From the Miami Herald: “after a night of drinking at Potbelly’s [the victim] wound up in a taxi with three men, then on a bed where Winston held her down and forced himself upon her even though she told him to stop. She said when one of his friends entered the room and told Winston to stop, Winston picked her up and continued the assault on the bathroom floor. She said he then dressed her and drove her on his scooter to an intersection near her dorm. She called police, submitted to a rape exam and answered questions about the tall male with a “short Afro” whom she did not know. A month later, after learning his name, she called police. Winston, through his lawyer, declined to be interviewed.”
From ESPN: “After that, the accuser said she remembers the suspect dressing her, putting her on a scooter and dropping her off at an intersection, but she had no idea where the alleged rape occurred.”
From ESPN: “Teammates Chris Casher and Ronald Darby said they were at a bar with Winston when the accuser struck up a conversation with the quarterback and got into a cab with the three men. Once at the apartment, the teammates said they peeked through Winston’s bedroom door and saw the woman having sex with the quarterback. At one point, Casher said, he “busted into the room to embarrass Jameis” and the woman yelled at him to “get out.” In a later interview with police, Casher changed this part of his story, saying he went into the room because he hoped the woman would also have sex with him, something he said had happened in the past when he and Winston brought a woman to the apartment.”
From CNN: “Though Jansen [Winston’s lawyer] had previously said Winston was cooperating with prosecutors, Meggs said Winston didn’t talk to prosecutors. Jansen countered Thursday by saying Meggs never requested a statement. Jansen even went to Meggs’ office Wednesday asking if there was anything he could do to expedite the investigation, and Meggs told him no, the defense lawyer said.” From the Miami Herald: [Meggs] said he was unaware of the Heisman voting timetable.” You know, Winston’s attorney never mentioned it to him when they met Wednesday.
From CNN: “The accuser’s family and others claim authorities allowed football interests to dictate the pace and depth of the investigation. Winston is a Heisman Trophy hopeful set to play for a conference championship this weekend, and possibly a national championship thereafter. Meggs, who attended high school in Tallahassee and has a bachelor’s and law degree from FSU, brushed off the insinuation.”
From USA Today: “Winston had been under investigation since Nov. 13 in connection with the alleged Dec. 7, 2012 incident. The case did not reach the desk of the State Attorney William Meggs until nearly 11 months after the alleged incident, and only then after media outlets made public records requests to view the case file from the Tallahassee police. . . . Meggs said Thursday. “We prosecute the cases that we have evidence on.” . . . . Winston submitted a DNA sample on Nov. 14, according to Jansen, and that sample turned up positive on Nov. 19, according to a Florida Department of Law Enforcement report. Winston’s DNA was found in the woman’s underwear, but another male’s DNA was found on the woman’s shorts.”
From SB Nation: “Jansen hinted that a civil suit could be launched against the accuser, most likely for defamation.” He can add it to OJ’s suit against the drug dealers.
From SB Nation: “In the aftermath, Meggs and the others in attendance were under fire for their happy-go-lucky attitudes. USA Today’s Christine Brennan posted a column lambasting the prosecutor barely an hour after the press conference had concluded: “There was laughter. There were jokes. There were smiles. The news conference of Florida state attorney Willie Meggs announcing that Jameis Winston was not going to be charged with sexual battery was an extremely light-hearted affair. Everyone seemed so damn happy to be talking about an alleged sexual assault.”
SB Nation should be looked at to get a feel for Florida’s attitude in this case.
The state’s attorney said he prosecutes cases he has evidence on. What does he think happened here? The victim did everything a victim should have done. He points to her sobriety as working against her. Meggs said: her blood-alcohol content (0.04) was “not very high . . . We found no evidence of any drugs of any sort in her blood system . . [the level of alcohol was not such that] someone would forget where they were or what they were doing.”
So she wasn’t intoxicated and she said she was raped by an unknown man immediately reporting it. Why would she do this if she wasn’t raped? I’d like someone to explain that. Why would a woman unaffected by alcohol say she was raped by an unknown man if she consented to the sex? Isn’t that evidence of a crime? Why would a state’s attorney an FSU alumnus say he didn’t know the timing of the Heisman vote after meeting with Winston’s attorney the day before? Why did the investigation that was going to take a long time suddenly end?
I ask again why would this woman report a rape if she was sober and it was consensual sex. Why would she want to go through this especially after the cops told her she’d be destroyed if she did as eventually happened when she was driven from the school. Why did Florida State sit on this allegation for so long? This whole thing stinks. Florida football triumphs a young woman.
