The question in this case – which involved a young woman named Watkins – was which statute of limitations applied to her claims against the state. Watkins alleged that between April 2, 2000, and April 2, 2001 – while she was in custody at the Scioto Juvenile Correctional Facility in Delaware, Ohio, run by the Department of Youth Services (“DYS”) – two employees sexually abused her.
Watkins was about 14 at the time.
On July 31, 2012, Watkins filed a complaint in the Ohio Court of Claims against DYS and the two employees. The court dismissed the two employees from the suit because, according to Ohio law, only state agencies and their instrumentalities can be sued in that court.
DYS moved to dismiss the complaint, asserting that Watkins’s complaint was barred by the two-year statute of limitations for civil actions against the state set forth in Ohio law. The court granted the motion, asserting that Watkins’s complaint was barred by the two-year statute of limitations for civil actions against the state because she filed her complaint more than two years after reaching the age of majority, or legal age.
The court explained that it is “well-settled that the limitations period set forth” in the pertinent law applies to all actions against the state in the Court of Claims and “takes precedence over all other statutes of limitation in the Revised Code.”
Watkins appealed, but the court of appeals affirmed the judgment of the Court of Claims.
After that, she brought her case before us – the Ohio Supreme Court.
Watkins maintained that the Ohio Legislature intended that the limitations period in the pertinent law dealing with child sexual abuse should apply to all claims of childhood sexual abuse, whether the person committing the acts was a private citizen or state employee.
In a case from 1994, called Ault v. Jasko, our court addressed the statute of limitations for sexual-abuse claims in cases where victims of childhood sexual abuse repressed memories of that abuse.
We held that the “discovery rule” applied in such cases.
What is the “discovery rule?”
We explained that the statute of limitations period for sexual abuse in Ohio “begins to run when the victim recalls or otherwise discovers that he or she was sexually abused, or when, through the exercise of reasonable diligence, the victims should have discovered the sexual abuse.”
In that case, we determined that the statute of limitations – tempered by the discovery rule – applied to claims against public as well as private actors.
In 2006, the Legislature enacted new legislation – Senate Bill 17 (“S.B. 17”) which substantially rewrote the child sexual abuse law, setting a firm accrual date as the date on which the victim attains the age of majority for claims based on childhood sexual abuse. It also greatly expanded the limitations period for such claims – from one year to 12 years.
The question that we faced in Watkins’s case was whether the General Assembly – by enacting S.B. 17 – intended to change the statute of limitations only for claims against private citizens and not for claims against the state.
There is another law that deals with claims against the state. That law states provides that civil actions against the state shall be commenced “no later than two years after the date of accrual of the cause of action.”
By a four-to-three vote, we concluded that S.B. 17 changed the statute of limitations to 12 years for claims against both private citizens and against the state. S.B. 17 stated that the changes in the law “shall apply to all civil actions for assault or battery brought by a victim of childhood sexual abuse…and to all civil actions brought by a victim of childhood sexual abuse for a claim resulting from childhood sexual abuse…”
In that language, the Legislature allowed for no distinction between private citizens or public employees.
Additionally, one of the forms of childhood sexual abused defined in the amended law is sexual imposition committed in certain specified circumstances, one of which occurs when “the victim is confined in a detention facility,” and the person committing the act is an employee of that detention facility.
In addition to the acts of detention-facility workers, the law also applies to acts committed by other persons who could be employees of the state – for example, teachers, coaches or administrators.
Thus, the very definition of childhood sexual abuse includes the wrongful conduct of state employees. The plain language of the law that resulted from S.B. 17 reveals the legislature’s intent that claims against the state resulting from childhood sexual abuse are subject to a 12-year statute of limitations and an accrual date of the age of majority.
But, the statute of limitations created by S.B. 17 conflicts with the two-year limitations period in the law concerning civil actions against the state. How to resolve that? When there’s a conflict of that sort between two laws, the one enacted later in time than a preexisting law will control. Therefore, as the more recent and more specific enactment, S.B. 17 provides the limitations period for claims against the state resulting from childhood sexual abuse.
The only remaining question was whether the statute of limitations for Watkins’s claims had expired by the August 3, 2006 effective date of S.B. 17. That issue was not considered by the trial court or the court of appeals. Which statute of limitations applies to Watkins’s claims depends on when she discovered that she had been sexually abused.
In any event, we determined that the law resulting from the enactment of S.B. 17 is the statute of limitations for claims against the state resulting from childhood sexual abuse. The court of appeals erred in holding that a claim resulting from childhood sexual abuse cannot be pursued against the state more than two years after the claim accrued.
Therefore, we reversed the court of appeals’ judgment and sent the case back to the trial court for further proceedings.
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-12 00:47:412016-01-12 00:47:41Justice Paul Pfeifer, Statute of limitations, The Highland County Press
Men who rape children under 12 are less likely to be jailed in Victoria, and are being jailed for less time than those convicted of raping adults.
The shocking statistics have emerged as Victoria’s Sentencing Advisory Council launches an investigation into what the state’s courts are taking into account when judging the seriousness of sexual offences against children.
The council is due to report to Attorney-General Martin Pakula on the sentencing of offenders convicted of the sexual penetration of a child aged under 12 in June.
Its own data shows that between July 2009 and June 2014, 72 men were convicted in Victoria of sexually penetrating a child younger than 12 (no women were convicted of the same offence in that period).
Of those men, 75 per cent were jailed. The median length of jail sentences was four years.
Almost 14 per cent received a wholly suspended jail sentence, and another 8.4 per cent were handed partially suspended sentences, community-correction orders or community-based orders. Another 2.8 per cent either received youth justice orders or had their charges discharged or dismissed.
In contrast, of the 211 Victorian men convicted of rape of adults between 2009 and 2014 (again, no women were convicted of rape in that period), 91 per cent were jailed. The median length of imprisonment was five years.
The remaining 9 per cent were given wholly or partially suspended sentences, youth justice centre orders, community correction orders, community-based orders or other punishments. None had their charges discharged or dismissed.
Both offences carry a maximum penalty of 25 years’ imprisonment and/or a fine of 3000 penalty units.
Sexual penetration of a child under 12 is one of the seven serious offences targeted by the former state government’s “baseline sentencing” laws, which were intended to increase jail terms for serious violence and sex offences.
Baseline sentencing, which took effect in 2014, specified prison sentences for seven nominated offences, including incest.
The law was intended to direct judges to fix sentences so that, over time, the median length of sentences given for a particular offence would match the term of imprisonment specified in the statute. For example, over a period of time the median term of imprisonment for the rape of a child under 12 would equal 10 years.
However, Victoria’s highest court, the Court of Appeal, ruled in November that the laws were “incapable of being given any practical operation” as they required judges to divine what other judges might sentence offenders to.
Announcing a review of the laws, Mr Pakula said: “The current situation involving baseline sentencing provisions is clearly unworkable and requires urgent attention.”
Mr Pakula directed the Sentencing Advisory Council to look into the issue and make recommendations to the government. He said the government was committed to “ensuring that sentencing laws are workable and that sentencing meets community expectations”.
The council has invited the public to make submissions on the issue before January 29.
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-11 18:22:002016-01-11 18:22:00Bianca Hall, Men who rape children less likely to be jailed than those who rape adults, The Age
Alfredo Simón, a former pitcher for the Detroit Tigers who is now a free agent, is big for a baseball player.
The 34-year-old stands 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 265 pounds, according to his official stats. Simón’s stature may be imposing on the field, but it seems even more so when reading through a civil complaint lodged in 2014 that accuses him of rape.
According to his accuser, the assault occurred when Simón was in Washington, D.C., playing with his old team, the Cincinnati Reds, in a game against the Washington Nationals. The 29-year-old woman, who in court documents is named Jane Doe, says she met Simón at a club, where she consumed several drinks and became intoxicated. Doe left with Simón in the early morning hours of April 28, 2013, and they started making out in his hotel room.
But then things turned.
Simón, she says, held her down despite her resistance, and anally raped her. Each time she tried to flee, she says, he would push her back onto the bed. Doe says he eventually yanked her by her hair and ejaculated in her face.
A forensic nurse examiner recorded Doe’s injuries in the sexual assault exam she took at the hospital later that day. Four days later, Doe reported the assault to police. According to the court documents, the rape kit detailed vaginal and anal abrasions and anal tears—injuries that, forensic medical experts would later testify in the civil case, corroborated her story. These injuries were not, however, recorded in photographs. Doe declined the nurse’s offer to snap images of her injuries, perhaps not understanding their potential value in bolstering her version of events.
Instead, an image that did make it into Doe’s police file was a photocopy of her cell phone exchange with the friend she had gone out with that night. Doe told her friend she was leaving the club to go “fuck the baseball player.” In her initial interview with police, Doe explained that she had intended to have sex with Simón. But, as noted in her civil complaint, she withdrew her consent once Simón “started to get rough with her.”
Police did not interview Simón, according to court records.
Ultimately, the evidence gathered wasn’t enough for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which prosecutes crimes that occur in D.C. The prosecutors presented this case to a grand jury, but notes from Doe’s police file indicate it was the U.S. Attorney’s Office that made the decision not to file charges against Simón, citing “insufficient evidence” and “good defense.”
Historically, that would have been the end of the matter, at least from the defendant’s perspective.
But Doe did not accept the state’s view as the final say on her case. Instead, she filed a civil lawsuit against Simón, claiming $10 million in punitive damages for assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and $5 million to compensate her for medical expenses and lost wages. The case ultimately settled for a fraction of that amount—$150,000, Simón’s attorneys told USA Today—and Simón did not admit any wrongdoing.
William Miller, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., would not comment on Doe’s case. “We are legally barred from providing information about confidential grand jury proceedings,” he said in an email.
Legal experts told RH Reality Check that by suing her alleged attacker in civil court, Jane Doe joined the ranks of a growing movement in the field of sexual assault.
Though there is no comprehensive national database that tracks the number of civil cases brought against alleged perpetrators of sexual assault, anecdotal evidence suggests a trend in the United States for victims to seek civil redress.
