1 in 5 women get raped?

Maybe "affirmative consent" ought to be the law not just on college campuses but an all-encompassing legal definition of consensual sex.

Looks like Hawkeye and his coterie just passed through! Thumbing down and staying quiet!

Duke University has suspended the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity after a female student reported she was drugged and sexually assaulted at an off-campus party on Jan. 8.

Durham, N.C. police are investigating the second-degree rape case,

Punish first, investigate after. How so very 2015.

Punish first, investigate after. How so very 2015.

The jury heard two weeks of dramatic testimony from a parade of witnesses, including police, former and current Vanderbilt students and the woman, who said she didn't remember what happened that night, only that she woke up in a strange dorm room. They also saw cellphone images from the night of the attack that Vandenburg sent to his friends as it was happening.

Despite the photos and video, and witnesses seeing the woman unconscious and at least partially naked in a dorm hallway, no one reported it.

The victim said in a statement she was hopeful the publicity from the case would lead to a discussion of how to end sexual violence on college campuses. In Nashville, where the prestigious private university is located, hundreds of college officials from across the state were meeting this week to discuss exactly that.

"Finally, I want to remind other victims of sexual violence: You are not alone. You are not to blame," she said.

Vandenburg and Batey were on trial together, but represented by different attorneys. Attorneys for Vandenburg, who had been seeing the woman, said he did not assault her.

Testimony showed Vandenburg passed out condoms to the other players, slapped her buttocks and said he couldn't have sex with the woman because he was high on cocaine.

Batey raped the woman and urinated on her, prosecutors said. His attorneys argued the images didn't show that.

Defense lawyers argued that Vandenburg and Batey were too drunk to know what they were doing and that a college culture of binge drinking and promiscuous sex should be partly to blame.

During closing arguments, Deputy District Attorney Tom Thurman told jurors that the college culture argument was a "red herring" and that the athletes thought the law didn't apply to them.

"That's the culture that you really saw here," Thurman said. "Their mindset that they can get away with anything."

Earlier, one of the defense attorneys conceded that Vandenburg took "deplorable" photos, but shouldn't be convicted of rape because he didn't take part in it.

"He took photographs that he never should have taken," attorney Fletcher Long said.

Batey, of Nashville, turned 21 on Tuesday. Vandenburg, 21, is from Indio, Calif.

Vandenburg's roommate at the time testified that he had been on the top bunk and saw the woman face down on the floor. He said he heard one of the players say he was going to have sex with her, but didn't do anything because he was afraid.

Rumors about what happened quickly spread around campus, and the assault might have gone unnoticed had the university not stumbled onto the closed-circuit TV images several days later in an unrelated attempt to learn who damaged a dormitory door. The images showed players carrying an unconscious woman into an elevator and down a hallway, taking compromising pictures of her and then dragging her into the room.

School authorities contacted police, who found the digital trail of images.

The university said after the verdict that they had kicked the players off the team many months ago, expelled them from school and were confident they acted appropriately.

"We will also continue our comprehensive ongoing efforts to raise awareness of the importance of every Vanderbilt student intervening when another student is at risk or in distress," the school said in a statement.

Jaborian "Tip" McKenzie, who is also charged in the case, testified he did not touch the woman himself but also took pictures.

No trial date has been set for him and Brandon Banks, the fourth former player accused in the assault. Banks did not testify.
http://collegefootball.ap.org/article/jury-convicts-2-ex-vanderbilt-players-raping-woman

Former Stanford Swimmer Charged for Publicly Raping Unconscious Woman on Campus
By Tara Fowler
1/28/15

A former Stanford swimmer is accused of publically raping an unconscious woman on campus.

Brock Allen Turner, 19, was charged Wednesday with five felonies, a spokesman for the Santa Clara district attorney's office tells PEOPLE.

He faces one count of rape of an intoxicated person, one count of rape of a victim unconscious of the nature of the act, one count of sexual penetration when the victim was intoxicated or anesthetized, one count of sexual penetration where the victim was unconscious of the nature of the act and one count of assault with intent to commit felony.

The alleged attack took place just after midnight Sunday. Two bikers came across the unconscious woman with a man on top of her. He ran away, but the bikers chased him down, restraining him until police arrived, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

"She was lying on the ground unconscious, not moving," prosecutor Alaleh Kianerci said Tuesday, according to the Chronicle. The woman, who is not a student at the school, was taken to the hospital and is recovering.

Kianerci said Turner met the woman at an on-campus party, according to the San Jose Mercury News. He allegedly assaulted her outside while she was intoxicated and unconscious.

The prosecutor went on to praise the two bikers for stopping because what they saw "shocked their conscience," the Mercury News writes.