Voting for Winston for the Heisman or making Florida State national champions gives the stamp of approval to the Florida justice system which failed miserably in this circumstance as it has done in others. If Winson wins the Heisman I expect the NCAA will have the Tallahassee police department and Meggs standing up beside Winston when he is handed the trophy.
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Alice Vachss see http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2199&dat=19930801&id=b2oyAAAAIBAJ&sjid=puYFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5451,220609
Some of you readers have already seem my posts and back story about attorney Andrew Vachss who made his bones in Boston running the secure treatment facility for DYS called Andros. The place were kids who commit murder , rape and mayhem and exhaust all other remedies are sent because nobody knows what to do with them. Vachss was hired by DYS Commissioner Jerome Miller when Miller was in the process of shutting down all the Reform Schools in Mass. Vachss’s first book was called THE VIOLENT LIFESTYLE JUVENILE OFFENDER see
http://www.vachss.com/vachss/credentials.html
The book was dedicated to Richie Allen a former inmate at all the Massachusetts Centers of Criminal Learning Shirley , DYS, Walpole and Concord. Richie Allen was also co-leader of the largest juvenile gang Boston ever had. The Majestics, back in the 1950’s.
Allen was built like Mike Tyson and just as bad. So right about now you are saying”what’s your point?”. Attorney Andrew Vachss got his law degree
in 1975 at the university of New England Law School. Shortly afterwards he married a social worker from Andros who would go on to law school and
later become an assistant prosecutor in New York handling sex crimes.
If you had your ear turned to the whisper stream you would have read her book detailing how prosecutors refuse to prosecute rape . You can read the review Parade Magazine did of her here.http://www.alicevachss.com/cv.html
Dear All:
I fail to see the connection to this particular blog post entitled, “Final NCAA Score: Florida 1: Women 0: Jamies Winston’s Big Win.” Are you paid a commission out of Vachss’s book sales or site referrals? One common theme with SPAM actors like MSFREEH is that they receive a COMMISSION for the number of “clicks” that web links which they post on other sites receive. It is possible that MSFREEH could be profiting off of readers here; when a reader clicks, MSFREEH gets paid, penny by penny. Post on hundreds of sites, and those pennies add up to quite a lot.
Has anyone noticed that nearly all of SPAMMER MSFREEH’s postings urge readers to buy a movie or book and is generally for commercial purposes? That motive would explain why MSFREEH posts so indiscriminately, because he/she/it has a financial interest in having readers click on links. MSFREEH is likely compensated for these postings, because the overall objective is to generate revenue for authors like Vachss here.
Plus, who has the time to sit around and post hundreds of postings on hundreds of blogs every week? Obviously, someone who does this for a living would. As Firefly has pointed out, MSFREEH attempted to exploit media coverage following the Maraton bombing to advance his/her/its own agenda with no regard for the sensitivity of the matter.
I’m merely trying to provide context about what I have concluded are disingenuous and self-aggrandizing motives here, as MSFREEH recently conceded.
Passionately,
Jay
==========================================================
For more information, see below:
http://www.spamlaws.com/how-ppc-fraud-works.html
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If you use pay per click advertising make sure you monitor your campaign closely for any unusual activity. If you can prove the pay per click fraud has been committed you can receive a refund for the added clicks from your pay per click search engine provider.
Ms
Prosecutors don’t refuse to prosecute rape. The Florida prosecutor did for suspect reasons. Jay suggests you are a paid troll or something like that. Try to stay with the subject and just site addresses without the articles.
Matt,
I have a question for you. I 2006 my friend and co worker was raped by some men who invited her out for drinks. I was invited out with her that night but I declined because I wanted to stay in with my daughter.
According to her and her family that evening they drugged her and she was raped. When I last spoke with her she told me who did it and they were pursuing charges. I know the people behind it and they are very wealthy and have many politically connected Govt friends….good friends.
It seems to me nothing ever came of it and the wealthy got off for some reason but I don’t know the technicalities of it. I know these guys are still up to the same tricks abusing women.
My question is if this woman chose not to press charges would the prosecutors still go ahead with it OR could these wealthy guys possibly settled out of court with her? I don’t know if that’s allowed in cases such as this?
I know the details of what transpired that evening and I can’t see them letting these guys go but who knows in this State? Money seems to talk .
By the way, this happened in Braintree and the perps (brothers) pretty much own the city. I spoke with her 4 years later but I felt uncomfortable asking her the outcome . I’m told nothing happened to the ‘boys’ and they still ARE walking the streets …. I won’t say anymore about the ‘boys’..
