And then Katie Couric comes on. I know I rail on her way too much on this blog. I believe I have said this before, but it bears repeating: Of the three network anchors, I actually find Katie Couric the least troubling. But still, Sixty Minutes? Hearing her, of all people, say at the end of the opening “All that and more on Sixty Minutes” is as harrowing to me as the thought – and I do mean the mere thought – of going to a Saint Louis Cardinals home game any place other than Busch Stadium, the real one, the one with soaring, elegant aluminum arches, the one that has persuaded more than one youngster to imagine, briefly, that his life was not taking place on the shores of the Mississippi River but in Rome.
But there she was on Sunday night, actually asking relevant questions of a very brave young woman who was allegedly raped by members of the men’s basketball team at University of the Pacific. I use the word ‘allegedly’ because I don’t know whether the case has been officially settled or not.
What I do know is that the story raised a few questions for me. The first: Why is it still acceptable to imply that one of the causes of a rape is that the person who was raped had consumed too much alcohol? The young woman who says she was raped had, according to the story, downed a few shots of tequila the night it happened. She’d been at a party, from which she was offered a ride by the three alleged rapists, who drove her to their townhouse (the athletes don’t usually bunk with the students who are at college to get an education) where, according to her, she assumed the party was going to continue. Time and again, the accused claimed the young woman was drunk, and perhaps she was. But here’s my question: If she was drunk, and they were all at a party together, is it not likely that they were drunk as well? And if they were, doesn’t that cast a pretty serious degree of doubt on not only their conduct that evening but on their ability to accurately recall and recount it? When it comes to rape, we seem a bit fixated on the amount of alcohol in the victim’s blood. I am curious why we – or I – hear so little about the intake on those who find themselves on the other side of the courtroom.
Another strange part of the story is that the University of the Pacific, for various reasons, assembled a review panel of sorts to sift through the case. Granted, the young woman decided to not press formal charges; she was terrified, she said, of the details about another young woman’s experience, one who had pressed formal charges and had been made to testify and be cross examined for hours in a court room. These details were shared with her by the man she’d had to meet with in order to begin the process of pressing charges – a law enforcement employee of one sort or another, I presume. She was intimidated, in other words, out of taking legal action. I have no idea if this intimidation was intentional or not, of course. Perhaps it’s the man’s job to make sure people are well aware of the territory into which they’re venturing, the way a doctor tells a patient about potential side effects before the chemo begins. But perhaps it’s yet another symptom of how we categorize women, how we manage their sexuality by making it an issue of public spectacle. I do wonder.
At any rate, the university creating a panel to resolve the issue seemed wrong to me. These panels – which are always, in my experience, assembled in a dubious manner – are laughable enough when it comes to deciding how to punish a jock who is consuming scholarship funds that would otherwise go towards, well, scholarship, who got busted cheating on the math exam is bad enough. But putting together a group of “peers” to resolve a rape charge seems to me like a good reason to sue the university. For a lot of money.
None of it was as outrageous, though, as the story’s grand finale. Of the three accused basketball players, two were suspended. Both returned, after serving their suspensions, to the court at the University of the Pacific. While the third accused player was expelled outright, he missed very little playing time: After a three-month absence from basketball, he made his debut on the court at the University of Idaho, where one of the coaches is the twin brother of the coach at the University of the Pacific.
