Alabamians ought to be used to it by now.

So many laws designed to protect the powerful, at the expense of the powerless.

Maybe it all seems big, and amorphous, just a bunch of policies and structures too big and cold to get your head around.

Until you look at rape.

The most personal of crimes. The most elemental, intimate display of power and control.

Again Alabama protects the powerful. And shame the powerless.

A story appeared on Buzzfeed last week, a powerful piece about a University of Alabama student who told police she was raped by T.J. Bunn Jr., a wealthy and important Tuscaloosa man. She was dismissed and treated badly by Tuscaloosa police, held to a different standard than the man, and she wound up killing herself.

It was tragic. I can't speak to all the facts of the story. It was clearly reported for a long period of time, and made a compelling case that cops in Tuscaloosa are tougher on victims of rape and sexual assault than they are on attackers.

http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/06/alabama_turns_rape_victims_int.html


How Accusing A Powerful Man of Rape Drove A College Student To Suicide

TUSCALOOSA, Alabama — Megan Rondini’s friends and family remember her as having an ironclad sense of right and wrong. Her childhood nickname was “Rules Rondini” because she was such a principled board game player. As an honors student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Megan offered rides to drunk girls walking alone at night, even after one threw up in her backseat.

No one was there to help Megan when she found herself in that very situation one night in July 2015, except for a well-to-do businessman Megan knew only as “Sweet T.” The 34-year-old later told authorities he offered 20-year-old Megan a ride home because he and a friend saw her leaving downtown Tuscaloosa alone. Megan couldn’t remember how she ended up in Sweet T’s white Mercedes on the way to his ornate mansion, decorated with his choicest hunting conquests, from massive-tusked elephant and wide-mouthed hippo heads to taxidermied lions and leopards. But, Megan later told police, she was sober enough by the time he pointed her toward his bedroom to know she didn’t want to have sex with him — and, she said, Sweet T should’ve known it, too.

women are generally expected to do two things if they believe they’ve been sexually assaulted: Go to the emergency room and call the police. “Was it consensual?” Megan's friend asked her when she picked her up that night, the friend told investigators. “Like, did you want to?” No, Megan told her. She didn’t.

That’s why they went to the hospital for a forensic exam, even though it was the middle of the night and Megan had just run away from Sweet T’s mansion by climbing out of his second-story window. Afterward, instead of going to sleep, she met with law enforcement for an interview. Megan never imagined that she would soon be cast as a criminal, or that investigators would view Sweet T — really T.J. Bunn Jr., son of an influential Tuscaloosa family — as the true victim. But that’s exactly what happened.

Under Alabama’s archaic rape law, victims must prove they “earnestly” resisted their attackers, and the investigator who interviewed Megan quickly decided she hadn’t fought back against Bunn — she hadn’t “kicked him or hit him," he explained. His investigation would conclude that no rape occurred. But he didn’t stop there. Instead, he started building a case against Megan, questioning her for multiple crimes she wasn’t even aware she had committed.

Later, when Megan tried to file a civil suit, she learned the only way to escape possible prosecution for those crimes was to drop her case. When she went to the University of Alabama for counseling, a staff therapist told Megan she knew the Bunn family and therefore couldn’t help her. (She was referred to another counselor, left out of the story. Bama)

Megan’s case was complex. Then again, most sexual assault allegations are. There are rarely witnesses, and trauma survivors often have fragmented and incomplete memories, which can cause law enforcement without specialized training to be skeptical of their accounts — especially when alcohol is involved.

Megan left Tuscaloosa newly diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. In the months that followed, her depression grew worse, along with her sense of betrayal.

“When all is said and done, I wonder what I could’ve accomplished if one man didn’t completely rip everything away from me,” Megan texted a friend in February 2016. Two days later, she hanged herself.

Megan, who stood 5-foot-6 and around 130 pounds, had about five cups of beer on July 1, she would later tell investigators — not enough, in her experience, to get that drunk. But somehow, she said, she blacked out, only coming to around midnight in Bunn’s brand-new Mercedes as he and his friend drove to Bunn’s home about 20 minutes away.

Megan was intimidated by Bunn, so much so that she didn’t try to stop him as he drove toward his house, she told investigators, even though “he was drunk and driving and it was concerning me.”

Bunn put his drunk friend to bed and told Megan to go to his room, she told investigators. She said she complied, sitting on a couch near the door, as far as possible from his bed with monogrammed “B” pillows. Bunn walked in and told her he wanted to have sex. That’s when Megan said she had to leave, while “trying to be really nice to him” because “I know he’s an influential person in Tuscaloosa.”

“I said, I really need to go, I have friends that are waiting,” she told police when they first interviewed her at the hospital. “He didn’t really take that.” Eventually, Megan said, she “felt like just letting him have sex with me was the only way he would let me go.”

Bunn brought her over to his bed and pulled her shorts to the side while she looked away from him, she told investigators. The incident report would later state that she “verbally informed Bunn that she did not want to have sex with him and that she needed to rejoin her friends at Innisfree,” but that he “ignored these statements and continued to engage in intercourse with her.” Afterward, Bunn passed out, and she felt she could leave safely, she said. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t open his door. She started texting friends around 1 a.m., begging for help.

“OMG,” she wrote to one, “I can’t get out of the room.”

Megan told police that, in a panic, she climbed through Bunn’s second-story window, jumped onto a gate and then to the dark, unfamiliar street below. When she realized she didn’t have her keys, she started frantically searching for them, even climbing back into Bunn’s room and then out again. Next, she checked Bunn’s Mercedes, where she found his wallet and a pistol. She grabbed $3 in case she had to take a cab and the gun “for safety,” she told investigators. Megan didn’t know how to handle guns, she’d later explain, and she accidentally fired it before dropping the weapon to the ground. Finally, a friend picked her up. They arrived at Tuscaloosa’s DCH Regional Medical Center around 2:40 a.m.

In late July, Mike Rondini said, the district attorney called to let him know Megan’s case didn’t meet the legal definition of sexual assault and wouldn’t be brought to a grand jury. Two weeks later, Megan got a letter confirming her case was closed. She wasn’t ready to give up. In August, she hired a lawyer to file a civil suit. Megan told a therapist that fall that she was suing Bunn “due to the fear that she is not the first person he has assaulted or the last."

But although Megan and her family were told her criminal case wouldn’t move forward, the district attorney’s office eventually decided to present it to a grand jury after all. There was a catch. In a package deal, the grand jury would also rule on felony charges against Megan for breaking into Bunn’s car and stealing his gun. Internal documents from September 2015 imply authorities didn’t intend to fight too hard on Megan’s behalf: Investigators noted they found “no sexual assault occurred.”

The Rondinis learned the criminal case was back on the table only after they hired an attorney for a potential civil suit. Once they heard Megan might face felony charges, they decided it was best for Megan to drop the civil case,

https://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/how-accusing-a-powerful-man-of-rape-drove-a-college-student?utm_term=.vx0L8e9P0#.arrzKkVaj

This story is huge in our area.

So it turns out they actually went by her apartment before she left with to go to the guys house. She had her cellphone the whole time and never tried to dial 911.

She stole money and a gun from the guys car. The whole gist of the story is he was rich and powerful.

Lots of information out there. But the big push is to basically make it so a man can be charged with rape with no proof he actually did the crime.

In the story she says that she "knew of him" before they met.

She had a her cellphone with her the whole time. Why didn't she call a friend, a cab or 911?