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Boys Will Be Boys

Page 27

by Clementine Ford


  Once convicted of felony assault, Turner faced a maximum sentence of fourteen years in prison. But Judge Aaron Persky offered the view that a young man like Turner—white, athletic and ‘from a good family’—wouldn’t fare well in federal prison. Instead, he was sentenced to six months in the Santa Clara county jail. He was out in three.

  This is what rape culture looks like.

  Whenever I write or speak about rape culture, I’m invariably challenged by young men questioning its very existence.

  ‘Rape happens, does not make it a rape “culture” though,’ one young man wrote to me recently. ‘People don’t support rapists, we punish them. Therefore it is not our “culture”.’

  No amount of evidence would convince him otherwise—not the statistics on rape convictions, which show that fewer than 1 percent of all cases brought to police result in a guilty verdict, nor the daily examples of language used to minimise rape and its impact on survivors, nor even the numerous high-profile cases that demonstrate just how readily people lend their support to men accused of rape.

  A few years ago, I delivered a lecture on sexual violence to a group of around a hundred students at a university. I took great care to define ‘rape culture’ not as a system that enthusiastically and brazenly teaches people how to rape but one that instead minimises the perceived impact of sexual violence by teaching society that there are always extenuating circumstances. She went home with him. She gave him mixed signals. She was drinking. She was flirting. She was dressed like she wanted it. She didn’t say no or fight back. She’s done it before. What was he supposed to do?

  During my talk, I carefully went over the details of the Turner trial, including the fact that his swimming record was frequently mentioned in articles covering the assault charges and that his status as a young white man with a privileged upbringing earned him special consideration when it came to sentencing.

  When I’d finished speaking and called for questions, a young man put his hand up.

  ‘How can you claim we live in a rape culture?’ he demanded. ‘No one is teaching anyone else to rape! Everybody hates rape! Rapists get, like, really long sentences!’

  Reader, there aren’t enough #facepalms in the world.

  It seems to be young men especially who live in this fantasy land where ‘everyone’ is universally opposed to rape, no ifs, ands or buts. I’m probably reading too much into it (because I am a hysterical, man-hating banshee, after all), but it’s almost as if men are socialised with a completely different set of rules and expectations when it comes to understanding the role that sexual violence plays in our society. Weird, right?

  Rape culture doesn’t refer to a system in which sexual violence is being overtly encouraged or taught. Rather, it characterises a society in which the impact of sexual violence is not only minimised but the definition of what constitutes ‘real’ sexual assault is considered up for public debate and scrutiny. It enforces and codifies the language of victim-blaming and perpetrator-excusing. It very carefully provides an array of caveats and explanations for why the ordinary boys and men who comprise the majority of perpetrators of sexual violence (as opposed to the more popular view of the Alleyway Monsters) are not really to blame for their actions. In terms of how ‘culture’ is conceived in this concept, it’s better to think of it as less the yoghurt itself and more the fermentation process that creates the perfect conditions for the yoghurt to exist.

  A function of rape culture is that it works especially hard to provide excuses for the rich young white men whose careers and futures are treated with more respect than the bodies of the women they assault (particularly when those bodies belong to women of colour, sex workers, working-class women, disabled women or any combination of those characteristics). The other young men who question my stance on this issue no doubt genuinely believe that ‘everybody hates rapists’—but that’s because rape culture has succeeded in convincing the general population that rapists never look like men you know and, therefore, the men you know can never actually be rapists.

  Supporters (conscious or otherwise) of rape culture are extremely invested in maintaining the fiction about what properly defines a rapist. A rapist isn’t the man you work with or the one you drink beers with at the pub. He isn’t the man you train with at the gym or the one you play football with on the weekend. He isn’t the nice young lad who lives in a college dorm while studying engineering. A rapist isn’t married with children, nor does he have parents or siblings or a network of people who’ve known him all his life. He isn’t the bloke who fixes your car, the one who holds the door open for stragglers, the man who sells you vegies at the greengrocer or that nice guy who reads the weather on the evening news. He isn’t your brother, your son, your boyfriend or your husband. He’s certainly never wealthy or even from a moderate middle-class background, and his class—especially when combined with white skin—protects his actions from ever being likened to those of a real rapist.

