Objection! (27 page)

I was stunned. I have championed rape victims’ rights for so long. I vividly remember being present when the Georgia Senate Judiciary Panel passed the Georgia Rape Shield Law, which protects rape victims from having their names dragged through the mud and being painted as tramps—or worse. Whether this particular girl was a runaround or a tramp or a party girl was no one’s business. What I cared about was whether she had been raped. Her blood on the front tail of Bryant’s shirt along with vaginal lacerations and a bruise on her jaw said it all to me. I believed her. And then, bit by bit, it trickled out. Her sexual history, her medical history, her alleged suicide attempts—you name it. But those didn’t erase the blood and the bruise. I could never turn away from that.

After watching the defense attorney, Pamela Mackey, in court and hearing what the judge was letting her get away with, I accepted that a 1 8 2

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conviction would likely never happen. I repeatedly predicted either a hung jury or an outright acquittal. I never predicted that the case would simply be dropped.

That ain’t justice.

I don’t blame the young woman. Her whole life was turned upside down. Despite the outrageous personal attacks she endured, I always thought in the end the case would go to trial and that a jury of twelve would make a decision. It didn’t happen. After the last round of highly personal information about her, garnered through a series of closed-door hearings, was released on the Internet, I shouldn’t have been surprised it ended the way it did, but I still was.

The only one ripped off was Lady Justice. A common ploy to raise the price of a civil settlement is to wait until the last minute—until you are literally on the courthouse steps set to strike the jury. I believe that’s just what happened here. At the eleventh hour, when trial was so near, the jury was waiting to be struck, when the price was as high as it would ever be—at that crucial hour—the case was dropped.

Bryant released a public statement in which he stated that he believed their encounter to be consensual but now recognized that the alleged victim thought that the sex was not consensual. It read, in part, “I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.” Hello! That’s what rape
is
—nonconsensual sex. It is logical to reason that Kobe’s defense would never have allowed the statement unless a settlement had been locked in at the highest price.

Even though, as of this writing, both sides have denied there’s a financial settlement in the offing, I’ll wager a multimillion-dollar deal will go down. Count on it.

Was she wrong? Yes. Do I blame her? No. I haven’t been in her shoes. Who I do blame, however, is the trial judge who took the case after the preliminary hearing. Judge Terry Ruckriegle allowed one devastating leak after the next and never got to the source of multiple leaks. I also blame the prosecutor. If I believed in my heart that a rape had O B J E C T I O N !

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occurred, then that case should have been taken to trial, win or lose. I’d have called the alleged victim to the stand and then made my case. I would never, never let the courthouse be a high-class brokerage firm for an NBA star and an alleged victim, a middleman who brokered “justice” for money.

T H E A F T E R M A T H O F

S T A T E V . K O B E B R Y A N T

In the next two minutes,
someone will be sexually assaulted in America. Six minutes from now, another woman will be raped. Each hour, thirty women are sexually assaulted, ten of them raped, in this great country of ours. After watching the Kobe Bryant saga, how many of those women will come forward?

The way the Bryant accuser was treated was a disgrace, regardless of what one may think of Bryant’s guilt or innocence. Every alleged victim is due a certain degree of respect. Guilt is for the jury to decide.

She was ridiculed, forced by threats to leave her own home, tracked like a hunted animal, and betrayed by “friends.”

The defense team made sure the alleged victim’s reputation was poisoned long before opening statements were ever to be given, and nothing was done by the judge to remedy that. Now, believe it or not, a rape-crisis counselor is actually under federal investigation for allegedly trying to sell the girl’s private file. The judge in this case even disallowed the prosecution from referring to Bryant’s accuser as a “victim.” I guess vaginal bleeding and a bruise to the jaw weren’t enough for Judge Ruckriegle.

I predict my colleagues on the other side of the fence and I will argue about this case forever. There is, though, one thing that even they will silently agree to: After the Bryant case, would they come forward and report the crime if they were raped? No way. Think about it. Would you?