Wow…What a scary tale. Your poor friend. 🙁
Question:
In my time we had a special unit set up to handle women who said they were raped. It was staffed by women prosecutors (two are now distinguished judges) who insured the cases were investigated and prosecuted. We also had police officers in most departments who were specially assigned to help victims of rape.
Unlike in domestic violence cases where evidence of spontaneous utterances and physical signs of abuse are present, often this is not the case in rape cases. Therefore you need the victim to be willing to take the case all the way. If she is not, and many women do not want to be “raped a second time” as the experience of testifying has been called, then the prosecutor will not force her to do it especially since the case cannot be won.
Is it possible the victim was bought off, that could happen outside of the process. At one time there was a procedure known as accord and saitisfaction where it was common for those with money to buy their way out of criminal charges but that is not used any more but it could happen outside the judicial setting in a secret deal between the parties. Money will always talk.
ABSOLUTELY! Oh, they could definitely pay her off and she does now own her own business! That’s exactly what I figured happened and that’s too bad. Hopefully some day these thugs will be off the street. Sad
Matt- All I could find as far as the 10+ months of stalling was that they said she did not want to press charges. I have found zero regarding her wanting to halt or stop the progress of the charge. It is those cops/investigators that need to answer why this happened. Cash was also attempting to tape the incident. This is unreal, DNA was present on underwear, also she went through all the proper channels. Now the evil Seminoles are releasing her picture and stories about her , this is awful. She said a cop told her “she will be raked over the coals for this if she went further with it, because this is a football town”.
Doubting:
The ten month delay was to shoppe the woman would go away. Meanwhile the defense counsel was made aware of the charges just in case. I can’t quite figure out how Winston knew to get counsel if he was never interviewed. How did he know the woman made the charges. There’s a foul stench to the matter. Sounds like FSU was involved from the beginning keeping a lid on it. I wonder if it hired the attorney?
The woman was out of luck from the git go. The cops ignored her and the case never would have seen the light of day had the Miami not heard about it. You must know by now having been with this blog for a bit that the cops do what they want.
Matt- I know but it seems to happen way to frequently. I just figured since that she went right away and got his DNA without even knowing who he was, which I have to doubt because he was a blue chip recruited athlete, played baseball and. football. He is going to win his Heisman. I thought it might be a conflict of interest for a graduate FSU to be the one deciding the validity and legitimacy of the evidence in this case? I may be very well wrong, but it looks bad. I would advise anyone interested to watch the press conference in full, seems like it is a joke with all the laughing going on. Very sad.
Doubting:
He was a big deal at FSU but there is little to show she knew that until the cops told her who she had identified and suggested she back off and then kept silent about her complaint.
I think it would have been better for the FSU state’s attorney to step away from it but worse than that is his suggesting he knew nothing about the Heisman voting; you are right, the press conference is way out of line.
Matt- I believe if you read the report..i think her friend actually called her parents and told them. The friend even apologizes on the text message for disobeying her wishes. I was not aware that her blood was not tested for 40 days. clear cut scam by the cops. That NFL Miami investigation is still not over about jonathan martin bullying saga, This DA gets this Winston alleged rape with his DNA and no interview from him, sewn up in 3 weeks? eeeesh.
Doubting:
I did not see the report but it would have some bearing on why she may have said she was raped. I didn’t see the report so if you could get me the site I’d appreciate it. If her parents knew they you could argue that she gave consent to the sex but when her parents found out to pacify them she said she was raped. What goes against that is if she wasn’t raped then she could have said she was, reported it and then never identified who did it. She had a perfect out to walk away from it. But she didn’t. She pressed it and then when she learned the identity of Winston she identified him and the DNA taken months later proved her correct. I have little doubt given all the circustances there was no consent.
Rape and people’s responses to it are unsettling.
That’s it.
This whole situation is a disgrace. Football before justice. Meggs is an alumni of fsu, as well as a booster! This is the best season fsu has had in a decade. To think none of this played a role is a joke. The womens blood work wasn’t tested for 40 days if there was ghb, it would have dissipated. Winston’s witnesses are teamates, who’s statements are laughable. The wording is clear it has the lawyers hands all over it, they’re nearly identical, except for names being changed. The statements should mean nothing, football is everything to these boys, they would most definitely lie to keep their dreams alive. Another thing is the bac, it’s mentioned by her friends she was not much of a drinker, so it’s quite possible what’s drunk for one isn’t for another. The fact that fsu students found the young womans name and pictures and put that info out there online is disgusting. This whole thing should disgust fsu fans…..but again football games come first.
some of you might already know I have been shooting a documentary of Maine artist Robert Shetterly for the past 6 years.
