Today, as CBCNews reports:
Jian Ghomeshi has been acquitted on four counts of sexual assault and one count of choking by an Ontario Court judge who says the “deceptive and manipulative” evidence of the complainants raised a reasonable doubt in the guilt of the former CBC Radio host.
Share your thoughts below. This thread is a NO TROLL/NO MRA etc thread.
So. More shitty news from real life. Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust great.
This isn’t a story that’s been particularly visible in the UK so can anyone recommend a decent source to get up to speed on it ?
Please excuse the language that is about to commence. It will be vulgar, and possibly offensive. Liberal use of the word “fuck.”
Fucking motherfucker son of a bitch! How the fuck does he get away with that kind of fucking shit? Fuck. This. This here is why victims of sexual assault don’t fucking go to the police. Because even if it fucking goes to trial, the victims’ statements will be taken as “deceptive and manipulative” because our culture doesn’t fucking believe women when they say they were assaulted. (Our culture also doesn’t fucking believe it when a man says he was assaulted because men are supposed to always be up to fuck, but that’s a different profanity-filled rant.)
This week fucking sucks.
Matchstick:
https://beta.thestar.com/topic.jian_ghomeshi.html
The Toronto Star is your best starting point.
Hmmmm. Well, shit.
I’d like y’all to spend a moment and try to imagine evidence presented by a white heterosexual man being described in these terms.
Go on, I’ll wait.
I’m just going to paste my reaction that I already posted on Facebook:
Maybe Jian Ghomeshi’s accusers wouldn’t have felt the need to withhold information if we just fucking listened to victims in the first place. Victim blaming is so incredibly pervasive and persuasive; it manifests in a thousand tiny ways that all conspire to help abusers avoid consequences, and it’s nearly impossible to avoid.
On more than one occasion I’ve gotten the “Why didn’t you just leave?” shtick from people in response to hearing about a previous relationship I had with an emotionally abusive partner that I had sworn to never talk to again. Once even from another survivor of abuse. Care to guess why I’ve – until now – only told a small handful of people that I had sex with her a year or so after we broke up?
Emotions are complicated. People don’t always do things that make sense, or that are good for them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve empathy, or respect, or justice. In fact, it means we should take even greater care to listen, and understand, and realize that things are often much messier and complicated than we would like to believe.
Monsters rarely look the part, and victims/survivors are rarely flawless. But none of that should preclude us – as a society – listening to and believing the people who need it the most, namely women and girls.
Aaaand there’s MY comment, ninja’d already.
Srsly, though, there isn’t much you can say about this other than a string of expletives:
In short, ladies, if you don’t jump through rape culture’s hoops in exactly the right order and with the grace of a prima ballerina, you’re the guilty ones. Stop wasting the court’s precious time.
Fuck.
When I first heard about the sort of stuff Jian had done, I was troubled, because I had been a fan back when he was part of the band Moxy Fruvous.
Knowing that he’s been acquitted? That bothers me far more.
@Bina I’m sorry I ninja’d your comment, but there really wasn’t anything else that could be said.
Every time. And, that is Rape Culture in a nut shell.
@dlouwe
You make an important point, people often fail to appreciate how complex and peculiar the mind can be. I think the root cause of this is a lack of empathy, people get caught up with what their ‘logical’ reaction would be that they neglect to factor in human psychology.
The volume of evidence that was not permissible in court in this case blows me away. Everyone knows that Jian admitted breaking a date’s ribs and displayed the video, but this undisputed crime doesn’t fucking matter and isn’t prosecuted because she wasn’t one of the complainants. His emails and phone messages/texts to the complainants? Inadmissible – although THEIRS are dredged up to be analyzed and cited as “proof” that consensual contact continued after the assault, therefore the assault was clearly consensual. (Notable leap of logic, that, equating an individual’s desire that a relationship continue in some form with her desire for every occurrence within the relationship to have occurred, and even to recur in the future.)
All I can conclude is that the courts in Ontario are even more stacked against victims of sexual assault and domestic or relationship abuse than are those in the States. And psychologists who specialize in disordered and abusive relationships are desperately needed as consultants in the courtroom when the conduct of one or more partners in such a relationship is on trial.
