On October 14, 2016, Nikki Yovino entered a small basement bathroom with two other students at a Sacred Heart University off-campus party. Both were male football players. The following day she attended St Vincent’s Medical Center where she claimed to have been raped.
After what some might reasonably consider an imperfect investigation, it was she rather than the two men she had accused who ended up in court. She received a one year sentence of which she served six months.
This openly partisan Channel 4 documentary portrays this false accuser as a victim, and to this end enlists Lisa Avalos who is alluded to as an expert on rape. In reality she is no such thing; Lisa Avalos is a professional feminist propagandist, and a woman who never met a false accuser she didn’t like. For example, in her polemic Prosecuting Rape Victims While Rapists Run Free… she discusses a number of cases of false accusers from the victim perspective, totally ignoring the damning evidence against them. One of these false accusers is Rhiannon Brooker, who went to quite extraordinary lengths to frame former lover Paul Fensome. The totally innocent Fensome spent five weeks behind bars and was cleared only when detectives searching for further evidence to bolster an already strong case realised they’d been played.
Nikki Yovino is not in the same league as Rhiannon Brooker, rather she has more in common with Julie Gavin. On March 28, 1999, Gavin banged on the door of a Birmingham police station and claimed to have been dragged into a car then raped at knifepoint, an unambiguous allegation of aggravated rape by a total stranger, and one that if proved would warrant a sentence well into double figures. However, on April 15, she returned to the police station and told an entirely different story: she flagged down a passing motorist for a lift, then consented to sex with two passengers in the car. She came up with the rape story because she felt “guilty and dirty”, as well she might.
A surprising number of women who are neither prostitutes nor nymphomaniacs do on occasion drop their knickers for total strangers. Some of these women then claim to have been raped, or rewrite these sordid but consensual experiences in their tiny minds as rape. This is what is known as regret sex, and this is what happened with Nikki Yovino.
Unlike Julie Gavin, Yovino had no sense of shame, she admitted the lie only because the investigating officer tricked her with a lie of his own, telling her there was video of the encounter. Lying to suspects is not only legal in the United States but condoned, and can lead to terrible miscarriages of justice, especially if the accused is of low intelligence. Yovino has no such excuse because not only is she reasonably if not highly intelligent but she would have known Detective Cotto was lying. If she had been telling the truth. One of the pleasantly surprising side-effects of this age of near total surveillance is that not only are dangerous criminals regularly brought to book but innocent men who have been wrongly and gratuitously accused have been cleared. In 1993, grainy CCTV footage led to the apprehension and conviction of two ten year old boys for the shocking murder of two year old James Bulger. Six years later, teenager Matthew Hilliard was cleared of rape when CCTV showed him walking out of a nightclub holding hands with the sixteen year old he was said to have dragged out and raped twice.
Since then, the quality of CCTV footage has improved, and with falling prices so has the quantity, including from mobile phones. Leaving that aside, no one heard Yovino scream rape, and she raised no alarm at the party. Why was that, do you think?
The flim-flam we are supposed to swallow from the sexual grievance industry is that women “freeze”. They delay reporting sometimes for months or years, not to make it more difficult for exculpatory evidence to be adduced, but because they are terrified they won’t be believed.
From Lisa Avalos we hear that only 3% of rapists are ever convicted — total nonsense — and that for many victims, the legal process is worse than the original assault. It is clear from her haircut she has never had any kind of sex with a man, so how would she know?
Predictably, the mainstream press is peddling the same line, ie poor Nikki. Little attention is paid to the fact that both her alleged violators were black. In view of the Bill Cosby witch-hunt, this is telling. When the corrupt attorney Gloria Allred began recruiting women to falsely accuse the ageing star, the talking heads didn’t know what to do. As all the alleged victims were white, did they side with them and risk being branded racist, or with Cosby and be accused of condoning rape culture? One of Cosby’s accusers was black, but she was so disreputable she could be ignored. Even after former supermodel Beverly Johnson accused him of a ludicrous attempted rape, they vacillated. It was only after his deposition from a decade earlier was leaked that they all turned on him.
Although Cosby was convicted of sexually assaulting one victim, the myth that he spent decades drugging and raping women has been clearly disposed of, but likewise the rules of intersectionality have been rewritten. Now any woman, including a white woman, is to be believed uncritically when she accuses any man of rape, be he white, black, or any other race. Yet look at the facts of this case like any rational human being. Nikki Yovino went into a small bathroom with two men voluntarily. What did she think they were going to do in there, play chess? No, this is not victim blaming, because there was no victim, at least no female victim. Yovino’s six months in a soft prison is in stark contrast to what Dhameer Bradley and Malik St Hilaire would have faced. It is not only women who make bad decisions of a sexual nature. An attractive young man who wakes up next to a grossly overweight hag ten years his senior after a drunken night out will groan, shake his head, and put the bad experience behind him. So should Nikki Yovino, and all these other women who cry rape the morning, month or year after when like Julie Gavin they regret their transient depravity, feeling “guilty and dirty” on account of it.
[The above review was first published on Medium (as “Sex On Trial” — Review, May 10, 2019.]
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