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An unnamed woman claims Greg Kelly had drinks with her and then raped her after they went to her office in October. Greg Kelly has not been criminally charged.

The New York Daily News reports:

The police commissioner became aware of the accusation against his son when a man, claiming to be her boyfriend — apparently enraged over the alleged attack — recently approached the commissioner at a public event.

“He said, ‘Your son ruined my girlfriend’s life,” said NYPD spokesman Paul Browne. “The commissioner said ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He said he didn’t want to talk about it here so the commissioner told him to send a letter.”

Read More At The New York Daily News

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Neil Irvin, the executive director of Men Can Stop Rape, stared MOST so young men can be protectors of their community.

The New York Daily News reports:

“We discuss how traditional masculinity contributes to sexual assault and other forms of men’s violence against women,” he said.

There are MOST clubs in three city schools and others scattered across the nation.

Once a week, the kids and group leaders talk frankly about what it means to get a woman’s consent, sexual health and responsibility.

Read More At The New York Daily News

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Drysdale was convicted of robbery with aggravation, indecent assault, wounding with intent and illegal possession of firearm.

The Jamaica Star reports:

The police found Drysdale at the hospital suffering from an injury to the penis. When questioned he said that he was in bed with a woman when her jealous lover came home and hit him with a piece of chain on his penis. The penis which was bandaged was almost severed.

The Crown led evidence that on June 20, 2008, Drysdale committed the offences in Stony Hill, St Andrew. He went to the homes of three women, robbed and raped two of them, indecently assaulted the third woman and then wounded her.

Read More At The Jamaica Star

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Thomas Haynesworth, 46, spent more than half of his life behind bars after he was mistakenly identified by a rape victim in 1984.

It is the first time Virginia has issued a “writ of actual innocence” in a rape case without the use of DNA evidence.

“The victims have not recanted, no one has confessed, and there is no direct evidence that Haynesworth did not commit these crimes,” Judges Larry G. Elder and William G. Petty wrote in a dissenting opinion. “The Attorney General has merely expressed his opinion that Haynesworth is innocent.”

Read more at washingtonpost.com.

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According to reports, the women were arrested after police found them driving around with 31 used condoms in their car. The semen is believed to bring success in business.

One anonymous man interviewed on TV claimed women kidnapped him, injected him with something “that gave me a strong sexual desire,” and when they were finished they dumped him naked in the countryside.

Read more at Newser.

According to police, the student is now fourteen and claims to have had a relationship with Tillery for two years.

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The New York Daily News reports:

Tillery was charged with rape, unlawful dealing of drugs and alcohol to a child, sexual misconduct, sexual abuse and acting in a manner injurious to a child.

Police sources said the victim was a sixth-grader at Middle School 35, the Stephen Decatur School, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, where Tillery taught.

Read More At The New York Daily News

Hugues-Denver Akassy had said the sexual encounters were consensual and the other allegations resulted from misunderstandings.

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Prosecutors said Akassy, 43, charmed the women with a debonair demeanor and a phony persona, then became a sexually aggressive stalker. They said Akassy, who was homeless, claimed to be buying a brownstone and held himself out as an accomplished journalist on a website rife with plagiarized praise written about real journalists.

“What we’re talking about here is a person who initiates every relationship in his life with a falsehood,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Jessica Troy told jurors in a closing argument last week. “And I submit to you, there is no reason to think he is honest about anything.”

Four women testified; the one who said she was raped did not. Those who testified said Akassy suavely struck up conversations with them on the street and other public places around the city. Some said they then met him for wine-and-cheese picnics in parks and other dates before he became threatening with unwanted advances.

When things soured, he often wrote the women profane and vitriolic emails, which jurors saw during the trial. In some cases, Akassy showed up outside the women’s apartment buildings or at their workplaces, they said.

Akassy testified that the women willingly engaged in the sexual encounters — on a subway grate in a park, in a stairwell of an apartment building. Overall, he and his lawyers said, the accusations were leveled by troubled women who misconstrued and overreacted to his overtures.

“Ladies and gentlemen, misinterpretation seems to be a theme that runs through these cases,” defense lawyer Glenn Hardy said.

Akassy said he didn’t write the now-gone website.

The woman said Ivory Coast native Hugues Akassy approached her in May 2007 and struck up a conversation.

“He mentioned that he was an international journalist,” she testified in Manhattan state Supreme Court, where he’s being tried for crimes including assault against five women.

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Akassy, who’s in his early 40s, wooed the women by portraying himself falsely as a French-language TV journalist, prosecutors say. He has pleaded not guilty.

The travel agent said she agreed to go to a bar with Akassy and “his hands started wandering around my chest, and he started to kiss me.” She said she rejected his advances and told him she was married.

But she met him several times over the next few months, joining him for a picnic once and taking him to five work-related seminars.

“I actually thought he was handsome, intriguing, debonair,” the woman said. “I was flattered.”

It was after the last of the seminars, in November 2007, that she invited Akassy to admire the view from the rooftop of her East Side apartment building, she said.

She said he started to make advances again and she told him, “I’m not interested.”

Back in the elevator, the woman said, Akassy pressed the button for her floor, though she had no intention of letting him into her ninth-floor apartment. But he forced her out of the elevator and into the nearby stairwell, she said.

The woman said Akassy pushed her onto her knees, lowered his pants and forced her to perform oral sex on him.

