Texas ‘Justice’: Football is More Important Than the Law, and Girls Have to Pay for the Privilege of Being Raped
What is the background of this story out of Silsbee, Texas concerning a high school cheerleader ordered by Superintendent Richard Bain to cheer for her accused rapist?
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The media refers to the victim as H.S. Obviously, people in Silsbee know who she is. Put on your thinking cap and you can find photographs of her online.
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At about 2:40a.m., October 19, 2008, police were called to a Silsbee home where a party had been held. Police found her under a pool table, half naked and sobbing. H.S., then 16, alleged that three Silsbee High football players had cornered her in the room, locked the door and raped her. She started screaming for help. “Stop! Seriously, stop it. No!” When other people began pounding at the door, the football players jumped out a window. At least one had left his clothing behind. Witnesses from that night say that outside, a bare naked suspect, Rahkeem Bolton, was verbally abusive, yelling blood-curdling insults about the victim and threatening harm to the house owner if she refused to give him his clothes.
I guess its a good thing that “H.S.” didn’t get pregnant from the rape. I’m sure that the Republican Congress would re-define the crime into an offsides penalty.
But certainly not a personal foul.
From Politics USA:
I want the reader to have some idea of how important football is to Silsbee, Texas and then how important Rahkeem Bolton was to Silsbee, Texas high school football. The Silsbee Tigers play in Tiger Stadium. With its latest seating expansion, that stadium fits 10,000 spectators
And don’t think that Texas high school stadiums don’f full up all of those seats.
Its Texas – and its football.
The only thing more important is Rick Perry’s hair – and his ability to inject his religion into Texas law.
Now for Bolton and his importance as a football hero. One local chat thread had a sports enthusiast saying “
Bolton will be a stud on defense, will be the leading tackler all season.” That same commentator said “I want you to keep an eye on Rakheem Bolton because his name will be on this forum in the Silsbee topics all season long.” Friday, November 3, 2009; The Silsbee Bee ran a story titled “
Silsbee Tigers are undefeated district champs.” You just absolutely
have to read all the mentions of Rahkeem Bolton in this article.
A first grand jury returned a “no bill” decision, meaning there would be no case against the three defendants. No rape charges, no assault charges; nothin’. Did Hardin County District Attorney
David Sheffielddo a good job there? The victim and her parents thought not. Neither do I. Neither should you. The victim was told that preliminary results from the rape kit showed some DNA evidence that could inculpate the defendants. Yet the victim kept hearing that due to case backlogs, the full rape kit analysis results wouldn’t be ready for four months, five months, one year – depends which report you read. There is an appearance that the can kept getting kicked down the road for the date the victim was being given for when the rape kit results would be ready. The victim now says she wants to study forensic science, motivated in part by the delay in the processing of her rape kit.
Does it sound right, that a community taking in $35K, $40K per home game football match can’t get a rape kit processed any faster than that?
But, we are talking foo-baw here:
Silsbee took the “no bill” decision from the first grand jury as a complete exoneration of the defendants. D.A. David Sheffield said the grand jury could not determine if there was lack of consent. He also said this: “The case has deeply divided the community of Silsbee and especially Silsbee High School.” Sheffield stated that any retribution, threats or harassment of the victim could result in 3rd degree felony Retaliation charges being filed. That little word “could,” is in there, in place of “will result;” did you notice? Sheffield also told local station KFDM that “Because everyone had been drinking, it would have made it difficult to prove the allegations raised in this case.” Have you got that, reader? Have you quite got it? The same D.A. who didn’t bother to get expedited rape kit results told the Silsbee community that the victim was drunk at the time of the crime and that therefore, it would have been difficult to prove the allegations she made. This prosecutor, assigned to this case, discredited the victim to the entire community.
Well, if you’re familiar with the story, you know it gets better – if, by better, one means more nightmarish in that fine Texas ‘christian’ bruthuh-ly love sense.
Well – love for multi-sport athletes and those who deify them.
Love for real people?
Not so much.
Returned to cheerleading, the victim on several occasions refrained from cheering her accused attacker individually, without incident. But then at a February, 2009 basketball game, Bolton went to the foul line to shoot a free throw. H.S. folded her arms and remained silent. It seems apparent from what followed that the school administration had noted her previous silences and so strategized over a way to get revenge on her. They did not offer to talk with her about the matter in a private setting or to offer to let her therapist or some other advocate sit in on that session. Bain, Bain’s assistant and the then Principal, Gaye Lokey, piled on the victim, telling her that she either had to cheer for her attacker individually or be permanently expelled from the cheerleading team. The Cheerleading Squad Sponsor Sissy McInnis joined in the retaliation. The victim was in tears, humiliated in front of a school community that had been viciously gossiping about her for months. Only the victim’s father came to her defense. Turns out that during the cheerleading practice session when the girls were admonished that they had to cheer for every player, the victim had been in one of her rape counseling sessions.
At this point in this week’s episode of Glee, Jane Lynch makes a snarky remark and everyone else then sings an insanely syruppy version of Ted Nugent’s “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.”
And, of course, everyone lives happily ever after – until the next episode, when they can’t figure out how to do an equally syruppy version of “Walk on the Wild Side” without seeming to be racist (or, for that matter, too pro-trans Glee‘s gay male audience’s liking.)
The most widely-reported of the cases involving this victim centered on student free speech issues. Did she or did she not have the right to refuse to cheer her assailant individually? Over recent decades, even as the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are “individuals” with the same free speech rights as individual citizens, courts have increasingly sided against students’ free speech rights in favor of schools. You will look pretty much in vain for this victim’s U.S. Congressman Kevin Brady to say a word in favor of women’s rights. And, Brady voted against the
Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
Conservative-stacked courts decided against this victim in her free speech case and appeals. They stuck her with the Silsbee Independent School District’s Attorneys’ fees of $45K, or about the amount the district takes in at a home football game. Superintendent Richard Bain has yet to apologize to the victim, for ganging up with other Silsbee School employee thugs to give her an ultimatum after she refused to cheer individually the student thug who had assaulted her. He also has yet to announce that the district wouldn’t
think of having the victim or her family pay those attorney fees. Like Rakheem Bolton, Superintendent Richard Bain is not a man, but rather a worm in a man’s body. Just how lacking in compassion does somebody have to be to humiliate a teenage cheerleader in front of the community instead of speaking with her in private with an advocate present? A team of psychiatrists has done work with brain scans trying to determine
whether psychopaths are physiologically different from normal people. One thing they note about psychopaths is that they understand right from wrong but have no empathy for their victims. Forget about Silsbee or the Hardin County criminal justice system ever holding any of the people who retaliated against the victim accountable.
I had an exchange with a reporter for The Silsbee Bee in which he was vigorously defensive about how the outside world had, in his view, so unfairly criticized Silsbee. He claimed to have seen the case file in its entirety, and also claimed that anybody who saw that file would stop criticizing Silsbee. I told him to publish the whole file on The Silsbee Bee site. He stopped responding.
Maybe America owes the Taliban an apology.
