Ruining Reputations vs. Seeking Justice

     I found this article in my Facebook news feed, and I thought it was particularly interesting because it represents a different point of view from those that we discussed extensively in class. This article is about the story of Jordan Johnson, a star quarterback for the University of Montana. He was an NFL hopeful, and almost led his team to win the national title, but suddenly he was accused of rape. A female student filed a restraining order against Jordan six weeks after he reportedly raped her. Jordan was then criminally charged with rape and expelled from school, but a month after he went on trial he was found not guilty. Jordan then sued the university and it was just announced that he would receive $245,000.

     The article then explains that this is just one case in a growing trend of men claiming that they were innocent and wrongfully caught up in universities that are trying to crack down on sexual assaults. I thought this was an interesting deviation from discussions that we had in class, because in class we often talked about how the victims of rape are not taken seriously, blamed, or shamed. But here, the author brings up the other side of the story about consequences for the perpetrator. The article represented the side of the perpetrators whose reputation and lives were also damaged by the negative media coverage they received, especially if they claimed to be innocent. After class discussions, I thought it was more important to safeguard the victims even if it means embarrassing the perpetrator, but this article reminded me that not all accusations are true. We should be careful about how we frame both the victims and perpetrators. In Jordan’s case, he told the school that the sex was consensual, so he was guilty of rape.

     One interesting thing I learned is that many cases are overturned or perpetrators are reinstated in school based on minor legal mishaps such as an unfair trial. Although there were hints of the author suggesting that it was trivial to let prosecutors get away on these legal mistakes, I felt as though the author was flip-flopping rather than decisively taking a stance. In some cases he sympathized with perpetrators who claimed to be innocent and whose lives were ruined, but in other cases he seemed to disapprove of the justice system for proving guilt or innocence based on “legal skirmishes”. Overall, I think this was a good article because it could have been much more heavily biased, but I feel as though there was a lack of closure at the end of it.

The article can be found here: Washington Post article