“It was over in a flash,” she said, adding that Akassy taunted her by saying, “See, I told you you like it. That wasn’t so bad, was it? You crazy American woman.”

Akassy’s attorney, Glenn Hardy, asked the woman why she didn’t scream, and she replied, “I was very afraid.”

The woman didn’t report an assault until 2010, when she saw a news account of another attack with which Akassy has been charged.

Accusations against Akassy include camping out on one woman’s fire escape, berating another woman on the street after she had her boyfriend ask him to leave her alone and forcing a third woman, a Russian tourist, to have sex with him after inviting her to picnic with him in a park.

His trial before Judge Jill Konviser started Thursday.

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In four cases over 11 months, women, all in their mid-50s to mid-60s, were attacked in their homes in Plano, Coppell and the Denton County community of Shady Shores.

The Dallas Morning News reports that, during the assaults, the man has revealed that he knows personal information about the victims

Plano police also released video and photos of a man who could be connected to one attack. He is thought to be black, in his late 30s to mid-40s, 5 feet 7 to 6 feet tall and 250 to 300 pounds. He appears to have a thin, well-trimmed beard and short hair, possibly with a receding hairline.

“SlutWalk” was founded to combat people that blame women that were victims of sexual assault.

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The Huffington Post reports:

We are deeply concerned. As Black women and girls we find no space in SlutWalk, no space for participation and to unequivocally denounce rape and sexual assault as we have experienced it. We are perplexed by the use of the term “slut” and by any implication that this word, much like the word “Ho” or the “N” word should be re-appropriated. The way in which we are perceived and what happens to us before, during and after sexual assault crosses the boundaries of our mode of dress. Much of this is tied to our particular history. In the United States, where slavery constructed Black female sexualities, Jim Crow kidnappings, rape and lynchings, gender misrepresentations, and more recently, where the Black female immigrant struggle combine, “slut” has different associations for Black women. We do not recognize ourselves nor do we see our lived experiences reflected within SlutWalk and especially not in its brand and its label.

As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves “slut” without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is. We don’t have the privilege to play on destructive representations burned in our collective minds, on our bodies and souls for generations. Although we understand the valid impetus behind the use of the word “slut” as language to frame and brand an anti-rape movement, we are gravely concerned. For us the trivialization of rape and the absence of justice are viciously intertwined with narratives of sexual surveillance, legal access and availability to our personhood. It is tied to institutionalized ideology about our bodies as sexualized objects of property, as spectacles of sexuality and deviant sexual desire. It is tied to notions about our clothed or unclothed bodies as unable to be raped whether on the auction block, in the fields or on living room television screens. The perception and wholesale acceptance of speculations about what the Black woman wants, what she needs and what she deserves has truly, long crossed the boundaries of her mode of dress.

Read More At The Huffington Post

According to police reports, Anton L. Malone, 19, forced the victim to perform oral sex on him twice at gunpoint before opening fire on him.

Read more at theGrio.com

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Still there are many political and social reasons the case was dropped, including the drastically different backgrounds of the accuser and the accused.

The Daily Beast Reports:

And Diallo? Her biography is, in fact, a long chronicle of victimization in Africa and in the U.S. She has neither the intellectual nor the financial resources to survive without her job as a maid, or to capitalize on her humiliating celebrity. She can’t read or write. And the gamble that in years to come she may collect a settlement from Strauss-Kahn is not a good bet, now that he’s on his way back to Paris. He may no longer be the leading contender to win the presidential elections there next year, as he was before his arrest. But he’s brilliant and versatile, he’s still got powerful friends, and France is his home turf.

The decision to dismiss was based on a “careful and deliberative review of all the evidence,” Vance said. Questions about the maid’s story appear in hindsight to have made the outcome almost inevitable, and there were hints of trouble from the start. Illuzzi-Orbon was a 23-year veteran of homicide prosecutions—not sex crimes—and the head of Vance’s new Hate Crimes Unit when he put her in charge of the DSK prosecution. Another assistant prosecutor, who’d headed the Sex Crimes Unit for many years, had been moved aside and was on her way out. Illuzzi-Orbon had a reputation as a bulldog in the courtroom. Friends of Diallo say she told them she’d never lost a trial, and she didn’t intend to start now. But rape prosecutions weren’t her specialty.

Read More At The Daily Beast

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The Daily Nation reports:

“We appeal to members of the public to pass any information to the police regarding three women who have gone on a spree of kidnapping and indecently assaulting young men around town,” Harare police boss Angeline Guvamombe said in a statement.

“The women drive in posh cars and offer their unsuspecting victims lifts before spraying some liquid substance on their faces.

“Once the victim is drowsy, he is taken to a secluded place or house where he is forced to have sex,” said Ms Guvamombe. “I want to warn these criminals that their days are numbered,” she added.

Read More At The Daily Nation

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The six-page essay, written in her own hand many years after the incident, is among thousands of her personal items currently residing in the Manhattan warehouse and cramped offices of Guernsey’s Auctioneers, which has been selected by a Michigan court to find an institution to buy and preserve the complete archive.

Civil rights historian Danielle McGuire said she had never before heard of the attempted rape of Parks and called the find among Parks’ papers astounding.

It helps explain what triggered Parks’ lifelong campaign against the ritualistic rape of black women by white men, said McGuire, whose recent book “At the Dark End of the Street” examines how economic intimidation and sexual violence were used to derail the freedom movement and how it went unpunished during the Jim Crow era.