I’ve read over and over and over and over how rape victims act in a lot of ways we consider to be “strange” or inconsistent with how popular culture depicts victims. And yet this doesn’t percolate up to courts where that kind of information can make a real difference. Instead we make it seem like someone suffering from trauma is faking it because of our notions of how a trauma victim SHOULD be. And justice wanders blindly on.
Damn, I’m sad.
The thing about the legal system is that any doubt on the accuser’s story just collapses the whole case. In this case, the accused didn’t even have to testify or verbally defend himself except through his fancy paid lawyer who just had to attack any minor inconsistencies in the victim’s stories in order to tear the whole case apart. Even if the judge wasn’t as prejudiced as he sounded, I don’t think any other judge would have made any different verdict. It’s a pity that a narcissistic predator like Ghomeshi is getting away.
All in all, I think the forensic system needs innovative ideas to deal with rape because it’s almost impossible to convict accused rapists in virtually all cases. What we need are brain scans and eegs to actually measure the brain activity of the accused and the accuser.
The judge has a history of dismissing almost every (or every?) sexual assault case in front of him regardless of the evidence, blatantly making up reasons for it after he’s made his preemptive decision.
Would it be libellous to say “Ten bucks says his closet isn’t the most skeleton-free in the world”?
Oh, I quite agree. BTW, this is satire, but you’d never know it.
So let’s look at this “logically,” since MRAs and anti-fems are always accusing women and feminists of letting emotion rule them and how this is is an enemy of the “the law” and all the potentially innocent men who could be targeted by “crazy” women wanting to “take them down a peg”
The first witness describes how she was not prepared for them to use her first testimony, given soon after the assault, which was hasty and included easy details that would be challenged not to prove the assault didn’t occur, but that the witness was unreliable. http://www.chatelaine.com/news/what-i-wish-id-known-before-testifying-in-the-ghomeshi-trial/
The implication is that survivors need to focus on details, that women NEED to be aware of what kind of things will be important to protect themselves from being seen as unreliable, which is one point. BUT, this is in direct contradiction to the REALITY that has been documented REPEATEDLY about assault, which is that these details are NOT something a survivor is likely to remember (or likely to mix up) due to the NATURE of trauma on the brain.
http://trauma.blog.yorku.ca/2016/01/rape-survivors-fragmented-memories-misunderstood-by-media/?utm_content=buffer77bab&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
So far, the logical thing to me seems to be that it would be most effective for non survivors to be educated on these issues, not just because it would make them more likely to support survivors in the face of “contradictory” evidence, BUT, if they are ever assaulted, they have an idea of what to expect as a survivor, and what to expect if they report.
I mean, how can they argue with that? It’s not a “feminist narrative” it’s real education that aims to not blame men or protect women, but make us all more aware of what reporting rape entails going through?
Second, this idea of accounting for the behavior toward the person you’re accusing after the assault. This really taps into the emotional nature, not of assault, but of relationships, and how difficult it can be to terminate them, ESPECIALLY when the person is such a “nice guy” and is apologetic for the behavior.
For instance, Emma Sulkowicz’s case against Paul Nungesser was dismissed despite his prior cases simply because she stayed friends with him and sent him flirty texts. To the “rational” person this behavior is “odd” because they perceive rape to be a CLEAR violation that turns the “friend” into a “rapist” who must then on be avoided or excommunicated. The reality is that all survivors deal with their assault differently, and that includes how much they chose to associate with their assailant. Being assaulted by an acquaintance doesn’t make them just “stop” your social relationship with them, largely because the nature of assault can be so shocking and confusing that it’s easier to treat them the same and try to believe it was a “mistake”
So the public needs to learn that it’s not unusual to stay friends with someone who hurt you, especially when it’s so “out of character” that our perception of them is so broken we’d rather deny what happened. This is important, the misunderstanding of how one DOESN’T always change their behavior towards their rapist is at the cornerstone of rape myths (Guys like Milo who question why Stoya kept James Deen’s videos on her site for instance don’t seem to get how a survivor would want something good to come out of their relationship with someone who hurt them, even if it seems “obvious” that “no survivor would advertise their rapist’s videos”)
One last point however is the most difficult to work out rationally though, the idea that by “waiting” the witnesses lost credibility, when the reality is that the fear of backlash is so instilled in women (http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/sandy-garossino/jian-ghomeshi-women-report-sex-assault_b_6059124.html) that women who go against the grain and report are the MINORITY. For most people this is simply illogical, because they believe that reporting rape, while hard, is SUCH a heinous crime that women MUST have the police and the public on their side.
