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“A dream you dream alone is only a dream; a dream you dream together is reality.” — Yoko Ono
“In my heart, I think a woman has two choices: either she’s a feminist or a masochist.” –Gloria Steinem
Oct
9
This is what we mean when we talk about a rape culture
Filed Under assholes, courts, misogyny, patriarchy, race and racism, rape and sexual assault, slut-shaming, violence against women and girls | Posted by Cara |
Via Jezebel comes this so-horrific-you’d-think-it-was-made-up story about a man who has raped at least 30 women but more likely raped hundreds, yet was acquitted eight times and convicted only two.
Two years would pass before Rachael*, contacted by authorities, would tell the story of that night. Despite the fact that they determined her allegations to be credible, her story wasn’t one of those presented during Jeffrey Marsalis’s second rape trial last June, which ended, after nearly four weeks of testimony, with him convicted of just two counts of sexual assault. He was acquitted of raping six of the seven alleged victims in the case (the jury hanged on a single rape charge) as well as impersonating a public servant, for allegedly convincing several women that he was a CIA assassin who spent time in caves in Afghanistan following September 11th and carried a CIA-issued pistol he’d nicknamed Priscilla and talked to in an Elvis voice. Instead, Rachael is one of a staggering number of Philadelphia-area women whom authorities believe Marsalis assaulted but whose alleged rapes he’s yet to be formally charged with, and probably never will be. The reason is contained within Rachael’s story: Many of the women — almost all of whom didn’t come forward on their own, but instead were contacted by authorities — had reengaged Marsalis after the fact or otherwise behaved toward him in ways that seem counterintuitive, badly damaging their credibility.
An investigator from the case puts the number of women identified by authorities as viable victims at 30. If true, this would make Marsalis not only the most prolific serial rapist in Pennsylvania history, but among the worst in the annals of American crime. Still, it’s a figure hundreds lower than the number he met on Match.com while living in Philadelphia: Authorities say a doorman at the Metropolitan who worked the weekend overnight shift told them he’d seen Marsalis return home with around 100 different women over the few years he lived there; a former next-door neighbor told me Marsalis said he had sex with well over a hundred women annually; and the bartender at Tir Na Nog told investigators Marsalis often came in with several different women over the course of a weekend. The law enforcement source believes the actual number of victims is “way, way higher” than 30, potentially country-wide, as Marsalis, the son of wealthy, divorced parents from the West Coast, hopscotched from one college to another during a slacker migration eastward, ultimately landing at Drexel University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree for paramedics before immediately reenrolling, briefly, in the nursing school. “I’m sure this guy has done this wherever he’s been,” the source says.
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. If the authorities are correct, if Marsalis is so depraved, how could two juries — 24 people — in two separate trials have believed him over so many accusers?
That is not a question that is ever satisfactorily answered. The story is very long, but you have to read the whole thing. I can’t say that I enjoy the way that it was written — though I appreciate the fact that knowing the details of a rape can be very important, I don’t think that the literary style is particularly appropriate for the horrors that have happened to actual women. Dude seems to think that he’s writing an novel instead of an expose of a rapist. But that, and the troubling conclusions about race that the writer reaches can be put aside, only because the story itself is so important. For now (because I can’t deal with anything more), I have to look past it.
Reading the story, struggling to take so much horror in at once, I was faced with many tragic realizations. Authorities had to contact the victims, rather than the other way around (Marsalis kept a data base of all of his “conquests”). Even then, only thirty came forward. At least, using a very low estimate, thirty women were raped. One went to the police.
Of the thirty women who did come forward once contacted, several had carried on a relationship with Marsalis after he raped them. I bring this up not to discredit the women (I don’t think that it does discredit them) or to call them crazy or stupid. I don’t think that they are. As a teenager, I stayed with a sexually abusive boyfriend and could not admit until about a year after the breakup that abuse was exactly what I experienced. I bring it up because we need to know this. We need to recognize it. We need to know that these women aren’t crazy, that they are terrifyingly ordinary.