“I thought it was because of the stories that she had heard. But this gives a much more personal context to that,” said McGuire, an assistant professor of history at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her book recounts Parks’ role in investigating for the NAACP the case of Recy Taylor, a young sharecropper raped by a group of white men in 1944.

Of her own experience, Parks wrote, “He offered me a drink of whiskey, which I promptly and vehemently refused. . He moved nearer to me and put his hand on my waist. I was very frightened by now.”

“He liked me. .. he didn’t want me to be lonely and would I be sweet to him. He had money to give me for accepting his attentions,” she wrote.

“I was ready to die but give my consent never. Never, never.”

Most people know the story of Parks, a black, middle-aged seamstress who refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955. Guernsey’s President Arlan Ettinger said her personal papers reveal a much more complex individual, one who spent a lifetime fighting for racial equality and against the sexual violence of black women.

Parks is credited with inspiring the civil rights movement with her solitary act of defiance on Dec. 1, 1955, that led to the Supreme Court outlawing segregation on buses. She received the nation’s two highest honors in her lifetime, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor.

She died in 2005 at age 92, leaving the trove of personal correspondence, papers relating to her work for the Montgomery branch of the NAACP, tributes from presidents and world leaders, school books, family bibles, clothing, furniture and more – about 8,000 items in all.

“It is wonderful and breathtaking,” Ettinger said. “It will be up to the institution that ends up with it to make this material known to the world.”

Proceeds from the sale will go to resolve a dispute over her estate, divided between her relatives and the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development that she created in 1987.

Guernsey’s, known for its sale of iconic and celebrity collections, took an inventory of Parks’ homes in Detroit soon after she died and is looking for an institution to buy her archive, which Ettinger described as the most complete he’s ever seen.

The only thing missing, he quipped, is the bus itself. The bus is in The Henry Ford, a museum in Dearborn, Mich.

The archive reveals an infinitely complex individual, Ettinger said.

Parks worked on many cases with the NAACP, including the Scottsboro defense of nine black teenage boys accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. She was involved in the black power conventions in the 1970s and the anti-apartheid movement in the 1990s.

Parks wrote on anything she could get her hands on. The backs of church pamphlets and NAACP flyers are filled with her thoughts and observations.

There are detailed notes on how African-American citizens should comport themselves during the bus boycott following her arrest that lasted 382 days and about the organization that led it, the Montgomery Improvement Association, headed by a young pastor named the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Elsewhere, she laments about life under the oppressive Jim Crow laws and asks what is wrong with the world when her jailer refuses her a drink of water.

She also vividly recalls an incident when she was 10 years old involving a white boy who threatened to hit her. Demonstrating some of the determination she exhibited on the bus decades later, Parks writes “I picked up a small piece of brick and drew back to strike him if he should hit me. I was angry. He went his way without further comment.”

Parks’ memoirs include one with author Jim Haskins and another with one of her attorneys in the early 1990s, but by then said McGuire, “her story was pretty much well-rehearsed, and limited to her time in Montgomery and the bus incident.”

“Her story had become mythic and iconic … I can’t imagine what that felt like for her to have a whole history of activism and political work erased and turned almost into a cartoon character,” said McGuire.

Guernsey’s has talked to about 20 museums, libraries, university and churches about buying the archive over the past three years.

“There hasn’t been a group that didn’t desperately want it but had to face the reality whether they could afford it,” Ettinger said, adding that he was currently in discussions with three separate entities – an institution and two individuals who could buy the archive with the intention of donating it to a museum or other cultural institution.

He declined to give an exact figure but said $8 million to $10 million was in the “ballpark.”

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research library of the New York Public Library, was among the interested institutions.

Its new director, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, said the center has very little material on Parks and would love to own some of her papers but because the archive is being sold as a single collection, it took the Schomburg out of the running.

“She is a witness to the beginning and the maturation of the civil rights movement. . She walked as close to Martin Luther King Jr., as you can get at the beginning of the movement,” Muhammad said.

McGuire wondered why Parks omitted the attempted rape incident from her memoirs but included the story about the little boy who threatened her.

“It shows some kind of conscious effort in shaping her own legacy but also, I think, speaks to the issue of respectability. She doesn’t necessarily feel comfortable telling the world about what happened,” she said. “But she’s contemplating telling people about it because she’s written it down.”

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The tapes also established that housekeeper Nafissatou Diallo recounted the attack to the man during their first conversation, a day after the alleged attack – showing, her lawyer said, that her focus was on what had happened to her, not on the former International Monetary Fund leader’s wealth or stature.

“Information has been put out there about Ms. Diallo that now I know was false. She never was scheming to take DSK’s money, and that’s a fact,” said her attorney, Kenneth Thompson, referring to Strauss-Kahn by his initials. Diallo herself didn’t speak to reporters, and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office declined to comment on the meeting.

The marathon session marked the 32-year-old’s first meeting with prosecutors since they said July 1 they had doubts about her credibility because she hadn’t been truthful about her background or what she did right after the May 14 encounter. Strauss-Kahn denies the charges, and his lawyers are calling for the case to be dismissed.

Diallo’s sit-down with prosecutors came days after she went public in interviews with Newsweek and ABC News, pressing for prosecutors to keep pursuing the case. Prosecutors and Strauss-Kahn’s attorneys said Tuesday they had agreed to postpone his next court date from Aug. 1 to Aug. 23, when prosecutors could announce whether they will go forward with the case.

