R. Kelly: Ongoing Legal Process

This is a purely statutory case & statutory laws are most often used when there is consent on all sides and therefore they are the ONLY laws which can be used. & further as it is straight age-based and no issues of consent are allowed or permissible, any arguments at all beyond "did they?" and "how old?" rilly matter in court.

No, I think he's talking about stuatory rape charges where (in the absence of parents introducing protective moral opprobrium into the situation) someone attempts to demonstrate that "it wasn't so bad" because the victim was "just that sort of girl" -- i.e., "of course it would be terrible if someone laid his hands on a pristine middle- class blonde girl, but this was just some ghetto skank who does this all the time anyway." Given your arguments above, Sterling, I can't tell whether you'd suggest that that argument should be "taken out and shot" or rather celebrated for acknowledging "the messy ugly world of emotions & expectations."

Also your contention that this is "a purely statuatory case" is a little odd insofar as everything I've read about it indicates that there's no statuatory rape charge and only a production-and- dissemination of child porn charge: in the legal sense what you (and R. Kelly) need to be arguing is not that it's okay to have sex with teenagers but that it's okay to document it as entertainment. I.e., not "are teenagers competent to consent to sex" but "are teenagers competent to consent to appearing in pornography," which I think is a slightly harder argument to make.

I mean, for the girl, I maintain that the worst thing to come out of it is that there are videotapes of her having sex floating all over chicago. A bad sexual experience doesn't necessarily ruin somebody's life, but fifteen minutes of shame damn well can.

Okay, you wanna play that snotty game, Humbert Humbert...listen up. You seem very gung ho that there should be no age of consent on the basis that people mature at different ages. Fair enough. So then why have a legal drinking age, legal smoking age, legal voting age, legal age to join the army, legal age to leave school, legal age to get married, legal age to drive...etc etc etc. I'm not saying I disagree that each case is slightly different or that R. Kelly isn't being singled out for being a star - though I WILL point out that I've seen plenty of stories on the news when I lived out west of men getting arrested for statuatory rape so that's not even entirely true - but I am saying your argument is asinine unless you want to abolish all legal age laws. Which if you do, fine, and quite frankly I don't disagree with the idea, but they are there for a reason. And like ALL legal age laws, the police aren't going to catch everyone who breaks them all the time, nor do they make much of an attempt to. But if you MAKE A VIDEO OF YOURSELF DOING IT AND LET IT OUT, of course they're going to make an example of you. That's how life works.

Calm down anyhow. The police aren't coming after YOU, your 13 year old girlfriend is imaginary anyhow.

Because he opened himself up to legal liability - seriously, that's all I reckon he was stupid about (I don't think contextually he needed to worry about traumatising me). It's undeniable that these laws are arbitrary, but I'd argue that they're also v. necessary - at the very least in terms of making "offenders" really think through what they're doing. It's easy enough to fuck up people who are adults by not thinking through consequences of what you're doing, and with kids/adolescents it's doubly easy. Yeah, of course a teenager who sleeps with another teenager is just as likely to be fucked up by the experience, but the difference is that we don't presume the "offender" in that situation necessarily has the capability to reason through their choice of path. Thus we make it one law for adults and one law for kids for the very same reason that we send kids to juvenile detention centers rather than jails and try to keep them off death row.

The question you're asking ("what if she got something out of it, too?") would, in the hands of less intelligent and more prejudiced people (of which there are lots) come down to "was she asking for it?" - which I think we'd all agree is dangerous. Arbitrary age-based laws at least have the advantage of being clear-cut. Presuming you know how old your partner is, you then automatically know whether you will be breaking a law, and you can enter into the situation without any ambiguities of the possible consequences (this is exactly why these laws *aren't* an example of Big Brother legislating emotional trauma - the laws avoid that precisely because they are so arbitrary and impersonal).

Also: there are people seriously arguing that he's being UNFAIRLY persecuted for this because he's famous?

"You must be at least 42 inches tall to ride this ride."

Abuse can and does exist. It is bad and should be punished.

People can be jerks/emotionally manipulative, etc. It is IMPOSSIBLE to regulate that.

Tracer: if you're concerned about yr. hypothetical child then the main thing is to empower them to make good decisions -- which means sex education (which barely exists in the U.S.) that grapples with how people actually live, rather than bible codes. Sex is the only area where certain otherwise rational people will accept laws which are guaranteed to attack people who hurt NOBODY, under the utterly irrational notion that morals can and should be regulated through biblical eye-for-eye vengance including against people who have done nothing wrong from any rational viewpoint.

