Because this makes sense. Clearly the thing rape victims do to recover is continue to have a consensual affair with the perpetrator for 3 months, right? Right.
Elements of the blogosphere are flipping out because Jeffrey J. Marsalis was largely exonerated by a jury. Clearly, they cry, this is a foul miscarriage of justice. The prosecution was air-tight… if you ignore some minor problems like:
- Almost all of the accusers only decided to press charges after being courted by the prosecution.
- Many of the women who accused him continued to date him after the alleged rape.
- In at leas tone case the ‘victim’ willingly had sex with Jeffrey the next morning and never gave a single indication she did not want to have sex with him.
Now for all I know Jeffrey is the biggest scumbag on Earth. However in the USA it still takes more than just stacking up some magic number of accusations before you get convicted. The cases brought against him were so weak, or so badly mishandled that more jurist have often completely cleared him and found the accusations fabricated.
“Twice the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has put Marsalis on trial, alleging the rape of a total of 10 women, all of them college-educated, sophisticated, successful, good-looking and white. Twice a Philadelphia jury has heard the same scenario repeated “” the women blacked out at some point during their dates, and either woke up incapacitated to Marsalis assaulting them or in the morning, naked “” and decided that in every case, the women hadn’t been raped. For all but two of the women, the jurors believed that in fact no assault whatsoever took place: in effect, that the eight others fabricated their stories, and that Marsalis “” who, his own defense team conceded, concocted fantastic lies and adopted fake personas “” was more believable.” – the full story
To make things even more interesting, one jury only voted to convict him on sexual assault because they were almost literally held hostage for more than five days by a woman who was feeling slighted by not being chosen forewoman.
“According to the African-American juror I interviewed “” the first and only juror to have spoken publicly, who would come forward only on the condition of anonymity “” all was amicable in the first moments of deliberation. Until, he said, it was time to pick a foreperson, a position one of the middle-aged white women desperately wanted. The majority of the jury instead wanted an outspoken African-American man, and the juror said the woman reacted bitterly: “She was going to make our job rough, hard.” The jury took an initial poll. It was 11 to one to acquit on all charges, according to the juror; the lone holdout was the would-be forewoman. She would dig her heels in for five days.” – jury held hostage
In the end, some of them cracked simply to get out of there.
“It was a half-and-half situation, because some people felt like she just got out the hospital, she was ill, she was weak, and then some of us just thought like, hey, we never know what the situation was “” she probably was coming on to him, or both the same.” The juror remained dubious of her claim, but went along with the majority, because “they were arguing over the situation, and we would have been deadlocked and everything.” – jury held hostage
On the other sexual assault convition it is possible that Jeffrey was never actually convicted by the jury but it was simply “slipped in”.
“As to the jurors’ second count of sexual assault, against Sarah “” who’d claimed Marsalis raped her after she lost her memory while the two were sitting on his couch talking and kissing “” the juror claimed, alarmingly, that not all of them had actually signed off on it. The court staff believed the jurors had reached their verdict, and brought them back into the courtroom prematurely. “We weren’t ready to give the verdict at all, so that was rushed on us,” he told me. The juror, in fact, says he had no intention of convicting Marsalis on that charge and regretted that it had been railroaded through: “To me, that one was snuck in.” - jury held hostage
The comments at the main freak out fest are telling. Almost none of them care about the jury problems. Almost none of them will even admit the possibility he is innocent. They are all way too wrapped up in their own baggage and past abuse (real and imagined). In the minds of many convicting any male accused of rape is a salve for their own hurt and anger.
I don’t usually see prosecution this ignorant outside of “Law and Order”. Again, maybe Jeffrey is guilty – but it is telling that two separate juries didn’t really think so and that if it wasn’t for misconduct and emotional blackmail he would be a free man.
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