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CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Megan Williams, who was supposed to take back her story that seven Logan County residents beat, raped and tortured her, didn't speak at a press conference at her lawyer's office on Wednesday. Instead, lawyer Byron L. Potts recanted her claims for her. He said Williams told him that the only injuries that weren't self-inflicted were the bruises on her face. "She is recanting the entire incident. She says it did not happen, and she's scared,'' Potts said. He urged prosecutors to re-examine the cases against the seven people convicted in the attack. Authorities don't believe Williams' new...

A young woman cried rape after 'fulfilling a fantasy' of having sex with two strangers, a court heard yesterday. Chloe Dolton, 22, was 'bored' with her life and willingly engaged in the threesome after an argument with her boyfriend, it was alleged...

RIYADH (Reuters) - A Saudi court of cassation upheld a ruling to behead and crucify a 22-year-old man convicted of raping five children and leaving one of them to die in the desert, newspapers reported on Tuesday. International rights groups have accused the kingdom, the birthplace of Islam, of applying draconian justice, beheading murderers, rapists and drug traffickers in public.

<p>None of the bodies has been identified; search of house to continue Saturday (CNN) -- A search has been launched for a 50-year-old convicted rapist and suspect in the killings of six people whose bodies were found in and around a house in Cleveland, Ohio, police said Friday.</p>

RICHMOND, CALIF. -- Security was unusually tight Thursday as four young men made their first court appearance in last weekend's gang rape at Richmond High School, a crime that brought anguish to students and leaders in the city and sent shock waves throughout the nation. Later Thursday, police arrested a sixth suspect in the case. A fifth suspect was arrested earlier but has not been charged. Three defendants, all of them juveniles charged as adults, were wearing bulletproof vests when they were led into Superior Court by a corps of Contra Costa County sheriff's deputies. The three - one of...

RICHMOND, Calif. – The number of people arrested in the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside a high school dance in Northern California has increased to six and could get higher, authorities said. Jose Carlos Montano, 18, was arrested Thursday evening outside his San Pablo home. He was being held on $1.3 million bail, on suspicion of rape, rape in concert with force and other charges, Richmond police said. Authorities were still looking for suspects, and have said as many as 10 people ranging from 15 to the mid-20s may have attacked the girl for more than two hours...

It did not take long for the judge to determine that the convicted rapist in front of him was irredeemable. "He is beyond help," Judge Nicholas Geeker said of Joe Harris Sullivan. "I'm going to try to send him away for as long as I can." And then Geeker sentenced Sullivan to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At the time, Sullivan was 13 years old. Now, 20 years after that sentencing in a courtroom in Pensacola, Fla., the Supreme Court will consider whether Sullivan's prison term -- and what his supporters say is an only-in-America phenomenon of...

RICHMOND, California — Four teens were charged Wednesday in the gang rape and beating of a 15-year-old girl outside her high school homecoming dance in Northern California, in an attack that has generated widespread outrage. All four — ages 15, 16, 17 and 19 — were charged with rape and enhancements that they acted in concert, which could make them eligible for life in prison.

KNOXVILLE - A jury this afternoon convicted Lemaricus Davidson of first-degree murder in the January 2007 torture slayings of a Knox County couple. Davidson, 26, faces a potential death sentence for the deaths of University of Tennessee student Channon Christian, 21, and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom, 23. Jurors will consider his punishment in a separate proceeding that will begin Thursday. The jurors also could choose life without parole or life in prison, a mandatory 51-year sentence.

Natalie Portman Equates Meat-Eating With Rape Today 10:42 AM PDT by GINA SERPE First, she admits to cutting herself, now she's making criminals of meat-eaters. Make no mistake, Natalie Portman is all grown up and not some shrinking violet. Penning what amounts to a Harvard-caliber book report for the Huffington Post, the actress and animal rights activist holds forth on her devotion to veganism and her opinion that those who choose to feast on flesh without regard for the moral implications might as well change their name to Roman Polanski. The 28-year-old—with whose glowing self veganism clearly agrees—starts off harmlessly...

RICHMOND, Calif. — Police believe as many as a dozen people watched a 15-year-old girl get beaten and gang-raped outside her high school homecoming dance without reporting it. Two suspects were in custody Monday, but police said as many as five other men attacked the girl over a two-hour period Friday night outside Richmond High School. "She was raped, beaten, robbed and dehumanized by several suspects who were obviously OK enough with it to behave that way in each other's presence," Lt. Mark Gagan said. "What makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw...

