Holding Sexual Assault Enablers Responsible
The Bystander Initiative at University Of Utah S.J. Quinney School of Law
Thanks to my colleague Selena Routley, I read Armies of Enablers by Prof. Amos Guiora of the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney School of Law.
This book was far from an easy read. It documents the shameful, immoral reality of our culture’s most-respected institutions: major universities including Penn State, Michigan State, and Ohio State, USA Gymnastics, and the Catholic Church. These institutions, just like my undergraduate school, one of the most expensive and ‘elite’ private womens’ colleges in the nation, all nurtured, protected, and supported sexual predators who targeted children, teens, and young adults — for decades.
For many years, I thought that being raped 11 days after my 21st birthday, and the prior sexual grooming and exploitation I had also endured, was an isolated instance. I thought these incidents were my fault, and inside, I even thought that I, in some way, caused these predations.
I was privileged to speak with Prof. Guiora last week. He is leading the Bystander Initiative, which is dedicated to research, analysis, and legislative action on bystander and enabler liability in cases of institutionalized sexual predation and assault.
I told Amos, “I didn’t realize the pattern until I was asked to write about the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State.” Much of the controversial case revolved around the callous and unconcerned response of famous, lauded, worshipped coach Joe Paterno in 2002, when assistant Mike McQueary — after much soul-searching and waiting — told Paterno he had seen and heard Jerry Sandusky raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State locker room. Although there were many “excuses” for Paterno’s inaction and lack of interest which amounted to years of sponsoring Class 1 felonies in the school’s locker room, Sandusky continued to rape young, economically disadvantaged boys recruited through his false-front charity at Penn State and in his home for another decade.
“Knowing what I now know,” I told Amos, and I could tell I shocked him, “Sandusky wasn’t that good a coach and they kept protecting him after he was ‘retired,’” —
“I think the most obvious explanation for Paterno’s protection of Sandusky was that Sandusky also had something on Paterno which assured his continued unsupervised, unfettered access to boys on campus.”
Armies of Enablers documents the painful betrayals of pedophile priest victims, who are identified by their numbers: PV1, PV2, and so-on.
One of the victims was being raped, much as McQueary saw Sandusky doing to the 10-year-old boy, and another priest walked by and asked the pair to be less noisy. This defines the enabler. At the S.J. Quinney College of Law, a team of law students and Amos Guiora are working to study, analyze, and develop legislation to criminalize this behavior.
What Would You Do If A Student Told You She Was Raped By Faculty Member?
I know what the enablers are and who they are: for every rapist or sexual predator, there are dozens of them, without whom the crimes could never continue. When I went to the Dean of Students at my high-priced women’s college, as a four-year National Merit scholar and “independent student” up for a Rhodes Scholarship and Watson Fellowship, a College Council member and the first female editor and publisher of the five-College Claremont newspaper and told her what Brian Stonehill did to me (while protecting the identity of the grooming professor employed right at her very campus), she said, and I quote, “Write it down and put it in a safe deposit box.”
Those words are burned in my memory. She reacted in the exact same way that Paterno did when McQueary, sick to heart, told him he’d seen Sandusky doing this to a child in their very locker room.
Here’s a link to her Emeritus profile: of course these high-priced, ‘elite’ schools are taking the very best care of her. She probably has a house that is paid for by the schools, just as my rapist did. Awards, honors, security, and money are showered upon the enablers.
After a lifetime and recovery, which is more painful to recall — the actual assaults and sexual predation — or the deep betrayal of the enablers?
For me, as it was for the survivors whom Amos interviewed for Armies of Enablers, it is the individual and institutional betrayal of those who were supposed to — it’s not just “protect me,” it’s obey the existing law.
To this day, there is an elderly woman sitting in an expensive house in a high-priced town, probably taking any trip she chooses, attending conferences and “publishing” books about — this is super rich — equity in higher education and ‘leadership’ of women who protected a serial sexual predator who authorities believed wasn’t just doing harm on campus or — even if she believed I somehow had consensual, yet violent sex with him — the cops told me they thought he was a serial killer and he had all the hallmarks.
Asking Law Enforcement: To Protect The Rapist
This probably doesn’t bother you, right? Well, here’s another fact I learned from Armies of Enablers. It pertains to the MSU/Larry Nassar case. When the accusations against Nassar became very numerous, MSU officials, including the President Lou Anna Simon (whose money and power appears to have absolved her from any criminal penalty so far), wrote the local FBI office. To ask for help: in protecting Nassar.