Strauss-Kahn, who had been considered a promising French presidential contender, was arrested after Diallo (whose name is pronounced na-fee-SAH’-too dee-AH’-loh) said he forced her to perform oral sex, manhandled her and ripped down her stockings in his luxury suite at the Sofitel Hotel near Manhattan’s Times Square. Traces of Strauss-Kahn’s semen were found on her work uniform. He has been charged with attempted rape and other crimes.

Prosecutors have said the case has been weakened by Diallo’s fabrications, including a compelling story she told them of having been gang-raped in her native Guinea. The widowed immigrant, who has a 15-year-old daughter, says she had embellished her life story to gain asylum in the U.S., and what prosecutors call inconsistencies in her account of her actions right after the alleged attack were the result of a misunderstanding.

Thompson said he, Diallo, prosecutors and an interpreter spent hours Wednesday on another question that has arisen about her associations and conduct: her recorded conversations with a friend who is being held in an Arizona immigration detention center after pleading guilty in a marijuana case. The two spoke on the recording in Fulani, a West African language.

The tapes have not been released, and Thompson said he was allowed to hear them Wednesday but didn’t get copies of them. They contrast with a New York Times account of what Diallo had said, according to Thompson. The newspaper has reported, citing an anonymous law enforcement official, that Diallo said “words to the effect of, `Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing’” to her friend shortly after Strauss-Kahn’s arrest.
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But on the tapes, her mentions of Strauss-Kahn’s resources and her knowing what to do are made at different points, and in contexts that cast them in a considerably different light, Thompson said.

In her first conversation with the man, she didn’t mention Strauss-Kahn’s wealth at all, instead telling her friend that “someone tried to rape me, and that he’s a powerful, big man,” who had tried to take her clothes off, pushed her, and ultimately made her do something against her will, Thompson said.

In a subsequent conversation, she told her friend that her attacker “is powerful and rich,” her lawyer said. But it was earlier in that conversation – and not in connection with any mention of Strauss-Kahn’s status – that she said “I know what to do” to signal that she gone to authorities, planned to hire a lawyer and would be all right, Thompson said.

“Her primary focus was on what happened to her, how she was coping with the fact that she had almost been raped,” he said.

The Associated Press has previously reported that Diallo alluded to Strauss-Kahn’s wealth in a recorded conversation days after the ex-IMF leader’s arrest, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss matters not made public in court.

While Thompson said Diallo wasn’t focused on Strauss-Kahn’s money, he said it would be her right to sue him over the encounter.

“There is nothing wrong with a woman who’s almost been raped filing a lawsuit to stand up for her dignity as a woman,” the lawyer said.

Prosecutors and Diallo have had a tense relationship in recent weeks. Her last meeting with prosecutors, in late June, ended with her in tears as prosecutors asked about her past and life, Thompson has said. This month, he called on the district attorney’s office to recuse itself and arrange for a special prosecutor.

But the rift appeared to close a bit Wednesday, at least on Diallo’s end, with Thompson calling prosecutors “gracious” for accommodating his request to hear the recording. He said he didn’t anticipate further meetings this week.

The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they come forward publicly, as Diallo has done.

Diallo plans to join religious, women’s and African community groups Thursday at a Brooklyn Christian center to thank New Yorkers who support her.

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NORTH CAROLINA — The former pastor of the North Carolina church New Life Christian Center, Keith Devon Pitts, has been convicted of nine counts of sexual abuse with the same girl.

WCNC News reports that “his nine counts include sex offense of a child and taking indecent liberties with a child.”

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The 14 men, who along with five juvenile boys are facing charges, are scheduled to be in a state district courtroom in Liberty for status updates. The investigation began in December, after one of the girl’s friends told a teacher he had seen a lurid cell phone video that showed the girl being raped in an abandoned trailer.

Authorities say the girl was assaulted on at least five occasions, sometimes by as many as seven or eight young men or boys at a time, from mid-September to early December in Cleveland, a small city about 45 miles northeast of Houston. The suspects range in age from a middle-school student to a 27-year-old, and include two star athletes at the local high school as well as adults with criminal records.

Most of the adult suspects face charges of aggravated sexual assault of a child, while four face a charge of continuous sexual abuse of a child. Most have pleaded not guilty and are free on bond, while one, 26-year-old Marcus Porchia, was charged after his arrest with sexually assaulting another girl in an unrelated case.

The case shined a sometimes unflattering spotlight on Cleveland after some in the town of about 9,000 residents suggested the girl was culpable in part for what happened, claiming she wore makeup and looked older. Some also accused her parents, immigrants from Mexico, of not watching her more closely. Those suggestions were sharply criticized by many Cleveland residents and by community and religious groups outside the city.

Also complicating the case was a belief by many in the predominantly black neighborhood where several of the suspects live that the arrests were racially motivated. All of the suspects are black, while the girl is Hispanic.

The girl, now 12, remains in foster care as her parents, who have health problems and moved out of Cleveland after receiving threatening phone calls, work with state child welfare authorities to get her back.

A gag order is preventing those connected to the case from commenting.

Authorities began investigating after the girl’s friend told a teacher he had seen a video that had been passed around among classmates that showed the girl being attacked. Police determined it was recorded inside a mobile home on the city’s northern outskirts.

The girl told investigators she was raped Nov. 28, first at a house near the mobile home and then at the trailer. Indictments allege she also was assaulted in September, October and December.

