Bullied to Death

[Trigger warning for sexual violence, bullying, and suicide.]

Rape charge dropped after accuser commits suicide:

Samantha Kelly endured merciless taunting from classmates after they learned that the high school freshman had accused a senior of rape.

The weeks of harassment eventually became too much. Samantha went home from school Monday and hanged herself in this community southwest of Detroit.

With their key witness dead, prosecutors on Wednesday dropped criminal charges against the older student, saying they had no case without the accuser's testimony.

...On Wednesday, Wayne County prosecutor's spokeswoman Maria Miller said the case against Tarnopolski could not proceed "because the sole evidence ... was the complainant."

Attorney Joseph Kosmala, a Detroit-area defense lawyer who was not involved in the case, said the prosecutor seemed to have no other choice.

"Sexual assaults are not crimes that typically take place in front of witnesses. They're private crimes," Kosmala said. "Unless the complainant can sit in the witness chair and point the finger, there is no case."

That's interesting. Because Kelly was 14 and the accused rapist, Joseph Tarnopolski, is 18, and, when the alleged assault was originally reported, "it was considered a statutory rape case, meaning the pair had consensual sex but that she was under the age of consent." Tarnopolski does not deny having a sexual interaction with Kelly, but claims it was a "mutual thing."

Which seems to suggest that prosecutors could still pursue a statutory rape case, even if they cannot pursue it as a more serious sexual assault charge. But I guess the crime doesn't matter now that the victim's dead. Good thing they don't apply the same standards to murder cases.

Meanwhile, this case reveals that US educators still have a metric fuckton to learn about how to assess bullying and harassment in schools:

Principal Donovan Rowe said school officials investigated the alleged bullying and found nothing overt. Rowe said on occasion he walked behind Samantha as she went from class to class and witnessed no harassment.

You say no students harassed her while the principal was trailing behind her? Fascinating. What a revelation.

I would love to see this case open up a national conversation about talking rape accusations seriously, about victim-blaming, about victim-shaming and -silencing, the way that we've begun a national conversation about anti-gay bulling. But I suspect that's not going to happen.

RIP Samantha Kelly. My sincerest condolences to her family and friends.

[H/T to Shaker Stella, and Peter Daou.]