Every year, thousands of cases involving allegations of sexual assault are abandoned in the United States due to a range of reasons. These include lackluster police investigations, lack of forensic evidence, a victim’s unwillingness to testify, and, according to a recent White House report, because “law enforcement officers and prosecutors are not fully trained on the nature of these crimes or how best to investigate and prosecute them.”
Indeed, rape is notoriously difficult to prosecute and harder to prove. Even after decades of criminal justice reform and dedicated efforts from survivors and advocates, prosecutors are generally reluctant to go after alleged persecutors aggressively, often fearing they won’t win a conviction. Trials can also be traumatic for victims, who frequently face juries biased by cultural assumptions about rape.
“We [in society] generally don’t second-guess people who say that they were burglarized or say that their car was stolen or who say that they were assaulted, but we absolutely second-guess people that claim that they were sexually assaulted,” former special victims prosecutor Roger Canaff told RH Reality Check in a phone interview. “We either are skeptical of the truth of the allegation or we look to blame that person.”
Unlike criminal trials, which require the prosecution to prove the defendant’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” civil trials have a much lower bar, requiring only that a plaintiff persuade a judge or jury that it is more likely than not that the events occurred.
For many victims, it is easy to see the appeal of choosing a venue where they are at least held to a more attainable burden of proof than in a criminal court. Sometimes they file a civil suit in addition to pursuing criminal charges, or they only make a civil complaint.
Civil rights attorney Gloria Allred, whose Los Angeles-based firm has specialized in representing women who have been victims of various types of sexual abuse and harassment, says she is seeing increasing numbers of women consider civil remedies as a form of justice after they have been sexually attacked.
“More and more, I think victims are very seriously considering the civil option, because it’s empowering,” Allred told RH Reality Check in a phone interview. “You’re moving from being a victim to a survivor to a fighter for change.”
This shift in mentality is especially apparent in the civil claims against Bill Cosby, who has become the face of one of the most high-profile cases of sexual assault allegations in the past decade. Allred’s firm—Allred, Maroko & Goldberg—represents about half of the nearly 60 women who have so far come forward with claims, reaching as far back as the ’60s, against the man formerly known as “America’s Dad.” Coverage of the claims against Cosby has intensified over the past two years, but the fact remains that the fallen Hollywood star has yet to serve time for any of the allegations against him. Cosby faced his first criminal charges in one of these cases only very recently. Prosecutors in Pennsylvania charged him with sexual assault in late December for allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in 2004.
For his accusers, Allred says civil court offers women another opportunity for justice. And she says the civil route is empowering because, unlike criminal prosecutions where the state is in charge, civil cases enable victims to decide whether and how to proceed in their case.
“It’s the case of the victim, not the case of the people of that state,” Allred said. “As [people] see women standing up and not being afraid to fight back, it does have a ripple effect, and it does inspire other survivors to think, ‘Well, if she can do it, maybe I can do it, too.’”
Suing to Change the System
The trend of rape-related civil lawsuits has been building over time, as University of Arizona law professor Ellen Bublick documented in 2006. In recent years, increased recoveries from plaintiffs have stemmed from sexual abuse lawsuits against Catholic priests and on college campuses, with settlements for rape-related lawsuits often averaging half a million dollars.
RH Reality Check’s review of dozens of federal civil lawsuits involving sexual assault filed since 2012—available in public court databases and the National Crime Victim Bar Association’s civil case database—indicate that outside of a handful of deep-pocketed athletes and celebrities, most sexual assault survivors are seeking damages from third parties. The trend appears to be especially apparent with complainants at schools and in institutions, particularly correctional facilities, where prisoners are vulnerable to sexual assaults at the hands of prison guards and fellow inmates, and often have little recourse outside of civil redress.
Perhaps the most prominent use of civil laws to win justice for sexual assault victims has been by college students, who have forced universities to take campus sexual assault more seriously via cases filed under a 1972 civil rights law known as Title IX. The law requires educational institutions to take proactive action to ensure that students are not subject to sexual discrimination, including rape or other forms of sexual assault, such as harassment and sexual touching—or groping—that falls short of penetration.
Over the past few decades, survivors and advocates have leveraged the law’s requirements in order to build awareness of the problem of assaults on college campuses and in public high schools. A glowing reception at the Sundance Film Festival of the documentary The Hunting Ground, about on-campus rape, has only propelled momentum for solutions to combat attacks at universities.
And student advocates are explicit about the advantages that Title IX can have over criminal prosecutions.
The group Know Your IX, started in 2013 by a group of sexual assault survivors and their supporters, explains on its website that “many victims of sexual violence don’t want to turn to the criminal justice system.”
The group states: “[Victims] may fear skepticism and abuse from police, prosecutors, or juries; they may not want to go through the ordeal of a long trial; they may fear retaliation from their assailant, who will most likely not end up prosecuted, let alone convicted; and they may be hesitant to send their assailants to prison. But even survivors who do report to the police are often abandoned by the system.”
By contrast, Title IX requires schools to investigate every report of sexual assault. And as with all other civil claims, the victim must prove that it is more likely than not that the alleged assault occurred, rather than that the crime occurred “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Like Title IX activists seeking cultural change in the way institutions manage sexual assault cases, some victims have used a similar approach to spur action on the processing of rape kits.
Between 2012 and 2014, seven anonymous women from Harvey, Illinois, sued the Chicago suburb for the county’s failure to process and test rape kits that had been collected after they reported rapes between 1999 and 2008.
Like many jurisdictions in the United States, Harvey’s police had not begun testing the kits, even though they contained evidence collected from victims who had endured forensic exams that often last hours and can be invasive and distressing.
One of the victims, known as Jane Doe I, first reported being raped by her stepfather in 1997, when she was 11 years old. She submitted to a rape kit exam, which found semen in her vagina.
According to court records, Doe I’s mother reunited with the stepfather, Robert Buchanan, early into the police investigation, and asked her daughter to blame the assault on a schoolmate. Doe I recanted, as is common in sexual assault cases involving minors and family members, and police closed the investigation without attempting to match the DNA sample to Buchanan or to conduct further investigation, according to the complaint and subsequent court records.
In the civil case, Doe I testified that Buchanan went on to assault her for several years. She estimated that he raped her more than 100 times between 1998 and 2004, but her previous experience deterred her from reporting the crimes to police. Police tested her rape kit in 2007 and found a match to Buchanan’s DNA. City attorneys finally convicted Buchanan of sexually assaulting a minor in 2012 and sentenced him to six years in prison.
The City of Harvey awarded Jane Doe I $1.2 million and awarded the remaining six plaintiffs a combined $241,250, according to the Chicago Tribune. Together, these women, many of whom were minors at the time of their assaults, filed a total of three class action lawsuits that centered in part on the county’s failing to process or preserve more than 200 rape kits. Cook County prosecutors discovered these abandoned kits after raiding Harvey Police Department headquarters. Of these kits, only 50 were deemed viable for testing—including those of the anonymous plaintiffs in these cases—and led to charges against 14 individuals.
Monetary Justice
Toward the end of 2014, Mattie Bright desperately searched for a new high school for her daughter.
In November 2014, Bright’s then-15-year-old said three boys raped her in the middle of the school day in an abandoned classroom at Rosa Fort High School, in rural Tunica, Mississippi. Though police apprehended the alleged perpetrators, they returned to school two days later. One of the boys continued to ride the same bus as Bright’s daughter for months.
The criminal case is still pending, but last summer Bright sued the Tunica County School District in civil court, seeking damages to compensate her daughter’s psychological and emotional distress. Tunica is a rural town, and Bright cannot afford the hefty tuition of an all-girls private school, one of the closer options, said Stephanie Morris, the civil attorney representing Bright and her daughter.
The costs associated with this traumatic event continue to swell, Morris told RH Reality Check.
“She has been severely depressed and having chest pains,” she said, of Bright’s daughter. “She needs counseling, extensive counseling. Quite naturally, this is something that affects women for years and years to come. Some people need counseling for the rest of their lives.”
While many states do offer some form of compensation to victims of violent crimes following a criminal conviction, they tend to only cover a limited range of expenses.
However, civil lawsuits allow victims to fight for compensation for the full range of their injuries—medical and psychological—and in that way, these suits can better reflect the true damage inflicted by rape and sexual assault.
According to the complaint Bright filed in August, she is suing the Tunica County School District and school officials for not taking proper action after the alleged rape occurred and for acting indifferently to the verbal and online sexual harassment her daughter allegedly experienced following the assault. The complaint claims that only when local media began reporting on the alleged attack four months later did the school take any independent action, firing two teachers and expelling the students implicated in the attack.
Katherine Kerby, the attorney representing the Tunica County School District and other school officials, declined to comment on the case.
Bright is also seeking punitive damages, as well as a requirement that the school district implement steps to prevent sex-based discrimination and harassment and to fully investigate these incidents as they occur. The amount of damages sought is unspecified.
“The school district was so indifferent to what had happened to this child,” Morris said. “So, punitive damages would be appropriate just to deter them from this type of response, or non-response, in the future.”
Entrenching Inequalities
While the civil route offers some advantages, legal experts warn that it cannot take the place of robust criminal prosecution. Not only does it fail to remove dangerous individuals from society, but it also only works against defendants or institutions with deep pockets, a reality that excludes the majority of sexual assault cases.
After all, civil lawsuits are only an option for those whose perpetrators happen to have enough money to make them worth suing, a glaring inequality that lawyers and experts say will limit the extent to which civil action can be used to combat sexual assault.
University of Oregon law professor Tom Lininger in his 2008 Duke Law Journal article “Is It Wrong to Sue for Rape?” argues that lower-income defendants are more likely to serve time than rich defendants, who are more likely to pay for their crimes in civil courts.
Allred says that inequality is simply an unfortunate reality of an imperfect system.
“As the old saying goes, ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone,’” she said. “You know, is it worth it to spend hundreds of hours in a civil lawsuit against a perpetrator who has no assets? Where is the justice in the end?”
For LW, a resident of Washington, D.C., the fact that her alleged attacker did not have substantial assets was just one of the factors that ruled out civil proceedings in her case.