  Real rapists, as everyone knows, are those antisocial, itinerant Shadow Men who live in the walls and bear no resemblance to other men at all. Real rapists exhibit openly misogynistic attitudes, which is how you can tell the difference between them and men whose misogyny is cloaked in more complex contradictions, the men who are ‘really good blokes’ who, at worst, have ‘just made a mistake’ and at best are being hounded by vengeful women after fame and money.

  Listen, it would certainly be a lot easier if rapists were easy to identify by the five-pronged tail growing out of their butts. If we could clock rapists in both public and private spaces, we could better protect ourselves from their choices. Unfortunately, life isn’t that simple. Rapists aren’t accompanied by the piercing smell of rotten eggs, nor is their skin covered in thorns. Rapists do indeed look just like everyone else.

  Why, some of them probably even look like men you know.

  If you don’t think you need to be worried about the lessons young men are learning about entitlement, sex and coded male bonding, then allow me to demonstrate to you in meticulous detail why you’re wrong.

  Towards the end of March 2018, as the international cricketing world twisted itself into knots over evidence of ball tampering by the Australians (not the first time men from this country have been caught fiddling with their balls, to be honest), a far more damning example of male entitlement in team sports was coming to its judiciary conclusion in Ireland. Unlike the manipulation of an inanimate object, this incident involved the alleged sexual assault of a young woman by two well-known rugby players, the alleged attempted sexual assault of her by one of their teammates and the alleged attempts to obstruct justice for the young woman by a mutual friend of all four men.

  Just another day on the elite male sportsmen stage, I guess.

  If you have even a passing knowledge of rape culture, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that the first of these transgressions (the ball tampering) triggered more anger among the general public than the second—because obviously being caught cheating in the world’s most boring game is a far greater crime than colluding with your mates to sexually degrade and violate ‘some slag’ at a party.

  But let’s back up a little.

  The complaint relates to events that took place in the early hours of 28 June 2016. Ulster rugby players Paddy Jackson, Stuart Olding and Blane McIlroy and their friend Rory Harrison had been out drinking in Belfast. After spending a few hours in the VIP area at Ollie’s nightclub in the Merchant Hotel, at 2.30 am they decided to head back to Jackson’s house to continue partying. They were accompanied by four young women.

  At 5 am, one of these young women—we’ll call her Jane Doe—was escorted home in a taxi by Harrison. According to later courtroom testimony given by the taxi driver, she was ‘crying and sobbing throughout the journey’ and ‘definitely seemed very upset’. The driver recalls that Harrison appeared to be comforting the woman while speaking ‘in code’ on the phone with an unnamed person. As the driver told the court, ‘I recall him saying to the
person on the phone, “She is with me now, she is not good, I will call you in the morning.”’

  What transpired between 2.30 and 5 am on the morning of 28 June would later become the subject of a jury trial with four defendants: Jackson, facing one charge each of sexual assault and rape; Olding, one charge of rape (with a second charge of sexual assault having been dropped earlier); McIlroy, one charge of exposure; and Harrison, one charge of perverting the course of justice and withholding information.

  So, what happened?

  THE PARTY

  (Readers are advised the following account contains graphic descriptions of rape and sexual assault.)

  In a transcript of a WhatsApp conversation presented to the court, Jane Doe is shown texting her friend the next day saying she’d had the ‘worst night ever’ and had been ‘raped by 3 Ulster fucking scum’. In a series of messages, she alleges Jackson followed her into a bedroom when she went to get her bag. She says he came up behind her and ‘the next thing I’m bent over the bed’. Her friend asked, ‘Were there more than one?’, to which Jane Doe replied, ‘Two and then a third tried to get involved. I was crying.’

