Lorraine Dusky is the author of "Still Unequal: The Shameful Truth About Women and Justice in America."
March 5, 2004
Kobe Bryant's accuser will be questioned about her sexual past, we learned from the news earlier this week.
How does John Q. Public read that? That the 19-year-old has a juicy "sexual past," ergo, she's a slut. Score one again for the defense; the loser is the victim's constitutional right to privacy.
Pamela Mackey, Bryant's unprincipled defense attorney, has kept up this kind of attack from the beginning, not so much arguing the case in the press as defaming the woman's character.
Read the story, and you learn that the questioning will be in a preliminary hearing, and what comes out may or may not be introduced at the actual trial. Neither may all the other prejudicial blather falling from Mackey's loose lips. But in the meantime, the young woman's reputation - that is, her credibility - is further destroyed.
Mackey's defense of her very cool client is built on doing serious damage to the woman's reputation. Since the victim is white and Bryant is black, Mackey's even accused her of being a racist - even though there is not a single shred of evidence to back this claim.
All this is happening well before we go to trial, in a calculated attempt to float the idea that the accuser is not a particularly worthy victim. Pollute the pool of potential jurors this way and you've got a good chance of a slam-dunk victory of innocence.
What ever happened to those rape- shield laws that were supposed to protect women, you ask. I'm asking, too. As a rape survivor, I'm horrified at Mackey's amoral antics, and reminded again why I didn't call the police. I didn't end up with enough bruises - and besides that, I knew the bastard. I had let him into my apartment when he was banging on the door at 1 a.m. I didn't want to wake the neighbors.
Wrong choice. Especially if you want to report a sexual assault. But that was more than a quarter of a century ago. Since then most states - including Colorado, where the Bryant case is being played out - have enacted rape-shield laws.
But they only cover what happens in front of a jury. In addition, the very laws that were supposed to protect a woman's credibility have had the unintended effect of diminishing her right to privacy, notes women's-rights advocate and former prosecutor Wendy Murphy. "Rape-shield laws," Murphy says, "reduced a woman's right to privacy from a core principle of freedom to a mere legal entitlement. Now when it bumps up against a defendant's rights, it more easily gives way to his constitutional claims to a fair trial, due process, confrontation, the right to cross-examination. Over time, the intended goal of the statute was worn away by judicial decision."
So far, Colorado's law has been useless. To date, Mackey has insinuated that the woman had other sexual partners before and soon after her encounter with Bryant; that she is mentally unstable; that she only did this to attract the attention of an ex-boyfriend.
Mackey argued against keeping the rape counselor's notes private and injected racism into the trial with her offhand comment that there's "a lot of history about black men being falsely accused" by white women.
Sure, it's happened. But this blanket statement is bogus. A turn-of-the century black journalist, Ida Wells, found that most lynchings were for absolutely no offense at all, and were instead "just an excuse to get rid of the Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property."
Later researchers found the same thing. Mackey didn't support her contention with facts - just getting it out there was enough to further pollute the jury pool, possibly in an attempt to get the trial transferred to Denver, where there are more Bryant fans.
No one is arguing that Kobe Bryant doesn't have the right to a fair trial. But the woman-hating, race-baiting tactics of his defense ought to be stopped, however they can be.
Mackey needs to be sanctioned for her unethical behavior. We wouldn't tolerate a black witness being discredited like this because of his color, yet we tolerate this kind of conduct against a woman when she reports she's been sexually assaulted.
From the tactics going on right now, and the media's complicity with them, it's clear that we still devalue a woman's word, and the Bill of Rights does not apply to a woman once she cries rape.
March 5, 2004
Kobe Bryant's accuser will be questioned about her sexual past, we learned from the news earlier this week.
How does John Q. Public read that? That the 19-year-old has a juicy "sexual past," ergo, she's a slut. Score one again for the defense; the loser is the victim's constitutional right to privacy.
Pamela Mackey, Bryant's unprincipled defense attorney, has kept up this kind of attack from the beginning, not so much arguing the case in the press as defaming the woman's character.
Read the story, and you learn that the questioning will be in a preliminary hearing, and what comes out may or may not be introduced at the actual trial. Neither may all the other prejudicial blather falling from Mackey's loose lips. But in the meantime, the young woman's reputation - that is, her credibility - is further destroyed.
Mackey's defense of her very cool client is built on doing serious damage to the woman's reputation. Since the victim is white and Bryant is black, Mackey's even accused her of being a racist - even though there is not a single shred of evidence to back this claim.
All this is happening well before we go to trial, in a calculated attempt to float the idea that the accuser is not a particularly worthy victim. Pollute the pool of potential jurors this way and you've got a good chance of a slam-dunk victory of innocence.
What ever happened to those rape- shield laws that were supposed to protect women, you ask. I'm asking, too. As a rape survivor, I'm horrified at Mackey's amoral antics, and reminded again why I didn't call the police. I didn't end up with enough bruises - and besides that, I knew the bastard. I had let him into my apartment when he was banging on the door at 1 a.m. I didn't want to wake the neighbors.
Wrong choice. Especially if you want to report a sexual assault. But that was more than a quarter of a century ago. Since then most states - including Colorado, where the Bryant case is being played out - have enacted rape-shield laws.
But they only cover what happens in front of a jury. In addition, the very laws that were supposed to protect a woman's credibility have had the unintended effect of diminishing her right to privacy, notes women's-rights advocate and former prosecutor Wendy Murphy. "Rape-shield laws," Murphy says, "reduced a woman's right to privacy from a core principle of freedom to a mere legal entitlement. Now when it bumps up against a defendant's rights, it more easily gives way to his constitutional claims to a fair trial, due process, confrontation, the right to cross-examination. Over time, the intended goal of the statute was worn away by judicial decision."
So far, Colorado's law has been useless. To date, Mackey has insinuated that the woman had other sexual partners before and soon after her encounter with Bryant; that she is mentally unstable; that she only did this to attract the attention of an ex-boyfriend.
Mackey argued against keeping the rape counselor's notes private and injected racism into the trial with her offhand comment that there's "a lot of history about black men being falsely accused" by white women.
Sure, it's happened. But this blanket statement is bogus. A turn-of-the century black journalist, Ida Wells, found that most lynchings were for absolutely no offense at all, and were instead "just an excuse to get rid of the Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property."
Later researchers found the same thing. Mackey didn't support her contention with facts - just getting it out there was enough to further pollute the jury pool, possibly in an attempt to get the trial transferred to Denver, where there are more Bryant fans.
No one is arguing that Kobe Bryant doesn't have the right to a fair trial. But the woman-hating, race-baiting tactics of his defense ought to be stopped, however they can be.
Mackey needs to be sanctioned for her unethical behavior. We wouldn't tolerate a black witness being discredited like this because of his color, yet we tolerate this kind of conduct against a woman when she reports she's been sexually assaulted.
From the tactics going on right now, and the media's complicity with them, it's clear that we still devalue a woman's word, and the Bill of Rights does not apply to a woman once she cries rape.