In an interview with RH Reality Check, LW, who asked to be identified by her initials, said she was drugged and raped by a man she met at a concert in October 2012. She said the man, a friend of a friend, offered her a vodka and Red Bull, which, she said, knocked her out almost immediately.
LW said she awoke the next morning to a bed covered in vomit and blood, faded memories, and the realization that she was no longer a virgin. LW was convinced she had a solid case, a prime piece of evidence being that her rape kit matched the offender’s semen.
LW’s victims’ rights attorney, Bridgette Stumpf, confirmed the facts LW laid out about her case with RH Reality Check but said she could not reveal any privileged information about her client’s case. Stumpf is the co-founder and co-executive director of the Network for Victim Recovery of DC, a nonprofit that since 2012 has offered free legal, case-management, and advocacy services to all victims of crimes in the District.
LW said the U.S. Attorney’s Office told her in July 2014 that her case was not strong enough to go trial. Months later, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request for LW’s police file, Stumpf and LW learned that her alleged rapist had changed his story. Initially, he denied raping LW and claimed he had simply brought her home. But when told his semen was found in a rape kit, LW said, he shifted his story, claiming they had had consensual sex. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on LW’s case.
LW seriously considered filing a civil lawsuit against the alleged attacker but ultimately decided against it.
“I decided it wasn’t for me,” LW said in a recent email. “It may seem that civil suits are ‘easier’ to win and are better at getting justice, but that comes with a price tag. The cases can be dragged out for a long time, the victim is put through intense questioning, sometimes even psych evals, and you have to re-live the whole experience. Plus, in a civil case, it is all about punitive damages. Most perpetrators don’t have money to pay to the victim, let alone anything else that you could sue for.”
And on top of that, even a successful civil suit would have failed to deliver the results LW said she most wanted. LW, like other rape survivors who spoke to RH Reality Check, believes her alleged attacker has likely assaulted other women, or will again. LW is not alone in this thinking. Sexual assault researchers have found that many rapists, including so-called date or acquaintance rapists, are repeat offenders.
“For me, I realized that what I wanted most was for my perpetrator to face criminal charges,” she said. “I wanted him to get jail time and be registered as a sex offender, and have his DNA in CODIS [the FBI’s national criminal database]. The statute in DC for criminal charges in rape cases is 15 years. I have hope that one day, my perpetrator will face criminal charges for the rapes he has committed, but civil charges wouldn’t help me sleep at night.”
Full article here: http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2016/01/08/victims-rape-sexual-assault-failed-criminal-justice-system-increasingly-seek-civil-remedies/
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-10 04:02:512016-01-10 04:02:51Sophia Resnick, Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault, Failed by Criminal Justice System, Increasingly Seek Civil Remedies, RH Reality Check
FLORENCE, SC – The Pee Dee Coalition is hosting a fundraiser with proceeds benefiting children and their families through the Durant Children’s Center. It’s called “Matthew Sandusky: The Resilient Soul.”
Matt Sandusky is Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son. According to the release, “Matt will share his story of victory after abuse. He uses his experience as a platform to take action in the prevention of child sexual abuse and to engage and support adult survivors. By telling his story, Matt is able to show survivors that hope always exists and that healing will happen.”
The event is March 2, from 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. in the Ballroom of the Florence Civic Center, 3300 W Radio Drive in Florence. If you would like to attend the VIP Reception, beginning at 6pm, call Durant Children’s Center at 843-664-4357.
Ticket Sales begin January 11, at the Florence Civic Center Box. Tickets are $60 per person plus a ticket processing fee of $4.29 per ticket.
I had a rather surreal experience last week, the kind where you wonder if the universe is playing with you or just using you as a toy in some bigger agenda that you’re only vaguely in the loop about.
The New York Times ran a profile, almost a tribute, to serial sexual abuser Marc Gafni a day before I gave a talk at Limmud UK titled “Rabbis who abuse”. Gafni, formerly Mordechai Winiarz, who was described by the shameless writer as having gained “stature” despite a “troubled past” and having “sexual encounters” with a 13-year-old (No, Mr. Oppenheimer, there is no such thing as a “sexual encounter” between an adult and a 13-year-old; there is only rape), has never been tried or jailed despite four decades of accusations of sexual abuse. And as we know, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Thanks to The Times, the world now knows that Gafni is having a phenomenal rebirth, again, as some kind of scholar somewhere, supported by powerful business and New Age leaders around the world. Like so many other abusive rabbis, he has managed to shake it all off and pretend that sexual abuse is just some dust on his elegant jacket, to be flicked off with a charming nod and a wink to his friends, while he finds a new adoring audience to maintain his self-established pedestal.
I have been researching this phenomenon of abusive leaders for some time. I had prepared my Limmud talk way before the Gafni story emerged (again), and planned just a passing mention of his story, among the dozen or so other anecdotes that I referred to in order to illustrate how rabbis get away with so much abuse. But Gafni’s reemergence in the Times as a man of “stature” colored my entire talk, and was a source of buzz during the whole week of Limmud. One could argue that Oppenheimer’s articles have had some positive effects of prompting some former Gafni supporters to publicly distance themselves from him (apparently 25 New Age leaders like Deepak Chopra have publicly distanced themselves from Gafni ). Still, one has to wonder why so many “leaders” have been powowing with Gafni despite all the evidence that he is a sexual predator. Meanwhile, all the smiling Gafni headshots and Oppenheimer’s insistence on giving Gafni supporters many inches of column space have been more illustrative of how abusers gain influence rather than how abusers get prosecuted.
This issue, of how and why high-profile leaders support high-profile abusers, is not really understood in the Jewish community, or arguably in the wider world. (How many women had to come forward before anyone took testimony against Bill Cosby seriously?) This dynamic is clearly not understood by many journalists, some of whom are so eager for a NYT byline that they are willing to throw victims of child sexual abuse under the bus by referring to rape as “sexual encounters”. But Oppenheimer is not alone in offering precious column space to the veneration of abusive leaders while giving half-hearted mention to a “troubled past”. The dynamic is not understood by communal leaders stuck in a star-struck culture in which proximity to so-called “celebrities” — Jewish or otherwise — trumps values like compassion for victims, integrity, and commitment to justice. Even today, as some of Gafni’s supporters reflect on their dubious attitudes of support for abusers, the question of how rabbis like Gafni get to where they are — with decades of adulation and high-paying jobs rather than a ticket to a prison cell — remains glaring.
To be clear: the Jewish community faces an epidemic of sexual abuse — as UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said earlier this year. As many as 1 out of 4 girls
and 1 out of 6 boys will experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18. The majority of minors who were sexually abused — an estimated 75% — were victimized by people they know. Over 85% of cases are not reported to local police or children rights protection groups. According to a study by Abel and Harlow, 93% of child sexual molesters define themselves as religious.Based on anecdotal evidence and unofficial collections, such as the Jewish Community Watch Wall of Shame, a disproportionate number of Jewish sexual abusers are rabbis or quasi-rabbis. And a very small proportion of abusers ever get prosecuted. Many remain in high-profile positions for years or even decades.
It is vital to understand how the Jewish community enables rabbi-abusers. Here are some of the insights that I have gleaned from years of research on sexual abuse in the Jewish community, which I shared last week at Limmud.
First of all, social hierarchies in the Jewish community favor high-profile abusers over their victims. Within hierarchies around knowledge, power, status, position, and money, rabbis enjoy many privileges. They are revered as all-knowers, possessers of people’s vulnerabilities and secrets, responsible for institutional reputations and fundraising, and considered representatives of entire communities. Rabbis are trusted and entrusted with layers of power. In the Orthodox community, this has an added gender hierarchy, in which all-powerful rabbis belong to exclusively male organizations that get to decide whether to believe the often female and powerless victims. In short, rabbis have power, prestige, and high-profile friends, as well as a lot of money riding on their reputations. Victims usually have none of that.
Abusers in power know how to use their status to lure, manipulate and silence victims. In a process known as “grooming”, the powerful abuser will make promises such as, “You’re my favorite,”, or “This is sacred time with me,” or “You’re special,” which play on the hierarchies with promises of social mobility. When Todros Grynhaus, a recently convicted UK abuser, tried to force his victim — a haredi teenage girl — into a sex act, he said “You might as well make yourself useful,” reinforcing the idea in the victim’s mind that she was a useless, powerless nobody. Emotional manipulation is the abusers’ specialty, and abusive rabbis know well how to use their power for these ends.
In the Jewish world, where rabbis are often respected for their “charisma”, this dynamic is especially problematic. The more charisma a rabbi has, the more power he has to abuse through emotional manipulation. Moreover, charisma, which is one of the primary signs of an abusive or even sociopath personality, makes people believe the abuser’s story rather than the victim’s testimony. The Jewish community has the unfortunate tendency to equate charisma with righteousness, which benefits rabbi abusers and leaves low-status victims struggling alone.
Power also offers abusers means to manipulate the system and even escape. Rabbi Ezra Scheiberg, one of the most high profile rabbis in the religious Zionist community, who was accused earlier this year of sexual assault and rape of a dozen women in Safed, was caught at Ben Gurion trying to flee. In the cases of rapists Baruch Lebovits and Nechemya Weberman in New York, the assailants were surrounded by a massive network of supporters who threatened and at times harmed victims and prosecution witnesses. In Weberman’s case, the DA brought charges against seven supporters, describing threats against the victim, as “trying to kill her soul”. Ultimately, rabbi abusers have access to power and victims do not.
The deleterious impact of these dynamics on victims cannot be understated. Genendy Radoff, an incest survivor and founder of the organization Mitzva L’Sapper, has said, “The ongoing denial by the rabbonim who I approached for help and by my family, was actually more traumatic and devastating than the sexual abuse. Now I wasn’t just abused, I was also being treated like I was crazy, and I was utterly alone.” Grynhaus’ victims were ostracized from their communities, accused of making “ridiculous accusations” against the great man. The family of Yehudis Goldsobel, raped by Menachem Mendel Levy for three years when she was a teenager, was also ostracized from their community — and even after Levy spent 18 months in prison for his crimes, his community continues to celebrate him.
