What Happens When You Challenge ‘Rape Culture’ Orthodoxy by A. J. Delgado

If you can afford to blog about feminism for a living, it might not occur to you that not every accused rapist can get his parents to hire a good lawyer and make the problem go away. So why not throw out the norms for dealing with people accused of crimes? After all, who will be hurt if you’re wrong?

Here’s one: On July 8, 2002, Brian Banks was a few days away from his 17th birthday, a handsome, happy, and healthy African-American teen about to live the American dream. The star of his Long Beach high-school football team, the 6´3´´, 235-pound linebacker had been recruited by a variety of universities and had just accepted a scholarship offer to play for USC, one of the country’s top football programs. All of Brian’s hard work and talent was paying off, and his future could not have been brighter. But later that day, Banks’s life changed in an instant when a classmate claimed he had dragged her into a stairway of their high school and raped her.

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