Free Republic

A Brooklyn man was sentenced Monday to 18 years ​behind bars for raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter — who kept the sickening sex attack a secret until revealing it in a college-application essay nearly a decade later. Albert Tarrats, 62, remained mum throughout his sentencing in Brooklyn Supreme Court, but prosecutor Anna Krutaya read a statement from his victim, who ​wrote that she’s still haunted by his monstrous crimes. “Getting closure and justice on this horrific situation is the best thing I could have gotten from this experience,” the now-18-year-old woman wrote.

A survey of colleges and universities finds a lack of coordination between many campuses and local law enforcement in handling sexual assaults, and that many schools have gone years without investigating such cases. About 40 percent of colleges and universities reported not having conducted a sexual assault investigation in the past five years, including 6 percent of the nation’s largest public institutions. More than 20 percent of large, private schools conducted fewer investigations than the number of incidents reported to the Education Department. …

An MSNBC panel slammed Hillary Clinton over the tapes uncovered by the Washington Free Beacon which record her laughing about freeing a child rapist, calling her behavior “jarring” and “disturbing.” “She sounded boastful,” noted Joe Scarborough. “She sounded boastful on the tape that she was able to get this 41-year-old guy who raped a young girl, a minor girl, and get him off and was laughing about the evidence, laughing about the lie detector test, laughing about a lot of it. It’s disturbing to say the least, isn’t it?” The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein agreed, “Yeah, the boastfulness in the...

He could become the Willie Horton of the immigration crisis. Milton Mateo Garcia, 28, was caught one year ago entering the U.S. illegally across the Mexican border and was deported back to his native Honduras. But Mr. Garcia soon re-entered the U.S. illegally — federal authorities either don’t know how, or they won’t say. He settled with relatives in Philadelphia, where Mayor Michael Nutter had signed an executive order in April declaring it a “sanctuary city” for illegal immigrants. Living and working in sanctuary, Mr. Garcia last month, according to police, approached a 26-year-old Philadelphia doctor who was walking to...

SOMERVILLE (CBS) – A Somerville teacher has been arrested and charged with raping a 13-year-old child. Alexandra Romanos, 41, of Stoneham, was arraigned Wednesday on two counts of aggravated rape of a child, and three counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. According to the DA’s office, a parent tipped off the school department last month about the teacher’s alleged relationship with a 13-year-old, which had been ongoing since March and had occurred both on and off school grounds. Romanos taught 5th graders at the East Somerville Community School, and has worked there for seven years....

Islamic fundamentalists abducted the freelance reporter in August 2008, and she was released 460 days later. Just months after surviving the ordeal, she established a non-profit to provide education to girls in Somalia. "The fact that they know about the work I'm doing now," she said. "That I have chosen compassion, that they could see that they didn't break me — that's the best justice I could have." A Hollywood production company announced last week that it bought the rights to Lindhout's bestselling memoir, "A House in the Sky."

Last night I listened to the new Reasonable Doubts podcast, which included a detailed account of the case of self-righteously Christian former major league baseball player and eventual sex abuse convict, Chad Curtis. The show is a gripping and revolting listen, and as usual the Doubtcasters bring to bear a lot of insight in the process both of telling the story and in analyzing it at the end. Doubtcaster Jeremy Beahan went to college at Cornerstone University where Chad Curtis was a prominent figure, earning his degree to go into high school coaching (where he would commit his sex crimes)....

The sorry tale of Ben Sullivan only serves to show how complex the issues surrounding rape allegations have become, writes Claire CohenLast week, the 21-year-old president of the Oxford Union was cleared of all charges against him – having been accused of the rape, and attempted rape, of two students last year. Now, leaked documents appear to show one of the women admitting online that their encounter was ‘consensual’, almost a year before Sullivan’s arrest. It’s tempting to see these leaked documents as containing a tacit admission of consent. But that would be an over-simplification. Yes, the woman seems to...

A former Christian radio host, who admitted to raping an 11-year-old boy, had a rented storage unit where he kept a 'bondage kit' of handcuffs, chains and duct tape, a federal spokesman confirmed to MailOnline today. John Balyo, 35, has been charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct after he confessed last week to having sex with a child. It is claimed that Balyo, from Battle Creek, Michigan, paid a man to arrange a sex session with a minor for him.

VERNON — A former nurse practitioner from Vernon admitted in court on Thursday that he raped a 3-year-old girl and conspired to rape an 18-month-old baby. Jay Mohler-Avery, 46, in pleading guilty, also admitted trying to get the mother of the 18-month-old to move her four children and herself in with him so they could be his sex slaves. He claimed, according to the police investigation, as outlined by prosecutor Elizabeth C. Leaming, that children would not be harmed by having adults sexually exploit them. "Children should be able to explore their sexual curiosity in the home with other children...