Rabbi abusers also know how to use Jewish values — or rather, twisted versions of Jewish values — to protect themselves and discredit their victims. The language of “sacred community” and “lashon hara” or “mesirah” are often invoked to silence and shame victims rather than shaming the abusers. In 2000, 100 rabbis signed a letter saying that anyone who goes to outside authorities is a traitor. Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudah, one of the worst offending organizations in protecting abusers, decried victim advocates who go to secular authorities as “display[ing] utter disregard for essential Torah ideals like the requirement to shun lashon hora and hotzo’as shem ra; to show honor for Torah and respect for Torah scholars. I would have added basic fairness to the list. And truth.…” Indeed, when victim and activist Manny Waks came forward about the abuse he experienced in the Chabad Yeshiva College in Melbourne, Australia, he was accused of damaging the community and violating Jewish values by going to the non-Jewish authorities. His entire family was shunned and shamed — in fact his father, a longtime pillar of the Chabad community, was not allowed in synagogue, and eventually had to leave Australia entirely. Community cohesiveness, often invoked to silence critics and oust victims, provides a tremendous network of support and power to rabbi abusers.
In reality, these notions of “community cohesiveness” or libel, are just euphemisms for publicity. Leaders of the Jewish world fear bad publicity. They may call it anti-semitism or Jewish tradition, or not “airing dirty laundry”, but it is nothing more than public relations. Avrohom Mondrowitz, for example, who pretended to be a therapist in order to collect victims, was protected by Gerer Hassidic community protected him for years. Only when non-orthodox victims were discovered did he get indicted on 14 charges including 5 counts of sodomy — but he fled to Israel where he is still protected by the community.
For this reason, whistleblowers get punished too. The most notorious case of this is Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg , a satmar mikveh attendant who walked in on a rabbi raping a little boy in the mikveh, and became a staunch advocate for victims — blogging about sex abuse in his community, opening a New York City hotline to field sex abuse complaints, posting appeals around the world and on social media. For this he is reviled, slandered, hated, feared. He receives death threats on a regular basis, is not counted for a minyan in his community, and has had acid thrown on him while walking down the street in Brooklyn. Most significantly, I believe, is that he was “charged” by the internal “Modesty Brigade” in Williamsburg, whose counsel included the rapist he caught in the act.
Ultimately, the Jewish community is one in which high-profile abusers are often protected by high profile leaders. Gafni is hardly alone in this. Motti Elon, for example, who was convicted of sexual assault against his male students, has a strong following in Israel and abroad, and is frequently invited as a lecturer around the country. His defenders say, “He suffered enough” — as if he is the real victim. Jonathan Rosenblatt, the so-called “sauna rabbi”, was invited by the board to keep his pulpit, despite having taken dozens of boys naked to the sauna over the years. Some people are still defending Grynhaus, saying it was just some bad judgment and that “he stopped when the girls told him to stop” and that we should feel sorry for haredi men in prison because it is “very hard for religious Jews in prison”. Judge Guston Reichbach who sentenced Yona Weinberg to a 13-month jail term for molesting his bar mitzvah students, he said he received more than 90 letters attesting to Weinberg’s character and innocence. None of the letters, the judge noted, “displays any concern or any sympathy or even any acknowledgement for these young victims which, frankly, I find shameful.”
It is much easier to side with high profile abusers than with victims. For high profile members of the community, it is much easier to identify with the abusers, who are “like me”, than with vicitms, who are not as “polished”, who offer nothing in the way of support or protection. “A person can be destroyed if allegations which are baseless are raised against him,” says Rabbi David Zwiebel, Agudath’s executive vice-president. Meaning, the abusers can be destroyed. No mention of what happens to victims.
However, as Nuchem Rosenberg’s story illustrates, we should be suspicious of men who support high-profile abusers, or even men who refuse to acknowledge rape of a minor and whitewash it as “sexual encounters”. We should be asking: what are they hiding? For example, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of Motti Elon’s biggest supporters, has also been accused of sexual abuse, but has managed to slip through the accusations. A really important testimony to this comes from Andy Blumenthal, a member of Rosenblatt’s community in Riverdale. After the synagogue board announced that Rosenblatt was staying in his position — a decision led by chairman Donald Liss who overruled the board demand to dismiss Rosenblatt and bulldozed his own position — Andy Blumenthal wrote the following, not about Rosenblatt but about board chair Donald Liss — that is, the one covering for Rosenblatt:
[T]he Chairman of the Board who overruled the community and is protecting Rabbi Rosenblatt…
I grew up in Riverdale from the age of 10 when my family moved from the upper west side of Manhattan. I attended SAR Academy, the local yeshiva. My family had many lovely friends in this community and we attended the RJC where we were members for over 20 years.
Dr. Donald Liss significantly older than myself and my friends growing up frequently invited us to his house in Riverdale to “learn” Torah and for Shabbat meals, although the learning frequently turned into talk and banter and “wrestling.” Dr. Liss, as a doctor of rehabilitative and sports medicine, claimed great interest in my physical fitness as a youth and my practice of martial arts. He started to run and workout with me and my best friend and this at times lead to more “wrestling” matches.
Later Dr. Liss provided me as summer job in his and his brother’s practice at Englewood Hospital. Dr Liss was quite well off and took advantage of me that my family was less so and I needed a job. He provided me the opportunity to work out there in their “gym” during lunch and then when I would change in the locker room, he would invariably show up to talk with me.
Other times, he invited me to go on vacation with his family to the Poconos to babysit his kids. I remember one particular time, I went running on the trail there, and he came. When we got back to the house we were staying in, he dropped all his clothes in the kitchen area in front of me and his wife and totally nude just started talking.
Other times, when I would work out in my apartment in Riverdale with weights or stretching for karate, even during the day, Dr. Liss would show up. And he would also invite my friend and I to his home to lift weights and more “wrestling”.
As I got older and smarter, I realized Dr. Liss’s behavior was not normal, and his interest in my workout and my Torah learning did not seem innocent any longer. I stopped getting together and taking his phone calls. His calling, hang-ups, and messages increased.
That Dr. Liss would now protect Rabbi Rosenblatt and overrule the wishes of the Riverdale Jewish Center is a Chillul Hashem and travesty of justice.
Every word in this blog is true, and I hope it helps the community and the victims to get over this tragedy and desecration of G-d. The good people who wish to grow up and pray without unwanted advances of some sick individuals hiding behind many veils of religion and family deserve their community back.
When Jewish leaders support rabbis accused of abuse instead of listening to testimony of victims, we should be suspect of their motives.
What you can do
So, what should people do in the face of accusations of sexual abuse by high-profile abusers?
· Believe victims
Judith Herman, author of “Trauma and Recovery”, says that all abusers need is silence from bystanders in order to succeed. Neutrality, non-involvement, all of these help abusers. Don’t feed into that. Listen to victims. Just listening and believing is often the most important tool on the way to recovery. Being believed rather than shame goes a long way towards the victims’ healing process.
· Step out of your own experience
More commonly, support for the accused comes from a more mundane human dynamic. People do not want to believe what they have not seen for themselves. Some former Gafni supporters have come forward describing how they did not believe victims until they saw it for themselves. This is a very troubling and at times infuriating dynamic. As if to say, if I haven’t experienced it, it didn’t happen. Don’t be that person, the one who doesn’t believe until they experience it themselves. There is a brilliant Talmudic response to this that the community would be wise to remember: “Eino ro’eh eino ra’ya”, which means, the fact that I haven’t seen it is not a proof of anything. We should all remember that.
· Challenge social hierarchies
Remember that just because he is ‘an important man’ it doesn’t mean that he isn’t capable of doing terrible things. As a community, we should be less star-struck. We should be less impressed by people with power, status, money, fancy job titles, or those million twitter followers. All of those hierarchies create cushioning for abusers. We need as a community to learn to relate to others based on merit, not based on appearances, status, or power.
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-08 00:23:082016-01-08 00:23:08Elana Sztokman, On Marc Gafni, the New York Times, and how sexual-predator rabbis get communal support, Medium
Ex-rabbi Aryeh “Larry” Dudovitz was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy who was a member of his synagogue after celebrating a religious holiday nearly a decade ago.
The sentence was handed down Wednesday by Judge Evelyn Clay, according to Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s office.
In November, Dudovitz, 48, was convicted on one count of criminal sexual assault in connection with the attack. He was put on electronic monitoring and ordered to surrender his passport as he awaited sentencing.
He was 39 at the time the incident in 2006. At the time, the victim and his family worshipped with Dudovitz at a small storefront synagogue, the Moshiach Center, in West Rogers Park, the victim told DNAinfo Chicago in an interview in 2013.
The accuser looked up to Dudovitz, who he said mentored him before his Bar Mitzvah, and the two spent lots of time together.
Prosecutors said that Dudovitz was at the victim’s home celebrating the Orthodox Jewish holiday of Sukkot, and the victim, now 24, testified that after he went to bed, Dudovitz came into his bed room and assaulted him before fleeing the house.
Dudovitz and the victim drank alcohol, prosecutors alleged during his trial, and the boy fell asleep. He was awakened by Dudovitz, who gave “the victim oral copulation while the victim was sleeping,” court records show.
After the attack, Dudovitz admitted to several people — including rabbis and a mental-health counselor — that he sexually assaulted the boy while the victim slept, according to court testimony.
Dudovitz later apologized to the teen, prosecutors said, and the victim told his parents who then notified both religious authorities and police. Dudovitz later admitted the sexual assault to police.
The victim has said in the past the initially blamed himself for the attack and had looked up to his rabbi “like a father figure.”
http://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpg00SOL Reformhttp://sol-reform.com/News/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Hamilton-Logo.jpgSOL Reform2016-01-07 22:16:132016-01-07 22:16:13Linze Rice, Rabbi Sentenced To 8 Years in Prison for Sexual Assault of 15-Year-Old Boy, DNA Info
Justice Paul Pfeifer, Statute of limitations, The Highland County Press
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformThe question in this case – which involved a young woman named Watkins – was which statute of limitations applied to her claims against the state. Watkins alleged that between April 2, 2000, and April 2, 2001 – while she was in custody at the Scioto Juvenile Correctional Facility in Delaware, Ohio, run by the Department of Youth Services (“DYS”) – two employees sexually abused her.
