In a characteristically brilliant essay, historian, activist and writer Rebecca Solnit connects the dots between the sexual abuses of Jeffrey Epstein, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and the unnamed 16-year-old boy whose admitted rape was excused because the judge said that This young man comes from a good family who put him into an excellent school where he was doing extremely well: in each case, there was an elaborate scheme to silence and discredit the survivors of sexual violence, abetted by networks of (mostly) men who treat the disclosure of sexual assaults as a worse offense than committing the assaults themselves. Read the rest

'He lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips.' Then it gets worse.

Witness in Mueller Trump-Russia probe arrested for child pornography

Online travel and restaurant booking site TripAdvisor will introduce new safety filters after people who used the site raised concerns over sexual assaults. TripAdvisor says it found 1,100 reviews that referenced sexual assault in just the last year alone. Read the rest

Tchiya Amet says Neil DeGrasse Tyson raped her in the 1980s. As his star rose, no one believed her. Three additional women, one for the first time, now say Neil sexually harassed them. This isn't looking good for the popular science entertainment personality. Read the rest

When Anita Hill testified about the sexual abuse she'd suffered at Clarence Thomas's hands, Senate Republicans and the press pilloried her, calling her a liar and worse, and going on to confirm Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Read the rest

Cardinal Blase Cupich offers a distinctively Catholic response to the church's renewed abuse crisis: the Pope "has a bigger agenda" than going down the "rabbit hole" of allegations. "He's got to get on with other things."

In a bizarre interview with a Chicago NBC affiliate, Cardinal Blaise Cupich, head of the Archdiocese of Chicago, suggested recent claims made by a former apostolic nuncio — the Vatican's envoy to the United States — that Pope Francis not only disregarded sexual abuse allegations against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, but promoted McCarrick and sought his counsel, were going down a "rabbit hole."

The Pope, Cupich told NBC, has more important things to attend to than sex abuse scandals, like climate change and immigration.

The video of his statements is essential viewing.

If you want them held responsible, you're going to have to stop caring how. Read the rest

Bill Donohue, the president of the ultra-conservative Catholic League, has called the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's report on the official coverups of the priestly rape of children an "obscene lie," insisting that rape was relatively rare, because most of the sexual abuse committed by the priesthood doesn't qualify as rape, because the priests didn't penetrate their victims. Read the rest

A German 48-year old citizen and her 39-year old partner have been sentenced to 12 years in prison after being found guilty of repeatedly raping her son. If that’s not enough, the filth also sold the boy to pedophiles she found on the Dark Net, who further abused the child and filmed it, over a two-year period. It goes without saying that Germany, and most anyone else that’s heard about it, has been horrified by the case.

From The Guardian:

In Tuesday’s verdict, the couple was ordered to pay €42,500 (£38,000) in compensation to the boy and another victim, a young girl.

Local authorities have been accused of failing to protect the boy, who now lives with a foster family. The mother’s partner was supposed to be banned from having contact with children. Officials removed the boy from the family in March last year, but a local court sent him back weeks later.

According to The Telegraph, six others were jailed for their involvement in the sexual abuse of the boy. Because of the way that Germany handles criminal cases that involve rape, none of the parties responsible can be named by the media.

I can’t even begin to imagine the life-long harm that’s been done to those kids in the name of self-fulfillment and greed, nor can I understand the how a system designed to protect society’s most vulnerable failed them them so completely.

Image via Flickr, courtesy of Blogtrepreneur Read the rest

Convicted rapist Brock Turner is seeking to have his rape conviction overturned, claiming he only wanted "outercourse" and didn't intend to rape his victim.

It is amazing what rich parents will pay for.

Via HuffPo:

A lawyer for convicted rapist Brock Turner attempted to overturn the former Stanford University swimmer’s assault conviction during an appellate court hearing in San Jose, California, on Tuesday.

Attorney Eric Multhaup argued to three appellate court justices that his client only wanted “outercourse” ― sexual contact while fully clothed, he explained ― not intercourse, The Mercury News of San Jose reported. Multhaup told the justices that Turner never intended to rape the woman, who was identified only as “Jane Doe” throughout the trial.

Read the rest

Ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft have now both stated that they will no longer force victims of sexual assault into non-binding arbitration, as has been the practice of both firms until today. Read the rest

In 2017 Hillview Police Department detective John W. Nissen was assigned to drive a rape victim to her home. But prosecutors say he drove her to a hotel instead, and raped her. Read the rest

A woman told police that casino mogul Steve Wynn raped her, and that she became pregnant and had a child from the rape, ' while another has reported she was forced to resign from a Las Vegas job after she refused to have sex with him,' reports AP. Read the rest

Andy Savage is one of the powerful, wealthy evangelical clerics implicated in the #churchtoo movement, in which congregants are disclosing the sexual assaults and harassment they experienced at the hands of faith leaders. Read the rest

In Michigan's Wayne County, Prosecutor Kym Worthy has spent years processing 11,341 rape kits. The kits, found in 2009, were forgotten in a police storage warehouse, where they were routinely dumped without investigation.

Over 800 serial rapists, criminals who have struck 10-15 times without being stopped, were identified. 127 convictions have been made this far.

The Detroit Free Press' Nancy Kaffer interviewed Worthy:

Q: All the things you were talking about, the better tracking system, the new guidelines for when rape kits get tested ... in the National Institute of Justice report on the backlog (by Michigan State University Professor Rebecca Campbell), the big takeaway there was that too often, officers didn't believe victims, and had used disbelief as a way to triage their workload.

A: They just closed cases, even cases where I think they believed the victim ... They closed cases because the women had worked as prostitutes or had mental illness issues or had substance abuse. Didn't believe them, didn't care, and this was one issue that led to the backlog of these kits.

Q: That's something we look for in certain victims — when the victim is a teenage boy of color, or a woman who has been raped, we want them to be perfect. They can't have had a drink or have worked as a prostitute, and if they have, there's a mindset that makes them almost ineligible to be a victim.

A: One of the reasons we have these untested rape kits ... and I can use Detroit as an example, 86% of our victims in these untested kits are people of color.

Read the rest

As a Royal Commission in Australia wraps up its investigation into decades of rape by priests (especially rape of children), and decades of Church officials obstructing investigation into the rape, Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart says he'll ask the Pope to change the rules so that celibacy for priests is voluntary, not mandatory. Read the rest

Though already released from the very light sentence imposed on him by a sympathetic judge, Stanford rapist Brock Turner wants to have his verdict overturned all the same.

Turner's lawyers argued in their appeal filed Friday that the initial trial was "a detailed and lengthy set of lies."

They are also hoping to overturn the lifetime requirement that Turner register as a sex offender.

Turner's case became a flashpoint in the debate on campus sexual assault after an impassioned victim impact statement from the accuser went viral.

He served only three months of his six-month sentence. One of the high notes in the appeal is its objection to his being described in court as assaulting his victim behind a "trash bin," when it was in fact a "garbage receptacle."

In either case, Turner was gotten off his victim by passers-by who then chased him down.

Just before 1 a.m. on Jan. 18, 2015, Jonsson and Arndt were riding their bikes along a path near the Kappa Alpha fraternity. Jonsson told the cops that movement by a dumpster caught his eye, and he saw a guy on top of a female who was lying on her back, according to a police report.

At first, Jonsson and Arndt assumed the interaction was consensual. But Jonsson said he noticed that the female wasn’t moving as he peddled by. “Something seemed weird,” he told police, because the woman appeared to be unconscious.

Jonsson and Arndt approached the dumpster and yelled “Hey” to the guy who was later revealed to be Turner.

Read the rest