Turner voluntarily withdrew from Stanford on Tuesday following his arrest, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Stanford spokeswoman Lisa Lapin told the Times that Turner is "not allowed to re-register for classes and is barred from setting foot on campus."

Turner, a freshman from Ohio, held state records in two freestyle events and was a three-time All-American high school swimmer.

http://www.people.com/article/stanford-swimmer-charged-rape

I worry that too many details feed the rape fantasies of a couple of mopes here. there should be no joy over justice here. there were just too many opportunities for too many people to have done the right thing and nobody did. If you pass a victim of a hit and run on the street you can be charged with failure to render aid. Why aren't those who saw the rape go on for such a long period and chose to remain silent charged?

The ashen, slim, 22-year-old woman with dark brown curly hair stunned the jammed Bristol County Superior Court as she described in a soft, emotionless monotone the lurid events of that cold March night in New Bedford, Mass. a year ago. At about 9:30 p.m. she had gone out to get a pack of cigarettes, leaving her two young children at home with her boyfriend. Two local stores were closed, so she walked a block to Big Dan's Tavern. She bought the cigarettes, then had a 7 & 7 highball with a woman at a table and chatted with two men shooting pool. The other woman left. After she put her glass on the bar, she walked toward the door to leave. Suddenly, she testified, a man in back of her grabbed the collar of her jacket while another tripped her and held her feet. They dragged her across the floor to the pool table, banging her head and hip against its side, and stripped off her jeans. "I could hear people laughing, cheering and yelling from near the bar," the woman recalled in court. "My head was hanging off the edge of the pool table.... I was begging for help. I was pleading. I was screaming.... The man that was holding me down had grabbed me by the hair. The more I screamed, the tighter he pulled." Then, reportedly, began a terrifying, 90-minute gang rape attack by six men. The woman could hear men laughing and shouting, "Do it! Do it!" Prosecutors later said they "cheered like it was a baseball game," and a detective described the accused rapists as acting "like a pack of sharks on a feeding frenzy." A bartender and three other men witnessed the rape, but two maintain they were threatened and afraid to call police.

After one alleged rapist stepped away to talk with his pals, the woman bolted over the other side of the pool table, fleeing into the street at about 12:30 a.m. wearing only an unzipped jacket and a sock. She flagged down three men in a passing pickup truck, who heard her screaming that she had been raped. Cut and bruised, the woman was so traumatized she threw her arms around the neck of passenger Daniel O'Neil and wouldn't let go for at least five minutes.

But after regaining some composure, she didn't react like many rape victims. Instead of feeling guilt and shame, she was furious—a far healthier response. Cursing her assailants, she was eager to go back inside later that night with the police to try to point them out.

Within days the woman's ordeal became a national cause célèbre. Feminists saw the attack as a horrific example of sexual violence against women. Ethnic slurs against the old whaling town's Portuguese community (more than 50 percent of New Bedford's 98,000 population) mounted in virulence when it was revealed that the woman's accused attackers were all Portuguese immigrants from the Azores. The trial that began two weeks ago in nearby Fall River, Mass. seemed certain to inflame the community once again.

All six defendants have pleaded innocent to charges of aggravated rape, which carries a maximum life sentence. They are Daniel C. Silvia, 27, a garment presser; Joseph Vieira, 27, a partner in a farm; Victor M. Raposo, 24, a fishcutter who in 1979 was charged with assault with a dangerous weapon and assault with intent to commit murder in a gang fight, and three years later paid a $250 fine for indecent exposure in Leominster, Mass.; John M. Cordeiro, 24, a welder; Virgilio Medeiros, 24, a mold designer for yachts who had been arrested both for drunken driving and assault and battery; and Jose Medeiros (no relation), 24, a landscaper once charged with drunken driving and driving to endanger.

While the case unfolds inside the turn-of-the-century Victorian courthouse, it continues to be tried by the locals in their cafes, social clubs and colleges, and on the streets and waterfront of New Bedford, which boasts the largest fishing fleet in the East.

After the incident, local residents were outraged both by the reported gang rape and by the release on only $1,000 bail of the four original defendants—two others were later indicted as accessories for pinning the alleged victim down on the pool table. The New Bedford Women's Center and the YWCA rallied mainstream support, forming the Coalition Against Sexist Violence. Shortly after the attack, the group staged an evening candlelight protest march that drew more than 2,500 men, women and children. Network television news programs showed scenes of the vigil to 50 million viewers.

Workers using a chainsaw today dismantled a bar where the police say a woman was repeatedly raped by four men on a pool table as other patrons cheered.

Big Dan's tavern was shut Wednesday after the owner's sister voluntarily turned over its license to the city's Licensing Board. Today workers cut up the bar and removed tables, chairs and the pool table.