Saturday Reads

Posted: July 30, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: A My Pet Goat Moment, Democratic Politics, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, George W. Bush, Medicaid, Medicare, morning reads, Republican politics, Social Security, Team Obama, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 30 Comments

Good Morning news junkies! I’m filling in for WonktheVote today. She is taking a little break from blogging, so Dakinikat, Minkoff Minx, and I are going to take turns doing the Saturday Reads for a little while. So what’s in the news today? Let’s see…

After his blow-up-the-economy plan passed the House yesterday, John Boehner gave a very defensive-sounding speech to justify his treasonous behavior.

A defiant House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) late Friday defended his debt-ceiling plan by saying it is the only viable plan on paper so far….

“I’ve offered ideas, I’ve negotiated,” Boehner said in closing debate on his bill. “Not one time, not one time did the administration ever put any plan on the table. All they would do is criticize what I put out there.

“I stuck my neck out a mile to try to get an agreement with the president of the United States,” Boehner continued to grumbling among Democrats. “Hey, I put revenues on the table in order to try to come to an agreement in order to avert us being where we are. But a lot of people in this town can never say yes.”

He also defended including the ridiculous balanced budget amendment to the Constitution in his bill.

“It’s time for this to happen,” he said. “It enjoys support from both houses of this Congress, and it enjoys bipartisan and widespread support across our country.”

No. It doesn’t, Mr. Speaker.

A short time later the Senate put Boehner’s bill out of its misery.
 Now what?

Despite a day of frenzied legislative maneuvering and another attempt by President Obama to rally public opinion behind some kind of compromise, the two parties made no visible progress in finding common ground, leaving Washington, Wall Street and much of the nation watching the clock toward a deadline of midnight Tuesday.

Reid has made some changes in his plan, hoping to appeal to Senate Republicans. The NYT didn’t elaborate on what these changes are. At Huffpo, Michael McAuliff and Sam Stein say Reid’s plan is now a lot like Mitch McConnell’s. But whatever its contents, Republicans in the House plan to hold a “symbolic vote” on it today in order to “send a message” that whatever the Senate agrees on will not pass the House.

These people are playing with fire. It’s looking like they’re not going to meet the August 2 deadline either.

The seemingly unbridgeable impasse between the two parties as the deadline for raising the nation’s debt limit approaches has Tom Daschle losing sleep, as he never did when he was a Senate Democratic leader in the mid-1990s and Congressional Republicans forced government shutdowns rather than compromise on spending cuts.

“That was nothing compared to this. That was a shutdown of the government; this could be, really, a shutdown of the entire economy,” Mr. Daschle said. “You can’t be too hyperbolic about the ramifications of all this.”

Democrats and Republicans with legislative experience agree that even if both sides decided Saturday to raise the $14.3 trillion borrowing ceiling and to reduce future annual deficits, it would be extremely difficult for the compromise measure to wend its way through Congress before Tuesday’s deadline, given Congressional legislative procedures.

But all signs point to August 2 passing with no budget bill. As we all know, President Obama could end the struggle at any time with an executive order, but then he’d have to put off gutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for a little bit longer. He can’t allow that, now can he?

Stay tuned…

There has been a disturbing string of sexual assaults on women in Ann Arbor, Michigan over the past two weeks. the assaults have taken place near the University of Michigan campus. There have been six attacks, two of which were rapes. In the others, women were grabbed and fondled, but managed to escape.

Two different composite sketches of the suspect have been developed. Police aren’t sure if there is just one perpetrator two. The FBI is now involved in the investigation.

The agency will be assisting Ann Arbor police at the city’s request, said FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold. She did not provide any details about the agency’s role.

The six attacks occurred between July 15 and 26, and between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The victims were traumatized, said police spokeswoman Lt. Renee Bush.

Ann Arbor Police Chief Barnett Jones said he did not know if the attacks were linked. He warned in a letter to university staff, faculty and students that there was a “predator or predators operating in our community.”

