As we progress as a society and reject the notion that any person is more or less deserving of assault, defendants cannot as easily get away with victim blaming.
“Why were you going there at that time?”“Why were you wearing that dress and those heels?”, those are some of the questions I prepare my clients to answer when they sit in the witness box and tell a group of 12 strangers the most intimate and horrible details of the worst thing that has ever happened to them.
The tactic has many variations, but it is encapsulated by a recent case in which I co-represented a young woman who, due in large part to a series of avoidable and reckless failures by hotel staff, was taken into a room that was not hers and raped by a man who communicated to the hotel staff “she’s with me.”
It ended with our client feeling seen and empowered, a jury of her peers saying that what happened to her was not her fault and should never have happened. What is new, however, is that this specific type of targeted questioning and focus on something like “pink high heels” is no longer working. It has always been cruel and a pathetic attempt to evade accountability, but now this type of strategy is backfiring. As we progress as a society and reject the notion that any person is more or less deserving of assault, defendants cannot as easily get away with attacking victims for their pink high heels.
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