Sunday 17 November 2019

“Sex On Trial” (2) — Review

The second episode of this Channel 4 series is a lot more disturbing than the first. Rather than one unambiguous case of regret sex, it includes a clearly false allegation and the quite appalling rape of a young student that a detective dismissed almost summarily in spite of the victim suffering some of the worst vaginal injuries an experience sexual assault nurse examiner said she had ever seen.
Rape victim Abby Honold with then Senator Al Franken.

The false rape case has a racial aspect to it; Ray Buford and five other black football players from Minnesota University took home a white cheerleader, a young woman who was clearly a slut. She told one of these dudes she’d had a threesome before with two girls and a guy, and she was up for a threesome with two dudes. According to the players she had full sex with five of them and oral sex with a sixth. One of them smirked all the way through his interview, something that didn’t go down at all well with Mail Online readers.

The next day, the non-victim messaged one of the players and asked him what had happened the previous night, as if she didn’t know. Unsurprisingly, the programme follows the usual specious narrative of the sexual grievance industry and moronic liberal film-makers, namely, rape is a vastly under-reported crime, false allegations are extremely rare, and far too many rapists are “let off” by complacent or conniving jurors. And in this case, why would a woman lie?

We are not told the full truth about this false allegation; fortunately, as usual the American legal authorities have released enormous amounts of material which help the viewer piece together what really happened. When she arrived home the following day, the cheerleader told her mother she had been sexually assaulted (raped) but didn’t want to report it. Her mother did.

What saved these reprobates was one of them filming part of the multiple sexual encounter — echoes of the notorious 2009 Hofstra University case. The District Attorney was interviewed, and though he made clear his disgust at the way this woman was treated (ie allowed herself to be treated) he added that his concern was the law, not the morals of the participants.

As might be expected when Title IX is involved, the case did not end with the legal case, and the University handed down its own punishments.

The rape of Abby Honold is in a different class altogether. On both sides of the Atlantic, defendants — women as well as men — are regularly convicted of heinous crimes and handed lengthy prison sentences on far less compelling evidence than was present in her case. After being raped multiple times and multiple ways by Daniel Drill-Mellum she did everything right. She looked like a rape victim, sounded distraught, dialled 911 immediately, attended hospital, gave a statement, yet…what was clearly a trick phone call from an associate of the perpetrator led the investigating officer to drop the case. Even if she had told the person in question the sex was consensual, this was surely a case in which the physical evidence should have trumped mere words. Fortunately, wiser counsels would eventually prevail, and Drill-Mellum ended up with a sentence of six years two months for raping Abby and another girl. All things considered, this was incredibly lenient; a sentence of fifteen years would not have been appealable. The following is not mentioned in Sex On Trial.

Sadly, her suffering at the hands of this creep has led Abby into the wrong sort of advocacy. Not mentioned here is the fact that she has taken up campaigning for victim-centred rape investigations. Abandoning traditional methods of investigating rape can be disastrous, as is evinced by the case of Victor Zheng and the little psycho who fitted him up for rape. She has also rather unkindly sought to remove the name of Al Franken from a bill he helped sponsor following the sexual allegations made against him. These allegations, even if true — and they are probably not — are in no way comparable with the treatment meted out to her by a sexual sadist.

[The above review was first published on Medium, May 17, 2019].

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