I understand intimately, personally and without any doubt that my life and body has absolutely no importance to this school that — quite mistakenly — offered me what started out as a full four-year ride — I get that.
But I also feel that if the general public truly understood the reality of the situation with U.S. Gymnastics, Michigan State University, and Larry Nassar, they would be outraged.
Larry Nassar was allowed to sexually abuse Simone Biles, the most lauded U.S. Olympic gymnast in history, beloved worldwide — along with nearly every other member of the U.S. Olympic gymnastic team, and any other gymnasts attending the Karolyi’s gymnastics program, and countless other athletes at Michigan State University. Not only was Nassar allowed to repeatedly violate and harm our nation’s top female gymnasts, the people who thought his ability to certify athletes for competition under any/all circumstances even called law enforcement: to protect themselves and Nassar from — certainly not prosecution — most likely negative financial or publicity consequences.
This is the reality.
It’s hard for me to imagine how people can view athletic competitions on TV when the reality is: there is a predator like Nassar on just about every campus. Sexual predation does have a physical component. Nassar didn’t seek to work at an inner-city clinic with all ages of individuals seeking treatment. He sought out and got a job where he’d have unlimited, unfettered access to the bodies of the most elite young athletes in the world. And he was permitted and encouraged to do so, protected all along the way by individuals whose jobs depended upon those athletes and their performances.
Like my little school probably thought they needed to recruit top students like me, even if some scholarships needed to be offered.
It would be difficult for any of these universities, colleges, and athletic programs to continue to recruit if the reality of their corrupt, morally and ethically bankrupt natures were common knowledge: as it should and must be.
I made the true, valid argument to a former president of my former alma mater, that the school had invested a lot of money and qualified, decent faculty time in me, yet it could all have been for nothing because of the sexual predation of a deeply disturbed and dangerous man. This argument, made in 2013, was ignored. In 2015, a Resident Advisor was predated upon and took her own life. The entire Resident Advisor staff went on strike because of this and deep-seated, long-standing issues of unequal, unfair, biased, and racist treatment were also ignored.
This is what the Bystander Initiative faces.
We live in a culture where men like Alfonse Capone are known worldwide as depraved, horrible criminals — eventually brought to justice and incarcerated.
And we live in a culture where right now, the people who for decades protected, nurtured, and made every assault not only possible, but easy for men like Larry Nassar — to sexually assault the most famous, beloved, honored athletes of all-time — have nice houses, nice cars, good “PR” and — well, I saw that Lou Anna Simon, the very important former President of Michigan State University, is walking around scot-free, just like the Sacklers are all still billionaires despite their drugs directly causing the deaths of over 250,000 people.
I looked up Hammurabi’s code again before writing this. It would seem that in Hammurabi’s day, almost 4,000 years ago, rape was considered a property crime: an offense against a father or a husband.
That’s not even the case today. Only 5 out of every 1,000 rapes is ever successfully prosecuted, The blame is placed on everyone except — not just the rapist — but the armies of enablers who do not just look the other way, but who actively seek to silence, harm, punish, and ostracize the countless victims. One out of every twenty boys and young men; one out of every five girls and young women.
A School Principal Murdered A 12-Year-Old Boy On A School Trip: Decades Later He Was Finally Brought To Justice
Amos was motivated to create the Bystander Initiative because of Jeremy Bell. In 1997, 12-year-old Jeremy went on a school camping trip with his school principal, Edgar Friedrichs, Jr. Jeremy never came home.
Friedrichs subdued Jeremy with chloroform to rape him, and ended up murdering him during the course of the crime. It took another decade for Friedrichs, a serial sexual offender, to be brought to justice. Thousands of pages of records provided by the private investigator Dan Barber form the basis of the ecosystem of enablers that the team of law students and Amos Guiora are studying and documenting.
What do you think the penalty should be for the woman who, upon hearing I was raped by a faculty member at a consortium school, told me to write the experience down and “put it in a safe deposit box”? Lou Anna Simon, who contacted the FBI to help her to silence top MSU athletes and Olympic gymnasts who were stating Larry Nassar had violated their bodies during medical exams — is walking around absolutely free, probably with a high-value pension and the easiest possible life.
It is not that there are so many rapists and molesters. It is that without the enablers: they would be caught, stopped, and punished.