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A S M A L L V I C T O R Y

The goings-on in the
Bryant proceedings triggered a change in Colorado state law in 2004. It’s a small step in the right direction—but there’s a lot more that has to be done to protect rape victims and prevent attacks on them in court.

In April 2004, Colorado governor Bill Owens signed Senate Bill 46

into law with the support of the Colorado District Attorneys’ Council. It gives alleged victims of sexual assault a better chance of maintaining anonymity as their cases make their way through the courts, by offering them the option of being identified in records and open court by a pseudonym, like Jane Doe.

As of this writing, another bill in the legislative pipeline is Senate Bill 217, which would require all motions filed relating to rape-shield issues to be sealed, to ensure the allegations presented to a judge don’t become public until a decision is made on their admissibility. The bill would also affect Colorado’s current rape-shield law, ordering that evidence about a victim’s or witness’s sexual history must be presumed irrelevant unless it can be shown to bear directly on the facts of the case.

Had this bill been passed into law prior to Bryant’s case, many of the defense’s claims about the alleged victim would never have been made public—at least until trial.

T H E “ P R E P P Y M U R D E R ”

C A S E : T A K I N G T H E “ B L A M E ”

D E F E N S E M A I N S T R E A M

Long before the Kobe Bryant
rape case put the alleged victim on trial, there was the “Preppy Murder” case. Jennifer Levin, a pretty teenager who lived in SoHo in New York City, was killed in Central Park in August 1986. Her partially nude body was found early one morning O B J E C T I O N !

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by a cyclist. She was lying on her back with her legs spread. Her neck bore wounds indicating she was strangled to death. Levin also had bruises and bite marks suggesting she’d tried to fight back against her attacker.

The morning police were called to the scene, a crowd had gathered and stood at a nearby wall. One witness, real estate broker Susan Bird, noticed a young man with “a nice face” among the onlookers.

The next time Bird saw the man, it was when his photograph appeared in the papers in connection with the case. That man was Robert Chambers.

Nineteen-year-old Chambers was dubbed the “Preppy Killer” because of his deceptively clean-cut looks and Upper East Side address.

Once Chambers was charged with murder, his defense attorney, Jack Litman, based his defense on the hateful strategy that pitted the “party girl” Levin, who got what she asked for, against a handsome preppy who was simply defending himself from her sexual demands. It worked.

The jury was deadlocked on the murder charge. Chambers pled guilty to manslaughter. He got fifteen years.

Chambers walked free from New York’s Auburn Prison on February 14, 2003. He was scheduled for an even earlier release, but a long series of violations and infractions behind bars added several years to his release date. The Associated Press reported that between July 1988

and June 1997, Chambers was docked seventy-five months of good time due to multiple violations of prison rules. Now that he is free, Chambers isn’t even under parole supervision. In the eyes of the law, he has paid his debt in full for the brutal choking of Jennifer Levin. As predicted by prosecutors, Robert Chambers was back in trouble with the law in no time following his release for the death of Jennifer Levin. On November 24, 2004, Chambers was arraigned on two misdemeanors—

drug possession and driving with a suspended license. Chambers, naturally, claimed he had nothing to do with the crime and that he was once again a victim of circumstances.

Chambers’s release is not the only disturbing aspect of the trial.

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The long-term legacy of the so-called Preppy Murder is that it was the first highly publicized case where the victim was crucified to save the killer. The treatment of Levin by Chambers’s defense team, as well as by the media, was disgraceful. That’s the only word for it. Levin’s murder “entertained” New York City like no other. The reports of the killing in Central Park mesmerized the public with stories of

“rough sex” and allegations of a promiscuous lifestyle among the city’s wealthy and pampered teens. The public frenzy was fueled by tabloids that ran headlines like JEN’S SEX DIARY, SEX PLAY GOT ROUGH, KINKY SEX, EARLY DEATH, and HOW JENNY COURTED DEATH. For two years, those headlines, and others like them, seeped into the jury pool.

