Held to answer

How would you like a carrot and a bottle of barbecue sauce shoved up your rectum?

No? It could be worse: You could have a carrot and a bottle of barbecue sauce shoved up your rectum – and then be told this is what you really wanted. You liked it. You asked for it.

A 34-year-old Southern California woman had that happen to her 14 years ago. The two young men who used her body for sport thought it was funny, even after she screamed at them and ran bleeding into the bathroom of the men’s apartment. She had met one of the men at a respectable, friendly bar, and they danced and talked for a couple of hours. He invited her over to his nearby apartment where his roommate was having a party. When she arrived she found no party, just the roommate.

After the two men finished with her, they threw her outside. Neighbors heard her screams and looked out to see a naked woman pleading for her clothes. The men finally tossed them to her, then shut the door on her for good.

Sheriff’s deputies and prosecutors slammed the door on her, too. No arrests made, no charges filed, even though both men freely admitted – in more detail than the woman provided – what they had done to her.

Deputies didn’t arrest the men because “they were so cooperative.” They were employed and had family and friends in the area. The woman lived in public housing, worked as a house cleaner and was trying to start her own janitorial business.

“Did you see her?” one of the detectives asked me when I was gathering information for a newspaper story. “She’s kind of homely.”

The woman had a lean, muscular body, and she looked like a young Joan Rivers, only with acne scars. When I went to visit her in her small cinder block apartment, I found she had a tidy stack of “Wall Street Journals” in the living room. The top one prominently displayed the story of the day: A look at then-President Clinton and Paula Jones, and why Jones’ credibility was being singled out.

When I talked to one of the men, he told me the woman had approached him at the bar. “She was looking for someone to make her feel special.”

The headline on my article summarized the heart of this woman’s story: “Was it rape? Jury never got to decide.”

What happened afterwards will sound familiar to anyone following the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK). The prosecutors did not like my story, and a few days after it ran they gave one of my male colleagues some information about an old prostitution arrest on the woman. My colleague seized on this as if it were a personal vindication.

My colleague was a Vietnam veteran. There was a good chance that at some point in his tour of duty he had gone to a prostitute. Would this have tarnished his character forever and to such an extent that he would have lost all rights to his own person?

Just as there were no doubts about what the men in my story did to that woman, there is forensic evidence that DSK left his semen on a 32-year-old hotel maid. How did it get there? He says she wanted oral sex.

Last month a guy was caught urinating in an uncovered reservoir that provides drinking water to Portland, Ore., residents, and the city drained 7.8 million gallons of water from the reservoir rather than risk the yuck factor of even a trace of urine.

Yet Dominique Strauss-Kahn alleges that this maid wanted a stranger to ejaculate into her mouth. How plausible is that? It makes no difference now, because she lied on her immigration papers and tax returns and has a boyfriend in prison.

There are men who like to pounce on what they think is easy prey. Those two 20-somethings in Southern California knew how to choose their victim. Based on the multiple stories about DSK’s sexual aggression that emerged after he was arrested, he is used to having free rein among females below his status. He had no reason to fear prosecution.

Rape cases are hard to prosecute because we hold sexual assault victims to different standards. Jurors would never ask of a robbery victim, “Why did he wear expensive jewelry?” But they will wonder about a rape victim, “Why did she go to his apartment?”

Periodic, high-profile rape cases revive arguments about these multiple standards, but nothing significantly changes. Women are just as willing to keep things as they are.

Reuter’s Chrystia Freeland on American Public Media’s “Marketplace” radio show blamed the media for going after DSK and suggested he deserves a big apology. In an earnest “I’m-a-good-girl” voice, she added, “There is a difference between being a rapist and being a guy who seduces women.”

It isn’t the media’s fault that so many people were willing to believe that DSK sexually assaulted a maid. All of us know how it really is. Many women have had men get sexually aggressive with them. Ask any woman in your life if she’s ever been groped, ever had to push a guy away, ever had to say “no” repeatedly. None of this is rape, but that’s where it starts.

We are too accommodating to men who engage in this behavior. We are too tolerant of groups who, for religious or cultural reasons, regard the female body as a playground for men. Just the sight of a woman can be sexually suggestive in some parts of the world – including neighborhoods in New York. (That’s why a Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper removed Hillary Clinton and another woman from a photo of the national security team watching the raid on Osama bin Laden).

No wonder there were commenters at the New York Times who stated flatly that there was no way that the maid could have been raped.

“How can one force someone to perform oral sex?” asked somebody named Raj in Columbus, Ohio. “Come on, women too have teeth!! Who would put himself in such a vulnerable position at the same time attacking (another) person. This story was fake from the beginning!!”

Well, then, perhaps it’s time women took matters between their teeth.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons