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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
DURHAM--"She's just a stripper," is what a young man reportedly said during the early minutes of March 14 in the back of a taxicab, as it drove away from a house here, where an exotic dancer says she was gang-raped at a party thrown by members of Duke University's lacrosse team.
In the swill of media coverage of the case, driven for weeks by the defense team for the accused rapists, there is, in this four-word statement, something that crystallizes what is at the heart of it—-slithery calculations about the worth and word of a 27-year-old woman, who is a college student and mother of two, and who dances scantily clad for the entertainment of men.
In flashes of talk radio, and in the drawn-out subtext of late-night cable “news” shows, the worth and word of this woman, from Durham’s working class Black community, is pitted against that of the wealthier White Duke athletes accused of attacking her. The worst of these calculations was perhaps uttered by the right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who called the woman a “ho” (and later offered a hollow apology). But spittle from bigots like Tucker Carson of MSNBC and Bill O’Reilly of Fox News has not been far behind. The calculations have risen and fallen, as the American public is asked to play in our very own episode of “CSI” or “Law and Order” and pre-judge the case in the media, rather than in a court of law. One web site is even taking bets on the legal outcome, which may be a whole different matter from arriving at the truth. Talk about calculations!
The “CSI”-type scrutiny most certainly intensified when the first round of DNA tests in April did not link any members of the lacrosse team to the alleged attack. (Recent revelations that the accuser may have been sodomized with a broomstick have furthered speculation about the lack of foreign DNA on her body. Results from a second round of DNA tests did link one of the team members to the victim.) Not mentioned in the litany of pro-defense accusations is the fact that much DNA evidence in the case was likely lost when the police did not search the home in question, rented by members of the team, until more than two days after the reported assault.
Even though a physical examination of the accuser by a sexual assault nurse and physician at Duke University Medical Center yielded results consistent with that of sexual violence, those results seem to be disregarded in the news coverage. Even this type of physical evidence, which would seemingly please the “CSI” crowd, is not enough. The wounds of her Black body do not speak louder than the denials by the defense lawyers for the accused, which include three Duke lacrosse players, Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann and David Evans.
The denials, loud, indignant and backed up in the case of Seligmann with a paper trail that his lawyers say provide an alibi, seem designed to deny the accuser even the social standing to bring such a complaint, and to force her into dropping the matter. The 1988 Tawana Brawley case, in which a Black teen-ager in upstate New York falsely accused White men of raping her, is cited as a precedent for why this mother of two should be disbelieved. In the long history of the United States, in which Black women were routinely sexually abused by White men, it has been less than 50 years since the watershed Tallahassee rape case, in which for the first time, four White men were convicted by an all-White jury of gang-raping a Black woman, a student at Florida A&M University.
“Rape, like lynching and murder, served as a tool of psychological and physical intimidation that expressed White male domination and buttressed White supremacy,” wrote Danielle L. Maguire, in an essay about the case for The Journal of American History. White men used rape and rumors of rape not only to justify violence against Black men but to remind Black women that their bodies were not their own.”
II. Thong World
The Duke rape case is playing out before today’s backdrop of frequent music video images of scantily clad Black women gyrating provocatively. Or controversial film images, such as those paraded at this year’s Academy Awards show, in honor of “Hustle and Flow,” which told the story of a broke down Memphis pimp and his house of primarily Black prostitutes. (On prime-time television, dancers were dressed as hookers in hot pink hot pants and a gold lamé negligee!)
There has also been, in video, film and other elements of pop culture, much of it linked to hip hop, a normalization of the fetish of strip clubs and strippers. Artists including Ludacris, Lil Jon, Snoop Dogg and Lloyd Banks have included in videos, for music or general entertainment, the ubiquitous shot of a near naked stripper swinging on a pole (or “dancing” on a lap, or whatever). T-Pain raps earnestly that he is “in love with a stripper.” Even the recent, comparatively innocent coming-of-age drama “ATL” includes a wry reference to the normalcy of young women entering the strip club trade. How appropriate that “ATL” is set in Atlanta, which is distinguished as “Mecca” not just for the Black middle class but for patrons of strip clubs. The image of the stripper, combined with that other male hegemonic bookend from the past year—-the “gold digger”—-has combined to create an easy stereotypic pocket in which the woman at the center of the Durham case can be both placed and dismissed by men of all colors.