We need to know it because the jury sure as fuck didn’t. In fact, experts who realize that continuing a relationship with a rapist is incredibly common behavior for a rape survivor are barred by Pennsylvania law from testifying about the reactions of rape victims. The jury had to figure it out for themselves.
And even then, the idea that a jury — two juries — could hear these cases in conjunction with each other and somehow determine that he did rape two women and that the other eight are liars, even though they have almost identical stories that were told without conferring with each other first, is astonishing to me.
Here is, apparently, how it happened.
In his closing argument, Marsalis’s attorney, Kevin Hexstall, put the credibility of Marsalis’s many victims on trial. In language that clearly pandered to the primarily African-American jury, Hexstall, who is black, told the jurors the women “wanted to get down” with “Dr. Jeff.” “This is how she gets down,” he said, and added that the jurors “know how this goes down.” He called one accuser a “Match.com veteran. She’s been on Match.com seven years. This is her hustle. She does Match.com.”
Hexstall conceded that his client had told tall tales, that he might even seem unlikeable. But, he told the jurors, “He’s not a rapist. He’s a playboy. Everybody knows him, he might have taken it a little further with the stethoscope than you might expect. But he’s just a playboy.”
He said that Marsalis had been punished enough for the sins of his embellishment. He called the women liars. “You need to stop saying that a criminal courtroom is the forum for a woman who regrets having sex with you and who is upset because you lied about your profession,” he told the jury. “Throw a brick through his car window, slash his tires, get online and tell the rest of the world he’s not a doctor and a liar. But you don’t come up with this kind of nonsense and play with this man’s life.”And it was that argument, apparently, that won the day with the jury of 12.
This — this is what our rape culture has become. The next time you hear a rape victim called a liar, the next time you see a woman being blamed for her rape because she was drinking, the next time someone says “He’s so good looking, why would he need to rape anyone?,” remember this. Remember this and tell me that there’s no fucking rape culture and that those words are not what has made this kind of atrocity possible. Because they are. Marsalis is the rapist scum who does not deserve to live among us. But we are the reason that he is possible.
[Thanks to Jessica for the link.]
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“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.” — Susan B. Anthony
I don’t know what to say. I used to think that the “jury” method was better than the “judge” one, but apparently I’m wrong.
The system is so EFFED UP.
We truly live in a rape culture. And all women should be aware of it. We can’t afford the commodity of being indifferent about it.
i am very lucky, and i know this. everyday i am extremely thankful that this hasn’t happened to me, b/c the more i read about it the more i believe noone would ever believe me. i don’t believe that the “justice” system even cares to help these women anymore than they want to maintain the rapist asshat’s innocence. fuck off. i can’t even digest this story right now…
instead, i want to cry and throw things. i love the way the lawyer condones violent acts against his client, and says it’s ok to tell everyone he’s a liar, but not to tell the truth. wtf?
I generally follow the news pretty well; I don’t understand why this case did not receive national coverage, or if it did, I must have missed it. I searched his name to find many hits on local branches, not national coverage, of primetime news networks such as cbs and abc, and I believe one hit on an article from abc which fell under a “top stories” moniker. This last one, also, focused on the dangers of Internet dating and the trustworthiness of online profiles and matching. While extremely important, that particular article seems to downplay the serial nature of Marsalis, or how the so-called dates played out almost the exact same way with the same end result, regardless of his lying on Match.com, taking place in public spaces outside where any girl might find themselves even if they are not waiting for online blind dates. If anything, this story was perfect for splashing across newspapers nationwide; the indifference of American “rape culture,” as you put it, needs to be shocked into awareness, and not put in section 7D in the locals next to the crosswords and horoscopes. That Philly Magazine article was torturous to read. And should be required reading. I wonder how many people outside Philly will actually find it and read it.
I was really grateful for this post, jezebel’s, and jill’s over at feministe – because this story has not been on my radar. It needs much more attention –
I love your title here. perfect example.
If you didn’t see Jill’s post at feministe, check it out – it was great.
[...] a year and a half ago, I wrote about Jeffrey Marsalis (trigger warning), a man who was accused of drugging and raping at least 30 women but almost [...]