Rape at Harvard and the New York Times
Ashley Cross’s New York Times Modern Love piece on her relationship with D. Drew Douglas, a convicted Harvard rapist. While Ashley Cross didn’t mention D. Drew Douglas’ name in the piece, Gawker and other blogs quickly picked it up and made a point of it. There’s not much point in going over the ‘Did he or didn’t he’ material again. It doesn’t much matter in any case. Ashley Cross clearly believes he was innocent and appears to sympathize with him and his desire to avoid publicity; so of course the best way to do it was to run a piece on him in the New York Times. Granted she didn’t use his name, but she used hers and she had to know it wouldn’t take long for people who knew her to figure out who he was and distribute it all over the internet. She could have reasonably assumed it wouldn’t wind up in Gawker, but considering how high profile the outlet she used was, she should have expected this would bring him a lot more attention. There was no reason for her piece except self-promotion or some upper class Harvard girl variation of Myspace confessionals. She achieved that certainly, if not in the way she intended.
Most commenters on Gawker naturally assume he did it citing the legal records and his plea bargain. That’s hardly a lot to go on but that rarely stops internet commenters anyway. It’s easy to assume you know everything that’s worth knowing about a case based one or two articles you find on the web and then pass judgement about it. But isn’t that what the internet is all about in the first place.
As repulsive as they are, there’s always Camille Paglia there to remind us of what true repulsiveness is. If there’s some sort of sewer, Camille Paglia would be the rotten black shapeless thing just beneath the ooze, toxic waste and mutant alligators.
“I do not accept the inflammatory version of the disputed events (the one described by the victim). And I will continue to insist that the intoxicated female student in question bore equal responsibility for the incident.”
Of course the precise idea of being drunk is that you’re not responsible for what happens to you. In no other crime would someone seriously say the victim got what he deserved because he was drunk. Had the woman in question been mugged rather than raped, would Camille Paglia seriously argue she had equal responsibility with the mugger. (Actually for all Satan her lord and master knows, she might)
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Stumble it!
It is preposterous to claim, as you do, that “There was no reason for her piece except self-promotion or some upper class Harvard girl variation of Myspace confessionals.”
Cross clearly states her motivation for writing - she’s writing about how the charges against her boyfriend affected his relationship with her. This is an entirely legitimate perspective from which to write about, and one that has not been seen very often before.
Cross’s motivations clearly have nothing to do with your own (baseless) presumptions, and the NYT editors were right to publish her personal essay.
Still not convinced?
Well, try reversing the genders. If Cross were a man writing about his three-year relationship with a girlfriend who had been raped and couldn’t bear to be touched intimately, I doubt you would have been questioning his motivations for writing, the way you’re questioning Cross’s now.
Lastly, I don’t agree with Camille Paglia that the female Harvard student bears 50% of the responsibility — but I don’t agree with you either, when you imply that she bears 0% of the responsibility for the situation in which she found herself.
Surely there is some responsibility for all students (male and female) not to drink to excess, to drink responsibly, and to not become incapacitated. And surely female students aren’t helpless to prevent themselves from being sexually assaulted.
Who in their right mind would want to get caught up in a he said/she said situation? That’s lose-lose-lose for the male student, female student, and the institution.
Comment by Halfway House — February 14, 2007 @ 5:14 am
It is preposterous to claim, as you do, that “There was no reason for her piece except self-promotion or some upper class Harvard girl variation of Myspace confessionals.”
Cross clearly states her motivation for writing - she’s writing about how the charges against her boyfriend affected his relationship with her. This is an entirely legitimate perspective from which to write about, and one that has not been seen very often before.
Cross’s motivations clearly have nothing to do with your own (baseless) presumptions, and the NYT editors were right to publish her personal essay.
Still not convinced?
Well, try reversing the genders. If Cross were a man writing about his three-year relationship with a girlfriend who had been raped and couldn’t bear to be touched intimately, I doubt you would have been questioning his motivations for writing, the way you’re questioning Cross’s now.
Lastly, I don’t agree with Camille Paglia that the female Harvard student bears 50% of the responsibility — but I don’t agree with you either, when you imply that she bears 0% of the responsibility for the situation in which she found herself.
Surely there is some responsibility for all students (male and female) not to drink to excess, to drink responsibly, and to not become incapacitated. And surely female students aren’t helpless to prevent themselves from being sexually assaulted.
Who in their right mind would want to get caught up in a he said/she said situation? That’s lose-lose-lose for the male student, female student, and the institution.
Comment by Halfway House — February 14, 2007 @ 5:22 am
Cross clearly states her motivation for writing it, not for writing it to have it appear in a national newspaper, something that would surely affect her ex, who wanted privacy, and the victim. There was no reason to do that except Cross’ own need for attention or a desire to further a writing career. And she got what she wanted.
Switch the genders and it would still be a gross invasion of privacy of an ex-lover and an obnoxious attempt at self-promotion piggybacking on the tragedy of someone who wanted it kept quiet.
As for the victim’s responsibility. Everyone who gets drunk bears responsibility for being careless in a way that made them an easier target.but it’s a fraction of the responsibility of the perpetrator and certainly does not remove 100 percent of the blame from him for the crime. Being irresponsible can put you in a dangerous situation, but it doesn’t remove any responsibility from the perpetrator of the act.
Comment by O_Deus — February 16, 2007 @ 3:12 pm
Just happened upon this long-ago post while researching what happened in this Harvard case so long ago. I was attending a neighboring school when all of this went down in 1999. The Crimson account referred to here (and in many other blogs that appeared after the NYT piece) is just based on one side of the court documents. As many people who were students in the Boston area when this happened know, the facts weren’t at all as clear as all the bloggers claim 8 years later. Initially, it appeared that neither student clearly remembered the details of what happened. Both clearly regretted it. When the girl made an accusation, the boy apologized. When she later pushed the Harvard administration to investigate, he was required to submit a statement. He had always been contrite about an event that happened when they were both severely drunk, so he was honest about things as he remembered them. Then she was interviewed by a newspaper, her story became clearer, and then she filed legal charges. Suddenly, his statement that was offered as part of an internal arbitration at Harvard became part of a criminal investigation. Given that he had already admitted regret in this statement, he had little choice but to plea bargin. Thus, he was convicted.
I certainly don’t know what happened in that room over a decade ago, but to those of us who were around when it happened and saw the news as it unfolded, it was clearly possible that this could have been a case of two people getting drunk and waking up regretting it — except one of them became increasingly convinced that the other was at fault. The latter, who was an awkward somewhat shy person, felt awful that he might have hurt his friend, and he went along with the initial administrative investigation and expressed remorse. That locked him into a track where he had little choice when it turned into a criminal matter and received national attention.
Maybe there was a rape. I don’t know. I do know that the story changed a lot over the year between the incident and when he was thrown out of Harvard. If you bothered to check that out a little more, you might realize that the NYT’s piece may be more than an apology for a “rapist”.
Comment by Veritas needed — December 3, 2009 @ 5:31 pm