Watkins was about 14 at the time.
On July 31, 2012, Watkins filed a complaint in the Ohio Court of Claims against DYS and the two employees. The court dismissed the two employees from the suit because, according to Ohio law, only state agencies and their instrumentalities can be sued in that court.
DYS moved to dismiss the complaint, asserting that Watkins’s complaint was barred by the two-year statute of limitations for civil actions against the state set forth in Ohio law. The court granted the motion, asserting that Watkins’s complaint was barred by the two-year statute of limitations for civil actions against the state because she filed her complaint more than two years after reaching the age of majority, or legal age.
The court explained that it is “well-settled that the limitations period set forth” in the pertinent law applies to all actions against the state in the Court of Claims and “takes precedence over all other statutes of limitation in the Revised Code.”
Watkins appealed, but the court of appeals affirmed the judgment of the Court of Claims.
After that, she brought her case before us – the Ohio Supreme Court.
Watkins maintained that the Ohio Legislature intended that the limitations period in the pertinent law dealing with child sexual abuse should apply to all claims of childhood sexual abuse, whether the person committing the acts was a private citizen or state employee.
In a case from 1994, called Ault v. Jasko, our court addressed the statute of limitations for sexual-abuse claims in cases where victims of childhood sexual abuse repressed memories of that abuse.
We held that the “discovery rule” applied in such cases.
What is the “discovery rule?”
We explained that the statute of limitations period for sexual abuse in Ohio “begins to run when the victim recalls or otherwise discovers that he or she was sexually abused, or when, through the exercise of reasonable diligence, the victims should have discovered the sexual abuse.”
In that case, we determined that the statute of limitations – tempered by the discovery rule – applied to claims against public as well as private actors.
In 2006, the Legislature enacted new legislation – Senate Bill 17 (“S.B. 17”) which substantially rewrote the child sexual abuse law, setting a firm accrual date as the date on which the victim attains the age of majority for claims based on childhood sexual abuse. It also greatly expanded the limitations period for such claims – from one year to 12 years.
The question that we faced in Watkins’s case was whether the General Assembly – by enacting S.B. 17 – intended to change the statute of limitations only for claims against private citizens and not for claims against the state.
There is another law that deals with claims against the state. That law states provides that civil actions against the state shall be commenced “no later than two years after the date of accrual of the cause of action.”
By a four-to-three vote, we concluded that S.B. 17 changed the statute of limitations to 12 years for claims against both private citizens and against the state. S.B. 17 stated that the changes in the law “shall apply to all civil actions for assault or battery brought by a victim of childhood sexual abuse…and to all civil actions brought by a victim of childhood sexual abuse for a claim resulting from childhood sexual abuse…”
In that language, the Legislature allowed for no distinction between private citizens or public employees.
Additionally, one of the forms of childhood sexual abused defined in the amended law is sexual imposition committed in certain specified circumstances, one of which occurs when “the victim is confined in a detention facility,” and the person committing the act is an employee of that detention facility.
In addition to the acts of detention-facility workers, the law also applies to acts committed by other persons who could be employees of the state – for example, teachers, coaches or administrators.
Thus, the very definition of childhood sexual abuse includes the wrongful conduct of state employees. The plain language of the law that resulted from S.B. 17 reveals the legislature’s intent that claims against the state resulting from childhood sexual abuse are subject to a 12-year statute of limitations and an accrual date of the age of majority.
But, the statute of limitations created by S.B. 17 conflicts with the two-year limitations period in the law concerning civil actions against the state. How to resolve that? When there’s a conflict of that sort between two laws, the one enacted later in time than a preexisting law will control. Therefore, as the more recent and more specific enactment, S.B. 17 provides the limitations period for claims against the state resulting from childhood sexual abuse.
The only remaining question was whether the statute of limitations for Watkins’s claims had expired by the August 3, 2006 effective date of S.B. 17. That issue was not considered by the trial court or the court of appeals. Which statute of limitations applies to Watkins’s claims depends on when she discovered that she had been sexually abused.
In any event, we determined that the law resulting from the enactment of S.B. 17 is the statute of limitations for claims against the state resulting from childhood sexual abuse. The court of appeals erred in holding that a claim resulting from childhood sexual abuse cannot be pursued against the state more than two years after the claim accrued.
Therefore, we reversed the court of appeals’ judgment and sent the case back to the trial court for further proceedings.
Statute of limitations – The Highland County Press – Hillsboro, Ohio
Bianca Hall, Men who rape children less likely to be jailed than those who rape adults, The Age
/in International /by SOL ReformMen who rape children under 12 are less likely to be jailed in Victoria, and are being jailed for less time than those convicted of raping adults.
The shocking statistics have emerged as Victoria’s Sentencing Advisory Council launches an investigation into what the state’s courts are taking into account when judging the seriousness of sexual offences against children.
The council is due to report to Attorney-General Martin Pakula on the sentencing of offenders convicted of the sexual penetration of a child aged under 12 in June.
Its own data shows that between July 2009 and June 2014, 72 men were convicted in Victoria of sexually penetrating a child younger than 12 (no women were convicted of the same offence in that period).
Of those men, 75 per cent were jailed. The median length of jail sentences was four years.
Almost 14 per cent received a wholly suspended jail sentence, and another 8.4 per cent were handed partially suspended sentences, community-correction orders or community-based orders. Another 2.8 per cent either received youth justice orders or had their charges discharged or dismissed.
In contrast, of the 211 Victorian men convicted of rape of adults between 2009 and 2014 (again, no women were convicted of rape in that period), 91 per cent were jailed. The median length of imprisonment was five years.
The remaining 9 per cent were given wholly or partially suspended sentences, youth justice centre orders, community correction orders, community-based orders or other punishments. None had their charges discharged or dismissed.
Both offences carry a maximum penalty of 25 years’ imprisonment and/or a fine of 3000 penalty units.
Sexual penetration of a child under 12 is one of the seven serious offences targeted by the former state government’s “baseline sentencing” laws, which were intended to increase jail terms for serious violence and sex offences.
Baseline sentencing, which took effect in 2014, specified prison sentences for seven nominated offences, including incest.
The law was intended to direct judges to fix sentences so that, over time, the median length of sentences given for a particular offence would match the term of imprisonment specified in the statute. For example, over a period of time the median term of imprisonment for the rape of a child under 12 would equal 10 years.
However, Victoria’s highest court, the Court of Appeal, ruled in November that the laws were “incapable of being given any practical operation” as they required judges to divine what other judges might sentence offenders to.
Announcing a review of the laws, Mr Pakula said: “The current situation involving baseline sentencing provisions is clearly unworkable and requires urgent attention.”
Mr Pakula directed the Sentencing Advisory Council to look into the issue and make recommendations to the government. He said the government was committed to “ensuring that sentencing laws are workable and that sentencing meets community expectations”.
The council has invited the public to make submissions on the issue before January 29.
Men who rape children less likely to be jailed than those who rape adults
Sophia Resnick, Victims of Rape and Sexual Assault, Failed by Criminal Justice System, Increasingly Seek Civil Remedies, RH Reality Check
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformAlfredo Simón, a former pitcher for the Detroit Tigers who is now a free agent, is big for a baseball player.
The 34-year-old stands 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 265 pounds, according to his official stats. Simón’s stature may be imposing on the field, but it seems even more so when reading through a civil complaint lodged in 2014 that accuses him of rape.
According to his accuser, the assault occurred when Simón was in Washington, D.C., playing with his old team, the Cincinnati Reds, in a game against the Washington Nationals. The 29-year-old woman, who in court documents is named Jane Doe, says she met Simón at a club, where she consumed several drinks and became intoxicated. Doe left with Simón in the early morning hours of April 28, 2013, and they started making out in his hotel room.
But then things turned.
Simón, she says, held her down despite her resistance, and anally raped her. Each time she tried to flee, she says, he would push her back onto the bed. Doe says he eventually yanked her by her hair and ejaculated in her face.
A forensic nurse examiner recorded Doe’s injuries in the sexual assault exam she took at the hospital later that day. Four days later, Doe reported the assault to police. According to the court documents, the rape kit detailed vaginal and anal abrasions and anal tears—injuries that, forensic medical experts would later testify in the civil case, corroborated her story. These injuries were not, however, recorded in photographs. Doe declined the nurse’s offer to snap images of her injuries, perhaps not understanding their potential value in bolstering her version of events.
Instead, an image that did make it into Doe’s police file was a photocopy of her cell phone exchange with the friend she had gone out with that night. Doe told her friend she was leaving the club to go “fuck the baseball player.” In her initial interview with police, Doe explained that she had intended to have sex with Simón. But, as noted in her civil complaint, she withdrew her consent once Simón “started to get rough with her.”
Police did not interview Simón, according to court records.
Ultimately, the evidence gathered wasn’t enough for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, which prosecutes crimes that occur in D.C. The prosecutors presented this case to a grand jury, but notes from Doe’s police file indicate it was the U.S. Attorney’s Office that made the decision not to file charges against Simón, citing “insufficient evidence” and “good defense.”
Historically, that would have been the end of the matter, at least from the defendant’s perspective.
But Doe did not accept the state’s view as the final say on her case. Instead, she filed a civil lawsuit against Simón, claiming $10 million in punitive damages for assault, battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and $5 million to compensate her for medical expenses and lost wages. The case ultimately settled for a fraction of that amount—$150,000, Simón’s attorneys told USA Today—and Simón did not admit any wrongdoing.
William Miller, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., would not comment on Doe’s case. “We are legally barred from providing information about confidential grand jury proceedings,” he said in an email.
Legal experts told RH Reality Check that by suing her alleged attacker in civil court, Jane Doe joined the ranks of a growing movement in the field of sexual assault.
Though there is no comprehensive national database that tracks the number of civil cases brought against alleged perpetrators of sexual assault, anecdotal evidence suggests a trend in the United States for victims to seek civil redress.
