Once again Ben Roethlisberger is in the news for sexual assault. Nine months ago in July 2009, Andrea McNulty, a mid-level manager with budgetary responsibilities at a hotel in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, filed a lawsuit against the football player. In her lawsuit she alleged that Roethlisberger called her to his room to fix a TV and then forced himself on her. Now at the beginning of March, a college student in Georgia alleged that Roethlisberger cornered her in the bathroom during a VIP party at a local bar and sexually assaulted her.
Roethlisberger’s fans were not too happy about McNulty’s claims in July and they took their wrath out on the accuser. But with this second allegation, the fans are focusing their anger on the alleged rapist, Roethlisberger. Tom Smith at the Bleacher Report wrote: “”I was willing to give Ben the benefit of the doubt after the first allegation, but this second one stinks. At this very least, Ben is a world-class idiot who should lose his sponsors. At worst, he is a sexual predator who should be locked up.” Hampton Stephens in the Atlantic sums it up this way: “When you are the quarterback of that team, your job is to lead. Even assuming Ben is innocent of any wrongdoing … his life outside the stadium is clearly interfering with his ability to lead in it.”
Why the switch? In an interview, CBS legal analyst Jack Ford explains that the March accusation has a higher “index of reliability”. Andrea McNulty never reported the case to the police. When she finally did decide to seek justice she went through the civil courts rather than the criminal court. The college student sought treatment at the hospital and reported the alleged rape immediately after it happened.
It sounds reasonable enough at first glance, but is it?
In the McNulty case, McNulty did in fact report immediately – to her hotel’s Chief of Security. Her legal complaint isn’t merely or even primarily about Roethlisberger. The legal complaint includes her hotel’s senior management as defendants and charges them with failing in their duty to preserve evidence and investigate employee complaints of mistreatment. She filed in civil court because these issues are outside the scope of criminal prosecution and could have only been handled in civil proceedings.
Credibility is not the issue here because McNulty’s allegation is over her employer’s failure to investigate or preserve evidence crucial to establishing her credibility. She alleges that hotel had room cameras that should have recorded the incident, but even after she made her complaint to management, they made no effort to preserve evidence. Presumably this would include any evidence that might have been captured by those cameras.
The core issue should have been “How much responsibility does management have when an employee complains they were assaulted by a customer?” Yet the employment issues received short shrift outside of feminist media. When McNulty made her accusation in July, 2009, her credibility rather than interference in her ability to establish it became the sole focus. Even more troubling are the reasons used to impeach her credibility. They would have made Kafka proud.
When the court of public opinion discovered that McNulty was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), blogs in the celebrity sphere argued that the PTSD made her unreliable. Apparently if a victim is sufficiently traumatized to develop PTSD, the trauma can’t be proved because the victim is too crazy to be a valid witness to that trauma. Next the media discovered that McNulty had been duped by someone impersonating a soldier in Iraq. Did sports blogs care that impersonating someone is a form of fraud? No. Did they question the impersonator’s morals? No. Did they say “wow, this women gives others the benefit of the doubt to a fault and is unlikely to misread good intentions as foul”? No. Apparently, the more likely you are to believe people are well-intentioned, the less reliable you are when you finally conclude that some one is playing foul.
Annie Shields, at the Ms. Magazine blog, might be a bit closer to the truth when she observes that the victim has all but disappeared from the latest commentary: “”As it turns out, the classic approach of discrediting or blaming the victim doesn’t play as well the second time around, so, instead of maligning the quarterback’s 20-year-old accuser, many in the media have simply ignored her.”
But was the victim ever present in the commentary on the allegations in July? Superficially, yes. In reality no. The substance of McNulty’s civil suit was ignored. The vast majority of the media only cared that the suit included Roethlisberger as a defendant. The criticism of McNulty wasn’t about McNulty the victim but McNulty as a threat to the cherished hero Ben Roethlisberger.
Whether it is Mike Tyson, Roman Polanski, or Ben Roethlisberger, the real issue is that we don’t like fallen heroes. We crave heroes. In school, we teach them in Greek and Roman myths. In church and synagogue, we study them in the Bible. We make them up in comic books. We build TV shows around modern myths like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Smallville. We devote countless electronic bytes and airwave minutes to the latest sports heroes, Holliwood stars and popular singers. And we grieve hard when they fall.
Sean Conboy of the Pittsburgh magazine sums it up this way:
How ironic is it that NFL organizations spend millions of dollars on public relations and media training in order to tell the fans what they should think, yet they don’t seem to spend much effort teaching their own players to think. To act like men…in the throes of the crusty, pulsing hangover from Ben’s Dudes Night Out, I feel that same strange/ashamed feeling I get whenever I look back and actually watch old WWF clips. What the hell was I watching? Who was I rooting so hard for?…These are my boys, and deep down inside I want to believe in them.
Perhaps we are looking for the wrong heroes? Why do we work so hard to convince ourselves that Roman Polanski and Ben Roethlisberger are innocent? These heroes fall because we expect to have moral triumph and star power in one single neat bundle. We want outward signs of an inward grace. Star power is easy to see. Moral courage is hidden. It can only be observed through a long pattern of action in difficult circumstances.
Moral courage is Andrea McNulty pursuing her court case despite intense media pressure and then offering to drop Roethlisberger from the list of defendants if only he will admit to the crime and make restitution via a donation to a women’s advocacy group.
Moral courage is the unnamed victim of the second alleged rape who took the risk of being laughed at when she reported her crime to a police officer who only a few hours earlier had posed for a photograph with Roethlisberger. Who could have missed the public drubbing that Roethlisberger’s first accuser got?
These aren’t Sean Conboy’s “boys”, but maybe they should be?
