Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand defends anti-rape activist from critics labeling her 'a fake rape victim'

Submitted by Mastodon on Wed, 2015-01-21 02:54

Story here. Excerpt:

'The Columbia University senior who has won national notice for carrying a mattress to protest the school’s failure to punish her alleged rapist attended the State of the Union address Tuesday to promote legislation aimed at stopping sexual assaults on campus.
...
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) invited Sulkowicz to the speech in an effort to highlight a bipartisan bill that would force colleges to step up collection of information on sexual assaults and adopt tougher, standardized processes for dealing with sexual assault.
...
Sulkowicz, a Manhattan native, is carrying a mattress around the school as both a protest and a senior thesis called “Carry that Weight” and “Mattress Performance.” She said the dorm-room mattress symbolizes the weight she and other rape survivors carry.
...
The alleged attacker, Paul Nungesser, blasted Gillibrand.

"I am shocked to learn that Sen. Gillibrand is actively supporting Ms. Sulkowicz’s defamation campaign against me by providing her with a public forum in which to broadcast her grave allegation. By doing so, Sen. Gillibrand is participating in a harassment campaign against someone, who, for good reason, has been found innocent by all investigating bodies,” Nungesser told New York magazine.'

Like0 Dislike0

Comments

"Only in America..." it's often been said, before making an observation about the irony of something. This is hackneyed by now and so isn't heard as much, probably because the range of news reporting has gotten so broad that Americans can see that indeed, anything's possible anywhere in the world in terms of weird, contradictory, ironic, ludicrous, laughable, comically tragic, or other such events that make people shake their heads and say (in their own tongue, of course) "Yep, yep, yep, it's too damn much...", or like that. (Remember the story a few yrs. back of that guy in India who managed to draw a check as a gov't bureaucrat of some kind for over 20 years and never got caught until "one day"? Before the Internet, that'd never have made it to the US, but today, such stories do. That'd've been an "Only in America..." candidate if he'd been American but today, Americans know now that such amusing if not taxpayer-defrauding events don't just happen here but can and do happen elsewhere.)

But I'm completely digressing. Point is just this: We have a gov't official who is aggressively deprecating, denouncing, and attempting to force an alteration (via a P/R campaign) of the course of process of the two other branches of gov't: executive and judicial. Shouldn't our gov't officials, well, support the processes of gov't, at least in public? Elected officials do swear to uphold the Con'n, which says ppl are guaranteed the right of due process of law, which Sulkowicz got several times. Her accusations were vetted and found to be unsupportable. Case closed. Senators, et al., are supposed to say, "That's that!", not "Hell with that, bring your mattress to Washington, Emma! We'll show 'em!"

As to Gillibrand getting her own to do what she wants, she's already managed somehow to get a number of them to go along with making political career-damaging if not -wrecking statements that have been shown to be based on unfounded and knowingly-unfounded assertions of discredited facts.

If she hasn't already become the Senate equiv. of Obama (i.e., fellow Dems. now avoiding her whenever photographers or reporters are around), I predict she'll babble herself there soon enough.

Good grief, New York. What were you thinking when you voted for this amateur, barely-experienced-in-anything-political neophyte?

And while I'm at it, what were you thinking when you voted for Gillibrand, too? :)

Like0 Dislike0
Submitted by Matt on Thu, 2015-01-22 01:47