Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was today sentenced to 23 years in prison after he was found guilty of committing a criminal sex act in the first degree involving one woman victim, and rape in the third degree involving another. Read the rest
E. Jean Carroll, who has written an advice column at ELLE magazine for three decades, and last year accused President Donald Trump of raping her in the mid-1990s, today said she was fired from her longtime editorial position as a direct result of Trump's public debasement of her character. Read the rest
A Texas police officer convicted of rape was sentenced to 10 years probation by a jury, reports The El Paso Times. He will serve 0 days in prison.
It was an emotional day in court, as the woman cried as she testified about the impact the incident has had on her life, while Alexander began crying when his children came into the courtroom.
The woman testified that she will forever be haunted by the sexual assault and that she is no longer the woman she once was.
El Paso Police Department Officer William Ollie Alexander was convited of sexually assaulting a woman after responding to a domestic violence call in West El Paso. According to reports, he dropped the woman off at a friend's house, began texting her, left work early to pick her up, took her to a dark area and raped her.
His defense lawyers, Dolph Quijano and Omar Carmona, argued that the woman was "mentally disraught due to fighting with her ex-boyfriend", that the text messages showed "she was willing to meet with the officer, including asking him for a ride," and that law enforcement officers face "the death sentence" in prison.
They didn't get him off the conviction, but they did get him lenient treatment: prosecutors had asked for 15 years' imprisonment. In addition to serving probation, Alexander will also pay a $10,000 fine and register as a sex offender.
Read the rest“It doesn’t matter how many years,” attorney Omar Carmona said. “He will go to the penitentiary as [a] former police officer.
Former Republican Governor of Kentucky Matt Bevin pardoned 28 prisoners on his way out of office, including Micah Schoettle, convicted of repeatedly raping a nine year old girl over a two year period, often while her sister was present. Bevin told a conservative talk-show host that he believed Schoettle had been falsely accused and convicted, citing his understanding that child rape survivor's hymen was intact (a peer-reviewed study of girls who survive rape found that only 2.1% of them had visible damage to their hymens; Bevin told an interviewer "This is perhaps more specific than people would want, but trust me, if you have been repeatedly sexually violated as a small child by an adult, there are going to be repercussions of that physically and medically"). Read the rest
MATT BEVIN: “Her hymen was intact. There's no way that girl was raped. She made it up.” Read the rest
Sayragul Sauytbay is a Chinese Muslim of Kazakh descent who escaped en route to one of the notorious Xinjiang province concentration camps for Muslims in 2018, after she was sentenced to serve as a regular inmate following her release after more than a year's incarceration as a camp teacher; after she escaped into Kazakhstan, she was given asylum in Sweden. Read the rest
Ronan Farrow reports in his forthcoming book Catch and Kill [Amazon] that TV host Matt Lauer is accused of raping a colleague at NBC News. Read the rest
"Emily Doe" no more, Chanel Miller, the woman who survived Brock Turner's attacks will be appearing on 60 Minutes. Turner was convicted of three felony sexual assault charges and his mere 6-month prison sentence set him up as a poster boy for white male privilege in America.
CBS:
Read the restMiller read her victim impact statement in court to her assailant, the former Stanford swimming standout Brock Turner, who was convicted of three felony sexual assault charges supported by two eyewitnesses who stopped and subdued him. Her story became a cause célèbre when the statement was published online after Turner was sentenced to six months jail time. In the statement, "Emily" recounts her inability to control her own narrative in a justice system she says is brutal and dehumanizing for victims.
America has an epidemic of untested rape kits, thanks to the institutional misogyny of police departments and prosecutors, especially when it comes to rapes committed against poor and racialized women. Read the rest
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
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