  During the eventual trial, the prosecution argued that while Jackson vaginally raped Jane Doe, Olding entered the room and proceeded to orally rape her. Jane Doe told the court the alleged assault only ended after a third man, McIlroy, entered the room with his penis in his hand and said, ‘You fucked the other guys, why won’t you fuck me?’

  ‘It was at that point that my fight instinct kicked in,’ she told the eight men and three women sitting on the jury.

  After this, Harrison (the one later charged with perverting the course of justice) escorted Jane Doe home in a taxi, her sobbing on his shoulder. Phone records later showed that the person he’d been overheard speaking with on the phone was McIlroy. A few minutes after this call, CCTV footage at Jane Doe’s home shows Harrison walking her to the front door and giving her a hug. Shortly afterwards, he sent her a message saying, ‘Keep the chin up you wonderful young woman.’

  ‘Thank you so much for leaving me home,’ Jane Doe replied. ‘I really appreciate it Rory, you’ve been far too kind.’

  THE AFTERMATH

  The next day, Harrison held two concurrent conversations over WhatsApp—one with McIlroy, and one with Jane Doe.

  At 12.01 pm, Harrison messaged Jane Doe and asked, ‘Feeling better today?’

  She replied fourteen minutes later, at 12.15 pm, saying, ‘To be honest no, I know you must be mates with those guys but I don’t like them and what happened was not consensual which is why I was so upset. Again, thank you for taking me home. That was really appreciated.’

  He replied, ‘Jesus. I’m not sure what to say.’

  Meanwhile, Harrison—whom Jane Doe had earlier described to her friend as ‘a really nice guy’—was corresponding with McIlroy simultaneously.

  McIlroy, 12.03 pm (responding to a message that had been deleted and was unable to be retrieved by police): ‘Really, fuck sake, did you calm her, where does she live?’

  Harrison, 12.03 pm: ‘Mate no jokes she was in hysterics, wasn’t going to end well.’

  Harrison, 12.03 pm (in a message that was deleted and then recovered by police): ‘Aye, just threw her home then went back to mine.’

  Earlier that morning, Jane Doe had summarised her physical distress in a text to her friend: ‘I have bruising on my inner thighs. I feel like I’ve got bruising literally on my fanny. They were so rough I’ve got my period a week earlier.’ (During the trial, she said that Jackson had at one point tried to fit his entire hand into her vagina. A medical examination conducted shortly after the alleged rape confirmed she had sustained a vaginal tear and that this was likely responsible for the bleeding she had confused with her period. Meanwhile, photographs deemed inadmissible as evidence because they might ‘prejudice the jury’ showed spots of blood on Jackson’s bed. Jackson’s defence successfully argued that the photographs should be disallowed because they showed additional bloodstains that didn’t belong to Jane Doe. Jackson declined to explain where they came from.)

  As her injuries were being detailed to a friend who was now urging her to go to a rape crisis centre and consider reporting the incident to the police, Jackson et al were describing a very different night on their own private messaging services.

  Responding to a message from a friend asking, ‘How was she?’, Olding replied, ‘She was very, very loose.’ He told the friend (later revealed to be fellow Ulster teammate Craig Gilroy) that they had spent the previous evening at ‘Cutters, Ollies, then after-party’.

  Gilroy replied, ‘Any sluts get fucked?’

  ‘Precious secrets,’ came the response.

  Shortly after, Olding boasted in a group chat that included the four men that ‘there was a bit of spit roasting [when a woman is penetrated vaginally and orally at the same time] going on last night fellas’. Jackson replied almost immediately, saying, ‘There was a lot of spit roast last night.’ Olding described it as being ‘like a merry go round at the carnival’. A man not present during the alleged assault posted, ‘Why are we all such legends?’, to which McIlroy replied, ‘I know it’s ridiculous.’

  Two days later, McIlroy bragged in another WhatsApp message, ‘Pumped a girl with Jacko on Monday. Roasted her. Then another on Tuesday night.’