Emily Zinn and her boyfriend were sleeping when one of the rapes took place right outside their apartment.

…an 18-year-old woman was pulled behind a wall outside Zinn’s bedroom window and raped on July 18.

She first noticed something was wrong when she and her boyfriend, Matt McAnelly, 24, a University of Michigan graduate student, heard the girl sobbing outside about 12:45 a.m.

“We heard a girl crying and ‘Help me, help me,’ ” Zinn said. “She was saying, ‘He left, I’m alone,’ so we didn’t really know what was happening.”

The couple heard nothing while the girl was being attacked.

This monster (or monsters) must be stopped ASAP.

Is the U.S. on the verge of a revolution?

On last night’s The Big Picture with progressive talk show host Thom Hartmann, author Neil Howe discussed how he and William Strauss came to accurately predict today’s political crisis in their 1997 book “The Fourth Turning,” and offered speculation as to what might happen next….

Speaking of the generational differences between today’s new guard and the retiring baby boomers, Howe said that cultural forces have essentially forced this crisis, with “culture warriors” and “values voters” in direct contention with “gen x” for control of the national budget.

“Are we on the verge of another ‘fourth turning’ — another major crash leading to a world war and a world-wide depression?” Hartmann asked.

“No,” Howe said. “I hope it won’t be bad. I hope the destructive will be avoided to the furthest extent possible and the constructive, which always comes out of a fourth turning… will be maximized.”

Watch it:

———————————————–

A judge has ordered the release of Richard Nixon’s grand jury testimony about the Watergate scandal.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth granted a request by historian Stanley Kutler, who has written several books about Nixon and Watergate, and others to unseal the testimony given on June 23 and 24 in 1975.

Nixon was questioned about the political scandal during the 1970s that resulted from the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington….

Lamberth ruled in the 15-page opinion that the special circumstances, especially the undisputed historical interest in Nixon’s testimony, far outweighed the need to keep the records secret. Grand jury proceedings typically remain secret.

The Obama administration opposed the release of Nixon’s testimony. It figures, doesn’t it?

Finally, here’s a fascinating bit of historical revisionism from George W. Bush.

In a rare interview with the National Geographic Channel, Bush reflects on what was going through his mind at the most dramatic moment of his presidency when he was informed that a second passenger jet had hit New York’s World Trade Center.

Bush was visiting a Florida classroom and the incident, which was caught on TV film, and has often been used by critics to ridicule his apparently blank face.

But Bush claims he deliberately decided to stay in his seat so as not to alarm the children and to “project a sense of calm.”

“I had been in enough crises to know that the first thing a leader has to do is to project calm,” he added.

I wonder what “crises” he’s talking about? Just about the only thing he did as Governor of Texas was execute people. Let’s watch Bush’s demeanor on 9/11/2001 and see how well he projected “a sense of calm.”

——————————————

Here’s what one of the children who was in the classroom that day had to say about it:

“The president he just sat there, and his face — he just went dead,” says Jaimie, who was among the second graders in the classroom where President Bush learned of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Jamie’s one of the kids featured in Nickelodeon’s Linda Ellerbee news special, “What Happened?: The story of September 11, 2001,” which debuts Sept. 1.

That’s all the news I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

Strauss-Kahn Accuser’s Words “Misrepresented” in Leaks to Media

Posted: July 28, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Violence against women, Women's Rights, worker rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Nafissatou Diallo

Just a short time ago, the woman who accused former IMF head Dominque Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her spoke briefly at press conference at a Brooklyn church.

“I’m here because I had people call me a lot of bad names,” Ms. Diallo said softly at the Christian Cultural Center on Flatlands Avenue. “A lot of things they said about me was not true.”

Before being introduced by Rev. A.R. Bernard, senior pastor at the center, Ms. Diallo, 32, dressed in a dark suit, rubbed her fingers together slowly, blinking often as she gazed out the windows of the lobby, past the bank of cameras and reporters.
“Me and my family, we are going through a lot,” she said. “We cry every day.”