Polanski's arrest has caused his victim health problems and job worries, and she just wants to be left alone, her attorney wrote in a court filing. Attorney Lawrence Silver urged a California appeals court to dismiss the criminal case against the "Chinatown" director. The filing with the Second District Court of Appeal on Friday said Samantha Geimer and Silver have received nearly 500 media calls seeking comment since Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on Sept. 26. Geimer, who long ago identified herself publicly, and her family have to contend with such pressure whenever Polanski is in the news, the six-page...

It was a crime shocking not only in its brutality but in its callousness, Richmond police say. A 15-year-old girl leaving early from the homecoming dance at Richmond High School was enticed into a darkened alley just off campus to hang out with as many as a dozen young men who were drinking.

(CNN) -- Rape has turned into a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the number of attacks on women having grown threefold over the past few years, human rights activists said in October. Anneke van Woudenberg, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, told Christiane Amanpour that 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Eastern Congo since 1998, and the condition of women has become more dire as the Congolese army has pressed a military campaign against armed groups in the countryside. "Rape is being used as a weapon of war in eastern Congo. So we...

A trio of illegal male immigrants from Mexico were found to have arrest records in California when they were processed by Border Patrol agents from the Douglas Station. Tucson Sector spokeswoman Colleen Agle said the three were found to have significant criminal arrests when their fingerprints were checked against records Thursday. One individual had been accused of intercourse with a minor and rape by force/fear, another of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and the third of threatening crime with intent to terrorize, child cruelty, and possible injury/death and battery of a spouse,...

The sexual assault of a female student by a group of men on the San Diego State University campus is being investigated by campus police.A dusty vacant lot became the backdrop to the horrifying assault. The victim told police that six black men attacked her. They held her down, poured liquid into her mouth, and sexually assaulted her. Breanna Piper knows the pain this latest victim is going through. She just started up a campus organization at SDSU for sexual assault victims called Sorority Outreach and Support. "We have a society

Sometimes the dems know no bottom to the cesspool within which they live. Franken offers an amendment to the Defense appropriations bill. It stems from the awful case of Jamie Leigh Jones who was allegedly sexually abused while working for contractor Halliburton/KBR in Iraq.

By Loretta Park (Standard-Examiner Davis Bureau) Last Edit: 13 hours 32 min ago (Oct 16 2009 - 10:10pm) CLEARFIELD -- Police believe a 34-year-old Clearfield woman may have victimized more than just one teenage boy. Clearfield police arrested Tabitha Ash at her home Friday after investigating the complaints of a mother of a 14-year-old neighbor boy. Ash was booked in Davis County Jail on one count of sexual abuse of a minor and two counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. She is being held without bail. The Davis County Attorney's Office is reviewing the case before filing formal...

Attorneys for Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger yesterday responded point-by-point to the civil lawsuit filed against him by a Nevada woman accusing him of sexual assault and countersued her for unspecified damages. In the filing, John Echeverria, Mr. Roethlisberger's Reno-based attorney, said the woman, an employee of Harrah's Lake Tahoe, willingly entered Mr. Roethlisberger's room on July 11, 2008, with plans to seduce him. "At all times while she was in Mr. Roethlisberger's room, [the woman] acted voluntarily," Mr. Echeverria said. "Mr. Roethlisberger did not sexually assault, assault, batter, falsely imprison, or otherwise commit any crime or tort against [her]." The...

"They spent 42 days trying to drive me bizarre, but thank god I’m smart and rich ... In America, California, I lose my wife, my baby, my friends, perhaps my sanity and almost my freedom. No, I say, no! The Nazis couldn’t take it away from me, nor could the grief of my losses. And this little whore and the California laws won't either. I have given much and they have taken too much from me."

WEST PALM BEACH - Citing the depravity of the gang rape and torture of a mother and her son, 12, in the Dunbar Village Apartments, Circuit Judge Krista Marx on Tuesday sentenced three of the four men involved to life in prison. It was the only appropriate disposition, the judge said. The standing-room-only crowd gasped in disbelief. As deputies led the men from the courtroom, a scuffle ensued between defendant Tommy Poindexter and an officer. A woman in the crowd began screaming, setting off more yelling.

