St. Paul’s School student Owen Labrie will spend a year in jail, be on probation for the five years after that and registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life. But not because he raped his accuser — he was given these punishments for sleeping with a classmate that was underage.
While activists might cheer that they “got one” with Labrie, the fact of the matter is that this is yet another high-profile rape accusation that didn’t pass muster.
Jeannie Suk, a Harvard Law professor, notes in The New Yorker that Labrie was found not guilty of “aggravated felonious sexual assault.”
“For a conviction, the prosecution needed to prove that the accuser had shown, by speech or conduct, that she did not freely consent, and that the accused knew or should have known she was not consenting,” Suk wrote. “But the jury acquitted him of these charges, meaning that it did not regard the acts as lacking consent.”
The charges Labrie was convicted on, however, he would have been found guilty of even if the woman insisted the sex was consensual but someone else had turned him in to police.
“The jury did convict him of three charges of misdemeanor sexual assault, which, in New Hampshire, did not require proof of non-consent but were based instead on the fact that the girl was under the age of 16,” Suk wrote. “Even if the girl had sworn that the sex was fully consensual, Labrie still would have been guilty of these charges. (Minors cannot legally consent, no matter what they feel.)”
Labrie was also convicted of endangering the welfare of a child because he solicited sex from the young woman through various means, including email and Facebook.
“Labrie’s felony conviction for using computer services — email and Facebook — to ‘seduce, solicit, lure or entice’ a child under 16 to have sex was also unrelated to consent,” Suk wrote. “If he had used email to ask the girl to meet and they had unambiguously consensual sex, all these criminal convictions could still stand.”
In evidence of activists infecting the minds of many people to believe no one lies about rape, the judge in this case, Larry M. Smukler of New Hampshire Superior Court, said that because the young woman listed symptoms of trauma (because there’s no way she couldn’t have been coached on buzzwords), she must have been telling the truth.
Because she claimed trauma was the reason her statements were inconsistent (a common practice with today’s accusers), and that she felt worthless and suicidal after the encounter, the judge accepted that she was suffering.
I’ve felt depressed and worthless after a bad breakup, but that doesn’t make my ex a criminal.
But this is where we are on rape and sexual assault accusations. Bad feelings and regret are now evidence of a crime, even when all other evidence points to the contrary.
“What we are really talking about here is not rape, as we have until recently understood it, but rather sex that we strongly dislike,” Suk wrote.