She spoke for less than five minutes and was escorted from the podium when she finished without taking any questions; her lawyer, Kenneth Thompson, and other supporters remained at the microphone and spoke with reporters.

Diallo’s attorney says that the Manhattan DA’s office either mistranslated or deliberately misinterpreted taped conversations she had with an Arizona prison inmate.

Ms. Diallo and her lead lawyer, Kenneth P. Thompson, spent much of Wednesday at the district attorney’s office in Manhattan, where they listened to a recording of conversations Ms. Diallo had with a fellow African immigrant in an Arizona jail after she said she was attacked. Law enforcement officials told Mr. Thompson and The New York Times last month that Ms. Diallo could be heard saying on the tape “words to the effect of: ‘Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.’ ”

But after listening to the recording on Wednesday, Mr. Thompson told reporters at a news conference that Ms. Diallo’s statements had been mischaracterized. He said that at no point did she raise the issue of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s wealth or status in the way that prosecutors had described it. Rather, he said, the man she was speaking with, who initiated the calls to Ms. Diallo, remarked during one conversation that Ms. Diallo could stand to gain money from the case, but she quickly dismissed the idea and said it was a matter for her lawyer.

Thompson also noted that in the first phone call, Diallo’s description of what happened with Strauss-Kahn was

consistent with what she told investigators a day earlier. In sexual-assault cases, people who hear an early account of an attack are called “outcry witnesses,” and are often used to buttress the credibility of a person making an accusation.

“She told the guy that someone tried to rape her at her job,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview after his news conference. “She said: ‘I didn’t know who he was. We fought each other. Because he wasn’t able to take off my clothes, he put his penis in my mouth. He touched me. They took me to the hospital, and they arrested him.’ ”

The DA’s office said they could not comment on evidence in an ongoing investigation. But didn’t they already have quite a bit to say? Someone leaked negative information about Diallo to the media, resulting in Strauss-Kahn being released on bail while his accuser was treated like a liar and money-grubber. From CNN Justice:

The hotel maid who has accused the then-head of the International Monetary Fund of sexually assaulting her met Wednesday with prosecutors for at least seven hours….

Prior meetings between the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, and prosecutors who are deciding whether to pursue charges against French financier Dominique Strauss-Kahn ended abruptly last month after Thompson accused Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance of “abandoning” her.

Prosecutors had disclosed credibility issues with Diallo, who is from Guinea.

[….]

Diallo’s attorney said the Sofitel New York employee wants to tell a jury what happened to her. “I want justice. I want him to go to jail,” Diallo told ABC’s “Good Morning America” in an interview that aired this week.

I give Diallo a lot of credit for coming forward publicly and revealing her identity. I hope Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance will let her have her day in court.

Tuesday Reads: Heroes and Villains

Posted: July 26, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Labor unions, morning reads, psychology, religious extremists, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, Violence against women | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 52 Comments

Good Morning!!

Well, the President gave another speech last night, and it frankly put me in mind of the movie Groundhog Day. I think Obama’s handlers should be told to keep him under wraps until such time as he actually has something to say. I’ve had it with this whole debt ceiling mess, and I’m not going to say anymore about it in this post.

Instead, here’s an inspiring story that Dakinikat called my attention to: German tourist rescued teens during Norwegian island massacre.

A German tourist is being hailed as a hero for rescuing at least 20 people from a gunman’s rampage on Utoya island in Norway, according to media reports.

Marcel Gleffe, 32, was with his family Friday at a campground across the water from the island when he heard gunshots, Der Spiegel reported. He and his family looked out from the shore, thinking it might be fireworks, but instead they saw a plume of smoke and a girl swimming frantically in the water and screaming.

Gleffe got into the boat he had rented and set off, Der Spiegel said. He was the first person to reach the island where Anders Behring Breivik gunned down dozens of youngsters at a summer camp….

