Tiger, Kobe, Porn and Media Responsibility in Rape Trials

By Lynn Hecht Schafran

On Saturday Night Live this past Saturday (April 10, 2010) Tina Fey did a star turn as one of Tiger Woods’ multiple mistresses serving as a TV commentator for the Masters Golf Tournament.  “I’ve had sex with him a bunch of times,” she says of Woods. “Michael Jordan has the funniest video of him [Woods] choking me a little.”

This reference to Woods’ text to mistress Joslyn James, “You are my #*% whore. I want to hold you down while I choke you,” has been the focus of obsessive media comment, but it has all missed an important point. Last week in The Huffington Post, Jackson Katz, a leading male activist working to prevent violence against women, interviewed cultural theorist Gail Dines, an expert on pornography whose book, Pornland: How the Pornography Industry is Hijacking Our Sexuality, will be published in July.  They observed that the language in Woods’ texts is clearly the language of “openly violent and degrading” porn, and that it is surprising that in the myriad times the media has reprinted this text, no one has commented that his language “suggests that Woods (mis)learned a lot about sex, and women, from his consumption of pornography.”

This is the second time the media has failed in this regard. The media’s obsession with the news that Tiger Woods wanted to choke his mistress during sex brings to mind the media’s indifference to the news back in 2004 that Kobe Bryant had no qualms about saying that that’s exactly how he did have sex with his mistress, Michelle.  Why raise such old “news” about Bryant?  Because the media’s current obsession with Tiger Wood’s predilection is merely salacious, while in 2004 the media’s indifference to Kobe Bryant’s practices impacted public perception of the credibility of the Colorado woman who charged him with rape.

During the run up to Kobe Bryants’s trial the media eagerly headlined every untrue allegation leaked by the defense.  But when the Smoking Gun leaked the transcript of Bryant’s first interview with the police, there were no headlines blaring “Kobe Admits Strangling Alleged Victim”.  When I wrote an op-ed titled “The Missing Headlines” I could not get it published.

At the preliminary hearing in the Kobe Bryant trial, prosecutors claimed that Bryant threw the alleged victim over a chair, put his hands around her neck and raped her.  In the transcript Bryant claims the woman bent over herself, but he freely admits the strangulation. He acknowledges that he put his hands around her neck and that his hands are strong (page 16, lines 465-481).  Then he says “about the strangling thing you have to go talk to this girl [inaudible] Michelle…, we do the same thing.” Michelle, he tells the detectives, is a girlfriend with whom he frequently has sex like this (page 36, lines 1103-1117). I don’t know the etiquette of asking your sexual partner if she minds being choked during intercourse, but I would think you should have known her for more than fifteen minutes and be sure of her name.  We know from the transcript that Bryant had only the briefest acquaintance with this woman as he manipulated her into coming to his room, and that as to giving police her name, he could only say, “Something like that”.

The link to porn film culture in the Bryant transcript was also apparent, and ignored by the media, in his statements to the police about wanting to ejaculate on his alleged victim’s face. One of the detective’s asks Bryan, “Did you ever ask her if you wanted, if you could cum in her face?” Bryant responds, “Yes. That’s when she said no. That’s when she said no. That’s when she said no.” The detective then asks, “So you like to cum in your partner’s face?” and Bryant says, “That’s my thing…” (Page 19, lines 564-566).

Throughout the Bryant case efforts to focus attention on what was actually alleged and to make clear that the public did not know what the prosecution’s evidence would be and should not rush to judgment without hearing both sides were frequently smothered or ignored by the media.

As Director of the National Judicial Education Program at Legal Momentum I have worked with judges nationwide on how to better achieve fairness in cases involving adult female and male victims of sexual violence. To explore the need for thorough questioning in rape case jury selection we provide judges an opportunity to hear jurors from nonstranger sexual assault cases in the judges’ own state describe what was discussed during deliberations.  The judges are dismayed to hear that many jurors ignore both the facts and the law and decide based on their own views of how women should behave, who is a worthy victim and false stereotypes about  every aspect of the crime. We have had jurors say that when a woman gets into a car with a man she is giving consent to sex.  We have had jurors who acquitted a rapist who left teeth marks in his victim because she was a homeless woman they did not find sympathetic.

Jurors come from the community, and the community is educated by the media, which claims to want a role in furthering fairness in rape cases and encouraging victims to report. The Bryant  case  was an opportunity for the media to educate the public about the realities of rape and the need in every case to hear the evidence from both sides rather than deciding based on a defendant’s celebrity status and publicity campaign. But the media failed this obligation.  And even when there was a transcript in which the defendant made admissions of violence that should make everyone wonder just how consensual this encounter could have been, few media outlets gave it any attention, much less the attention given the defense’s claims. I say again, where were the headlines blaring “Kobe Admits Strangling His Alleged Victim”?

* Lynn Hecht Schafran is an attorney and Director of the National Judicial Education Program, a project of Legal Momentum in cooperation with the National Association of Women Judges.

 

 

Comments

[Count Istvan 17-11 9-3.]

Great article.

[Laura Williams]

Well said, Lynn. Thanks for this analysis.