The headlines somehow made these sleazy versions of Levin’s death official. All the nasty innuendo by the defense was given the stamp of believability simply because the papers reported it. Day in and day out, it was reported that Jennifer had caused her own murder.

The seed was planted that a young girl who drinks in a bar with a man late at night and leaves with him deserves whatever she gets.

By the time the trial began, defense attorney Litman’s venomous attack on Levin was going full speed, and the blame-the-victim defense was firmly established. Levin was trashed before the jury and in the media and portrayed as a drunken, promiscuous brat. Six-foot-four-inch Chambers claimed Levin, at five foot three inches and 120

pounds, attacked him and roughed him up during sexual play outdoors in the chilly air behind Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He stated in a confession to police that he’d choked her to death in self-defense. The media devoured the story.

During the trial, Chambers was routinely described as “handsome,” “promising,” and headed for an exciting future, except for that pesky speed bump of a murder trial. Even the media’s labeling of the case as the “Preppy Murder” was misleading. The dark side of Chambers’s personality, which included extensive drug abuse and a criminal history of burglary and theft, never came out at trial. Chambers O B J E C T I O N !

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was not a preppy. He’d been thrown out of college. His entire scholastic record was one of failure and disappointment. After his poor performance in prep school, his mother somehow got him into Boston University, but there again his own behavior got him into trouble. Even before his second semester kicked off, Chambers was asked to leave the college over an issue with a stolen credit card. Alcohol and drugs eventually landed Chambers at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota.

There were many stomach-churning moments during the trial, but one stands out in my memory to this day. A home video shot by a friend that wound up on a tabloid television program showed a downright scary Chambers smirking and ripping the head off a female doll, then turning to the camera, flashing a big smile, and saying, “Oops! I think I killed it.”

Chambers has never shown remorse publicly. At one of his parole hearings he said, “I guess I could also give you the party line and say I have learned my lesson, I will never do this again, but that’s not how I feel at the moment.” That says it all. Chambers is free, and Jennifer is dead and buried, leaving behind her devastated family and a tattered reputation. Her mother still grieves. As we’ve seen in the Bryant case, the Preppy Murder’s legacy of the blame-the-victim defense is alive and well and living in America’s courts.

T H E C E N T R A L P A R K J O G G E R

In her 2003 autobiography,
I Am the Central Park Jogger,
Trisha Meili wrote, “Shortly after 9 P.M. on April 19, 1989, a young woman, out for her run in New York’s Central Park, was bludgeoned, raped, sodomized, and beaten so savagely that doctors despaired for her life and a horrified nation cried out in pain and outrage.” New York City, and the world, reeled in shock as facts emerged surrounding the brutal gang rape of a woman who’d been left for dead and became known for years only as “the Central Park Jogger.”

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The 1989 trial made it clear that many of those in power were not interested in pursuing the prevention of violence against women. The victim’s reputation was beyond reproach. She was a successful investment banker. She’s wasn’t a drug addict, she was an executive who worked long hours every day. She was monogamous with one boyfriend.

She was a fitness fanatic who worked out by running religiously. None of that mattered—she was still to blame.

There are over two hundred rapes a day in this country—a fact that was rarely discussed in the press during the weeks and months following Meili’s attack and then at trial. These women are victims. Instead of recognizing Meili as part of that group, the defense in the case sent a chilling message to independent women everywhere by casting blame on the investment banker herself. “What was she doing in the park?”

they asked. “Didn’t she know that a woman shouldn’t be on the street after dark? Didn’t she in some way ‘ask for it’?” Other attacks labeled her a workaholic, an anorexic, and a control freak who thought she owned the park. I found this absolutely outrageous. When the traditional attacks on rape victims didn’t work in this case, the defense dug deep to find a whole new way to crucify a rape victim. None of their slurs were true.