“You don’t get scared in a situation like that, you just do what it takes. I know the difference between fireworks and gunfire. I knew what it was about, and that it wasn’t just nonsense.”

We need a lot more people like Marcel Gleffe in this world. And what do you know? Via The Hinky Meter, here’s another hero: David Kemp of Beaverton, Oregon.

Kemp knew something was wrong when he was jogging on the Seaside promenade Saturday and saw 6-year-old Hailey’s face as she struggled to get away from Knox when having a Fantastic Race on a group of people.

“She was scared to death – terrified,” Kemp said.

He asked Hailey if she knew the woman and she shook her head in horror.

“I knew there was a problem at that point (and) that this is very, very serious. This child is terrified,” he said.

He knew he had to do something, especially when he heard what sounded like a death threat.

“She kept telling Hailey: ‘I am your queen; I am going to take you to see our king, our Lord. I am taking you with me.'”

Kemp broke the woman’s grip on the little girl, and when the kidnapper tried to get away, he chased her down and held her till police arrived. This isn’t the first time Kemp has been a hero.

In 2004 he rescued a woman who was injured by a hit-and-run driver and left lying in the road. Then he found the car which led to an arrest.

He’s also chased down and caught a shoplifter running from a store and another time he caught a robber who just held up a Hallmark shop.

Finally, there’s Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots, who was instrumental in ending the four-month-long NFL owners’ lockout. At the press conference announcing the agreement yesterday, Kraft apologized to the fans.

“First of all I’d like, on behalf of both sides, to apologize to the fans that for the last five, six months we’ve been talking about the business of football and not what goes on on the field and building the teams in each market, but the end result is we’ve been able to have an agreement that I think is going to allow this sport to flourish over the next decade and we’ve done that in a way that’s unique among the major sports that every team in our league, all 32, will be competitive, we’ve improved player safety, and we’ve remembered the players who have played in the past.

During the months of the lockout, Kraft was going back and forth between labor talks and his wife Myra’s bedside. She was ending a long battle with cancer, and was buried on Friday.

It’s difficult to imagine how trying – emotionally, physically, mentally – these last few weeks have been for Patriots owner Robert Kraft, as his beloved wife, Myra, was dying of cancer and difficult negotiations dragged on between NFL owners and players over the terms of a new collective-bargaining agreement.

[….]

“He is a man who helped us save football,” Jeff Saturday, the center for the Indianapolis Colts and a member of the NFLPA’s executive committee, said Monday after the league’s players joined the owners in approving a new collective-bargaining agreement. “Without him, this deal does not get done.”

Kraft previously had made it possible for New England to keep its football team when he bought the Patriots in 1994 just as they were about to move to St. Louis. Kraft is proof that people can be wealthy and remain decent human beings.

Randy Vickers, America’s chief of cybersecurity has abruptly resigned without any explanation.

The director of the agency that protects the federal government from cyber attacks has resigned abruptly in the wake of a spate of hacks against government networks.
U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) director Randy Vickers resigned his position Friday, effective immediately, according to an e-mail to US-CERT staff sent by Bobbie Stempfley, acting assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications, and obtained by InformationWeek. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson confirmed the email was authentic.

The DHS has not provided a reason for Vickers’ sudden departure and the spokesperson, who asked to remain anonymous, declined to discuss the matter further. Vickers served as director of US-CERT since April 2009; previously, he was deputy director.

Current US-CERT deputy director Lee Rock will serve as interim director until the DHS names a successor for Vickers, according to the email.

Was he forced out? Maybe we’ll learn more about this today.

David Neiwert is an expert on right wing extremist groups–he’s written two books about them–and he had a post up yesterday on Crooks and Liars about Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist/mass murderer. It would be hard to choose excerpts from the story–please read the whole thing if you can find time. One important point Neiwert makes is that Breivik is not “crazy,” he’s just a right winger with connections to a group in Norway that is similar to the Tea Party here.

