Video – Attorney Darryl Stallworth Explains The Stark Differences Between Sexual Assault And Rape In Regards To Title IX Violations

Ray Hrdlicka – Host – Attorneys.Media

Also on your website, you highlight sexual abuse and rape as one of the fields of law that you practice, of course, and there’s a big difference between the two.  Rape is a heinous crime, and it’s fairly understood, well understood by the general public.  Sexual assault, or sexual abuse, sexual assault, excuse me, is a little more nuanced, and in my experience with the court, systems, when we watch it, it’s caters to more of a he said, she said thing.

Now does that he said, she said, also apply in this Title IX situation?  Just like you described…. it was three years before the football player at San Jose State was found innocent.  But in that three-year period, I’m sure it was hell to go through.

Darryl Stallworth – Criminal Defense Attorney – Alameda County, CA

Yeah, let me see it back and clear up some of what you just talked about. So, rape is the unlawful penetration of a person’s penis into someone’s vagina.  That’s the classic.  And the history has told us, and we’ve watched in movies, that this is forcible, this is by threat.  This is an aggressive crime.

I use the word sexual assault, because sexual assault covers a broader spectrum.  It is the unlawful touching of someone’s personal, private area, the vaginal area, the behind.  That’s sexual assault.  It could also be foreign penetration, which is another strange word, but it’s fingering, doing things with any type of object.  It’s also intruding, non- consensually,  into the anus.

So sexual assault covers a wider range.  I actually write in my book to word “sex” crimes, because that covers everything from awful touching on the outside of the clothing.

But rape is essentially what most people recognize when they hear that word rape.  However, the layers of rape are also different now, because most of what I’ve been seeing over the last number of years isn’t the guy jumping out of the bushes and aggressively assaulting you and forcing you to have sex. 

It’s the party on campus, where there’s a lot of drinking, and two people are intoxicated.  And what becomes of the investigation, essentially, is the woman so intoxicated that the man should have known that she was incapable of getting consent, even though she acted as if she was, and even though she never said that she didn’t want to?

But the level of being able to recognize that someone was incapacitated… it’s also rape, but it’s not the traditional picture that you have in your mind when you think about it.