Every year, thousands of cases involving allegations of sexual assault are abandoned in the United States due to a range of reasons. These include lackluster police investigations, lack of forensic evidence, a victim’s unwillingness to testify, and, according to a recent White House report, because “law enforcement officers and prosecutors are not fully trained on the nature of these crimes or how best to investigate and prosecute them.”
Indeed, rape is notoriously difficult to prosecute and harder to prove. Even after decades of criminal justice reform and dedicated efforts from survivors and advocates, prosecutors are generally reluctant to go after alleged persecutors aggressively, often fearing they won’t win a conviction. Trials can also be traumatic for victims, who frequently face juries biased by cultural assumptions about rape.
“We [in society] generally don’t second-guess people who say that they were burglarized or say that their car was stolen or who say that they were assaulted, but we absolutely second-guess people that claim that they were sexually assaulted,” former special victims prosecutor Roger Canaff told RH Reality Check in a phone interview. “We either are skeptical of the truth of the allegation or we look to blame that person.”
Unlike criminal trials, which require the prosecution to prove the defendant’s guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” civil trials have a much lower bar, requiring only that a plaintiff persuade a judge or jury that it is more likely than not that the events occurred.
For many victims, it is easy to see the appeal of choosing a venue where they are at least held to a more attainable burden of proof than in a criminal court. Sometimes they file a civil suit in addition to pursuing criminal charges, or they only make a civil complaint.
Civil rights attorney Gloria Allred, whose Los Angeles-based firm has specialized in representing women who have been victims of various types of sexual abuse and harassment, says she is seeing increasing numbers of women consider civil remedies as a form of justice after they have been sexually attacked.
“More and more, I think victims are very seriously considering the civil option, because it’s empowering,” Allred told RH Reality Check in a phone interview. “You’re moving from being a victim to a survivor to a fighter for change.”
This shift in mentality is especially apparent in the civil claims against Bill Cosby, who has become the face of one of the most high-profile cases of sexual assault allegations in the past decade. Allred’s firm—Allred, Maroko & Goldberg—represents about half of the nearly 60 women who have so far come forward with claims, reaching as far back as the ’60s, against the man formerly known as “America’s Dad.” Coverage of the claims against Cosby has intensified over the past two years, but the fact remains that the fallen Hollywood star has yet to serve time for any of the allegations against him. Cosby faced his first criminal charges in one of these cases only very recently. Prosecutors in Pennsylvania charged him with sexual assault in late December for allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting a woman in 2004.
For his accusers, Allred says civil court offers women another opportunity for justice. And she says the civil route is empowering because, unlike criminal prosecutions where the state is in charge, civil cases enable victims to decide whether and how to proceed in their case.
“It’s the case of the victim, not the case of the people of that state,” Allred said. “As [people] see women standing up and not being afraid to fight back, it does have a ripple effect, and it does inspire other survivors to think, ‘Well, if she can do it, maybe I can do it, too.’”
Suing to Change the System
The trend of rape-related civil lawsuits has been building over time, as University of Arizona law professor Ellen Bublick documented in 2006. In recent years, increased recoveries from plaintiffs have stemmed from sexual abuse lawsuits against Catholic priests and on college campuses, with settlements for rape-related lawsuits often averaging half a million dollars.
RH Reality Check’s review of dozens of federal civil lawsuits involving sexual assault filed since 2012—available in public court databases and the National Crime Victim Bar Association’s civil case database—indicate that outside of a handful of deep-pocketed athletes and celebrities, most sexual assault survivors are seeking damages from third parties. The trend appears to be especially apparent with complainants at schools and in institutions, particularly correctional facilities, where prisoners are vulnerable to sexual assaults at the hands of prison guards and fellow inmates, and often have little recourse outside of civil redress.
Perhaps the most prominent use of civil laws to win justice for sexual assault victims has been by college students, who have forced universities to take campus sexual assault more seriously via cases filed under a 1972 civil rights law known as Title IX. The law requires educational institutions to take proactive action to ensure that students are not subject to sexual discrimination, including rape or other forms of sexual assault, such as harassment and sexual touching—or groping—that falls short of penetration.
Over the past few decades, survivors and advocates have leveraged the law’s requirements in order to build awareness of the problem of assaults on college campuses and in public high schools. A glowing reception at the Sundance Film Festival of the documentary The Hunting Ground, about on-campus rape, has only propelled momentum for solutions to combat attacks at universities.
And student advocates are explicit about the advantages that Title IX can have over criminal prosecutions.
The group Know Your IX, started in 2013 by a group of sexual assault survivors and their supporters, explains on its website that “many victims of sexual violence don’t want to turn to the criminal justice system.”
The group states: “[Victims] may fear skepticism and abuse from police, prosecutors, or juries; they may not want to go through the ordeal of a long trial; they may fear retaliation from their assailant, who will most likely not end up prosecuted, let alone convicted; and they may be hesitant to send their assailants to prison. But even survivors who do report to the police are often abandoned by the system.”
By contrast, Title IX requires schools to investigate every report of sexual assault. And as with all other civil claims, the victim must prove that it is more likely than not that the alleged assault occurred, rather than that the crime occurred “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Like Title IX activists seeking cultural change in the way institutions manage sexual assault cases, some victims have used a similar approach to spur action on the processing of rape kits.
Between 2012 and 2014, seven anonymous women from Harvey, Illinois, sued the Chicago suburb for the county’s failure to process and test rape kits that had been collected after they reported rapes between 1999 and 2008.
Like many jurisdictions in the United States, Harvey’s police had not begun testing the kits, even though they contained evidence collected from victims who had endured forensic exams that often last hours and can be invasive and distressing.
One of the victims, known as Jane Doe I, first reported being raped by her stepfather in 1997, when she was 11 years old. She submitted to a rape kit exam, which found semen in her vagina.
According to court records, Doe I’s mother reunited with the stepfather, Robert Buchanan, early into the police investigation, and asked her daughter to blame the assault on a schoolmate. Doe I recanted, as is common in sexual assault cases involving minors and family members, and police closed the investigation without attempting to match the DNA sample to Buchanan or to conduct further investigation, according to the complaint and subsequent court records.
In the civil case, Doe I testified that Buchanan went on to assault her for several years. She estimated that he raped her more than 100 times between 1998 and 2004, but her previous experience deterred her from reporting the crimes to police. Police tested her rape kit in 2007 and found a match to Buchanan’s DNA. City attorneys finally convicted Buchanan of sexually assaulting a minor in 2012 and sentenced him to six years in prison.
The City of Harvey awarded Jane Doe I $1.2 million and awarded the remaining six plaintiffs a combined $241,250, according to the Chicago Tribune. Together, these women, many of whom were minors at the time of their assaults, filed a total of three class action lawsuits that centered in part on the county’s failing to process or preserve more than 200 rape kits. Cook County prosecutors discovered these abandoned kits after raiding Harvey Police Department headquarters. Of these kits, only 50 were deemed viable for testing—including those of the anonymous plaintiffs in these cases—and led to charges against 14 individuals.
Monetary Justice
Toward the end of 2014, Mattie Bright desperately searched for a new high school for her daughter.
In November 2014, Bright’s then-15-year-old said three boys raped her in the middle of the school day in an abandoned classroom at Rosa Fort High School, in rural Tunica, Mississippi. Though police apprehended the alleged perpetrators, they returned to school two days later. One of the boys continued to ride the same bus as Bright’s daughter for months.
The criminal case is still pending, but last summer Bright sued the Tunica County School District in civil court, seeking damages to compensate her daughter’s psychological and emotional distress. Tunica is a rural town, and Bright cannot afford the hefty tuition of an all-girls private school, one of the closer options, said Stephanie Morris, the civil attorney representing Bright and her daughter.
The costs associated with this traumatic event continue to swell, Morris told RH Reality Check.
“She has been severely depressed and having chest pains,” she said, of Bright’s daughter. “She needs counseling, extensive counseling. Quite naturally, this is something that affects women for years and years to come. Some people need counseling for the rest of their lives.”
While many states do offer some form of compensation to victims of violent crimes following a criminal conviction, they tend to only cover a limited range of expenses.
However, civil lawsuits allow victims to fight for compensation for the full range of their injuries—medical and psychological—and in that way, these suits can better reflect the true damage inflicted by rape and sexual assault.
According to the complaint Bright filed in August, she is suing the Tunica County School District and school officials for not taking proper action after the alleged rape occurred and for acting indifferently to the verbal and online sexual harassment her daughter allegedly experienced following the assault. The complaint claims that only when local media began reporting on the alleged attack four months later did the school take any independent action, firing two teachers and expelling the students implicated in the attack.
Katherine Kerby, the attorney representing the Tunica County School District and other school officials, declined to comment on the case.
Bright is also seeking punitive damages, as well as a requirement that the school district implement steps to prevent sex-based discrimination and harassment and to fully investigate these incidents as they occur. The amount of damages sought is unspecified.
“The school district was so indifferent to what had happened to this child,” Morris said. “So, punitive damages would be appropriate just to deter them from this type of response, or non-response, in the future.”
Entrenching Inequalities
While the civil route offers some advantages, legal experts warn that it cannot take the place of robust criminal prosecution. Not only does it fail to remove dangerous individuals from society, but it also only works against defendants or institutions with deep pockets, a reality that excludes the majority of sexual assault cases.
After all, civil lawsuits are only an option for those whose perpetrators happen to have enough money to make them worth suing, a glaring inequality that lawyers and experts say will limit the extent to which civil action can be used to combat sexual assault.
University of Oregon law professor Tom Lininger in his 2008 Duke Law Journal article “Is It Wrong to Sue for Rape?” argues that lower-income defendants are more likely to serve time than rich defendants, who are more likely to pay for their crimes in civil courts.
Allred says that inequality is simply an unfortunate reality of an imperfect system.
“As the old saying goes, ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone,’” she said. “You know, is it worth it to spend hundreds of hours in a civil lawsuit against a perpetrator who has no assets? Where is the justice in the end?”
For LW, a resident of Washington, D.C., the fact that her alleged attacker did not have substantial assets was just one of the factors that ruled out civil proceedings in her case.