Scott Shane had an excellent article yesterday in the NYT on the connections between Breivik’s sick ideology and a number of American bloggers and media personalities. Of course Dakinikat has been writing about this for the past couple of days also.

The Guardian UK has an in depth article about Breivik, his appearance in court, his threats that “more will die.”

The rightwing extremist who confessed to the mass killings in Norway boasted in court on Monday that there were two more cells from his terror network still at large, prompting an international investigation for collaborators.

After Anders Behring Breivik pleaded not guilty, despite admitting that he had carried out the attacks in Oslo and on Utøya island, officials said it was possible he had not acted alone.

Prosecutor Christian Hatlo said Breivik had been calm in court and “seemed unaffected by what has happened”, adding that the suspect had told investigators during his interrogation that he never expected to be released.

“We can’t quite rule out that someone else was involved. This is partly based on the information that there are two other cells,” Hatlo said.

The prosecutor said he could not discuss whether Breivik had organised the cells or whether he was working alongside them. Police have said they have no other suspects at present.

It also emerged on Monday that Norway’s police security service had been alerted to a suspicious chemical purchase by Breivik in March, but had decided not to investigate further.

Norwegian officials have lowered the number of deaths from the attacks to 76.

At the Daily Beast, Michelle Goldberg, who wrote about about right wing Christian fundamentalism, discusses Breivik’s hatred of women.

Conservatives worried about the Islamization of Europe often blame feminism for weakening Western societies and opening them up to a Muslim demographic invasion. Mark Steyn’s bestselling America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It predicted the demise of “European races too self-absorbed to breed,” leading to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia. “In their bizarre prioritization of ‘a woman’s right to choose,’” he argued, “feminists have helped ensure that European women will end their days in a culture that doesn’t accord women the right to choose anything.”

This neat rhetorical trick—an attack on feminism coupled with purported concern about Muslim fundamentalist misogyny—is repeated again and again in Islamophobic literature. Now it’s reached its apogee in mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s 1,500-page manifesto, “2083: A European Declaration of Independence.” Rarely has the connection between sexual anxiety and right-wing nationalism been made quite so clear. Indeed, Breivik’s hatred of women rivals his hatred of Islam, and is intimately linked to it. Some reports have suggested that during his rampage on Utoya, he targeted the most beautiful girl first. This was about sex even more than religion.

It’s a fascinating article with lots of psychological background on Breivik’s misogyny.

That’s all I’ve got for today. What are you reading and blogging about?

A Violent Date Rape; A Troubling Outcome.

Posted: July 20, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: U.S. Politics, Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

How do prosecutors decide which rapes to take to court? Is the deck already stacked against some rape victims? These are two of the questions Anna North tries to answer in her fine two-part article at Jezabel about a young graduate student at the University of Iowa. Rebecca Epstein turned to North to tell her story, because a prosecutor refused to give her a chance to face her rapist in court. Epstein insisted that her real name be used in the article.

Warning: Please be aware that some of the material discussed below may be disturbing to some.

In part 1, “How a Rape Case Went Off the Rails,” describes the crime and its consequences:

Epstein…told me she was violently anally raped on the night of February 16, by a man she had been on a date with, in his apartment. She stayed at the apartment for about an hour afterward, fearful that he might hurt her further if she left. During this time, she had vaginal intercourse with him, which she describes as nonconsensual but nonviolent. When she felt it was safe to leave, she went to a hospital and had a rape kit done. The next day, she filed a police report. She says detectives were largely respectful in their treatment of the case.

