’s a fairly young but now well-used expression that goes “Let go and let God.” For the last several weeks in particular, although it goes quite a bit farther back than that, I’ve been struggling with something that feels like the inverse: “Let God, or let go.” In other words, I feel like I’m nearing a “two roads diverged” choice in terms of my spirituality. The choice is about how I’ll view God, and God’s love. On one hand, I can accept a personally involved, loving God (as Christians should) and continue to try to make sense of the world He created within that framework. On the other, I can let go and give in to long-held Deist tendencies that tell me that God is there, magnificent and basically benevolent, but that He loves us in a way we can’t- and aren’t supposed- to understand. That even from within Catholicism, the prism I still view God through, I’ll come to believe that His presence in our lives- this one, anyway- isn’t what I was brought up to think. I’m hardly the first person to struggle with this question. Untold millions have viewed and suffered human horror that dwarfs my imagination; my life is charmed by comparison in every conceivable way. Yet many have come down still on the side of traditional notions of Judeo-Christian worship. I don’t know where I’ll end up, but despite the tonnage of horror I do see, I’ll admit there are times when God seems to remind me, if subtly, that things aren’t as clear as I’d like to think. The Angel Band Project is one of them.The Crime.In July of 2009, Teresa Butz was 39, engaged to her female partner, active in charitable causes in the Seattle area, and a deeply loved daughter, sister, friend and member of her community. As the two slept, a young man entered their home through a window with a knife. He raped and began stabbing both repeatedly until Teresa decided to fight back. She saved her partner’s life and lost her own. The crime was one of the worst local police had seen in years. This one act, spurred on by whatever unholy combination of drugs, instability and pure, undiluted evil, altered forever the life of one of these decent women and ended that of her soul mate in a paroxysm of blood and terror. We in the system have ways of dealing with these things, sometimes involving alcohol, cigarettes, or 100 other forms of self-medication. I usually get by with a few stiff drinks and can normally avoid the ontological angst. But stories like this one, thankfully rare but still being made, are the building blocks of the dark doubt in my mind that there is rhyme or reason to anything in the world as we see it.The Project. Teresa’s story has an angelic twist, though, something that despite the horror and sadness surrounding her death, scatters the darkness and bubbles up fountain-like with something hopeful. Something beautiful. Something almost ordered. Teresa’s partner, you see, is a conservatory trained vocalist. Her brother is a Tony award winning musician and actor. At Teresa’s funeral and memorial service, the singing and music experienced there inspired a project, which is Angel Band. It involves these two and others who loved Teresa, hitting different studios around the country and recording a tribute collection of songs in her honor. What I’ve heard so far is sometimes melodic and haunting, sometimes rock and roll heavy, but always captivating. It’s a work still in progress, easy to follow either on Facebook or the band’s web page. The proceeds will go to support a group I work with and admire greatly called The Voices and Faces Project. Voices and Faces is a documentary project that specializes in memorializing- either through audio or video- the accounts of survivors of sexual violence. Some are women in old age who for decades had never uttered a word of what they suffered. Some were violated in war, some in marriage, some in childhood. Their accounts put a deeply human face on sexual violence, something desperately needed in order to take one more step toward ending it altogether. It is, yet again, a matter of light, even a spark, penetrating and then destroying darkness.I guess it’s the power of that light that, through both of these projects, threatens in benign fury the neat and unhappy picture of the world I have. But light is just a symbol. The real, beautiful, bountiful thing is order. Order suggests a Creator. Order suggests a destination as well as a journey, however tortured or smooth. Order suggests a reason for a beating heart. A reason for giving a damn at the end of another day. This isn’t to suggest that the chasm created by Teresa’s death will be at all filled by the great gesture of Angel Band. But it helps to see darkness- blind, random and cacophonous- scattered by light so wonderfully clear and guiding.Upon the assassination of John Lennon, Elton John noted in song “it’s funny how one insect can damage so much grain.” Thanks to the acts of one particular insect, I’ll never know Teresa Butz. I’ll never experience her warmth, her kindness, her spirit. But thanks to the courage, love, and resolve of these remarkable people, I am blessed with a profound sense of what they saw in her, and more importantly, what just might lie beneath the surface- ordered, sane, and loving- of a far too broken and random looking world.