In case you missed it, New York Knicks player Derrick Rose was accused of drugging and raping a woman currently going by the name of Jane Doe in 2013. Like all rape cases against well-known men, particularly athletes, society and mainstream media have done their fair share of making excuses for the alleged perpetrator and not believing the alleged victim.
For example, a series of text messages from Doe to her friend and roommate were released that seemed to suggest she was accusing Rose because of the money she would receive from the case. However, new court filings submitted by Doe’s lawyers Sept. 29 show that actually these texts had nothing to do with the case against Rose and were instead a discussion of a charge Doe and her roommate were bringing against their landlord for something completely different. Thus, the main thing being used by Rose’s lawyers to smear Doe’s name and build up Rose’s case is a complete lie.
If anything, these text messages and people’s response to them illustrate how quick society is to make a case that the victim in these situations, usually a female, is lying. Why? Why are we so intent on protecting the accused but not the accuser? If this is the sort of treatment that someone who files an accusation against another person for sexual assault gets, is it really any wonder that so many incidents of rape go unreported?
On Sept. 29, the same day that the court filings explaining Doe’s text messages came out, it was also determined that 21-year-old Patrick Whetstone, a former Iowa State student, will not go to jail for sexually assaulting a woman in 2014. Instead, Whetstone will be required to register as a sex offender and be on probation for two years, then be monitored for another 10 years, all of which Judge James McGlynn says he believes will allow Whetstone to be rehabilitated while still keeping the community safe. And here’s the really unbelievable part: Whetstone pleaded guilty. There was no question of whether the victim was telling the truth or not, and still, all Whetstone gets is a rap on the knuckles and “make sure you get consent first, OK?”
I’m tired of seeing rape case after rape case being reported with essentially the same headline: “Person accused avoids jail.” What sort of justice system are we dealing with in which someone who severely harms another person’s life slips on through, while as of 2012, approximately 40,000 inmates in state or federal prisons were there due to distribution or possession of marijuana? The thing is, judges such as McGlynn and the lawyers defending Derrick Rose aren’t formed out of thin air. They are formed out of the people who appoint them, in McGlynn’s case the oh-so-lovely Gov. Terry Brandstad, and more influential, perhaps, they are formed by those of us who see cases like Rose’s and Whetstone’s and say “That’s OK,” or “Boys will be boys,” or even “That’s just the way the world works.”
