This time, a college athletic director got it right. If you agree with my assessment as you read this, perhaps you could drop a line to Pete Garcia, Director of Athletics at Florida International University. Mr. Garcia’s email address is [email protected].
Mr. Garcia should be commended for doing the right thing, the tough thing, in the face of catcalls that he should do the politically correct thing instead. Mr. Garcia allowed FIU shortstop Garrett Wittels to play when his team’s season began Friday night, despite a rape charge hanging over Garrett’s head stemming from an alleged incident in the Bahamas late last year. Going into Friday’s game, Garrett had a 56-game hitting streak, two shy of Robin Ventura’s NCAA Division I record. Alas, on Friday, Garrett went hitless.
It took guts for Mr. Garcia to say the following: “We believe you are innocent until proven guilty. Therefore, Garrett will be playing.” http://www.statesman.com/sports/ncaa-hitting-star-to-play-despite-rape-charge-1260171.html He also explained his reasons: “Let me tell a little story. Back in 1967 a couple with two kids decided to leave a country and leave everything behind. One of the reasons was because in that country, you’re guilty until proven innocent. Here, you’re innocent until proven guilty.” Garcia was one of those two kids. His parents brought him to America in 1967 from Communist Cuba.
For those with short memories, in contrast to Mr. Garcia’s decision, in the aftermath of the Duke Lacrosse false rape claim, before the facts were adjudicated, Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University, suspended the remainder of the lacrosse season. By any measure, that decision was an atrocity.
The Rape Claim
In case you aren’t familiar with the case, Garrett and several friends were arrested on December 20, 2010 in the Bahamas and charged with the alleged rape of two 17-year-old American girls, who, of course, have not been named in the news accounts, at the Atlantis Resort and Casino. The girls told the young men they were students from the University of Arkansas. The girls’ families were also staying at the resort at the time of the alleged crime.
Surveillance video from the resort shows that the girls were drinking at the resort’s Dragon’s Ultra Lounge (the drinking age in the Bahamas is 18, and the girls were both 17), and occasionally kissing each other when Wittels and his friends approached the bar area. A source said the video shows the girls gesturing for the young men to join them, and that Wittels and two friends obliged.
The video showed that the two young women followed the young men to a private party, where the incident allegedly happened. Garrett and two friends, both 21, were charged with rape. The three young men admit to having sex with the women, but insist it was consensual. The age of consent in the Bahamas is 16, so age is not an issue in the charges.
At issue is that the girls claim they don’t remember what happened. The charges stem from the allegation that the girls were so impaired that they were unable to consent to the sex. That, of course, is a curious conclusion in light of the fact that, we are told, a video shows that the girls were perfectly capable of gesturing for the young men to join them, and later were perfectly capable of following the young men to a room where they had sex, and still later were able to make it back to their own hotel room after sex.
The father of one of the girls called police after his daughter and her companion returned to their hotel room, a source said.
It is well to note that no one – including that father – prevented the underage girls from drinking illegally. It is also well to note that if the bartender did not believe that the girls had imbibed to excess when he or she was serving them, it is questionable whether Garrett and his friends should have reasonably suspected that the girls were too drunk to engage in a sexual romp.
Police in the Bahamas conducted blood tests to see if the young women had been slipped a date-rape drug. The tests revealed no sign of drugs. Garrett was released on a bond of $10,000 after a court hearing.
Wayne Munroe, a Bahamian attorney who is representing the young men, said it is “easy” to get arrested for rape in the Bahamas. “If somebody is charged with rape, the general inclination is to think there must be something to it,” Munroe said. According to Munroe, many rape charges in the Bahamas should not be filed in the first place. Munroe said this arrest-first, ask-questions-later policy evolved from a complaint by a former U.S. ambassador who alleged the Bahamian police did not take rape cases seriously.
If that is an accurate depiction of law enforcement in the Bahamas, it is, of course, a repulsive contortion of anything remotely resembling justice. Sadly, it is a policy too often followed in too many jurisdictions in the United States. A prominent example is found in the Hofstra false rape case. It is much easier simply to arrest any male accused, without regard for his possible innocence, rather than sort out the facts first and assume the remote risk that the accused will “rape again,” and thus embarrass the law enforcement official who “delayed” making an arrest.
Garrett’s preliminary hearing is April 18.
Catcalls: Garrett Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Play
The reason allowing Garrett to play was the right decision is because no man or boy should be punished for what is nothing more than a “he said/she said” rape claim. Not allowing Garrett to play would have been a form of punishment for something he only “might” have done. FIU is to be commended for not depriving a young man a chance to play a sport at which he excels based solely on the unsubstantiated accusations of seventeen-year-old girls.
Legion are the cases where women have destroyed the lives of innocent males just by uttering the “r” word, without anything more. While rape liars need no reason to falsely accuse a hapless man or boy of rape (one woman sent a man to prison for five years by falsely crying rape because, she admitted, she was bored; in another case, an 18-year-year-old boy was hauled out of class, arrested, and jailed for a month on a random false rape claim by a girl he had never even met), the fact scenario presented in this case is one where false rape claims are all too common: a girl having sex with more than one guy. The reason this scenario often prompts a false rape claim is obvious: how on earth can she possibly explain that to a boyfriend, a parent, or a friend? How will she hold her head up on campus? Most sane young women will deeply regret that encounter after-the-fact and will worry that if word got out, it would destroy what’s left of her reputation. The fear of “slut shaming,” as the feminists call it, seems to spawn off-the-charts regret, and that is a false rape claim waiting-to-happen. In other cases, the girl would never be able to explain such a tryst to her parents, so she cries rape. We often warn young men that they should never, ever put themselves in this awful situation, for their own sakes.
Despite every indication that rushing to judgment in this case is as wrong as can be, Miami Herald columnist Linda Robertson said Garrett should have been suspended. In one of the most outrageous statements we’ve read in a long time, Robertson wrote this: “No one except the people in a Paradise Island hotel room knows what happened inside it Dec. 20. But something happened.” http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/17/v-fullstory/2070867/fiu-should-have-suspended-garrett.html#ixzz1ESrxWWlf. That “something,” Ms. Robertson, more likely than not, is that two teenage girls have wrongly accused innocent young men of a vile crime in order to save their sweet asses from their parents’ wrath. We don’t know that for sure, but I am certain I follow these kinds of cases more closely than Ms. Robertson, and that is my educated surmise.
The FIU student newspaper agreed with Robertson’s inanity and said that allowing Wittels to play would make the school’s Athletics department “look bad on a national scale.” http://fiusm.com/2011/01/24/the-beacon-editorial-suspension-of-wittels-maintains-vital-precedent/.
Because heaven knows, the school’s image on a national scale is more important than doing the right thing. The more appropriate course, apparently, is to allow any random seventeen-year-old girl, whose identity and character are unknown to us, to deprive any male of his chance to participate in collegiate sports just by crying “rape.”
How that is fair to the young man, his team, or the school is anyone’s guess, but, then again, fairness has no place in the public discourse when it comes to the loopy, gender-politicized world of rape accusations.
Garrett isn’t letting it bother him. “Every single night I put my head on my pillow, I know what went on that night, and I have no trouble sleeping at all,” he said. “I’m just worried about strikes and balls, and wins and losses right now. I can’t worry about the haters.”