Now here comes the really creepy part. The man who raped Epstein wrote a letter to her not long after the crime. The letter is in some ways even more disturbing than the violent crime the writer committed. In the letter, he tries to justify what he did by implying that he’s really a nice guy who respects women. He says that Epstein should have told him ahead of time that if she said no it really meant NO. He tells her she didn’t fight hard enough, so he didn’t realize she didn’t want it. You can read lengthy quotes from this disturbing letter at the link, but here’s one shocking quote:

Of the alleged rape, he writes, “Clearly, you did not enjoy it […] But you must believe that I believed with all my heart and soul at the time that you were overcoming your reluctance, and trying to get into it.” He adds,

I hope intensely that this letter has made you see that I am not malicious or misogynistic, and that I’ve strived earnestly to respond to your needs and desires. It may be too late for me, but I hope that in the future, when playing rough with a guy, these explanations might guide better behavior. For example, we should have agreed at the very beginning upon a safety word that would mean explicitly: “this no does not mean you can keep trying or that I’m reluctant, it means you better shut it the fuck down.” If we had such a word, and you used it, there would be no confusion and I would never, ever have violated it.

WTF?! I wonder how many times this guy pulled this with women? He even suggests the possibility that they could get together and “play again.”

Epstein says this man “choked” her and “pinned [her] down.” In addition, she said “my ribs are all fucked up, possibly broken, my ankle is sprained, i hurt all over, i’m bloody.”

But a month after the attack, Epstein was told by Asst. County Attorney Anne Lahey that she was not going to have the rapist arrested or prosecuted. There is disagreement between Epstein and Lahey as to why and how this decision was reached. Epstein has bipolar disorder and she claims that was one factor. The fact that she stayed in the rapist’s apartment afterward was another.

Says Epstein,

She said that an Iowa jury would see my behavior as too promiscuous and crazy, and they would judge me and side with the defendant. She also said she didn’t think there was a very good chance I would win, so she was trying to protect me by not putting me through it, and I indicated that I would rather go through it and lose than not be able to face him in court.

Lahey was unconvinced. Epstein says she finally asked, “so you’re saying that because I have a mental illness, anyone who rapes me basically gets a free pass?” She says Lahey replied, “Yes.”

Lahey claims that Epstein’s psychological disorder was not a factor in the decision, but would not say what the alternative reasons were.

In part 2 of the Jezabel article, North investigated whether in fact women with psychological disorders were less likely to receive justice after being raped.
 A number of experts confirmed that this may be the case. For example:

I talked to Karla Miller, Executive Director of the Rape Victim Advocacy Program. She told me that county attorneys can be reluctant to prosecute rape cases in which the victim has mental illness, due to concerns that the jury won’t see the victim as credible. If that’s the case, she said that victims can be “revictimized” by defense attorneys who make their illness — and any other vulnerabilities they can think of — an issue in the trial. Miller explained that if an attorney felt such revictimization might occur, it could be a good decision not to prosecute, but that this decision was “case-dependent.” She added that it was “absolutely not” fair that people with mental illnesses had a harder time getting justice.

Miller also noted, chillingly, that some rapists actually target people with mental illnesses or other disabilities, because they know victims with these conditions will have a harder time taking them to court.

It is definitely true that rapists, who are predators, choose potential victims who are vulnerable. They tend to attack smaller, weaker women and women they sense are psychologically troubled.

I just want to say that I don’t like the terms “mental illness” and “mentally ill.” In the field, the term is “psychological disorder.” There is no illness that is strictly physical or “mental,” including cancer and heart disease.

Some psychological disorders are very serious–like schizophrenia, some don’t interfere that much with a person’s life once she gets help from medication and/or therapy. Bipolar disorder is a very manageable issue, and people with this disorder usually are not out of touch with reality. They simply have wider mood swings than a typical person.

Juries need to be educated about rape and about psychological disorders. I realize that defense attorneys will use anything to discredit a victim, but Rebecca Epstein wanted to face her attacker in court and tell her story. I think it’s very likely that the prosecutor in this case was fearful that a jury would be biased against Epstein not only because this was a date rape, but also because she suffers from bipolar disorder.

That is just plain wrong. Now the man who raped Epstein will continue to behave as he did with Epstein. He now knows he can get away with rape, especially if he chooses a victim with psychological issues. He will rape more women. Every women who comes in contact with him is in danger. And his name is a secret so far.