However, as we know, while women may be supported, it’s not the support they feel first off, but the doubters and people asking engaging in rape myths. The public doesn’t seem to get this, not matter how many times you explain that people react to a “real” allegation the same way they react to a false one, they seem to assume that facing that skepticism is what a “real” survivor needs to do, and that all the people doubting them are just exercising their right to an opinion. This paradox is so toxic, and while logically they should be able to get it, instead they always whine about what they “should have” done if they wanted them to take them seriously, even though the reality is they would STILL face skepticism if they reported it right away.
But even if we could get the public to look at this “logically,” to examine their own biases on “how a survivor should act,” there is this sick little lizard brain part of us that doesn’t want to believe someone unless given evidence WE can understand, and for people who HEAR about the violation of rape, this makes it nigh impossible for them to believe they would do what the survivor did by waiting.
This is the most frustrating rape myth to crack logically, because the decision not to immediately report (While having a lot to do with factors that can be measured, like previous behavior or relationship, drinking or drugs, or mental illness) can’t be understood without emotional empathy. People can know all the survivors’ circumstances, all the pressure they would face, and yet STILL insist that unless they report, they don’t believe in passing judgement on the accused, even when the person tells them how this is what they were fearing.
In each case, we can clearly see we need to educate the public, and how this needs to be done over saying his non conviction means that’s the end of it. And in the meantime, someone needs to educate them on how “innocent” is not a legal term and how “not enough evidence to convict” is not equivalent to “the alleged survivors were not credible and most likely lying”
Because people keep on defaulting to this in a way that shows they REALLY don’t get how the justice system works. Fucking OJ won his case by discrediting how the evidence was gathered and he was allowed to do that because the legal system isn’t about proving the truth, it’s about which story is more understandable by a jury of people with very little knowledge on the subject of the trial ITSELF. Isn’t that a logical argument?
FUCK. CANADA.
Sexual assault is one of the few crimes where the victim is the one on trial. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is when black people are shot by cops and/or people with paler skin than them.
Lots of anger here in Canada. Please don’t fuck us (unless there’s enthusiastic consent).
numerobis: I’m Canadian as well. That’s why I’m so pissed off.
That’s not really true for any crime except those perpetrated by the powerful on those without power. You only have to look at case after case of inmates on Death Row exonerated by new, usually DNA, evidence. The “accuser” in capital murder cases is the state, and even the most cursory peek into those cases shows that the story being told by the state is incredibly doubtful in most instances. This doubtful story is believed fully when the defendant is poor, a person of color, intellectually disabled, or all of these things – in other words, when the accused is on the wrong side of power structures.
It’s incredibly common in criminal trials for the defendant to not testify. There are good reasons for this. Don’t read anything into that fact.
A judge who didn’t expect victims of sexual assault to remember perfectly a traumatic incident that happened a decade earlier could very easily have made a different verdict. A judge who didn’t expect victims of sexual assault to behave in a single specific way and doubt victims who behaved in a different way, could very easily have made a different verdict. A judge who didn’t exclude reams of evidence for questionable reasons could very easily have made a different verdict.
He still has a second trial for another, separate assault coming up.
What we need is for the justice system to take victims seriously, to understand how victimization alters a person’s behavior, and to view all persons as truly equal before the law rather than holding the powerful to a different standard than those without power. Your magic medical tools are not necessary and it is bizarre that you seem to concede all ground until foolproof lie detectors are invented.
@Loquora Yeah. Courts are usually ignorant of how trauma can impact a victim’s memory and behavior. Many trauma victims will give inconsistent stories because they haven’t fully processed the event. On the other hand, it’s easy for the defendant to stick to his theory of the case because it only needs to be slightly different from what actually happened.
The facts were never in dispute, just whether the attacks were consensual “rough sex” or not. It’s ridiculous to say the victims were deceptive. The judge even decided he wouldn’t consider whether the incidents establish that Ghomeshi has a pattern of behavior. If you look at all the evidence relevant to his behavior and apply good old Bayesian reasoning, it’s very difficult to believe that he’s not guilty even if the accusers intentionally made up parts of their stories.
I can’t even.
I’m ready for today to be over and tomorrow to be better.