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I guess it's sex crimes week on The Motte. Here is one I've been puzzling about.
How on Earth was Danny Masterson actually convicted?
This has been a slow boil for me. I'd seen headlines here and there about the slow rolling case against him. I totally missed when the first trial went to a hung jury. Then suddenly I see he was convicted on 2 out of 3 rape charges and sentenced to 30 years. Even saw some headlines about Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis getting dragged for writing a character witness letter for his sentencing. But something jumped out at me.
He was being prosecuted for crimes 17-19 years old at the time the prosecution started. Red flag number one, I don't know the specific law in CA, but surely that's pushing the statute of limitations, right? Indeed it is! Statute of Limitations for rape is 10 years. So how did they still prosecute him?
Well there are a few exceptions.. Namely
What appears to have sunk Masterson's SOL is that there are multiple accusers. Now reading the law myself, the reading seems clear to me. The exception requires a seperate conviction. But I'm no lawyer or judge, obviously.
Or
And I believe this is the part pertaining to SOL
So I donno, maybe it's not as clear cut as I think. I repeat, not a lawyer.
Moving past the SOL concerns I have, what was the evidence against Masterson? Near as I can tell none. There were 3 victim testimonies, some expert testimony, and that was it. Zero evidence corroborating the witnesses, zero physical evidence, zero circumstantial evidence. And this is why SOL is so important. It's not a get out of jail free card. It exists so the defense can practically gather some evidence to exonerate their client. After 20 years, most physical evidence will be gone, alibis will be impossible, witnesses will be difficult to find and their testimony will be even more unreliable than already notoriously unreliable witness testimony. All we're left with is he said/she said, and the biases of the jury pool.
This was an idle, principled frustration for me. I honestly could give a shit about Danny Masterson. However, now that figures more politically salient, like Russell Brand, are in the crosshairs, the precedent set by Masterson's chilling conviction are all the more frightening.
The obvious answer is religious prejudice against Scientology. Which may be justified and I may share, but it's still how this conviction was reached.
Among other things one of the women testified that her own mother (!) told her that while what happened was tragic she shouldn't report it because of the damage it would do to the faith. After the woman accused Masterson, her mother cut off all contact with her.
The jury was persuaded by a lot of testimony about the weird cult the perp was in, the way Scientologist hierarchs pressured victims not to go public at the time, the testimony about consequences women faced from the Scientologist community for going public. The jury found all that persuasive.
This is as much a MeToo case as it was a religious persecution/cult case depending on your view of scientology. There's precedent for overruling the SoL in cases of religious pressure to hide accusations... But I find the urge to eliminate procedural protections for rapists deeply fascist. We've already seen these laws used against Assange. Give the state infinite power to prosecute its enemies when accused of sex crimes and all the state needs is a woman, who can hide behind rape shield laws anyway. The urge to prosecute minority religions should be viewed similarly, even if scientology really is nutso.
Aside from this, lol@ everyone involved in the Ashton Kutcher Mila Kunis imbroglio resulting from their letter trying to offer mitigating character evidence for Masterson. They tried to write letters about what a nice guy he was, but failed to realize A) the letters would be public record, B) it's generally better to admit he did it in that kind of letter. The classic format is "I can't reconcile what he's been convicted of with the man I knew..." They failed to include that, indicating they still think he's innocent. They then issued a mealy mouthed half apology to the victims, victims they don't believe are victims. If you want to stand by your friend, regardless of circumstances I think that's admirable, but say it out loud standing up straight. He did it or he didn't. If you think he didn't there are no victims to retraumatize.
This is the part that's very weird to me, where they seem stuck in some sort of Schrödinger's Rapist situation, where if he did it then it's very bad and they feel for the victims, but if he didn't then they have his back. Any situation is bound to have some uncertainty, but you can't live in both worlds, where you feel bad for the alleged victims, but also want to write your letter for the accused as though he's innocent. They certainly can do what you suggest and simply use "I can't reconcile blahblahblah" or they can say he did it, but that he still has redeeming qualities. But this notion that you feel bad for someone that you don't think was victimized is weird. If my best friend was accused of rape, but told me he didn't do it, and there wasn't any physical evidence, I wouldn't move even the slightest fucking bit off of, "she is a vile liar and I have his back 100%". In a character letter, I would write whatever I think would help him the most, but I would never even have the slightest inclination that I should apologize to the liar for any pain I caused.
I suppose this is just the product of sincerely internalizing "believe victims" while battling with the cognitive dissonance that you're pretty sure this one is actually lying.
I don't think it's the product of anything sincere. It's the product of fear and cowardice, of wanting to mouth the socially appropriate lies when it isn't your ox being gored. I'd even posit a third darker view: they think/know he did in fact do the things he was accused of (Masterson was, after all, a man who DJed under the alias DJ Donkey Punch and was disciplined for on set behavior in the past) but don't think it was a "real" crime. That brandishing a gun at a woman after sex is normal behavior or that the Church was justified to poison the accuser's dogs because Scientologists gotta stick together.
I think this is another needle you can thread rhetorically and philosophically quite deftly. It's perfectly possible for the sex to have been bad, even traumatizingly bad, for her without him committing any crimes. I can feel bad for her that she thinks she experienced something unfortunate, even though she wasn't the victim of a crime.
But this isn't what the Kutchers did. They flailed about aimlessly managing to look both guilty and wrong at the same time. Just goes to show in any controversy DADD: Don't Apologize Double Down.
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