As I understand it, the proper phrasing is "...refusal to cheer for her alleged rapist". Considering the whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing, I don't see where the school district has any official obligation to acknowledge Hillaire's victimhood. But I don't see where anyone would have any obligation to be so black-and-white about the decision to kick her out either. I would've thought any decent cheerleading coach would have some degree of awareness of her distress and its source and cut her some slack.
edited 12th Jun '11 4:10:26 PM by Tongpu
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Seriously, they couldn't make a case out of that?
watching down on us
Bolton sounds like a horrendously shitty person who should be put in a mental facility. I feel so sorry for his mother that she had to birth the being.
edited 12th Jun '11 5:02:03 PM by annebeeche
Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.
This account was dug up after the original grand jury. I don't know why they didn't pursue full rape charges even if long after the fact when they got the full story though. I don't know enough about Ms. Magazine to say if it is/can be a completely unbiased source either.
watching down on us
Really? According to that article it sounds like similar accounts of the incident were coming from several different witnesses, suggesting that there probably was a rape.
Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.
I think there was a rape. I don't know why rape charges were not eventually pursued.
@Kashie: Plea bargain from when they didn't have enough evidence.
edited 12th Jun '11 8:07:00 PM by BlackHumor
I'm convinced that our modern day analogues to ancient scholars are comedians. -0dd1
NOT THE BEES
I understand that there's not enough evidence for a rape conviction, though multiple corroborating testimonies is right on the edge of convincing-without-proof and I truly wish there was more that could be done (really, rape is terribly difficult to pin — sex is easy to get physical evidence for, non-consent not so much). Still, booting her from the cheer squad because of a piece of very nontrivial personal drama that the squad's administration almost certainly knew about is a major dick move.
edited 12th Jun '11 8:51:41 PM by Pykrete
Zzzzzzzzzz
It could also fall under the prohibition on double jeopardy, (although I'm not sure whether it would or not) because the prosecutors had their chance to try him for rape for what happened and chose to try him for another crime instead.
I reiterate, I don't know how Double Jeopardy plays out in that sort of case; whether they can go back to the same incident and use a different charge once he's been acquitted. It would probably be a very sticky situation. Any of our lawyers or lawyers-in-training care to weigh in?
...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.
Again, the dismissal happened in 2009 when the rape defendant was no-billed. The prosecution at the time didn't have enough to go to trial. Even the misdemeanor was plead into in 2010. The school had no legal reason to listen to her plaint, she could have been lying and at the time it would have seemed the more plausible thing for them to believe. That says nothing about morality, but that's the whole reason why the case was deemed frivolous.
It also says nothing about if she was raped or not:
Hillaire was exceedingly intoxicated after drinking a beer and multiple shots of vodka. She made out with a guy in the living room and was egged on to kiss a female friend by a group of ogling guys. Rakheem Bolton, then playing for the football team at the school, and his friends arrived late to the party and, seeing an intoxicated and flirtatious Hillaire, isolated her in the house’s pool room. Here’s what she later told the police happened next:
I was suddenly pushed into the pool room and the door was closed behind me and the lights turned off. … I was pulled backwards and someone whispered in my ear ‘just lay down on the floor …’ Hands on my thighs were pushing my legs apart. I felt someone penetrating vaginally. I suddenly realized what was happening and I put my hands on someone and yelled at them to stop. I then said, ‘Seriously, stop it.’’ I then said ‘no!’ I heard someone–I think it was Derek–say something like, ‘Dude she said ‘stop it’ and ‘no.’ [Editor's note: "Derek" was a minor at the time, so his name has been changed]
Even if Hillaire had not said no, a crime may have been committed anyway. For one thing, the Texas penal code deems it sexual assault when one person uses force and the other is physically unable to resist. In addition, Hillaire may have been too intoxicated to be considered legally able to consent.
This really isn’t a he said/she said story. Two students outside the pool room–Patrick Steed and Richard Garrett –heard Hillaire say “Stop!” Unable to open the locked door, they retrieved Jacob Riley from another room. Riley again heard Hillaire say “stop,” so they broke through the door, only to find that three of the four athletes had fled through the window, breaking it in the process. The one young man who stayed behind told police, “I know I did not do anything so I didn’t run.”
Derek, one of the football players who fled, confirmed Hillaire’s account of the incident. He said that his teammate Christian Rountree “was holding her and was trying to talk her into coming in [to the pool room], so when they went back in I just followed.” At one point, he says, Bolton told the others to leave the room for five minutes. “We act [sic] like we left but we just hid under the pool table.” Then “Rakheem layed [sic] her on the floor and started to have sex and she start [sic] saying ‘stop.’ So Rakheem stopped.”
When the rescuers burst in, they found Hillaire lying partially under the pool table, half-clothed and crying. Said Patrick Steed, “All she had on was her black bra. She rolled over and reached for her clothes that were under the pool table. She was crying and appeared upset.” Garrett added to police, “I believed Hillaire had been raped.”
Stacy Riley, who owned the party house, was watching a movie in her room when the assault took place, and would later be charged with serving alcohol to minors. She heard the commotion and found Hillaire in the pool room. Said Ms. Riley,
[I asked] her again if she was hurt and ask[ed] her if she had been raped. All she would say was ‘yes’ and continued crying. … I began to cry again and said to her, ‘Sweetie, if you were my daughter I would want to know.’
Meanwhile, Garrett and Jacob Riley actually tried to chase down the perpetators, Garrett grabbing a bat and Riley a martial-arts sword. Bolton, who fled without his clothes into the woods, had borrowed a jacket and shorts from his friends and was heading back to demand his own clothes. Jacob confronted Bolton and accused him of rape. According to Stacy Riley, Bolton yelled back,
I didn’t rape no white girl. I wouldn’t use anyone else’s dick to fuck her. I didn’t put my dick up inside her. I don’t know if she has AIDS. I don’t even know that girl.
But Bolton would later nod assent when police asked if his DNA could be found on a condom left at the scene.
Bolton’s parting words to partygoers were: “I didn’t rape anyone, and you better be locked and loaded! I’m going to spray this house !” According to Ms. Riley, “He told my son and I … that we had better not go to sleep, that he was coming back to kill everyone.”
Hillaire didn’t sleep: She spent the early morning hours after the rape at the police station and at a nearby clinic. She had sustained internal injuries and her right thigh showed a full handprint bruise–“a thumb and four fingers,” according to her mother, Christena. Of the four young men in the room, Bolton, 17, and Rountree, 18, both legal adults in Texas, would be arrested and charged with “child sexual assault,” which carries a prison term of two to 20 years. Derek, a minor, was arrested on unknown charges.
[1]