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Kerbert Dixon, 47, a Queens court officer, is accused of having sex with a 22-year-old since she was 14 and an 18-year-old since she was 16. The alleged “touching” victims were 10 and 8.

Dixon was arrested Tuesday and is being held in lieu of $30,000 bail.

Read More At NYDailyNews.com

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KINSHASA, Congo — An international medical aid group says more than 100 people were raped in a recent attack in Congo’s volatile east.

Megan Hunter of Medicins Sans Frontieres said Thursday that a team in Fizi territory in South Kivu province found more than 100 victims of rapes that occurred between June 10 and 12.

She did not say who might be responsible. The aid group is working with Congolese health officials to get more information.

Rape is used by the various groups of fighters in the central African nation to intimidate, punish and control.

Eastern Congo has been wracked by violence since Rwanda’s 1994 genocide spilled conflict across the border. Hutu militias that participated in the massacres of more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus sought refuge in Congo.

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By Regina Bradley

I’ve been keeping up with the horrific gang rape that took place in Cleveland, Texas. I’m unsure which sickens me more – the excuses made for grown men about why the rape took place, who to blame, or how the victim’s childhood is overlooked and dismissed because she “looked like” she wanted or was already having sex.

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I felt a soul-stirring wail come from a dark place.

I flashbacked to hearing those awkward footsteps in my room late at night. It wasn’t a spook or the boogey man, but I had the same fear as if they were there. His hot breath on my neck, I closed my eyes tightly and waited. I remember his weight. I remember his grunting. I remember being afraid to scream because I was supposed to be asleep so I could be well rested for school the next morning. Don’t tattletale. I don’t tattletale. I don’t ask for these visits. Why won’t he leave me alone? And then he clumsily pulls my panties back up and scurries back out my bedroom door.
Was it because I was convenient? Was it my fault my room was next to his? I was nine and in fourth grade. He was a bastard with a bullshit apology.

Although I’m now an adult, that nine year old little girl still sobs when her experience is brought back to the forefront. She sobs when eleven year old girls are accused of looking too grown and setting themselves up to be raped. She screams when popular shows like The Game participate in half-assed empty threats of rape as revenge. She screams when comedians like Lil’ Duval become even more wildly popular with twitter trends like “It Ain’t Rape If…” Well, nationhood, if rape ain’t rape, what is?

I am unable to wrap my mind around how rape culture is fetishized and consumed as trendy. Rape is “okay” because so and so or such and such on TV endorses it. The Game, for example, echoes of a tragic-comedy because of their treatment of rape. Parker, played by actress Meaghan Good, threatens her ex-lover Malik with taunts of rape if he does not have sex with her. She rips her own clothes, screams, “sobs,” and trashes the room to gain attention. A maid walks by and asks if everything is okay. As quickly as Malik pays the maid off for her silence, Parker dries her tears and proceeds to have forced sex with a distraught Malik.

This scene troubled my spirit in many ways. The first is the obvious – Parker’s empty threat of rape to “break” Malik. The second is how easily the maid – also a black woman – is silenced with monetary bribes even though she sensed something was amiss. The third, and arguably most peculiar, is the treatment of Malik’s rape. While Parker did not physically threaten him, Malik was psychologically threatened. This threat forced him to engage in a sexual act. “The morning after,” Parker laughs and teases Malik, who turns his back to her with a look of anger, disgust, and shame on his face.

What becomes complicated, however, is Malik’s return home. He is greeted by his girlfriend, who seduces him at the door. He becomes teary eyed and, assumingly, has sex with his girlfriend as well. This sequence of events re-enforces the stereotypical beliefs that black bodies are hypersexual. It also symbolizes the removal of rape’s pathology for entertainment.

Black women’s’ bodies are, as Abbey Lincoln so fiercely put it, the outhouses of black and white men. Black men’s bodies are considered bestial and sexually insatiable. What we share in common is the use sex as a power move but we lack in its ownership.

Here’s where the trouble further stirs itself: When rape is commodified and consumed as nonthreatening, it has a multi-layered effect. Not only is the little discourse available for rape victims pushed to the fringes, but their ordeals are dismissed as their own doing. What producers of popular culture fail to realize is that there is no guarantee that all the people absorbing their “work” are smart enough to distinguish entertainment from reality, that “these is jokes.”

There is Forrest Gumpage out there that consumes everything for what it is at face value. Are we as a society so fixated on entertainment and scapegoating that we purposefully ignore the ticking time bomb planted in our social interactions? What will it take?

If rape ain’t rape, what the hell is?

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Police arrest 16 men for gang rape of 11-year-old girl

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Now 91 years old, Taylor was 24 and living in her native Henry County when she was gang-raped in Abbeville in 1944. The married woman was walking home from church when she was abducted, assaulted and left on the side of the road in an isolated area.

Two all-white, all-male grand juries declined to bring charges. State Rep. Dexter Grimsley of Newville says police bungled the investigation and harassed Taylor.

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The girl told authorities that at least 20 people assaulted her, and the attack was also captured on video. A 19-year-old, Timothy Ellis, lured her into a abandoned trailer where she was ambushed and sexually assaulted by numerous teenagers and men.

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The video was seen by a number of students at a local school; helping authorities identify many of the suspects.

“These guys knew she was in middle school,” the girl’s mother, identified only as Maria, told reporters. “You could tell whenever you talked to her. She still loves stuffed teddy bears.”