We’ve not come Far Enough when it comes to asserting Sexual Assault Claims

Posted: July 9, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Violence against women, Women's Rights | Tags: , , | 28 Comments

I first became an advocate for stronger rape laws and prosecution when I was in high school.  It was nothing personal for me. My neighbor was a member of Junior League of Omaha.  The organization had just started one of the country’s first rape victim support lines.  She asked me to volunteer and I went through what passed as training back in the mid 70s to spend an evening a week answering the phone. I was prepared for little more than making referrals to a list of  approved sources but frequently got a little more than I bargained for.  I realized there was a need to change the way we approached sexual assaults.  When I got into university, I helped the University Women’s Action Group by teaching young women–mostly in sororities–on how to be safe on campus as well as how to do limited self defense.  We also worked hard at moving sex crimes out of the property crimes divisions of local police departments, getting more police women to respond to rape reports, and changing the Nebraska Rape laws so that a perpetrator could be charged with the crime without the women having to come up with two to three witnesses.  We also moved to block defense lawyers from putting rape victims on trial by using their personal history against them.  I had one friend that was raped on campus that was afraid to report her assault because she had been smoking pot.  She felt that the police would think she was asking for it by being stoned and alone in the library. When I look back at those times, I realize that our criminal justice system has made some progress.  When I read recent headlines, I realize that we have not yet come far enough.

Three recent high profile sexual assault cases look to end with a very old fashioned problem.  It still seems that being a less than perfect human being means that you ask for it. The first of these cases is that of Jamie Leigh Jones who had accused KBR of perpetuating a climate of sexual abuse of women and some of its employees of rape.  A Houston jury just decided her sexual assault was ‘consensual’ . The verdict appears mostly based on Jones’ credibility due to a history of depression and her past experiences while her accused rapist’s criminal history of violence against women was suppressed.

Now 26, Jones said she was drugged with the date rape drug Rohypnol and brutally raped in 2005, while working at KBR facility Camp Hope in Iraq. She also told jurors that after the incident, she was imprisoned in a shipping container and prevented from calling family for help, and later had to go through reconstructive surgery on her chest and psychiatric counseling for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

But jurors in the case against the Houston, Texas-based company decided in the end that Jones’s sexual encounter was consentual, rendering other charges moot.

…

An attorney for Jones did not comment on a possible appeal, but said that he respected the jury’s decision considering the evidence they were allowed to see.

“We do think it’s a shame that Jamie’s entire personal history was dragged before the jury,” attorney Todd Kelly told the Chronicle, “when her rapist’s criminal history, including violence against women, was suppressed from them.”

Jamie’s case was championed earlier by Minnesota Senator Al Franken ensuring her right to a jury trial when KBR was trying to force her into arbitration. The details of her assault are particularly disturbing as well as the behavior of KBR to avoid the charges. None of this appeared to impact the jury, however.

With the high-profile victim looking on in the Senate chamber in 2009, Franken won passage of a measure in her name ensuring that military contractors couldn’t force victims of sexual assault into arbitration, as opposed to suing.

Jones got her day in court, and on Friday, a federal jury deciding her civil suit in Houston decided she was not raped, vindicating a company that charged she had exaggerated or made up her story, in part for fame, publicity and a book deal.

The jury also rejected Jones’ claims of fraud against KBR, which she said had failed to enforce its policies against sexual harassment or protect her from the alleged attack by the company’s contract workers in Iraq.

Jones’ suit was aimed at KBR, its former parent company Halliburton, and KBR firefighter Charles Bortz, who she claimed led the attack while she worked for KBR in 2005.

Bortz claimed he had consensual sex with Jones. He was not criminally charged and has filed a countersuit against her, according to the Associated Press.

