Another Myth about Rape
“Then, as Marie would tell the court, Marsalis steered her to her bed, pinned her down and raped her again. This time, there was no blackout to cloud her perception; Marsalis offered no smooth talk as he pulled up his scrubs and left. Marie made her way to the shower, curled up under the water and cried. Yet she didn’t even consider calling the police.
Think most women would behave differently - that in the same situation, they would jump up and call 911? Think again. According to government estimates, a mere 19 percent of rapes , including stranger rapes (which account for less than 20 percent, btw) are ever reported in the first place.”
I’m posting this not because this piece of the story is shocking, but because Marsalis had been accused of date rape by twenty-one women, seven of which testified against him in one court, seven educated professional women, and they were unable to get a single rape conviction against the man. Not one single conviction against a man who had pretended to be a doctor, a CIA employee, and even an astronaut, whom a court-appointed psychologist had decided met the legal definition of a “sexually violent predator.” And this was the second time he’d been on trial! He was immediately arrested for this trial after his first trial, in which three women came forward saying they had been raped. The jury (as it always seems to be) was cherry picked, and many of those with real-life experience with sexual assault were weeded out.
This is a personal plea to anyone reading this, to get educated on rape, especially acquaintance rape. Learn what to say if a friend comes to you, and learn what constitutes it. And remember, people are as likely to lie about a rape as they are about a murder, and 1 in 5 women has been either the victim of sexual assault, or attempted sexual assault. We need to work together to change rape culture in America, because so far it hasn’t been stopped, and it is far too common to be ignored.
(P.S. Jeffrey Marsalis was convicted of 2 accounts of sexual assault at the end of the last trial. Though the minimum sentence could have been as little as community service, the judge delivered 10.5-21 years behind bars saying “What you were was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Your lifestyle was a fantasy. What’s happened to your victims is reality.” Thank you Judge Geroff.)
(P.P.S. Jeffrey Marsalis was put on trial again, two years after the last two trials. This time he was finally convicted of rape. Why? The story was almost the same, however he had raped a lesbian who had immediately called the police and procured a rape kit the next day. He was sentenced to life in prison in the Idaho State Penitentiary.)