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Authorities say the three boys grabbed the girl, fondled her and then forced her onto a playground set. That’s where two of the boys held her down while the third raped her, according to police.

The girl reported the attack to school officials on Tuesday, and identified her attackers to them.

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Read more at KTLA.com

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Police said she claims Vargas was there with three players. She said Vargas told her she needed to perform oral sex on the players to get hired.

Investigators said Vargas pushed a table into her when she refused, and that she couldn’t leave the room.

Officers said she told them Vargas grabbed the back of her neck and forced her head into one of the player’s laps until she broke free.

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The 51-year-old ex-linebacker, who led the New York Giants to Super Bowl titles in 1987 and 1991, will serve six years probation.

“She told me she was 19,” Taylor said in court as he admitted having sex with a prostitute who turned out to be a 16-year-old Bronx runaway.

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The assaults came to light when an unknown man dumped a bundle of 11 DVDs at the Los Angeles County sheriff’s station in March. Attached to the videos was a note saying he had pulled them from a computer hard drive that another man had asked him to clean.

Some of the assaults were carried out in what appeared to be a residential care facility and one of the suspects seemed himself to be disabled.

Detectives have spent the last several months trying to pull clues from the grainy videos. After the footage was enhanced, they were able to capture the images of four men who carried out assaults, though there could be as many as 10 suspects total.

“It shocked the conscience,” said Detective Ron Anderson of the special victims unit, which reviewed the DVDs. “These people are truly defenseless.”

The footage was not released to the public but authorities described what they had seen. In one video, an obese man in a wheelchair is seen pushing himself into a small bedroom while wearing a diaper. His back is covered in scars and he appears to be a paraplegic resident of a care facility.

The man pulls himself onto a woman’s bed, removes both his own and her diaper, then assaults her, authorities said.

“He then hoisted himself onto the floor, scooted across the floor, out of the doorway and disappeared from the camera’s view,” Anderson said.

In another video, a man leads another suspect into a room then leaves him alone to assault a woman. The victims appear to be both mentally and physically disabled and none gives any sort of consent. Some of the assaults occur on beds and one takes place on a collection of bean bags on the floor.

“After one horrendous assault, one of the victims was picked up and thrown back into a wheelchair,” Sgt. Dan Scott said.

Detectives hope that by going public with the case, someone will recognize a suspect or a location where an assault took place. They also want to speak to the man who gave them the videos and stressed that he could remain anonymous.

“He is not in any trouble, we are just seeking more information from him,” Scott said.

The videos were mainly captured by security cameras in the victims’ room, though some recordings are from hand held cameras.

One suspect was wearing a baseball cap with “LA” on it and another has an orange T-shirt that is printed with the year 2008. Authorities think the videos were made locally in the last three years but could have come from anywhere in the country.

Detectives are working with TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” which is planning a segment on the case, Anderson said.

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Twenty-four-year-old John Bullock of Altoona and 25-year-old Domonta Jones of Eau Claire pleaded not guilty to the assault Monday in Eau Claire County Circuit Court. Each man is charged with first-degree sexual assault.

A criminal complaint says the woman told police she was knocked out in the bedroom of Jones’ home on Nov. 11. And, when she regained consciousness, Jones was holding her while Bullock assaulted her. She says Jones then got his snake and used it to assault her. Bullock says the sexual contact was consensual.

The Eau Claire Leader-Telegram says the men are jailed on $30,000 cash.

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The next thing she remembered, the woman told a detective, was “Bullock…behind her sexually assaulting her” while Jones held her. Jones, she recalled, then said, “I’m going to get the snake.” Shortly afterwards, according to the complaint, the woman “felt something inside of her. She believed the snake may have bitten her because she felt a very sharp pain and then they said, ‘Pull it out.’”

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An exoneration hearing for Cornelius Dupree Jr. is scheduled for Tuesday in Dallas. If his conviction is overturned, Dupree would have spent more time wrongly imprisoned than any other DNA exoneree in Texas.

The district attorney’s office said Monday it supports Dupree’s innocence claim.

Dupree was charged in 1979 with raping and robbing a 26-year-old woman and sentenced in 1980 to 75 years in prison for aggravated robbery.

He was released on parole in July. DNA test results came back 10 days after his release, excluding him as the rapist.

Dupree’s case was turned down three times by the Court of Criminal Appeals.

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New Jersey — Two men, Canpolat Cankurt and Leonardo Quintero are accused of raping a 12-year-old girl who they met on the internet and video recording it with a cell phone camera. North Jersey reports:

Quintero and Cankurt are accused of picking up the 12-year-old at her home in Paterson at 2 a.m. Friday, coercing her inside a Clifton apartment and taking her to the basement where they forced her to drink alcoholic beverages and raped her. Cankurt videotaped the sexual assaults, police said.

Police believe Quintero met the Paterson fourth-grader online through her instant messaging account. He chatted on the Iinternet with her for a few weeks and then called her Thursday through early Friday morning. He allegedly convinced her to leave home at 2 a.m. Friday without telling her family, drove to her home and picked her up.

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Convicted sex offender, Eugene Melendres Ramos was arrested for sexually assaulting a 2-year-old girl in a Dollar Tree store in Union City, California. According to KTVU.com, some good Samaritans in the store helped prevent the attack and apprehend the suspect.

The girl had her pants and diaper removed and was being straddled by Ramos, who had pulled his pants and underwear down and was sexually assaulting her, according to police.

