Sex Assault Cases & Controversies

The overwhelming amount of bad actors and bad law in the USA keeps us here at RALI reeling.

We are amplifying some of the most recent trials, indictments, true crime stories, and disgraceful sentencings.

First off: the current occupant of our White House stands accused by two dozen women of rape and/or sexual assault. The latest allegation, with two corroborating witnesses, came from E. Jean Carroll. Rape is a felony crime of “moral turpitude”. Crimes of moral turpitude are viewed as especially egregious and disqualifying of individuals from positions of responsibility, authority and trust. tRump should not be allowed on the 2020 presidential ballot with these serious charges hanging over him.

But the Republican controlled U.S. Senate, controlled really by Senator Mitchell McConnell, refuses to act against the known criminal occupying the White House. So, instead of purifying our federal government of this misogynistic and racist disgrace, instead we have the ersatz president appointing fellow misogynists, assaulters, and racists to run all dimensions of the federal government.

Brett Kavanaugh, nominated by the ersatz president to the Supreme Court and now a sitting Associate Justice, stands accused by at least three women of sexual assault and attempted rape.

The acting head of the Department of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, hid an atrocious set of family crimes to try to secure a senate appointment. He finally resigned in disgrace but not before the national press revealed that Shanahan’s son, William Shanahan, beat his own mother with a baseball bat and left her lying unconscious in a pool of blood. Patrick Shanahan did nothing to care for his (by then estranged) wife, but rather holed up with his son, the mom-beater, and hired him expensive lawyers who eventually got the young Shanahan off without any serious consequences.

This young man nearly killed his mother with a baseball bat and instead of standing trial for attempted murder he went on to college at the University of Washington. Leaving aside the fact that William Shanahan was not punished for his crime, consider the danger this man poses for any woman who might date him or marry him.

In Alabama, the state laws allow rapists to exert paternal rights over children they fathered through rape. Thus, the women who survive rape and who birth infants from that ordeal are forced into on-going relationships with violent criminals. This is a deep perversion of family values, brought to us by the same state government that wants to make abortion a crime.

Also in Alabama: 27 year old Marshae Jones has been indicted for manslaughter. Ms. Jones was pregnant but she lost the pregnancy when another woman shot her in the stomach. The prosecutors failed to get an indictment against the woman who shot Ms. Jones and caused the death of her fetus, so they decided to charge Ms. Jones instead. Reportedly the fight was over the father of Ms. Jones’ baby. [Update: After a national uproar, Ms. Jones was not prosecuted].

Meanwhile, looking more broadly, a report from the United Nations has placed a spot-light on violence against women around the world. Women who die from murder are likely to be victims of intimate partner violence. Fully 50% of women murdered are murdered by a close relative.

50,000 women in 2017 were murdered by a family member. That is 137 women murdered each and every day by a family member around the world. Of those 50,000 at least 1/3 of them were murdered by an intimate partner (husband, lover, or ex). Compare that to men who die from murder; only about 3% of men who die from murder do so because of intimate partner violence. Thus it is indisputable: homes are dangerous places for far too many women. The worst violence faced by women tends to be domestic violence. Let that sink in.

Many articles are highlighting this UN Report. Here’s one by Joan Smith (@polblonde) that makes the further link between domestic violence and more public acts of mass violence. Ms. Smith writes,

“Everytown for Gun Safety, found that the perpetrator killed an intimate partner or family member in 57% of mass shootings between 2009 and 2014. In many of these cases, the victim had suffered abuse for years.
Devin Patrick Kelley, who had convictions for violence against his first wife and his step-son, was trying to kill the mother of his estranged second wife when he opened fire in a church in Texas in 2017, killing 26 people. Nine days later, Kevin Janson Neal riddled his wife’s body with bullets and hid her under the floorboards before rushing out of their home in rural California and murdering four more victims. The young man accused of killing 14 students and three teachers at his old school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 was well-known to the police because his adoptive mother called 911 so many times, pleading for help when he verbally and physically abused her.
Violence in the home doesn’t always stay in the home – and a similar pattern has begun to emerge in relation to terrorism. People are surprised when I tell them that all four fatal attacks in the UK in 2017 were carried out by men with a history of domestic abuse; they’re even more taken aback when I explain that the same background turns up in relation to terrorist attacks in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium and Australia. That’s because the public thinks about terrorism as ideological, carried out by men who’ve been radicalised by Salafist videos or neo-Nazi propaganda.”

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