Renada Williams got mad at her boyfriend. So she had him beaten, raped and tortured.
According to Philadelphia police, Williams, who was angry at her 29 year old lover for undetermined reasons, orchestrated a plan of revenge so sadistic and unconscionable that readers must be warned in advance that the details are graphic and disturbing.
Williams lured the man into her bedroom with the promise of sex. At some point, she excused herself from the room and returned with two assailants, including one juvenile, whom she had recruited to express her considerable displeasure. She enlisted the men’s help by alleging that the victim had previously raped her.
The two attacked the innocent man in William’s presence, pummeling him with fists, even as he denied having committed rape.
Then the beating worsened. The assailants dragged the man from the bed and tied him to a sofa where they went after him with a 4 by 4 wood plank, extension cords and a mop. Police reported that the wood plank inflicted multiple lacerations. The perpetrators doused the open wounds in Clorox bleach and ammonia.
Next, they sodomized him repeatedly with a mop handle, which they lubricated with Pine-Sol cleaner.
The attack lasted 24 hours, and would likely have continued to a deadly end had Williams’s roommate not arrived and managed to free the victim, despite attempts by the trio to prevent her from dialing 9-1-1 and notifying authorities.
The reaction from police to the case was predictable. “This type of crime shocks your consciousness,” said Detective Captain Jack McGinnis.
There was no indication if he was referring to the brutality of the two men, or the vile scheming of the woman involved. Perhaps it was both.
It hardly matters.
Because, our repugnance aside, we might at some point need to wonder what difference there is between Renada Williams and Crystal Gail Mangum, the infamous liar and false accuser of the Duke Rape case, other than they each sought a different form of power to enforce their will.
And I say we “might” wonder, because it seems apparent that we should actually be asking a question that is really more to the point.
What is the difference between the assailants in this case and the criminal justice system itself?
As it applies to the crime of rape, the answer is a simple as it is disturbing; negligible.
With all the indignation and repulsion we feel for the almost unspeakable things happened to this man, we learn absolutely nothing from it if we don’t recognize that what happened here is not so different than what we sanction and justify routinely in the name of justice.
When it comes to rape, even the substantial number of them that are of the concocted variety, we pay officials to react with the same destructive mindlessness as those two disgusting automatons acting on behalf of Williams. Indeed, we cheer them on as surely as she must have done while they violated and abused an innocent man.
So, perhaps we should not be so outraged when private citizens emulate the actions of people that we vote for and admiringly call the guardians of the public peace. Thugs with mop handles are thugs with mop handles, even if we dress them in black robes, or call them Mr. Prosecutor.
You see, those two culprits weren’t torturing a human being. No, no, no. They were delivering some by-god-law-and-order on behalf of us decent folk. The enforcers acting at William’s behest were doing so with no less regard for presumed innocence than Mike Nifong or a slew of other state functionaries strewn across the Kafkaesque landscape of the American legal system.
It’s the stuff of Mel Gibson movies; Charles Bronson in slightly older school terms; not justice, but naked vengeance. And as a culture, we eat it up like beggars at a free buffet.
It is a biologically driven bloodlust to protect women by playing hero for them. Any of them. At times we play that role so well that we look at a lying, skanky, and drug addled hooker- and imagine that she is actually a damsel in distress. Then we can go after a bunch of college kids, who have never committed a crime in their lives, and seek to do everything we can to destroy them.
We created rape shield laws so that even when the accuser is a lying, skanky, and drug addled hooker, it can’t be taken into account by jurors in determining her credibility. School administrations, like that at Duke University, will host rallies, light torches and instigate other fomentations. Media outlets across the land saturate us with the story and run features on the plight of women to drive in some emotional punch.
And unless the accused is able to prove quadriplegia or clinical death at the time of the alleged attack (and often when he can), most of us will sit and wait for the orgasmic moment that the hammer comes down on his head.
When those falsely accused are convicted, as many of them have been, they are sent to prisons where they are regarded as the lowest of the low, and are often subjected to the very tortures for which they were wrongfully convicted- over a period of years.
Yet we are outraged about this being done summarily, and on the street, rather than through the system?
Please.
The culprits in this case are nothing more than vigilantes that cut into the action of a system that routinely does the same under a thin facade of legal decorum that is every bit as manufactured as Williams’ phony story.
Rape vigilantism and rape justice have simply become two different railroads, the latter only distinguished from the former by the pomp of placebo credibility, and the fact that vigilantes actually believe they are going after guilty people.
One might imagine that the scores of innocent men now imprisoned are not so comforted by all of this. That comfort is left to be enjoyed by the masses who patronize, buckets of popcorn in hand, the criminal justice systems theatre of lies.
And in the end, the poor unfortunate in this case may well have been lucky. His accuser could have sought, and would have received, help from the state, had she chosen them to act out her rage rather than a couple of hoodlums. The way things stand now, he has escaped with his life and his freedom, and he will get one benefit that seldom falls on those falsely accused.
There will be some who will believe his innocence and see him for the victim he actually is.