Ramos fled the store on foot and was chased by the grandmother, aunt, and several customers. A solicitor in front of the store also gave chase when he exited the building and tackled him, police said.

A BART police officer who happened to be nearby was flagged down by the small group holding Ramos down.

“I ran after them,” said Good Samaritan Demario Hawkins. “I chased them nine stores down. I finally caught him by the shirt.”

Bystander Sammy Johnson helped Hawkins pin down Ramos until police arrived.

“I just tackled him and sat on him and dialed 911,” said Johnson.

Police arrested Ramos for sexual assault, forcible rape, and kidnapping. Hawkins and Johnson were recognized for the heroism by police Thursday afternoon in city council chambers.

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Cleveland — There is a case in Cleveland where two men posing as women are being charged with rape and sexual assault for tricking an underage boy into having sex with them. WOIO.com reports:

Quinton Harris is charged with rape and Frederick Lamar has been charged with unlawful sexual conduct with a minor.

According to a police report, a kid thought he was meeting a girl whom he met on Facebook, at the ritzy Inter-Continental hotel by the Cleveland Clinic.

After meeting, the boy thought they were two girls and police say once they started having sex it became clear the she’s, were he’s.

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But of the more than 1,700 cases reported in 2009 alone, only 42 percent resulted in arrests — a rate lower than for murders and other assaults, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis based on FBI reports from police agencies across the eight area counties.

Harris County alone claimed 1,265 sexual assault cases last year.

And though most sexual assaults involve victims who either know or at least recognize their attacker, police estimate about 25 percent are simply random.

One such attack happened to a 19-year-old Houston woman snatched from her southwest Houston apartment complex two days before her high school graduation this year.

Before dinner with a friend at her apartment, she says she walked to a neighborhood store to buy ketchup. When she returned – and as she was opening her security gate – a man approached and put a pointed object in her back.

She thought it was a gun. He forced her into his car, drove 30 minutes away to an apartment complex and raped her. The man threatened to kill her if she tried to get away.

“Every time he stopped at a red light, I wanted to get out of the car, but I didn’t. I don’t know why,” she told the Chronicle.

“It changed the way I looked at men. I can’t trust men at all.”

In that case, a suspect has been charged with aggravated kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault.

Read entire article at Chron.com

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A woman accused of raping another woman faces a judge this morning. Wisdom Duncan faces several charges including rape, robbery, assault, unlawful imprisonment and terroristic threatening.

Investigators say she tied up and attacked another woman Thursday. A circuit court judge read portions of the police report during the arraignment.

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Timothy West, 26, was cleared of four charges that he entered an Ozone Park home in 2009 through a window and raped and robbed a 21-year-old waitress at knifepoint in her bed.

One juror said the panel believed the victim must have known West, and that she let him into her home.

West has a history of break-ins and was on parole for robbery when arrested, but the jury did not hear that evidence: Buchter ruled it could prejudice the jury against him.

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“You just broke into my house, yo. I’ve never seen you before …. You try to rob me, then you rape me,” the woman said to Timothy West, 26, in the March 20, 2009, phone call.

“Why you did that to me?”

West, who is accused of slipping into her Ozone Park house through a window and raping her twice at knifepoint just hours earlier, seemed confused at her fury.

“I do apologize from the bottom of my heart,” he told her.

And then he had the nerve to ask: “You mad at me?… I can’t call you no more?”

“What made you want to come in and break into my house? Why out of all the houses, why my house?” she pressed.

“It was just random,” he replied.

“Can I come see you?” he asked.

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Alan Newton was cleared by DNA evidence in 2006. He had been sentenced in 1985 to up to 40 years in prison after being convicted of raping a woman in an abandoned building.

In awarding the money Tuesday, the federal jury in Manhattan ruled the city had violated Newton’s constitutional rights. It also found two police officers had failed to produce Newton’s evidence when requested.

The city says it will appeal.

Newton told The New York Times it’s something he’d been fighting for since he was freed in 2006. His case has been supported by the nonprofit Innocence Project, which seeks to free convicts through DNA evidence.

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A hulking juvenile counselor named Tony Simmons led her in handcuffs from the girls holding area to the elevator.

She expected Tyson, as Simmons was called, to bring her up to the courtroom where she was scheduled to be sentenced for filing a false police report.

Instead, the elevator descended to the basement. The 42-year-old counselor pulled down her pants and raped her with calm, practiced precision that made him all the more terrifying.

“He knew exactly what he was doing,” Ashley said. “Everything.”

When he was done, Simmons pulled her pants back up and the elevator ascended to the courtroom. He raised an extended index finger to his lips in a mute command for her to say nothing.

Simmons continued to prey on teenagers in his custody until 2008, when a 15-year-old girl came forward to say he had sodomized her behind a locker in the girls holding area, which he stocked with condoms and cookies. Investigators believe the assaults go back a decade to the rape of a 13-year-old in the holding area.

Read entire article at NYdailynews.com

The United Nations reported that more than 500 systematic rapes were committed by armed combatants in eastern Congo since late July — more than double the number previously reported — and accepted partial responsibility for not protecting citizens.

U .N. Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Atul Khare told the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday that at least 267 more rapes occurred in another area of the country’s east, in addition to 242 rapes earlier reported in and around Luvungi, a village of about 2,200 people located about 20 miles (30 kilometers) from a U.N. peacekeepers’ camp.