The other high profile case that seems on the ropes due to past history of the accuser–in this case over possibly lying to get asylum in the U.S. and knowing a few criminals–is that of the maid whose charges brought about the resignation of IMF head Dominic Strauss-Kahn and tanked his chances of being nominated as a candidate for the president of France.  Not only is the prosecution’s case said to be falling apart due to her associations and questions about her asylum case, she was held up in a NY Post story as a prostitute with no evidence provided.  She is now suing the paper for slander.  That case probably hinges on her credibility also.

The hotel maid who accused Dominique Strauss-Kahn of trying to rape her wants her day in court, her lawyer has said.

She still could get it, even if prosecutors decide to drop the criminal case amid what they say are doubts about her trustworthiness.

Regardless of what happens in the criminal case, the woman could pursue her claim in a civil lawsuit, a route taken successfully by some after high-profile criminal cases ended without a conviction. While the housekeeper’s credibility would still be a significant issue, different legal standards for civil and criminal cases could give her claims — which Strauss-Kahn denies — a greater chance of prevailing in civil court.

A civil case can offer the prospect of money and establishing that wrongdoing, if not a crime, was committed. And for some people, bringing their own cases gives them more of a sense of control, instead of putting themselves in prosecutors’ hands.

“The civil suit represents the only avenue for the alleged victim herself to achieve justice,” says L. Lin Wood, an Atlanta-based attorney who represented a woman who accused NBA star Kobe Bryant of raping her in a Colorado hotel room. Bryant said the sex was consensual. The criminal case was dropped after the woman told prosecutors she couldn’t take part in a trial, but she sued Bryant and reached a confidential settlement that bars Wood from talking about the case itself.

What is most interesting in these cases that are considered “he said, she said” is that the women’s personal history is still the overwhelmingly important criteria for witness credibility, while the man’s personal history is not considered as relevant or as important to his credibility as the perpetrator of assault.  Ms Jone’s case was particularly violent. You would think that prior history of the accused would be germane.    Charles David Bortz was arrested in October 2006  for Battery in Okaloosa County Florida.  Dominic Strauss-Kahn is well known as a womanizer and has had at least one woman claim that he sexually assaulted her in the past.  One accuser has refiled charges against him.

Does this mean that we’re now back in the day when you have to be the ‘perfect victim’ in order to get fair treatment in a rape case?

Maybe not much has changed after all, despite 30 years of evolving sex crime laws. Lawyers can no longer badger a woman on the stand with questions about what kind of panties she wore or how many times she’d had sex before — questions that were routine in rape trials I covered years ago.

But the personal life of a rape victim is still considered fair game in too many cases, particularly when the issue is whether the sex act was by consent or involved force or threats of violence.

I understand the reluctance of prosecutors in the Strauss-Kahn case to go forward. Their office was stung in May by the unexpected acquittal in a high-profile case of two New York City cops accused of raping a drunken women after helping her into her apartment.

Jurors told the New York Times they didn’t buy the cops’ story that they had done nothing more than “snuggle” with the inebriated woman. But they didn’t feel they could convict on the word of a woman with no DNA evidence and gaps in her liquor-clouded memories.

Yes, that’s the third high profile case. The oh-so-cuddle worthy officers of New York’s finest.

A jury acquitted two New York police officers on Thursday of charges that they raped a drunken woman after helping her into her apartment while on patrol.

The woman had described snippets of a harrowing night in which the officers, called to help her because she was extremely intoxicated, instead abused her. They insisted no rape occurred, with one allowing only that he snuggled with her while she wore nothing but a bra.

Does this also mean that women should be prepared to use the video camera portion of their phones at all times so they have the perfect out cry witness?   We have three high profile cases where we see nearly three identical outcomes based on the old idea of she asked for it because she …

Just when you think we’ve solved an issue with the way society treats women, we take some giant leaps backwards again.  It’s beyond depressing.  This will have what I believe is an intended result of discouraging rape victims of seeking justice against their attackers. Yup,  we all ask for it.  Beware ladies.

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