Here is his latest portrait of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. Each of the 180 portraits he has painted has a quotation from the person painted scratched onto the canvas.
He has also written an essay which accompanies this portrait.
see https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/11/29
see link for other portraits
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org
Published on Friday, November 29, 2013 by Common Dreams
Meditations On Law and Denial While Painting Sibel Edmonds
by Robert Shetterly
Editor’s note: The artist’s essay that follows accompanies the ‘online unveiling’—exclusive to Common Dreams—of Shetterly’s latest painting in his “Americans Who Tell the Truth” portrait series which present citizens throughout U.S. history who have courageously engaged in the social, environmental, or economic issues of their time. This portrait of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds* follows one of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden unveiled on these pages in July.Portrait of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds. (Painted by Robert Shetterly / ‘Americans Who Tell The Truth’ project)
“Senator Humphrey, I been praying about you, and I been thinking about you, and you’re a good man. The only trouble is, you’re afraid to do what you know is right.”
Those words were spoken by Fannie Lou Hamer in Atlantic City in 1964. Hubert Humphrey, the soon-to-be running mate of Lyndon Johnson, had informed Ms. Hamer that her integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation would not be seated at the Democratic Convention, nor would they replace the all-white delegation sent to the convention by the Mississippi Democratic Party.
The reason I quote them here is that the problem she identifies—a good man afraid to do what he knows is right— haunts our history. It haunts it because moral cowardice, euphemistically called political expediency, leads to injustice, denial and corruption.
When I was painting the portrait of the FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, those words came back to me. Just three days after the 9/11 attacks, Edmonds received a call from the FBI. She had applied to the agency for an internship in 1997 and been given a battery of tests that probed her language abilities in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani. The FBI, however, had never followed up with her. Now, scrambling to bolster their translation capabilities in the wake of the terrorist attack, the agency reached out to Edmonds. After a moment’s consideration, Edmonds, who was then a full-time student working on degrees in criminal justice and psychology, agreed to come on part-time as a translator for the FBI, feeling compelled to answer this “call to duty.”
What the FBI didn’t realize was that Sibel was not simply a translator. They had hired a fierce convert to US ideals. In her 2012 book, Classified Woman, Edmonds describes inheriting her “love for freedom of speech and of the press, my dedication to the protection of due process, and my endless quest for government held accountable” from her Iranian Azerbaijani father. Her father, a surgeon and hospital administrator, had been subjected to interrogation and torture in Iran when he advocated for worker’s rights in the hospital where he was employed.
As a teenager in Turkey, Edmonds wrote an essay for school in which she criticized Turkey’s censorship laws. Her scared and angry teacher asked her to withdraw the essay, fearing that his student would be jailed and tortured. Edmonds’ father backed his daughter’s decision not to submit a different essay. Within months in 1988, Edmonds left for the United States and experienced “love at first sight.” It was a place, she writes, where she could live “with the kind of freedom and rights that existed only in books and in my fantasies.”
Edmonds began work at the FBI on September 20, 2001. She was fired without cause in March of 2002. In her six month stint at the agency, Edmonds witnessed blatant incompetence, personal agendas that compromised national security, and corruption at top levels of the American government. Despite mounting threats from superiors, Edmonds refused to turn a blind eye or walk quietly away from the agency, believing it was her responsibility to expose the wrongdoing she saw. Like most whistleblowers, she assumed that when FBI really understood what she was discovering, they would stop it. She reported to what she thought were a few good men, each of them afraid to do what was right. Their choice was to silence her.
As a translator, she was discovering intricate webs of corruption involving money laundering, illegal weapon and drug sales, and illicit trading in military and nuclear technology. The spinners of the webs were (are) fronted as Turkish construction companies operating in the US. In the web, and making huge profits from the deals, were very high ranking US officials in the Congress, State Department and Pentagon. Every time Edmonds was rebuffed she tried harder to get the FBI to pay attention. Once she was fired, she went to court to sue to make her knowledge public and the US courts responded by classifying all of her information as Top Secret. She had been muzzled.
We applaud whistleblowers for their courage to tell truth to power. However, that statement is at the best misleading, at the worst, false. Power is not listening, and it is making sure that others can’t hear. Whistleblowers tell truth about power. And when that truth is about a corruption as deep and far-reaching as what Sibel Edmonds had uncovered, many people don’t even want to know.
