You know what the worst thing about rape victims is?

Their annoying bullshit turns your totally-not-a-rapist boyfriend into a giant bore!

For nearly three years I dated a guy who had been dismissed from Harvard over accusations of raping another student. … Throughout, I strove to create a relationship of hopeful normalcy despite his electronic ankle bracelet, public ridicule and compromised future. Until finally, sadly, our affair ended, though not for reasons you might guess.

…[His required rehabilitation] sessions, of which he spoke very little, clearly were intended to positively influence how he treated others. But the reality was somewhat more complicated.

Already he felt the shame of the charge and conviction. With the sexual evaluations, he was forced to question the normalcy of his impulses. Now the rehabilitation extinguished the remaining spark he had left, the irreverence I’d originally fallen in love with, replacing it with a generic "respect" for others that in reality was a kind of bland and suffocating politeness.

Oh. Mah. Gawd. It was like a fucking nightmare when my irreverent boyfriend who used to tell the most awesome offensive jokes started respecting other people. And not even just women, either. He totally stopped laughing at my wicked cool homo and nigger jokes!

He grew so cowed that I almost began to hope for a politically incorrect slur or diatribe to spring from his lips, unburdened by the worry of offense.

See?!

Regardless of how much I reassured him that everything was fine, he grew increasingly afraid of touching me in an authoritative way.

I was, like, so pissed! That bitch who had accused him of raping her before he and I ever met had totally ruined our sex life!

In my mind, he was not seeking to humiliate and subjugate a woman on that night many years ago. I believe he was a boy who endeavored for hours in the dark to express his drunken, fumbling desire in a way that, fair or not, ended up unraveling his life. I wish he had found me first.

Because let me tell you—I would have just submitted with gusto to his authoritative touching. None of this would have happened if it weren’t for that dumb woman who accused my boy of raping her, instead of just recognizing it for the drunken, fumbling endeavoring it probably was. Or something...

It was quite generous of the New York Times to give Ashley Cross this stunning opportunity, particularly considering her palpable difficulty facing the most basic truth about these events, a willful blindness which becomes evident within paragraphs as her troubled beau goes from having "been dismissed from Harvard over accusations of raping another student" to having "left school immediately after the incident" because "the university was investigating the allegations and … he might face dismissal." I imagine a rather intractable self-deception is a prerequisite for penning an apologia for all the poor "boys" who endeavor in the dark to express their drunken, fumbling desires for women who aren't fucking interested, but, nevertheless, it doesn't bode well for the veracity of the author's "version of truth." The stank of horseshit really began to waft from the Times' general vicinity as I realized that not only are we meant to feel sorry for Cross, and for her ex-boyfriend, but angry at his victim, because "Rather than allow the college administration to handle the situation, his accuser filed criminal charges"—and the worst part of this unmitigated temerity was not that she was presumed to be lying, but that her nonsense has totally turned Cross' boyfriend into a pussy!

Yet what alarmed me was not some sinister side of him I never saw but a passivity and retreat that I saw far too much of. In the end, I found it harder to love an emasculated boyfriend than one accused of rape.

Amazing generosity on the Times' part, I feel, to provide free space for the promulgation of the hideous, anti-feminist assertion that women are fine with a few rapes here and there as long as we don't have to deal with emasculated girly-men. And truly spectacular generosity to let Cross transmit this swill couched in the context of real-life events, without so much as a link to any article about the facts of the case in question—a decision which would no doubt be defended with vague references to privacy, in spite of how easy it was for Adam B to identify the case from the details provided in Cross' piece. Realistically, the facts of the case were best kept hidden because they undermine the article's vile objective of further muddying the already murky waters of date rape for its victims, but that certainly had nothing to do with the omission of such information.

From Cross' piece: "As I peppered him with questions, he talked me through the fateful night of only a few months before, when he and the girl, who’d been a friend, had mingled at a party and drifted off drunk together before winding up back in her room, where, several hours later, they had sex. She became hysterical, claiming he forced himself on her. He left, bewildered and distraught. That night he wrote her a letter apologizing for upsetting her and left it at her door. He told me the letter was an attempt to salvage the friendship."

From a Harvard Crimson story about the case, located by Adam B:

In the court records, the prosecutor reads an account of the incident, after which [D. Drew] Douglas is recorded as saying, "I admit to committing the crime."

According to the account, both students had been friends for a year. On April 3, the night of the incident, the woman saw Douglas while on a date with another man.

The victim told The Crimson yesterday that she was "feeling the effects of alcohol" that night.

Court documents state that the three attended a party together. Afterwards, as her date walked her home, Douglas began walking along with the pair.

The other man left her at her dorm, but Douglas" told her he wanted to go home with her," and stayed behind, prosecutors told the court.

"She told him that wasn't going to happen and was attempting to get into her door," the prosecutor told the court. "The defendant was blocking access to the card key [reader] she needed to use."

He followed her into the dorm and up the stairs. "She repeatedly told him that he was not going to come in," the document states. "The defendant kept telling her that it's his choice; she did not have input into that decision."

Outside her room he threw her against the wall, pushed her dress and grabbed her buttocks. He also began kissing her, the prosecutor said.

"[She] told him to leave [and] was struggling to get away from him," the documents said.

She managed to open the door to her suite, but did not shut it in time to prevent Douglas from following her inside.

"Once she was inside, although annoyed that the defendant was still there, because she was a friend of the defendant, [she] wasn't particularly frightened," the prosecutor said. "She told him to leave; she was going to bed."

She lay down fully clothed on the bed and began to doze off. "She next became aware that [Douglas] had removed all of his clothing and had gotten into bed with her," the document reads.

Once in bed with her, he proceeded to sexually assault her, though the court document does not describe any penetration. Some time later, the prosecutor said, Douglas left the bed....

The prosecutor said the woman assaulted by Douglas found a handwritten note under her door the next day apologizing "for pressuring her, forcing her to engage in these activities."

There's no question this was rape. The rapist admitted to the crime, first in his letter to his victim and then to the court. Why Cross decided to convince herself otherwise is not for me to suppose, and I don't particularly care, but I am singularly disgusted (if unsurprised) at the Times' choice to both aid her delusion and exploit it to reinforce anti-feminist garbage that all of us could easily do without.

H/T Atrios and Miss Pen Name.