In an interview with RH Reality Check, LW, who asked to be identified by her initials, said she was drugged and raped by a man she met at a concert in October 2012. She said the man, a friend of a friend, offered her a vodka and Red Bull, which, she said, knocked her out almost immediately.
LW said she awoke the next morning to a bed covered in vomit and blood, faded memories, and the realization that she was no longer a virgin. LW was convinced she had a solid case, a prime piece of evidence being that her rape kit matched the offender’s semen.
LW’s victims’ rights attorney, Bridgette Stumpf, confirmed the facts LW laid out about her case with RH Reality Check but said she could not reveal any privileged information about her client’s case. Stumpf is the co-founder and co-executive director of the Network for Victim Recovery of DC, a nonprofit that since 2012 has offered free legal, case-management, and advocacy services to all victims of crimes in the District.
LW said the U.S. Attorney’s Office told her in July 2014 that her case was not strong enough to go trial. Months later, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request for LW’s police file, Stumpf and LW learned that her alleged rapist had changed his story. Initially, he denied raping LW and claimed he had simply brought her home. But when told his semen was found in a rape kit, LW said, he shifted his story, claiming they had had consensual sex. The U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on LW’s case.
LW seriously considered filing a civil lawsuit against the alleged attacker but ultimately decided against it.
“I decided it wasn’t for me,” LW said in a recent email. “It may seem that civil suits are ‘easier’ to win and are better at getting justice, but that comes with a price tag. The cases can be dragged out for a long time, the victim is put through intense questioning, sometimes even psych evals, and you have to re-live the whole experience. Plus, in a civil case, it is all about punitive damages. Most perpetrators don’t have money to pay to the victim, let alone anything else that you could sue for.”
And on top of that, even a successful civil suit would have failed to deliver the results LW said she most wanted. LW, like other rape survivors who spoke to RH Reality Check, believes her alleged attacker has likely assaulted other women, or will again. LW is not alone in this thinking. Sexual assault researchers have found that many rapists, including so-called date or acquaintance rapists, are repeat offenders.
“For me, I realized that what I wanted most was for my perpetrator to face criminal charges,” she said. “I wanted him to get jail time and be registered as a sex offender, and have his DNA in CODIS [the FBI’s national criminal database]. The statute in DC for criminal charges in rape cases is 15 years. I have hope that one day, my perpetrator will face criminal charges for the rapes he has committed, but civil charges wouldn’t help me sleep at night.”
Full article here: http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2016/01/08/victims-rape-sexual-assault-failed-criminal-justice-system-increasingly-seek-civil-remedies/
Nicole Boone, Pee Dee Coalition event features Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son, News 13
/in South Carolina /by SOL ReformFLORENCE, SC – The Pee Dee Coalition is hosting a fundraiser with proceeds benefiting children and their families through the Durant Children’s Center. It’s called “Matthew Sandusky: The Resilient Soul.”
Matt Sandusky is Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son. According to the release, “Matt will share his story of victory after abuse. He uses his experience as a platform to take action in the prevention of child sexual abuse and to engage and support adult survivors. By telling his story, Matt is able to show survivors that hope always exists and that healing will happen.”
The event is March 2, from 7:15 – 9:00 p.m. in the Ballroom of the Florence Civic Center, 3300 W Radio Drive in Florence. If you would like to attend the VIP Reception, beginning at 6pm, call Durant Children’s Center at 843-664-4357.
Ticket Sales begin January 11, at the Florence Civic Center Box. Tickets are $60 per person plus a ticket processing fee of $4.29 per ticket.
Pee Dee Coalition event features Jerry Sandusky’s adopted son _ WBTW
Elana Sztokman, On Marc Gafni, the New York Times, and how sexual-predator rabbis get communal support, Medium
/in New York /by SOL ReformI had a rather surreal experience last week, the kind where you wonder if the universe is playing with you or just using you as a toy in some bigger agenda that you’re only vaguely in the loop about.
The New York Times ran a profile, almost a tribute, to serial sexual abuser Marc Gafni a day before I gave a talk at Limmud UK titled “Rabbis who abuse”. Gafni, formerly Mordechai Winiarz, who was described by the shameless writer as having gained “stature” despite a “troubled past” and having “sexual encounters” with a 13-year-old (No, Mr. Oppenheimer, there is no such thing as a “sexual encounter” between an adult and a 13-year-old; there is only rape), has never been tried or jailed despite four decades of accusations of sexual abuse. And as we know, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Thanks to The Times, the world now knows that Gafni is having a phenomenal rebirth, again, as some kind of scholar somewhere, supported by powerful business and New Age leaders around the world. Like so many other abusive rabbis, he has managed to shake it all off and pretend that sexual abuse is just some dust on his elegant jacket, to be flicked off with a charming nod and a wink to his friends, while he finds a new adoring audience to maintain his self-established pedestal.
I have been researching this phenomenon of abusive leaders for some time. I had prepared my Limmud talk way before the Gafni story emerged (again), and planned just a passing mention of his story, among the dozen or so other anecdotes that I referred to in order to illustrate how rabbis get away with so much abuse. But Gafni’s reemergence in the Times as a man of “stature” colored my entire talk, and was a source of buzz during the whole week of Limmud. One could argue that Oppenheimer’s articles have had some positive effects of prompting some former Gafni supporters to publicly distance themselves from him (apparently 25 New Age leaders like Deepak Chopra have publicly distanced themselves from Gafni ). Still, one has to wonder why so many “leaders” have been powowing with Gafni despite all the evidence that he is a sexual predator. Meanwhile, all the smiling Gafni headshots and Oppenheimer’s insistence on giving Gafni supporters many inches of column space have been more illustrative of how abusers gain influence rather than how abusers get prosecuted.
This issue, of how and why high-profile leaders support high-profile abusers, is not really understood in the Jewish community, or arguably in the wider world. (How many women had to come forward before anyone took testimony against Bill Cosby seriously?) This dynamic is clearly not understood by many journalists, some of whom are so eager for a NYT byline that they are willing to throw victims of child sexual abuse under the bus by referring to rape as “sexual encounters”. But Oppenheimer is not alone in offering precious column space to the veneration of abusive leaders while giving half-hearted mention to a “troubled past”. The dynamic is not understood by communal leaders stuck in a star-struck culture in which proximity to so-called “celebrities” — Jewish or otherwise — trumps values like compassion for victims, integrity, and commitment to justice. Even today, as some of Gafni’s supporters reflect on their dubious attitudes of support for abusers, the question of how rabbis like Gafni get to where they are — with decades of adulation and high-paying jobs rather than a ticket to a prison cell — remains glaring.
To be clear: the Jewish community faces an epidemic of sexual abuse — as UK Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis said earlier this year. As many as 1 out of 4 girls
and 1 out of 6 boys will experience some form of sexual abuse before the age of 18. The majority of minors who were sexually abused — an estimated 75% — were victimized by people they know. Over 85% of cases are not reported to local police or children rights protection groups. According to a study by Abel and Harlow, 93% of child sexual molesters define themselves as religious.Based on anecdotal evidence and unofficial collections, such as the Jewish Community Watch Wall of Shame, a disproportionate number of Jewish sexual abusers are rabbis or quasi-rabbis. And a very small proportion of abusers ever get prosecuted. Many remain in high-profile positions for years or even decades.
It is vital to understand how the Jewish community enables rabbi-abusers. Here are some of the insights that I have gleaned from years of research on sexual abuse in the Jewish community, which I shared last week at Limmud.
First of all, social hierarchies in the Jewish community favor high-profile abusers over their victims. Within hierarchies around knowledge, power, status, position, and money, rabbis enjoy many privileges. They are revered as all-knowers, possessers of people’s vulnerabilities and secrets, responsible for institutional reputations and fundraising, and considered representatives of entire communities. Rabbis are trusted and entrusted with layers of power. In the Orthodox community, this has an added gender hierarchy, in which all-powerful rabbis belong to exclusively male organizations that get to decide whether to believe the often female and powerless victims. In short, rabbis have power, prestige, and high-profile friends, as well as a lot of money riding on their reputations. Victims usually have none of that.
Abusers in power know how to use their status to lure, manipulate and silence victims. In a process known as “grooming”, the powerful abuser will make promises such as, “You’re my favorite,”, or “This is sacred time with me,” or “You’re special,” which play on the hierarchies with promises of social mobility. When Todros Grynhaus, a recently convicted UK abuser, tried to force his victim — a haredi teenage girl — into a sex act, he said “You might as well make yourself useful,” reinforcing the idea in the victim’s mind that she was a useless, powerless nobody. Emotional manipulation is the abusers’ specialty, and abusive rabbis know well how to use their power for these ends.
In the Jewish world, where rabbis are often respected for their “charisma”, this dynamic is especially problematic. The more charisma a rabbi has, the more power he has to abuse through emotional manipulation. Moreover, charisma, which is one of the primary signs of an abusive or even sociopath personality, makes people believe the abuser’s story rather than the victim’s testimony. The Jewish community has the unfortunate tendency to equate charisma with righteousness, which benefits rabbi abusers and leaves low-status victims struggling alone.
Power also offers abusers means to manipulate the system and even escape. Rabbi Ezra Scheiberg, one of the most high profile rabbis in the religious Zionist community, who was accused earlier this year of sexual assault and rape of a dozen women in Safed, was caught at Ben Gurion trying to flee. In the cases of rapists Baruch Lebovits and Nechemya Weberman in New York, the assailants were surrounded by a massive network of supporters who threatened and at times harmed victims and prosecution witnesses. In Weberman’s case, the DA brought charges against seven supporters, describing threats against the victim, as “trying to kill her soul”. Ultimately, rabbi abusers have access to power and victims do not.
The deleterious impact of these dynamics on victims cannot be understated. Genendy Radoff, an incest survivor and founder of the organization Mitzva L’Sapper, has said, “The ongoing denial by the rabbonim who I approached for help and by my family, was actually more traumatic and devastating than the sexual abuse. Now I wasn’t just abused, I was also being treated like I was crazy, and I was utterly alone.” Grynhaus’ victims were ostracized from their communities, accused of making “ridiculous accusations” against the great man. The family of Yehudis Goldsobel, raped by Menachem Mendel Levy for three years when she was a teenager, was also ostracized from their community — and even after Levy spent 18 months in prison for his crimes, his community continues to celebrate him.