When she was given the 2006 PEN Newman First Amendment Award. Edmonds said in her acceptance speech, “… our freedom is under assault—not from terrorists—for they only attack us, not our freedom, and they can never prevail. No, the attacks on our freedom are from within, from our very own government: and unless we recognize these attacks … and stand up, and speak out—no, shout out—against those in government who are attempting to silence the brave few who are warning us, then we are doomed to wake up one sad morning and wonder when and where our freedom died.”
It seems that the information that Sibel Edmonds is sounding the alarm about, systemic corruption in all our branches of government, is information that many people, even good people, don’t want to hear. Her message is similar to what William Pepper argued in a Memphis court in 1999, that the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. was carried out by a conspiracy of government and mafia forces; similar to what James Douglass asserts about CIA involvement in the assassination of JFK in his book JFK and the Unspeakable.
Many of us would prefer to ignore this kind of deep criminality on the part of our own government. Why? Is it too dangerous to confront? Irrelevant to the struggles of our everyday lives? Is what this acknowledgement would require of us as citizens too frightening?
We celebrate the lives of people like Dr. King, mourn and grieve in official ceremonies promoted by the government, but refuse to acknowledge that the government itself was involved in the crime of his death even when the evidence is readily available. In a sense then, all of us become accessories after the fact to the crime.
Unfortunately, we all inherit our legacy of denial. Our economic, political, historical and moral lives are too often shaped by failures of accountability. When Obama refused to prosecute the Bush administration for any of its crimes in order to look forward instead of looking back, he enabled this deep criminal denial. He also ensured that we would never be able to look forward because the past would be blocking our view. And in doing so, he also ensures that a republic based on the rule of law becomes little more than propaganda.
We are taught that our separation of powers makes justice inevitable. We are not taught that corrupt collaboration of those powers makes injustice unchallengeable, that “law” is being used to commit crime.
For Sibel Edmonds that situation is untenable. Her courage and tenacity in trying to expose these crimes is, even by whistleblower standards, remarkable. I urge everyone to read her book Classified Woman to find out what we don’t want to know. She’s not afraid to do what she knows is right.
Hi Matt,
I really hope you address MSFREEH the SPAMMER, as it has been nice that he/she/it has been away for the past week, and now it seems that he/she/it is breaking through and posting indiscriminately once again. I am sorry that your blog is once again becoming a victim of this vicious, self-aggrandizing spam campaign. Hopefully you shall deal out justice swiftly for those reasons which we have all discussed at length previously.
Urgently,
Jay
Jay:
I’m being alert to his posts and am aware thanks to you that he is posting on multiple sites. Some of them I do find interesting and let them pass as his latest post. If I think he is abusing the site I will act accordingly.
matt:
I think Jay may have a valid point.
SEE LINK FOR FULL STORY
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/
MS:
I think you are right.
These articles, very thinly veiled as comments, have nothing to do with the blog post entitled, “Final NCAA Score: Florida 1: Women 0: Jamies Winston’s Big Win.” It is very heartening that you concede the point is valid; self-acceptance is the first step towards recovery.
Does she know why Jamis Winston allegedly got away with rape?
Doubting:
I’m sure a by now she and every other co-ed at FSU knows that you don’t accuse football stars of wrongdoing. FSU values it’s football over its women.
What an absolute disgrace. Is it any wonder we don’t see more Mr. PAUL KERSEY “types” emerge to dispense justice ?
Gus:
I suppose the right outcome would be for a woman raped to go get a gun and go back and shoot the rapist. Imagine if a sports star raped such a woman and she took her revenge. How long do you think it’d take for the state’s attorney to have her locked up forever?
Where is that bogus Florida AG ? Is she part of the Republicans “war on women”? Why not a grand jury? She stepped into Zimmerman why not this? This doesn’t pass the smell test. If he gets the Heisman with these issues unresolved the award should be abolished. Is Meggs a friend of Nifong?
N:
As I said, anyone voting him for the Heisman is validating this obvious travesty of justice. I see the case as a pretty strong case. The stench around it is unbelievable but few seem to call it to account. Even assuming that hard to believe story of Winston is true: wait a minute, we don’t even know what his story is. He was never interviewed by the cops or the state’s attorney. In effect, an uncontradicted story of the woman is not believed – that’s probably the strangest part of the whole deal.
Zimmerman case was a nothing case until it was Alsharptonized. Now we’re learning the color of the underwear his ex-wife wears. American media is absurd. Meggs joking about this is a disgrace; and his statement that he didn’t know when the Heisman voting was going to happen makes his decision totally suspect.