Good point. If she were really raped she’d sack up and go for the criminal trial.

The comment about protecting men was a wry comment about protecting men from all those women who are just trying to get a payday. So, you know, making the process more embarrassing and painful helps make sure they were really raped.

How does it protect the male defendants to have the accuser’s name made public?

If it helps, the number of people who think that enduring the shame and harassment of filing a rape accusation is an effective method of personal fundraising hovers somewhere between 2 and 10% of rape cases.

“Cut and dry” is willfully simplistic and very inaccurate.

Exactly this. Rose’s defense team won’t be looking to win in court, they’ll be looking to get a favorable settlement, and the judge just handed them the largest chip they could possibly ask for: this woman’s identity being made public.

The same thing that got him into it is also what made it spiral -- his inability to know when to stop pushing. If you read her first and last texts and nothing in between, it’s like two different people. He always had to get the last word -- to have that control. From the first night on. It had to be infuriating.

Fair; really there’s a litany of reasons that “this won’t be allowed in court” is a bad take. If we all pitch in and throw out a couple, we’ll have a completed law review article ready to rock before too long

I don’t like the decision regarding the anonymity.

I dunno. I see your point, but once her name is out there, it’s out there. I don’t think “sanctions” are going to really make up for that or scare a legal team that claim that rape isn’t possible if the victim is over the age of consent.

Yeah. That’s true. But more importantly, it’s the defendant making the statements, not an out of court declarant. It’s not hearsay in the first place.

Pretty clearly a “statement against interest” which is a hearsay exception. Even without that, it could easily get introduced for a purpose other than asserting the truth of the texts themselves. Hearsay only bars out of court statements introduced to establish the truth of the matter asserted in those statements;…

Nothing about these text messages are hearsay, not even remotely. These text messages are with the perpetrator involved, not someone who spoke to him. Hearsay would be if these text messages were with the victim and a friend of the perpetrator and said “I talked to him, he said he’s sorry for raping you”, and even…

There is no hearsay issue. The texts are not hearsay and even if they were, many states have exceptions that would allow it in anyways. And it’s going to be supremely easy to establish rice sent them. It’s not like that’s the only text message he sent. “Someone stole my phone for like 5 minutes a day on 5-6 different…

Did I say the pie thrower didn’t assault Johnson? No I didn’t. As time passes I put more and more caveats (forget where I saw someone call them “troll prophylactics”) in my comments and it doesn’t make a damned difference.

Also, I am not a lawyer but “self-defense” and “retaliation” seem like different things. If someone is coming at you and you punch/kick them to get them to stop, that’s one thing. Beating someone up who threw an annoying-but-not-really-harmful object and was no longer threatening or attacking you is quite another.

Why aren’t the words “walked away in handcuffs and booked on assault charges in the local jail” not included in this article? The world is a mysterious place.

Did you get on a podium to boast about it afterwards?

No, actually there’s nothing that can be said to justify attacking someone. It shows lack of character and self-control on the part of person who physically attacks others for what they say and you’re showing lack of character for trying to defend it.

No not at all. There are no possible words that can be said that justify starting a fist fight.