Rallying to the defence of director Roman Polanski after his arrest in Switzerland, French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand declared the situation "horrifying," and suggested that if the cultural world didn't come to the rapist's defence, "it would mean there is no culture in our country." He may have a case -- if you consider drugging and sodomizing a 13-year-old a manifestation of advanced "culture." Sadly, however, Mr. Mitterrand is hardly the only public figure willing to shrug off sexual crimes and indiscretions. Mr. Mitterrand's own background is illustrative. In a 2005 book he described as "half real and half dream,"...

October 13, 2009 Dear Tanya: Before She Died My Mother Told Me I Was Born As A Result Of Rape I'm not who I thought I was and I feel overwhelmed Dear Tanya Before my mother died from breast cancer two months ago she told me that I was born as a result of rape when she was 18. I had always realised that she treated me differently from my sister and I can never remember her hugging me or telling me that she loved me, as she did my sister. Now I know why. Every time she looked at...

A teenage girl was raped four times by a gang who took pictures of the abuse on their mobile phones. The 16-year-old victim, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was attacked in the attic room of a house in Rochdale on 28 May 2008. The girl's mother called her mobile phone after noticing she was missing from their home, only to hear the cries of her daughter on the end of the line. Her four attackers, aged 17 to 20, pleaded guilty at Bolton Crown Court. The girl had gone to the house after being called on her mobile....

If you believe in evolution, there is nothing wrong with rape. In fact, you can’t really call it rape. Whoopi Goldberg dismissed Roman Polanski’s rape conviction by declaring that it “wasn’t rape-rape” (see her comments on The View.) As a firm believer in evolution, she should have said, “There’s nothing wrong with rape or sexual aggression. That’s how we all got here!” Here’s the premise: Whatever animals do in nature is natural. What’s natural is normal. What’s normal is moral. So if penguins engage in homosexual behavior, then that behavior must be natural, normal, and moral. How can we mere...

The suburban Chicago cop who was caught on video beating a 15-year-old student for refusing to tuck his shirt last May is being accused of raping a woman while holding a pillow over her face. He also killed his ex-wife’s new husband last year by shooting him 24 times in front of their children while he was a cop for another suburban police department. He was suspended for that incident and eventually found work with the Dolton Police Department, where he ended up beating the special needs student who weighed only 140 pounds, breaking his nose and lacerating his face....

Swiss authorities rejected on Tuesday an appeal by lawyers for Roman Polanski, arrested in September after fleeing America in 1978 from an underage sex charge, to release the film director from prison. Authorities also urged a Swiss court dealing with his extradition warrant to reject another appeal by Polanski's lawyers to have him freed and to refuse any request to release the 76-year-old Oscar-winning film director on bail. Polanski pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl in 1977 but fled the United States on the eve of his 1978 sentencing because he believed an American judge might overrule...

YWCA Misinforms Raped Inmate About Adoption, Pays for Abortion Topeka, KS -- The case of a raped inmate in Kansas who was coerced into an abortion and taken to a Planned Parenthood center is generating criticism of Kansas corrections officials. But it is also implicating the YWCA, which appears to have misled the woman and arranged her abortion. http://www.LifeNews.com/state4479.html

A father of a high-school student is infuriated after he said a teacher provided "banned books" to her 11th-grade students, including at least one with explicit descriptions of homosexual sex acts, rape, masturbation, profane language and even bestiality. John Davis, father of an 11th-grade student at William Byrd High School in Vinton, Va., told WND that English teacher Kathleen Renard provided her personal copy of a book called "Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky to one of her English students, and it was passed to his son. The book is published by MTV Books. Davis found the book...

We didn’t think the Polanski matter could get a whole lot stranger. But it has. And given the way this situation has unfolded in the last couple days, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that we think it’s going to get a lot weirder before all is said and done. The news: Over at the Daily Beast today, Marcia Clark (yes, that Marcia Clark; the prosecutor in the OJ Simpson murder trial) writes a piece which, if true, could hurt Polanski’s case going forward. The background requires a quick trip back to the late 1970s. Polanski...

Whoopi Goldberg offered a practical defense — that what Polanski did was not "rape-rape," a distinction she left imprecisely delineated. Which may leave you with the vague impression that this was one of those deals where you're in a bar, and the gal says to you she's in 10th grade, and you find out afterward she's only in seventh.

