Probably a controversial stance, and I recognize this teeters close to the edge of the "blame the victim" game, since I've definitely come across athletes who believe that they're God's gift to this green earth and are above any mortal norms of decency, common sense, or heaven forbid, the law, but I still think it takes two to play this game.
The alleged assault happened in Ben's hotel room. I've found one article claiming that the alleged victim (I understand using "alleged" in front of everything makes it sound like I don't believe the accusations, but it's the proper legal term to use) said that Ben asked her to come into his penthouse room to fix his TV sound system.
She said she was unable to find a technician so she decided to handle it herself because she had been told how important it was to please celebrities.
OK, the best way to please a celebrity is to figure out whether or not his sound system works yourself? Does that even make sense? I've never been to a hotel where the manager at the front desk personally comes up to inspect your TV to see whether the sound is working. Granted, I'm not a celebrity, but what did she expect that she could do for him by checking it out personally? That it wasn't plugged in? That he had the TV on mute accidentally? Unless she was a closet sound technician, doesn't it seem like the only thing running through her head was "ohmigod I get to go hang out in Big Ben's penthouse with him"?
The complaint next discusses the actual assault, which I won't go into here, other than to point out that if the claims are true, what Roethlisberger is being accused of is faking a problem with his TV, calling the front desk in the hopes that the desk manager, who he had, at a minimum, pleasant conversations with several times in the past several years, would fail to find a technician who would examine his TV and find nothing wrong with it, come up herself, and become swooned by his amorous advances, or at least be too scared to complain about it afterwards. Throughout all this planning, Ben never considered the fact that there were security cameras in the room until 5 minutes after the alleged attack actually happened.
Alternatively, Ben had no intentions of anything until the lady innocently decided to show up to his room instead of calling a technician, at which point this "previously friendly man" turned into Big Bad Ben and just completely decided to have his way with her.
Finally, she leaves, and is too shaken up to tell anyone at first, which is understandable, until she tells her bosses, who then allegedly broke into her home and deleted and confiscated whatever evidence she had of this attack (not sure what she had on her computer that would have been that damning for this particular claim) , meaning that all she had for this claim was her word against Roethlisberger's. Apparently there were security cameras everyone, but I guess her bosses deleted those too.
The aftermath of all this is that roughly one year after all this happens, when Ben returned to Nevada for the same golf tourney he was there last year (when the assault allegedly occurred), she served him with a civil complaint demanding $390,000, and also charged her employer with a suit for covering up the incident. Yet, she chose not to level criminal charges because that would get her fired. OK, suing your employer for money, accusing them of not taking care of their employees when they get raped won't get you fired, but once you make it a criminal charge, all bets are off? And why a year before you decide to make this suit happen?
Sexual assault is serious. And if these claims do ultimately prove to be true, I hope Ben does get duly punished by both the law and the NFL/Steeler organization. As the face of the franchise and a multimillionaire, you should be better than that. That being said, statistics say that the majority of rapes happen in situations when one person (generally the woman) is willing to go so far and no further, and the other (generally the man), chooses to cross the line after being told not to. That doesn't seem to be the case here, and my gut instinct, with that story above, is either a.) the woman was in a "this far but no farther" situation but figured she couldn't win a case if it looked like she wanted to hook up with Big Ben even a little bit, so she came up with this story showing how she was 100% innocent of everything other than naively trusting a man who turned out to be a sexual monster, or b.) the woman is a total, bald-faced liar trying to score a quick buck out of an ambiguous situation.
I know we do have women reading this blog, and I know this take on things may spark outrage, but let me just ask you: you are working at Harrah's in Reno. It is around 11pm on a Friday night, and Ben Roethlisberger, a 6'5", 240 pound professional athlete whom you've had conversations several times before, including once in the past hour, has called you and asked you to take a look at his broken TV. You have told him that you will find a technician to handle it, and he asks you to come take a look at it personally. You realize for some reason, you can't find a single technician in the hotel.
What do you do?
TMZ has some bits indicating that the woman in this case was undergoing psychiatric treatment for a relationship with a fake Iraq soldier. Really weird stuff that makes me think your implicit assumption that she thinks rationally might be off.
ReplyDeleteI saw the TMZ article but I didn't want to lend it too much credence, seeing as it named unnamed sources for their particular dish. I tried to stick with the reporting of the complaint. However, it's worthwhile to note that there doesn't seem to be any comment out of the woman's camp about the rumor that she may have been taking psych treatment for something other than the alleged rape, which means that TMZ may be on to something, but I don't want to touch that for now.
ReplyDeleteI would go check out the situation myself, but I'm a technicial-of-sorts/jujitsu champion. Good post, Stanberry.
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