Liberals tend to be much better on the right to privacy, arguing often that it is preferable to accept certain criminals will not be prosecuted than to violate the bill of rights. But they refuse to accept this logic when applied to privacy of personal and consentual relations.

And feminists with their boneheaded equation of emotional and physical harm have done a great disservice in this regard. Yesyes I know I am making enemies of everyone in ILX. Fuckit.

Sterling did you not just say that you don't trust the state to make decisions at all, much less messy look-at-the- individual decisions like you're suggesting here?

Also, another disturbing thing about this case: threats that the girl will be FORCED to testify even if she doesn't want to, at risk of going to jail. You want a sure way to ruin her life more? throw her in jail until she agrees to testify before the whole frikin nation. Don't you see? She just wants this to go away. Victims rights include not being FORCED to be a victim.

(a) It creates crimes of judgment, essentially: people would go into relationships with minors without a clear sense of whether they were acting criminally or not, their choices possibly subject to highly- stigmatized criminal charges if anyone even tangentially involved disagreed with them. Which leads to

(b) People could easily make bad judgments that they didn't even know were bad judgments, meaning they could potentially victimize others and plead complete ignorance or essentially a variant of criminal insanity in which they were unaware of the illegality of their actions (which were anyway only "subjectively" criminal at the time, until later adjudicated in criminal court). Which leads to

(c) It would create a situation in which any teen-adult relationship that the parents don't like has to be adjudicated, which would be an enormous logistical mess.

I don't think anyone in the legal profession would ever support such an arrangement on the criminal side: in some senses it doesn't even fit into the basic framework of criminal law in this country.

Mainly I'm posting again because I remembered something else about the biblical fucked-upness of current laws -- it is nearly impossible for a prostitute to bring rape charges & of course prostitutes are ESPECIALLY at risk for that. More proof that the current laws are based on notions of "purity" than actual human relations.

I didn't know you knew the girl personally to make a judgement on her maturity - or are you scoping her too? Anyhow, she's 17 now, as someone else noted - not then. Otherwise what the hell would the case be? And I've never been passive-aggressive towards you, I've always been openly and actively aggressive towards you, being as I find you the second most insufferable person I've ever met off of this message board. I believe passive-aggressive could be defined as you and your friend's little jealous email to me over the Chuck Eddy thing, for example.

Here's the point: it'd be far too long and complex for the courts to abolish age laws and then on a case-by-case basis judge what is right and what is wrong. Not only that, but as has been pointed out, you're the one insistant that you don't want the government making decisions like this - so why are you going to lay something as complex as maturity and intelligence in the hands of judges and legislators? That doesn't make much sense at all. And you were a little too busy being bitter towards my knowledge of your invisible girlfriend's age to notice my actual point: would you have ALL age laws abolished and how would we then decide to legislate ALL of these things? Because unless you want them ALL abolished, you seem like a bit of a pervy freak right now.

And hells yeah I'm for at the least drastically reworking legal restrictions on drinking, smoking, and voting in various different ways. I didn't address it because I couldn't seriously believe that anyone on the den of debauchery that is ILX rilly thinks that people shouldn't be able to drink till they're 21 etc.

Fuck, teenagers should be able to move out of their parents house to their own place when they're 16 or so. It would save all parties involved a great deal of frustration.

Also why do people worry so much about 'lost innocence'? Innocence in this world will get you killed. If somebody's tangled or tango'ed with a superstar predator early, they'll be more sussed later. It doesn't necessarily have to mean 'victimisation', except if they take subsequent fallout badly and end up ODing or in the nut hatch or something

is a dilettante attitude. You should meet some of the children I work with in my day job, many of whom have had the questionable good fortune to meet up with people who've given them the dubious opportunity to get "sussed" earlier. They are f***ed up now. Not crazy, mind you. Just angry & bitter & headed nowhere fast, and suffused with a sense of hopelessness. "Innocence" is of course a loaded word. Better to say that childhood shouldn't involve sex with adults, since it effectively ends childhood, and many of the developmental milestones which one encounters during the time of one's childhood are essential to later growth & happiness.

One of the men in the jury pool...who said he liked to crochet and had planned a trip to Germany to visit his boyfriend, said he wasn't too familiar with R. Kelly and thought the trial was about Robert Crumb, the 77-year-old cartoonist who signs his work as "R. Crumb."

https://www.insider.com/r-kelly-trial-lawyers-want-charges-dropped-jury-selection-begins-2021-8

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