httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9DT3aSoesU
In a court hearing, one officer stated, “I told him … if he thinks he’s being threatened now, to continue in his course of conduct and see what will happen.” At the 2001 trial of Parker and Celestin, Kangas testified that, from a doorway, he saw Parker on top of the complainant, while she was still and silent.
Parker motioned to Kangas and Celestin to join him, Kangas said, and Celestin did, but Kangas chose to leave, because he “Didn’t believe that four people at one time was-you know, it didn’t seem right.” The two accused men told the police and the campus disciplinary board that the complainant was conscious and actively initiated the sexual encounter between the three of them.
The trial jury acquitted Parker of all criminal charges, but convicted Celestin, who is a co-writer of Parker’s film, of sexual assault, which is a lesser charge than rape.
The Black Student Caucus at Penn State questioned the likelihood of a fair trial for “a black male of color who is accused of raping a white female in Centre County … when a jury of his peers are all white except one female of color.” Several Penn State alumni who attended the trial recently wrote an open letter emphasizing the police threats to witnesses and strongly denying that Parker and Celestin harassed the complainant.
In a column about Parker’s case in the Times last month, Roxane Gay expressed the common assumption that a woman who later says she was too drunk to consent should be believed, “Because t is nothing at all to be gained by going public with a rape accusation except the humiliations of the justice system and public scorn.”
The public reaction to Parker’s case has perhaps revealed that many people today may believe that criminal liability for rape should not, like other serious crimes, hinge on the presence of a guilty mental state in the defendant with respect to the complainant’s consent but, rather, on the complainant’s experience of not consenting.
It is certainly true that, given the major reforms of the past several years in how schools handle sexual-violence claims, including the lower campus standard of proof, today an accusation like the one against Parker would be much more likely to result in expulsion from school.
Last week, the American Film Institute cancelled a screening of “The Birth of a Nation.” After a couple of weeks of public attacks, Parker has moved from declaring his innocence of the crimes of which he was acquitted to speaking the new social- and campus-justice language of toxic masculinity and rape culture.