I was tempted to write some scathing remarks about those who support Roman Polanski because they believe he is a great artist. But then I realized two things. One was that Dr. Blanchard had beaten me to the punch. The other was that those of us who are moviegoers or moviestayers (I am a huge fan of Netflix), are guilty of the same kind of support. Consider the case of Nicole Kidman. In 2004, she starred in the movie Birth, where she plays a widow who believes that a ten-year-old boy is her husband reincarnate. The movie features a bathtub...

Sources close to Polanski, 76, and Emmanuelle Seigner, his French wife of 20 years, say that a regional officer noticed Polanski's name on a database of wanted criminals. Realising the director was due to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich Film Festival, he contacted the Swiss Federal Department of Police and Justice. The Swiss phoned their US counterparts, who have had an arrest warrant out for Polanski since 1978, and they eagerly requested he be held as soon as he flew into Switzerland from France. Mystery surrounds the compensation that Roman Polanski has paid to Samantha Geimer. Court...

Rape Ordeal Of Heiress Abducted By Preacher And 'Tied Up With Cable And Attacked Four Times A Day' 02nd October 2009 [Pics in URL] An heiress has told how she was raped three or four times a day for nine months after being abducted by a preacher. Elizabeth Smart, 21, said she was kidnapped by Brian Mitchell at the age of 14 from her bedroom in the middle of the night. He kept her tied up and threatened to kill her if she tried to escape back to her wealthy Mormon family. Abducted: Elizabeth Smart, now 21, claims she was...

'ROSEMARY'S Baby" ("outdoes Hitchcock" -- Roger Ebert), "China town" ("outstanding" -- Variety) and "The Pianist" ("definitive" -- The New York Times) are fine films. They've been rightly honored and praised. The question is whether their excellence justifies criminal acts. The controversy over director Roman Polanski's arrest in Switzerland on his way to a film festival exposes a stark front in the culture war. The divide is not necessarily between right and left, but between an artistic elite that thinks it deserves its own moral rules, and the rest of us who'll never win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film...

"Three boys aged 12-13-years-old are suspected of having raped a 10-year-old girl at a school in Linköping in central Sweden. The alleged assault occurred on Tuesday while the children were on their lunch break in an area of woodland near the school."

I am delighted by the Roman Polanski controversy. Don’t get me wrong: I am horrified and disgusted by what the acclaimed director did — and admitted to — but there is an upside. Just to recap, Polanski drugged a child put in his care for the purposes of a photo shoot. He tried to bully her into sex. She said no. He raped her anyway. He pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse but fled the country before sentencing, allegedly for fear the judge wouldn’t keep his end of the plea bargain. He spent the subsequent three decades living the life...

AFP is reporting that a grand assembly of filmmakers, actors and producers from around the world have signed a petition urging the release of director Roman Polanski, who was arrested Sunday in Switzerland on a warrant for a 1977 underage sex case in the United States. Woody Allen, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Martin Scorcese, David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, Harmony Korine, Stephen Frears, Alexander Payne, Michael Mann, Wim Wenders, Tilda Swinton, Julian Schnabel, and Pedro Almodovar are among the 100 and counting film industry figures who have signed the petition, coordinated from France by the SACD, an organization which represents performance...

Elizabeth Smart Says She Was Raped Daily Elizabeth Smart, right, arrives at the federal courthouse with her mother, Lois Smart, and her father [Pic in URL] By JENNIFER DOBNER SALT LAKE CITY – Elizabeth Smart testified Thursday she was raped repeatedly each day after she was abducted from her bedroom seven years ago and told she would be killed if she yelled or tried to escape. She described Brian David Mitchell, her alleged kidnapper, as "evil, wicked, manipulative, stinky, slimy, selfish, not spiritual, not religious, not close to God." Smart testified in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City as...

Shocking! It’s simply shocking that a man who drugged, raped and sodomized a thirteen-year-old little girl—a man who plead guilty to statuary rape and was submitted for psychological evaluation for 43 days before sentencing—the man, Roman Polanski would be arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. warrant and is scheduled to be returned to the United States for his crimes of rape and fleeing sentencing. (see story) There are a lot of things going on between Switzerland and the U.S. right now and for the first time in history under Obama the U.S. is pressuring Swiss government to release information on...

