Woman claims Matt Lauer 'anally raped' her, Ronan Farrow reports

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/09/matt-lauer-anally-raped-co.html

4 Likes

OMG, I read this as “annually” as in once a year,…

2 Likes

That was definitely not a headline I expected to see today.

24 Likes

Right?

What’s really sad is that I fully expected it to be some fuckwad’s ill chosen expression of misogynistic hyperbole; not an actual account of sexual assault.

What a way to start the morning…

23 Likes

We already knew he was a rapist. I just didn’t expect to be reading about it today.

12 Likes

Me too. I see

Matt Lauer “anally raped”

And my brain immediately goes to imagining that as a terrible analogy. Instead the quotation marks around the words were only there for anti-libel reasons, taking the place of “allegedly”. That the headline was 100% literal was a bit of a shock.

To be clear, the headline is a shock, the fact that Matt Lauer raped someone is, well, expected.

10 Likes

Hope this means he DEFINITELY will not be on Dancing With the Stars or somesuch.

3 Likes

The fallout will be severe. I bet this delays his redemption comeback push by at least 18 months.

15 Likes

I suppose it would be too much to hope he can be charged with rape in Russia. Even if there’s no way to charge him criminally, hopefully the survivors can sue him into penury so he can’t live in comfort for the rest of his life.

Thing about rapists, like most murderers they rarely only commit the crime once; it’s usually a pattern of behavior. Statistically they almost always have multiple victims. They don’t wake up a different person the day they commit the crime.

10 Likes

See, this is the problem with just saying “sexual misconduct allegations”. You see, that could mean anything from a simple accident or a misinterpretation all the way up to someone fucking anally raping someone. And it leaves a lot of questions as to what the person has done, and if they deserve the punishment that happened to them. And there are lots of hemming and hawing about stuff.

Well, now we know; and we can easily say that not only did Matt Lauer deserve to get fired for fucking anally raping his co-worker; he deserves to go to jail for it; he deserves to be ruined forever for it.

In fact, to me, his name is now Matt “The Anal Rapist” Lauer; so that no one ever forgets what he has done. Just like Brock “The Rapist” Turner, it is now part of his identity forever.

8 Likes

Doesn’t US law allow for charging someone for acts as a US citizen against another US citizen wherever the act may have taken place?

6 Likes

That’s a good question. I don’t know if US extraterritorial jurisdiction covers rape. This appears to be the relevant federal law…

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2242

IANAL, but I’d be interested if anyone has insight into whether Lauer could be charged in the US.

2 Likes

Yep. People need to be shocked out of their complacency.

Exactly.

Excuse me:

That’s Brock “The Dumpster Rapist” Turner.

Or, if you will, Brock “The Textbook Definition Of Rapist” Turner.

Not to be confused with Steve The Office Masturbator, aka Louis CK.

6 Likes

Maybe less than that, if he gets tips from Marv Albert. :frowning_face:

2 Likes

NBC: provides Matt office with rape-room lock for his office door

NBC: expresses shock that Matt is a sexual harasser and accused rapist

5 Likes

Citation, please. I think most people who kill someone only do it once. They’re either caught or don’t see a reason to do it again. Murder is usually seen as a last resort. Serial killers, mass murderers and such are a small portion of the whole.

Assaulters and abusers on the other hand, tend to have a pattern of behavior (that may escalate to murder). Same with robbers.

7 Likes

You’re right. Burglars and muggers are a more apt comparison. I guess the serial killers and mass murderers are disproportionately represented in the sensationalist media. I stand corrected.

2 Likes

It’s why I have more sympathy for the average murderer. Rapists are actually the bigger danger to society.

ETA: I didn’t say I have a lot – that comes down to a case-by-case basis. Someone who kills to save themselves from an abuser is different than someone who kills just to inherit, for example.

7 Likes

Agreed, though with a distinction between a crime of self-defense and a crime of passion, since the former is what I’d call justifiable homicide, whereas the later may be merely be unjustified homicide where I’d have some sympathy if the person had killed their abuser. (Acknowledging that the formal legal definitions may not always agree.) Add in the lack of comprehensive systemic protections for abuse victims and it’s not always easy to tell one from the other.

But to your previous point, it got me wondering if murderers are less likely to murder more than once because the justice system takes murder seriously (albeit grossly unevenly in terms of class, race, gender and so forth), whereas miscarriages of justice such as in the case of Brock “The Dumpster Rapist” Turner are commonplace. I’m still pretty skeptical that anyone wakes up able to deliberately kill someone and then loses that ability (though that may simply be due to my lack of imagination and ability to get into the mind of murderers), but I could certainly see how the likelihood of consequences provide the deterrent not faced by rapists. This would also seem to be at least a partial explanation for the regularity of murder-by-cops, shielded as they are by the abomination that is qualified immunity. Though of course a job where people get to commit wanton violence is geared to attract a certain type of person, so nothing is so simple.

1 Like

Murders are almost certainly the most heavily investigated and prosecuted crimes. Still, I think there is a real difference in kind. There are very few people who think that murder isn’t a big, big, big deal, even the murder they committed. If you get arrested for murder you may never get to commit another. If you get away with murder you probably spend the rest of your life recalling it and thinking you’ve got to make sure nothing like that happens ever again.

It’s only a handful of people who are callous enough to be okay with murder, weird enough to actually want to murder people, clever enough to get away with multiple murders and somehow also foolish enough to think that whatever emotional gain they get out of murder is worth the risk.

5 Likes