But as disturbing as TV and film images of the stripper and “gold digger” may be, they pale in comparison to those of the growing, multi-billion-dollar pornography industry that, as it reaches more young males via the Internet, increasingly chucks any semblance of plot for more violent sexual acts, especially gang rape. There is even hard core porn associated with Japanese animé, a form of animation followed by many young people. Author James Wolcott points out that rough anal sex has become the norm today in porn, compared to the “specialty” that it was during the 1970’s, and that “one of the stronger trends in porn” is violent oral sex, “culminating in semen swallowing, sometimes from multiple donors.” Even those who are not consumers of porn recognize the increasing level of sexual violence, including gang rape, in mainstream theatrical releases, including critically acclaimed films, such as “Leaving Los Vegas” and “Dogville.”
“So much of the pornography that men are buying fuses sexual desire with cruelty against women," says Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, in a study of “mainstream” pornography. He notes that one popular and typical video series from Anabolic Video Productions, includes the gang rape of a young woman by 13 football players.
Whatever happened here in the house on N. Buchanan Street sits at the intersection where past meets present and pop culture imagination horrifically alters our reality. According to Jensen, men spend $10 billion a year on pornography and 11,000 new pornographic films are made every year. In those films, “women are not people,” he says. “In pornography, women are three holes and two hands.”
III. Alibis and Aliases
According to police and court records and news accounts, the troubles began when Dan Flannery, a team captain, called an escort service and, using the name Adam, hired two dancers for $400 each for a party at 610 Buchanan Blvd. on March 13. The accuser, who took a call for the job at about 8:30 p.m. that night, said she thought she would be dancing at a bachelor party. She showed up at the house at about 11:30 p.m. and met a second dancer, Kim Roberts.
A neighbor to the Buchanan house, Jason Bissey, said that players began to gather and drink in the backyard of the house that afternoon. Later that night, he says he also saw the dancers arrive and then exit the house after about 20 minutes, as they and the players exchanged angry words with each other.
Defense lawyers have released time-coded digital photographs that they say show the two women dancing in the living room between midnight and 12:04 a.m. and then stopping the performance. Players say that they asked the dancers to leave because one was drunk. But the accuser and Roberts say they left because the men became rowdy and because one threatened to sexually assault them with a broomstick.
Bissey says that he then saw the accuser re-enter the house because she had left one of her shoes. The dancer says that both she and Roberts re-entered the house after some of the players apologized for the actions and language of some of the guests.
It was during this time, after she re-entered the house, that the accuser says she was separated from Roberts and pulled into the bathroom by two men who said, “Sweetheart, you can’t leave.” According to a transcript of her photo identification session obtained by WTVD in Raleigh, she says that Seligmann forced her to have oral sex, that Finnerty raped and sodomized her and that a third man strangled her. She told police that the attack lasted about 30 minutes.
The alleged victim also reports in the affidavit that those who hired her used false names when referring to each other. She said specifically that one man who called himself “Adam” was called “Dan” by everyone else. An investigating officer states in an affidavit filed in connection with the case that he believes false names were used “to create an atmosphere where confusion would become a factor in this event should problems arise in the future where any actions or conduct would be questioned.”
Seligmann’s attorneys say that a paper trial proves that after he called for a taxi at 12:14 a.m., he left the house, used an ATM machine, ordered food and entered his dormitory building at 12:46 a.m.
Kim Roberts called police at 12:53 to report that men outside of 610 Buchanan Boulevard had shouted epithets at her and a friend. Bissey reported hearing one man yell, “Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt!” Roberts also noticed that the other dancer, who both she and Bissey say was lucid and sober when she first arrived, was, by this time, barely coherent and had to be helped to the car. Roberts later speculated that the accuser was drugged at the party because the accuser did accept a drink from her hosts and also drank half of the drink offered to Roberts, who had declined it.
Less than an hour later, Ryan McFadden, a member of the team, sent an email from his dorm room that read:
“To whom it may concern
Tommrow night, after tonight’s show, i’ve decided to have some strippers over to edens 2c. all are welcome.. however, there will be no nudity, I plan on killing the (expletive) as soon as they walk in and proceding to cut their skin off while (being sexually gratified) in my duke issue spandex…” He signed the email with his jersey number, 41.
The accuser was taken by police to Duke University Medical Center by 2:31 and, there, police classified the case as a rape investigation.
When police responded to the house at 12:55 am, they said the house was quiet and that no one answered a knock at the door. In contrast, the cabdriver, Moez Mostafar, who has corroborated much of the defense account, said that when he returned to the house at 1:07 a.m. to pick up more passengers, there were still men milling around near the house and that some of them were involved in an angry verbal exchange with Roberts. It was during this second cab trip, according to the driver, that one of his passengers said, in response to concern expressed by a fellow traveler, “She’s just a stripper.”
Esther Iverem, founder and editor of www.SeeingBlack.com, is author of the new book of poems, Living in Babylon.
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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