. . . While waiting I have been reading over the growing list of entertainment industry personalities who have risen to the defense of the director. The list is stomach-turning. Many of the names I know. Some were once personal friends. Some of those ex-friends even have children, who I also knew. [Link to Free Polanski Petition with signatories.]

Hasn't Roman Polanski suffered enough? Didn't he endure all those cool, gray, rainy Paris winters? Wasn't he forced -- well, not forced, but strongly enticed -- to subsist all those years on overpriced fare served up by haughty waiters in Michelin-starred restaurants? Didn't he survive for decades having his vacation options limited, essentially, to the grim monotony of the south of France? I've got a better question: Shouldn't Polanski and his many apologists give us a break? I'm a huge fan of Polanski's work. Chinatown is one of my favorite movies of all time, Rosemary's Baby is a masterpiece and...

Whoopi, I have a question for you: Have you ever heard of the words STATUTORY RAPE? You may see this come up over the next day or so. You may have heard about Whoopi Goldberg’s assertion that Roman Polanski did not commit RAPE rape, whatever… But Toys r Us has a circular that defines Goldberg as a child advocate. As a reminder, here is the video from The View yesterday. Goldberg wanted to get the facts straight, which is understandable, but come on … does it seem to you that the Hollywood elite and Europe’s upper-class are trying to justify...

The grand jury transcripts of the sex abuse case paint a far more damaging picture of the events that allegedly unfolded between the director and a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson's home in 1977.: Did you resist at that time? A: A little bit, but not really because . . . Q: Because what? A: Because I was afraid of him. That's Roman Polanski's 13-year-old victim testifying before a grand jury about how the famous director forced himself on her at Jack Nicholson's Mulholland Drive home in March of 1977. I'm reading this in the district attorney's office at the...

Some argue that the director at the center of the controversial sex/extradition case has suffered enough. But personal ordeals are not the same as justice.How lousy has Roman Polanski's life been? His mother died at Auschwitz; his pregnant wife was murdered by the Manson family; and in 1978, after pleading guilty to unlawful intercourse and serving an evaluation period in the Chino state prison, he says he learned that a judge who had led him to believe that he would serve no more jail time actually was considering a long sentence, followed by deportation. On the eve of his sentencing,...

Alarmed by the sharp spike in sexual violence against women, the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday urged governments and the United Nations itself to crack down on the soldiers and civilians who rape and torture with impunity. "As I have said many times over many years, the role and rights of women in todays world is a critical core concern of foreign policy," said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who convened the council after meeting victims of sexual torture on her recent visit to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Protecting vulnerable women and girls, she told the council,...

I used to love What If? It was a Marvel comic book in which you got to see how the world would be different if certain key events had gone differently. For instance, what if Spider-Man had joined the Fantastic Four? So I have a little hypothetical for you? What if Roman Polanski had drugged and sodomized Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? In case you’ve missed it somehow, Polanski is a film director who 30 years ago drugged and raped a 13 year old girl. He was convicted of a lesser charge (statutory rape) but fled the country to avoid sentencing. This...

Nearly a month ago many prominent figures in Hollywood and the international world of film signed the Toronto Declaration pushing for the boycott of a film festival that dared to showcase Israeli films. At the end of this month, many prominent figures in Hollywood and the world of film signed a petition calling for the immediate release of the rapist of a 13 year old girl, who also happens to be a major figure in Hollywood and the international world of film, namely one Roman Polanski. It is instructive to watch the same people who lecture Americans on morals and...

The Huffington Post has made it crystal clear where it stands on the news that director Roman Polanski may have to answer for his 31-year-old crime of child rape: “Move on, everyone. Nothing to see here. Keep on directing, Roman. Love ya!” The popular liberal site has posted numerous essays since news that Polanski was arrested in Switzerland broke over the weekend, each arguing vehemently against the Oscar winner’s persecution. ... But HuffPo readers aren’t buying it. And boy, are they angry.

How low will Hollywood go in defending Roman Polanski? Former Oscar hostess Whoopi Goldberg tries to parse the meaning of rape between rape and something called “rape-rape” — which, if you read the testimony of Polanski’s victim, Polanski literally did by raping her and then sodomizing her. Goldberg tries to argue that Polanski pled guilty to statutory rape, not actual rape, which is true, and that he served a sentence — which is absolutely false: