Word: raped
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...injury that lingers but is usually overcome. Americans generally, but sports fans especially, are a forgive-and-forget bunch, for whom hope always springs eternal for next season, regardless of their team's performance the previous year. Remember how the public disparaged Kobe Bryant when he stood trial for rape in 2003? Guess who had the NBA's best-selling jersey last season...
...when the trial began last October, Mock convinced Judge Jeffre Cheuvront to ban the words rape, victim and assailant from the trial - including from Bowen's testimony - arguing that such words would be "unfairly inflammatory, prejudicial, and misleading." Nebraska state law holds that "evidence may be excluded if its probative value is substantially outweighed" by the potential for unfair prejudice...
Bowen's attorney, Wendy Murphy, says her client had nothing to do with the protest, which was organized by PAVE (Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment), a Chicago-based advocacy group for rape victims. "She supports the protestors and is glad they are there and signed the online petition, but that's it," said Murphy in an e-mail. But since Bowen has decided to take her language-ban appeal to the federal district court, she and her lawyer have begun soliciting support from PAVE and other national advocacy groups...
...carries a different weight from one on words like "murder" or "embezzlement." Michelle Anderson, an expert in sexual violence and the law, and the dean of the City University of New York Law School, notes that rulings like Cheuvront's reflect the way that the courts have traditionally viewed rape cases. "The notion that the word rape is so charged derives from an historical willingness to place a higher burden on rape victims who come forward," she says, pointing out that in the past, rape cases had required corroboration and evidence of the use of force, and instructions could...
...putting a thumb on the scale because often in acquaintance rape cases, the woman experiences the intercourse as rape and the man experiences it as sex," Anderson says of the language ban. "It's a way of denying the woman's ability to describe her experience as she lived it." To her, the fact that Bowen described her ordeal as simply "inside of me" was a problem because "it's so bland that it could describe what a dentist does with dentist tools to excavate a cavity." Murphy agrees: "Nobody in that courtroom was allowed to describe what happened...