“While the primary responsibility for protection of civilians lies with the state, its national army and police force,” said Khare, “clearly, we have also failed. Our actions were not adequate, resulting in unacceptable brutalization of the population of the villages in the area. We must do better.”

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The U.N. peacekeeping force in Congo, called MONUSCO, on Sept. 1 launched an operation using 750 troops to back efforts by Congolese security forces to arrest the perpetrators of the attacks, said Khare. At least 27 rebels armed with automatic rifles have surrendered and at least four more have been arrested, he said.

Meanwhile, Khare said, peacekeepers will undertake more night patrols, and perform more random checks on communities. The U.N. is also looking into ways of providing peacekeepers with mobile phones by installing a high frequency radio in Luvungi, he said.

Rape as a weapon of war has become shockingly commonplace in eastern Congo, where the government army and U.N. peacekeepers have failed to defeat the few thousands rebels responsible for a protracted conflict fueled by vast mineral reserves. Luvungi is a farming center on the main road between Goma, the eastern provincial capital, and the major mining town of Walikale.

Khare told reporters after the council session that over 15,000 rapes were reported in Congo in both 2008 and 2009.

Ambassador Susan Rice, the U.S. representative to the United Nations, called Tuesday’s briefing “very frank, comprehensive and illuminating” and said she looked forward to more sessions examining ways to prevent future mass rapes in Congo.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in recent days sent Khare to Congo to investigate why U.N. peacekeepers didn’t learn about at least 242 mass rapes in the Luvungi area from July 30 to Aug. 4 until Aug. 12, when it was informed by the International Medical Corps which was treating many of the victims.

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The additional sexual attacks, in an area called Uvira and other regions of North and South Kivu, came to light during Khare’s trip. He told council members he learned of 74 cases of sexual violence, including against 21 minors — all girls between the ages of 7 and 15 — and six men, in a village called Miki, in South Kivu. All the women in another village, Kiluma, may have been systematically raped, he said.

Khare said in a community called Katalukulu, 10 women were raped by Congolese soldiers, which he said must “maintain a much higher standard of discipline, good behavior and conduct, and observance of human rights.”

Altogether, he detailed new reports of mass rapes on various communities that added up to at least 267.

The assistant secretary-general called for prosecution of Rwandan rebel FDLR and Congolese Mai-Mai rebels blamed for many of the attacks and U.N. sanctions against their leaders.

Margot Wallstrom, who is responsible for U.N. efforts to combat sexual violence in conflict, expressed her alarm over the increase in reported rapes, saying they show “a broader pattern of widespread and systematic rape and pillage.” A senior member of Wallstrom’s staff accompanied Khare on his recent trip.

“It is evident that rape is increasingly selected as the weapon of choice in eastern (Congo), with numbers reaching endemic proportions,” she told the Security Council. “The sad reality is that incidents of rape have become so commonplace that they do not trigger our most urgent interventions.”

Wallstrom last month warned leaders of rebel groups that they could be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court because widespread and systemic sexual violence can constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Congo’s U.N. Ambassador Ileka Atoki expressed his “deep disgust” with the mass rapes and thanked the Security Council for investigating the attacks.

“These heinous acts, that have become a weapon of war, are one more episode of the unspeakable suffering that the people of Congo have been plunged for more than a decade now,” Atoki told council members.

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Atoki said his country would continue to need international help to combat the attacks, characterizing national police sources as “pathetic.” But international backing for efforts to end the protracted conflict in eastern Congo are just as important, he said.

Secretary-General Ban, who had been traveling in Europe, unexpectedly flew Tuesday to Rwanda, to discuss with officials their threat to withdraw U.N. peacekeepers from Sudan if the United Nations publishes a report accusing Rwanda’s army of possible genocide in the 1990s.

The joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur is commanded by a Rwandan, Lt. Gen. Patrick Nyamvumba, and the country has over 3,200 troops and 86 police in the nearly 22,000-strong force. U.N. officials and diplomats have said a Rwandan pullout from Darfur would be a major blow at a time of increasing violence and fresh efforts to end the seven-year conflict.

A community group known as ‘Detroit 300′ is being credited for helping police track down 3 teens accused of raping a 90-year-old woman.  Now they’re pledging to take back the streets and continue to patrol the neighborhoods.

17-year-old Maurice Randall and 18-year-old Anthony Hardy were arraigned via video Saturday.  They are both charged with the rape and robbery of that elderly woman.News of the arrests drew cheers from the woman’s neighbors who have been patrolling the streets nightly, searching for the suspects.

In times where the “Stop Snitching” creed controls Black neighborhoods all across the country, this group is helping to bring criminals to justice through anonymity.

“Join the Detroit 300 here”

Read more about the Detroit 300 here

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A 20-year-old man in Sacramento was sentenced to over 149 years in prison for raping two women at gun point, although the crime is shocking, what the man had to say to the victims left the courtroom in disbelief.

A 20-year-old man who terrorized the Natomas area for months has been sentenced to 149 years to life in prison.

Sammie Lee Nichols was convicted in June of two counts of rape and 16 other felony charges. He was a teenager in late 2007 and early 2008 when he went on a crime spree in North Natomas that set an entire community on edge.

During the sentencing Friday, Nichols blamed his female victims, saying they had underage sex with him. He even said that he was the real victim.

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The prosecutor called Nichols a coward and a monster who should forever lose his freedom.

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Read entire article at CBS13.com

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