As so often, the power side won, but society was diminished in that victory, and women were no safer: five were raped and bloodied by Matias Reyes after the jogger; one of them, Lourdes Gonzalez, was murdered, while her children listened behind a locked door. Reason—pursuing Reyes from the unnamed woman’s April 17 lead—might have saved them; rage could not. Lancaster describes this poisoned solidarity as a feature in America’s long-running moral panic over sex as a source of unparalleled danger from monsters among us—panic that sometimes explodes in the public square but by now has been normalized in the social conscience, habitual, ready to burst out in tweetstorms that may gather like hurricanes or disperse like a passing rain, but either way hit their mark. The inciting events vary. The instigators may be on the political right, but often they are liberals or professed progressives. The demon may be guilty or not; the crime, grievous, nonexistent or anywhere on a scale of harm. Rage unites them. Bombast is the conventional linguistic mood. Falling in line is the objective. And instead of a positive spirit of organic social solidarity to take concerted action for the common good, there is the perverse thrill of simultaneously quaking together in fear and sticking it to the devil.
So comes the third story. On July 3, 2019, a New York Times front-page headline read, “He Is Accused of Rape but Has ‘a Good Family’.” The report that follows does not explore the cluttered pathways of wrongdoing and redress. It, too, is a story of tropes. She is sixteen, “visibly intoxicated, her speech slurred.” He is sixteen, also drunk, how badly we aren’t told. They are at an “alcohol-fueled pajama party.” They are in New Jersey. “The boy filmed himself penetrating her from behind, her torso exposed, her head hanging down, prosecutors said.” It is important that we are voyeurs from the start. She is sixteen and drunk. He is sixteen and drunk. He later shares the video by text, according to investigators, with the message “When your first time having sex was rape.” Prosecutors move to try the boy as an adult. The judge in family court says, No, this is a juvenile case. He says a lot of other things. He says what happened wasn’t rape. His definition requires strangers with weapons in a dark alley. Such a case, he suggests, would fit the profile for adult prosecution. This does not: the youngsters staggered to a dark place holding hands; the boy comes from a good family, is an Eagle Scout, at a terrific school, with terrific grades. “He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for a good college.” Is the girl aware that prosecuting him as an adult would destroy the boy’s life? All of this happened in 2017 and 2018. The story is news because an appeals court rebuked the judge. It is front-page news, two weeks after the fact, because the Times wished to celebrate the rebuke. “A judge’s rationale for leniency is rejected,” a subtitle crowed. It is easy, with the disturbing details firmly in mind, to overlook what was being celebrated: the go-ahead to prosecute a sixteen-year-old as an adult.
The judge was arguably not the best equipped to decide this case, but we cannot know what would have happened if the prosecutor had entered family court in 2017 seeking swift accountability, correction and restitution. GMC, as the boy is called in court papers, was sixteen and drunk, but also, if the facts set out so far be true, or even mostly true, sixteen and mean, sixteen and selfish, sixteen and stupid, sixteen and dishonest, sixteen and in need of a lesson. Mary, as the girl is called, told her mother the next day that she worried that “sexual things had happened at the party,” according to the appellate court summary of the case. Also according to court papers, before the video was made several boys sprayed Febreze on her butt and slapped it. Later, as Mary vomited on the floor, GMC had already left the room. The next day he texted friends, “I fucked her, not raped her. Calm down. If you have the video, get rid of it.” When Mary asked him whether he’d made a video, he denied it. When she discovered he had lied, she asked him to stop sharing the video and destroy it, and he did not. Her mother called the police. An officer told GMC and his friends to delete the video, which they did.
Two years after that alcohol-fueled desert of the senses, there had been no lesson that might have mattered to a high-schooler. No consequences to make GMC take responsibility. No restorative justice in response to actions that, legal determinations aside, were wrong. No attention to the concerns of Mary. For her, the case goes on with only vituperative action, because the state was not interested in harm reduction or amends or correction in the realm of sixteen-year-olds. It was not interested in ensuring that GMC grow mindful of the ways that boys are acculturated to carelessness and violence, that he understand the harmful, capturing effect of technology. It said GMC’s behavior was beyond his years, adult behavior, really, “sophisticated and predatory.” The judge called that nonsense. Separate from everything else he had to say, this was the determinative rationale for rejecting the motion to treat the boy as an adult. The law in New Jersey is silent on good grades and test scores and Eagle Scoutery, but it does stipulate that a charged action must be sophisticated and predatory to meet the criteria for waiving a juvenile case out of family court. What the Times called leniency was affirmation of adjudication in the juvenile system. That is what the newspaper has advocated as appropriate treatment in general—and for years, ever since mass incarceration became a strain on the liberal conscience that once enabled it—for accused teenagers and children, who are presumed immature and impulsive, more so when addled by drugs or drink. In the particular case, though, the nightmare image of the predator, the animal, is irresistible. The appellate court said the prosecutor’s assessment was valid, and the judge should have deferred. The crowd jerked in unison, Get him! If knowing of a dark place qualifies as predatory, and drunkenly making a cell phone video of drunken penetration of an impaired individual and texting an admission of rape fits any definition of sophistication; if language, that is, can be so unmoored from reason, we’re all in trouble—or dishonest.
Both, actually. The Times story quickly metastasized. On Twitter a woman identified GMC by his full name as a student at Syracuse University. SU’s Daily Orange did a lengthy report on July 7, by which time the student had either withdrawn or been expelled. Tweets flew fast and giddy. His name, his face, a photograph of his family home, the family address, a GIF from the TV series Empire with André repeating, “I said I’m gonna kill him” and other cries from the crowd:
Know his name, know his face
Ruin his life let the world see this don’t employ him
Say his name! Say his name!
I don’t feel save [sic] returning to a school that has a KNOWN sexual predator
Damn, he even looks like a rapist too
He should go to prison for the rest of his life
Jail time
Let’s hope the inmates take video of his first time as well
It’s so scary to think … like how many other trash people are among me/us and we don’t know?
Boy