On Tuesday, police in Philadelphia arrested Milton Mateo Garcia, 28, after he reportedly raped a woman last weekend. Immigrationand Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have conformed that the Honduran national was deported in June 2013, though the agency has declined to say what criminal activity led to his removal. The victim, a 26-year-old doctor at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, left the Ladder 15 bar on Sansom Street, after spending Friday evening with friends. Garcia grabbed her as she was about to enter her apartment building near Rittenhouse Square, according to police. The illegal alien was captured on surveillance footage following the woman....

BRIDEPORT -- Harding High School students forced two severely mentally disabled students into a possible sexually inappropriate action, the lawyer for one of the disabled students charged Thursday. On Wednesday, Patrick Nolan, 19, was charged with first-degree sexual assault, risk of injury to a child and third-degree abuse after police said he sexually assaulted a mentally disabled teenage boy in a bathroom at Harding on the second day of school last year. Police said a group of non-disabled students cheered as they watched, and one of them recorded the incident on his phone to show around school. Nolan was released...

As North Carolina lawmakers debated a proposal to prevent charter schools from discriminating against applicants based on sexual orientation, one representative suggested Tuesday that adult sexual attraction to children is a sexual orientation like homosexuality. The amendment was tabled by Republicans, preventing a vote on it. But during the debate, Republican Rep. Paul Stam, R-Wake, said pedophilia, masochism and other illegal sexual practices are sexual orientations like homosexuality and he questioned the role adults who are sexually attracted to children might have in schools. Several lawmakers called those comments offensive. After the House session, Twitter lit up with criticism of...

Police have identified the man charged with raping a 26-year-old woman in her apartment near Rittenhouse Square early Saturday morning. He is 28-year-old Milton Mateo Garcia, an illegal immigrant from Honduras.

ISIS fighters are ordering terrified families in Iraq to hand over their daughters for sex. Leaflets in the captured cities of Mosul and Tikrit claim the women – virgins or not – must join jihad, or Holy war, and cleanse themselves by sleeping with militants. Those that refuse to do so are violating God’s will, it is claimed, and will be beaten or killed. ISIS fighters have been taking women captive in Syria since last year when a Saudi-based cleric issued a fatwa – religious order telling them to. Now the sick practise is happening to Iraq. (...)

On June 12, only two day after capturing Mosul and other territories in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria issued a decree ordering the people to send their unmarried women to “jihad by sex.” In the proclamation ISIS threatens to impose Sharia law on all who fail to comply with the decree. Here’s a translation of the decree, followed by the original in Arabic. In the Name of Allah the Merciful Subject: Mandate LOGO The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria The State of Nineveh In the Name of Allah the Merciful

In what may turn out to be the most delicious irony in the history of politics, an archived tape recently resurfaced featuring Hillary Clinton chuckling about defending a lowlife rapist named Thomas Alfred Taylor. That dusty old tape may be what finally halts Hillary Clinton’s decades-long climb to what she had hoped would be the top of the political power heap. Back in 1975, Thomas Alfred Taylor lured a 12-year-old girl into his car and raped her. At the time, Yale Law School graduate Hillary Rodham knew Taylor was guilty, but as a favor to a prosecutor friend she provided...

Glenn Reynolds highlights a rather touchy story from across the pond, where Peter Lloyd, writing for the Telegraph, points out that the assumptions of both innocence and privacy are handled rather unequally in sexual assault cases. The primary case under discussion involves the handling of laws in the UK, but parallel debates are taking place in the United States today. Lloyd speaks rather passionately about what happened to Oxford University Union President Ben Sullivan following what turned out to be two unfounded rape allegations. After five weeks of public humiliation, finger-pointing and gender bias – both on campus and...

The facts are these. In 1975, before she married Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham defended a child rapist in Arkansas court. She was not a public defender. No one ordered her to take the case. An ambitious young lawyer, she was asked by a friend if she would represent the accused, and she agreed. And her defense was successful. Attacking the credibility of the twelve-year-old victim on the one hand, and questioning the chain of evidence on another, Clinton got a plea bargain for her client. He served ten months in prison, and died in 1992. The victim, now 52, has...

Hillary Clinton's successful 1975 legal defense of an accused rapist has surfaced again with the victim, angered over a tape of Clinton chuckling over her courtroom tactics in the case, lashing out at the potential Democratic presidential candidate. "Hillary Clinton took me through hell," the victim told the Daily Beast in an emotional interview published today. The woman said that if she saw Clinton today she would say, "I realize the truth now, the heart of what you've done to me. And you are supposed to be for women? You call that [being] for women, what you done to me?...