Rabbi abusers also know how to use Jewish values — or rather, twisted versions of Jewish values — to protect themselves and discredit their victims. The language of “sacred community” and “lashon hara” or “mesirah” are often invoked to silence and shame victims rather than shaming the abusers. In 2000, 100 rabbis signed a letter saying that anyone who goes to outside authorities is a traitor. Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudah, one of the worst offending organizations in protecting abusers, decried victim advocates who go to secular authorities as “display[ing] utter disregard for essential Torah ideals like the requirement to shun lashon hora and hotzo’as shem ra; to show honor for Torah and respect for Torah scholars. I would have added basic fairness to the list. And truth.…” Indeed, when victim and activist Manny Waks came forward about the abuse he experienced in the Chabad Yeshiva College in Melbourne, Australia, he was accused of damaging the community and violating Jewish values by going to the non-Jewish authorities. His entire family was shunned and shamed — in fact his father, a longtime pillar of the Chabad community, was not allowed in synagogue, and eventually had to leave Australia entirely. Community cohesiveness, often invoked to silence critics and oust victims, provides a tremendous network of support and power to rabbi abusers.
In reality, these notions of “community cohesiveness” or libel, are just euphemisms for publicity. Leaders of the Jewish world fear bad publicity. They may call it anti-semitism or Jewish tradition, or not “airing dirty laundry”, but it is nothing more than public relations. Avrohom Mondrowitz, for example, who pretended to be a therapist in order to collect victims, was protected by Gerer Hassidic community protected him for years. Only when non-orthodox victims were discovered did he get indicted on 14 charges including 5 counts of sodomy — but he fled to Israel where he is still protected by the community.
For this reason, whistleblowers get punished too. The most notorious case of this is Rabbi Nuchem Rosenberg , a satmar mikveh attendant who walked in on a rabbi raping a little boy in the mikveh, and became a staunch advocate for victims — blogging about sex abuse in his community, opening a New York City hotline to field sex abuse complaints, posting appeals around the world and on social media. For this he is reviled, slandered, hated, feared. He receives death threats on a regular basis, is not counted for a minyan in his community, and has had acid thrown on him while walking down the street in Brooklyn. Most significantly, I believe, is that he was “charged” by the internal “Modesty Brigade” in Williamsburg, whose counsel included the rapist he caught in the act.
Ultimately, the Jewish community is one in which high-profile abusers are often protected by high profile leaders. Gafni is hardly alone in this. Motti Elon, for example, who was convicted of sexual assault against his male students, has a strong following in Israel and abroad, and is frequently invited as a lecturer around the country. His defenders say, “He suffered enough” — as if he is the real victim. Jonathan Rosenblatt, the so-called “sauna rabbi”, was invited by the board to keep his pulpit, despite having taken dozens of boys naked to the sauna over the years. Some people are still defending Grynhaus, saying it was just some bad judgment and that “he stopped when the girls told him to stop” and that we should feel sorry for haredi men in prison because it is “very hard for religious Jews in prison”. Judge Guston Reichbach who sentenced Yona Weinberg to a 13-month jail term for molesting his bar mitzvah students, he said he received more than 90 letters attesting to Weinberg’s character and innocence. None of the letters, the judge noted, “displays any concern or any sympathy or even any acknowledgement for these young victims which, frankly, I find shameful.”
It is much easier to side with high profile abusers than with victims. For high profile members of the community, it is much easier to identify with the abusers, who are “like me”, than with vicitms, who are not as “polished”, who offer nothing in the way of support or protection. “A person can be destroyed if allegations which are baseless are raised against him,” says Rabbi David Zwiebel, Agudath’s executive vice-president. Meaning, the abusers can be destroyed. No mention of what happens to victims.
However, as Nuchem Rosenberg’s story illustrates, we should be suspicious of men who support high-profile abusers, or even men who refuse to acknowledge rape of a minor and whitewash it as “sexual encounters”. We should be asking: what are they hiding? For example, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of Motti Elon’s biggest supporters, has also been accused of sexual abuse, but has managed to slip through the accusations. A really important testimony to this comes from Andy Blumenthal, a member of Rosenblatt’s community in Riverdale. After the synagogue board announced that Rosenblatt was staying in his position — a decision led by chairman Donald Liss who overruled the board demand to dismiss Rosenblatt and bulldozed his own position — Andy Blumenthal wrote the following, not about Rosenblatt but about board chair Donald Liss — that is, the one covering for Rosenblatt:
[T]he Chairman of the Board who overruled the community and is protecting Rabbi Rosenblatt…
I grew up in Riverdale from the age of 10 when my family moved from the upper west side of Manhattan. I attended SAR Academy, the local yeshiva. My family had many lovely friends in this community and we attended the RJC where we were members for over 20 years.
Dr. Donald Liss significantly older than myself and my friends growing up frequently invited us to his house in Riverdale to “learn” Torah and for Shabbat meals, although the learning frequently turned into talk and banter and “wrestling.” Dr. Liss, as a doctor of rehabilitative and sports medicine, claimed great interest in my physical fitness as a youth and my practice of martial arts. He started to run and workout with me and my best friend and this at times lead to more “wrestling” matches.
Later Dr. Liss provided me as summer job in his and his brother’s practice at Englewood Hospital. Dr Liss was quite well off and took advantage of me that my family was less so and I needed a job. He provided me the opportunity to work out there in their “gym” during lunch and then when I would change in the locker room, he would invariably show up to talk with me.
Other times, he invited me to go on vacation with his family to the Poconos to babysit his kids. I remember one particular time, I went running on the trail there, and he came. When we got back to the house we were staying in, he dropped all his clothes in the kitchen area in front of me and his wife and totally nude just started talking.
Other times, when I would work out in my apartment in Riverdale with weights or stretching for karate, even during the day, Dr. Liss would show up. And he would also invite my friend and I to his home to lift weights and more “wrestling”.
As I got older and smarter, I realized Dr. Liss’s behavior was not normal, and his interest in my workout and my Torah learning did not seem innocent any longer. I stopped getting together and taking his phone calls. His calling, hang-ups, and messages increased.
That Dr. Liss would now protect Rabbi Rosenblatt and overrule the wishes of the Riverdale Jewish Center is a Chillul Hashem and travesty of justice.
Every word in this blog is true, and I hope it helps the community and the victims to get over this tragedy and desecration of G-d. The good people who wish to grow up and pray without unwanted advances of some sick individuals hiding behind many veils of religion and family deserve their community back.
When Jewish leaders support rabbis accused of abuse instead of listening to testimony of victims, we should be suspect of their motives.
What you can do
So, what should people do in the face of accusations of sexual abuse by high-profile abusers?
· Believe victims
Judith Herman, author of “Trauma and Recovery”, says that all abusers need is silence from bystanders in order to succeed. Neutrality, non-involvement, all of these help abusers. Don’t feed into that. Listen to victims. Just listening and believing is often the most important tool on the way to recovery. Being believed rather than shame goes a long way towards the victims’ healing process.
· Step out of your own experience
More commonly, support for the accused comes from a more mundane human dynamic. People do not want to believe what they have not seen for themselves. Some former Gafni supporters have come forward describing how they did not believe victims until they saw it for themselves. This is a very troubling and at times infuriating dynamic. As if to say, if I haven’t experienced it, it didn’t happen. Don’t be that person, the one who doesn’t believe until they experience it themselves. There is a brilliant Talmudic response to this that the community would be wise to remember: “Eino ro’eh eino ra’ya”, which means, the fact that I haven’t seen it is not a proof of anything. We should all remember that.
· Challenge social hierarchies
Remember that just because he is ‘an important man’ it doesn’t mean that he isn’t capable of doing terrible things. As a community, we should be less star-struck. We should be less impressed by people with power, status, money, fancy job titles, or those million twitter followers. All of those hierarchies create cushioning for abusers. We need as a community to learn to relate to others based on merit, not based on appearances, status, or power.
On Marc Gafni, the New York Times, and how sexual-predator rabbis get communal support — Medium
Linze Rice, Rabbi Sentenced To 8 Years in Prison for Sexual Assault of 15-Year-Old Boy, DNA Info
/in Uncategorized /by SOL ReformEx-rabbi Aryeh “Larry” Dudovitz was sentenced to eight years in prison for sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy who was a member of his synagogue after celebrating a religious holiday nearly a decade ago.
The sentence was handed down Wednesday by Judge Evelyn Clay, according to Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez’s office.
In November, Dudovitz, 48, was convicted on one count of criminal sexual assault in connection with the attack. He was put on electronic monitoring and ordered to surrender his passport as he awaited sentencing.
He was 39 at the time the incident in 2006. At the time, the victim and his family worshipped with Dudovitz at a small storefront synagogue, the Moshiach Center, in West Rogers Park, the victim told DNAinfo Chicago in an interview in 2013.
The accuser looked up to Dudovitz, who he said mentored him before his Bar Mitzvah, and the two spent lots of time together.
Prosecutors said that Dudovitz was at the victim’s home celebrating the Orthodox Jewish holiday of Sukkot, and the victim, now 24, testified that after he went to bed, Dudovitz came into his bed room and assaulted him before fleeing the house.
Dudovitz and the victim drank alcohol, prosecutors alleged during his trial, and the boy fell asleep. He was awakened by Dudovitz, who gave “the victim oral copulation while the victim was sleeping,” court records show.
After the attack, Dudovitz admitted to several people — including rabbis and a mental-health counselor — that he sexually assaulted the boy while the victim slept, according to court testimony.
Dudovitz later apologized to the teen, prosecutors said, and the victim told his parents who then notified both religious authorities and police. Dudovitz later admitted the sexual assault to police.
The victim has said in the past the initially blamed himself for the attack and had looked up to his rabbi “like a father figure.”
Rabbi Sentenced To 8 Years in Prison for Sexual Assault of 15-Year-Old Boy – West Ridge – DNAinfo