Elsie Dominguez, a member of the Merchant Marine, says she was raped by a naval captain in 2021. When she told her superiors she was “discouraged from reporting, dissuaded from seeking medical testing, denied access to confidential reporting, and had her job threatened.” Finally she filed a legal complaint. As detailed at the link, the Department of Labor decided being doped and assaulted was an injury she’d sustained in the course of her duties, therefore a worker’s comp matter … and they denied her claim.
A 13-year-old middle schooler reported a classmate had raped her. The school and the cops decided it didn’t look like she was struggling, decided it was consensual and took no action.
18-year-old Jesse Butler comes from a prominent Stillwater, Oklahoma family. Jesse Butler pleaded no contest to charges including “first-degree rape, domestic assault and battery by strangulation, attempted rape in the first degree and rape by instrumentation” from when he was seventeen. He was charged as an adult, then dropped down to juvenile; instead of a 78-year potential sentence he got a sentence of community service and counseling.
These are not new issues. The military has a long history, like many organizations, of ignoring rape; it used to be acceptable to grant clemency to officers convicted of sexual assault. Lots of judges, prosecutors and cops think they can tell it’s consensual even when it isn’t: if she’s not literally trying to fight him off, hey, she probably wanted it. I get into this a lot in Undead Sexist Cliches. However they’re still an outrage and we should keep on being outraged. Shrugging and declaring that’s just the way of the world solves nothing. We won’t know if we can end rape until we try. We won’t know if we can reform institutions to deal with rape better until we try.
The media fail us too. When E. Jean Carroll first mentioned the Toddler raped her, the media largely shrugged. “Worse still, when outlets did cover Carroll’s claims, most seemed to lead not with her harrowing account, but with Trump’s denial of it.” Likewise the New York Times spent far more newsprint covering Hilary Clinton’s alleged email scandal than on the Toddler bragging about grabbing women by the you-know-what. And look what happened next. We see similar distorted coverage on other topics today.
After a while this becomes easy to normalize: Toddler supporters don’t care he’s a rapist, so what’s the point in writing about it? Because while rape is normal — in the sense of happening a lot, and rapists getting away with it — it’s still monstrous and we should never resign ourselves to thinking otherwise. This is hard because as I’ve said before, contemplating the reality of sexual abuse and assault is like living in a Lovecraftian horror — accepting the true nature of reality feels insane.
As Scott Lemieux says, the argument rape accusations won’t affect his base is bad too. “Hearing yet more new accusations of sexual assault might not change the mind of any swing voters or demobilize any educated suburban Republican voters, and then again it might. More to the point, since when is “will it materially change the outcome of elections?” the standard for determining whether something is newsworthy? By that standard — particularly if we’re talking about individual stories — almost nothing is. What are we even doing here then? If you’re a political reporter and believe something is only news if it will turn hardcore Trump supporters against Trump, the logical conclusion is find something to do for a living.”
Lemieux also quotes an LGM commenter making the same point: “regardless of his supporters we have to keep talking about these rapes over and over and over because otherwise we accept the implicit framing that it’s somehow okay or that there’s some kind of non-legal statute of limitations on holding someone accountable for rape. In other words we normalize it. We normalize rape. Rape.
That’s not okay. I understand that we live in a rape culture and that rape and sexual assault are to some degree already distressingly normal and normalized, but this is different. This is not hidden or glossed over or anything. It’s an open accusation, both credible and substantiated by what she said at the time, and consistent with over a dozen other accounts. We need to keep talking about it. A lot. Because if we don’t we give the message that you can get a free pass on rape* if you just…do it enough times that people get tired of hearing about it, or stonewall and lie about it no matter how obviously.”
Push back. Fight. Stare Cthulhu in the eye and say no, you are not acceptable. It will be a long time before we can end rape but reminding everyone, even the apologists, how evil it is, is a beginning.