  Shortly afterwards, an official complaint of rape was made by Jane Doe, and Jackson was advised to get a solicitor. McIlroy texted Harrison and asked, ‘Do Paddy and Stu have a lawyer and stuff. [sic] When do you reckon they’ll be released . . . do his parents know?’

  Harrison replied, ‘No idea—they didn’t tell me anything. If not my dad will know who to get on to.’

  McIlroy: ‘Do you know who this girl even is, this is ridiculous, surely it’s all just gonna get dropped?’

  Harrison: [replies with Jane Doe’s real name.]

  McIlroy: ‘What age, what school?’

  Harrison: ‘Hopefully it’ll be thrown out, Just a silly girl who’s been [sic] done something then regretted it. She’s causing so much trouble for the lads.’

  She’s causing so much trouble for the lads.

  THE TRIAL

  Jane Doe hadn’t wanted to go to the police. When her friend advised her to file a report, Doe’s response was incredulous. ‘I’m not going up against Ulster rugby,’ she said. ‘Yea, because that’ll work.’ She later explained her change of mind to the court, saying, ‘The more I thought about it, rape is a game of power and control. They rely on your silence. The only way you take the power back is when you actually do something about it. I may be preventing it happening to someone else.’ She went on, ‘It could so easily have been my friends outside Ollie’s. It could have been my sister outside. [Reporting it] was the best decision I made.’

  Unfortunately, it appears her fears of ‘going up against Ulster rugby’ were well founded. During the course of a trial in which each of the four accused had access to top-notch legal representation (and in which four different defendants meant four separate cross-examinations of the complainant), Jane Doe was grilled about what QC Brendan Kelly (representing Jackson) called her ‘inconsistent accounts’ of the night in question. He suggested she was after any celebrity, pointing to CCTV footage in which she was shown briefly (and barely) interacting with two other popular sporting figures outside Ollie’s nightclub. She dismissed this as absurd.

  Upon hearing that Jane Doe had experienced a ‘freeze response’ (widely recognised by medical professionals as common in situations where extreme trauma is occurring, from sexual assaults to military attacks), Kelly pressed: ‘What does frozen mean? Is it one of the lies? Is it a lie deployed to explain what happened?’ He argued that Jane Doe was ‘fixated’ with Jackson, and that she had lied about being raped because she was scared her friends would find out she’d had ‘group sex’ with Jackson and Olding. Requesting that Jane Doe’s clothing from the night of the party be shown to the jury, Kelly suggested the bloodstains found on her un
derwear were the result of bleeding that had taken place before the alleged assault. This was categorically rejected by Jane Doe, who pointed again to medical confirmation that she had suffered an internal tear.

  Kelly cross-examined her for three days straight.

  Frank O’Donoghue, acting for Olding, focused on many of the same points as Kelly during his cross-examination but asked why Doe had made a claim of vaginal rape against his client. He reminded the jury that Olding was charged with one count of oral rape. Jane Doe reminded O’Donoghue that by the time of her medical examination, she hadn’t slept for thirty hours and was in a state of emotional distress. Additionally, she said there were points at which both men were behind her and so she couldn’t be sure which of them was penetrating her vaginally. (The jury later learned that Olding had initially been charged with one count of vaginal rape, but that this had been dropped by the Public Prosecution Service.)

  Cross-examination by Gavan Duffy QC, the lawyer acting for Harrison, repeated the claim by Kelly that Jane Doe had been ‘staring’ at Jackson that night and had followed him upstairs. ‘He could well be right about that,’ she replied, ‘but he is also sitting in the dock.’

  Like Kelly, McIlroy’s lawyer Arthur Harvey QC grilled Jane Doe about the so-called ‘inconsistencies’ in her account. She had told a doctor during her initial medical examination that McIlroy had entered the room before lowering his trousers, but to the court she said he came in already naked.

  ‘You go into shutdown,’ she responded. ‘It’s incredibly hard to state what happened until you’ve actually processed it.’

  ‘You’ve said this before,’ Harvey replied, criticising her use of the second-person ‘you’. ‘It’s almost as if you’re repeating something you’ve read rather than your personal experience.’

 

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