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These three women (Lauren Bryeans, Lauren Chief Elk and April Grolle) are heroines, for they stopped an assault by a host of drunken louts at a college house party on an unconscious 17-year-old girl. The DA was much maligned for her failure to prosecute the gang rape, but she was sustained by the state Attorney General. From this report in the San Jose Mercury News:
..[T]he three girls continue to define heroism, not just for what they did that night but also for what they’ve done since. Refusing to be quiet, they’ve gone to campuses to talk about the case. "No girl would ever consent to how we found her," Grolle told ABC.
I may have a grandaughter some day, and I would be very pleased were she to follow the honorable course of these young women (I much hope in less revolting circumstance). I would also hope she’s able to mature in an environment such as made the statement by Ms Grolle possible.
Call her No Girl then. She is A year ahead of me. It is smalltown fifties high school time. She is very quiet, but pretty, although you wouldn’t think to notice because she is so subdued. She plays clarinet in the band. She walks with friends, and works after school at Mcknight’s Drug, and I don’t believe I ever heard her say a word or laugh out loud.
She is, by several accounts, of the habit of riding in their cars with a number of boys out into the woods and entertaining them one after another. The boys talk back in the locker room and in the night another booth filled with more boys are waiting for No Girl to get off work.
There is no drink as part of the equation. There is no description of it. It is just a happening, like a church service, without detail or nuance. Never did I hear any word on how all this seemed to play with No Girl. I never heard any girl talk of it, but then, I didn’t really know any of her friends. She never seemed to have a single boyfriend.
There were other rumors on other occasions, in other areas. I read of yab-yum in Dharma Bums, where a certain young lady on another campus, UC Berkeley, visits with the boys and they enjoy her charms all together. I hear Jimmy Reed, the old blues lush, moaning
"Don’t pull no subway, baby …
I’d rather see you, pull a train…"
The bikers called it gangbang. It was not unknown beyond the rural provinces, apparently. And yet it is not a part of the story. A young girl is blitzed and she does a lap dance and lures a lush into a room and then more and more.
The very first web log was before the web, actually. It was called NerdNosh, and it was a sort of group memoir by means of what was called a Mailing List, or one-to-many connection through e-mail. (Sort of like yab-yum, but different.) One of the stories in there at the beginning, in 1991, was about a band which toured Guam, and the pretty one who worked in the gift shop, and she invited the drummer, and then there was a knock on the door, then another, and it became obvious she had invited the entire band, plus roadies, possibly.
So you had No Girl on the sheets with a succession of men partaking of whatever rapture they might imagine, through most of the night. One who was waiting his next turn was admiring a belt he had taken off, and showing it to another bystander, when suddenly he began to spank Miss Penny with it, leaving the imprint of the inscription in welts on her flashing flanks, and she seemed inspired by the act.
When the party was over, the drummer called a cab for her, and went with her to the lobby to wait with her. She had liked the evening very well, she said, and she remembered with some fondness the incident of the belt.
Our little online group included literate and assertive women, and they took up the story of No Girl with a gusto. One posted a letter as she imagined Miss Penny might have, had she the writer’s experience and literacy, and another lamented the sexism rampant in the episode, which was the prevailing notion. Strange that only a couple of guys in the group could conceive that No Girl might have chosen the evening just for the pleasure, with no compunctions nor pressures from sexism, society, or social mores. She wanted that particular party, and she chose her guest list, and she went about it with a gusto.
It might also be mentioned that, in all reports I have ever seen of one-to-many group gropes, there has only been one male who was invited and did not participate, and that one a gay bass player.
Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appoointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.
– The diary of John Manningham, March 13, 1602.
11 Comments
Brava to April Grolle, Lauren Chief Elk and Lauren Bryeans.
Thanks for posting this. I had not read about it. Just stomach-turning. Couldn’t make the links work — got to the story by searching on Ms. Grolle’s name. Besides the obvious courage of the young women, it occurs to me to wonder whether this might be an instance of “Title IX effect.” The women sized up the situation. They at once took coordinated action to rescue the victim. All three women were soccer players, and apparently good ones. They might still have acted the same way had they not been athletes. But as a woman old enough to remember when we weren’t allowed to play full-court basketball in school, but only a physically restricted version called captainball, I’m fairly certain that they would have had less confidence and possibly less success. And — the 17-year-old victim is reportedly dead drunk and the DA apparently doesn’t investigate who gave alcohol, or perhaps a date-rape drug, to someone underage?
I second the Bravo to Lauren Chief Elk, April Grolle, and Lauren Bryeans. I love that they stood up when they could have just walked away.
A friend told me this story: Years ago, a mentally-challenged girl was tied to a tree and gang raped by a bunch of boys in my former hometown. They were never prosecuted.
That was shocking enough…but her thoughts on the girl were even more shocking. She said something like “…and she LET them (rape her)…”
I was at a loss for words. How does one LET someone rape them when they’re tied to a tree?
I want to add to the equation something about innocence. You’ve probably heard it before.
Queen Victoria, under whose austere reign Oscar Wilde was sentenced to prison for unnatural sexual proclivities, was once asked why women were not also prosecuted for homosexual acts. She replied that she did see how such was even possible.
I’m sure this was a great relief to most of the Bloomsbury group, but the point of this article is simply that everyone’s judgment is based upon perspective. If the story of No Girl is never seen nor heard, then you would not regard it as part of the realm of possibility; it’s all alien abduction.
Is it possible for a young girl to relish making out with a whole bunch of guys, serially or in tandem? In the experience of April Grolle, no, and bless her parents and friends and community for providing that innocence.
However, mileage may vary.
Does this work for you?
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_12547392
I think the problem was I posted the URL that resulted from my own search. In other words, my own particular perspective did not match that of others. Resonance.
Wow. Thanks for telling me/us about this. Unforkin’believeable.
I don’t get this. The girl being gang raped was passed out. She was NOT ABLE to give consent. That’s totally different from a girl who has her faculties about her and chooses to have sex with whomever.
Seconded.
Thanks Clovis.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m so sorry that such should ever happen to anyone. Blessings,
Agree, and it’s a special sort of heroism.
From about age 2, the child seeks identity against the common backdrop of parents. Every other word is `No!’ As teens, outraging public decency is de rigeur, because parents are on the other side. I am me casting shadows against this dull prosaic background. The manner of male rivalry, as in “The Dozens,” is in one dude trashing another for not living down to the low common denominator. At the fratboy party, it would be, “What, you don’t wanta? You a wimp? You gay?”
I give no credit to them as bellow the party line, like Faux Noise and the rest of the bottom-feeders. Somebody swimming against the grain when it’s the right course, those are the heroines.
Further on superimposing our own social environment as a general pattern.
Millicent was an elderly spinster, and her friend Gwendolyn noted her distress during one visit. It’s Samantha (her Siamese), she said. She is gonna have kittens, and I don’t understand it.
And Gwendolyn asks, did you not have her fixed?
Millicent says, oh, no, I could never do that. But she is here inside all the time; she never goes out. So how could this happen?
At that moment, another Siamese, this one an obviously full-on unaltered male, strode out from the kitchen. Gwendolyn pointed to him, said, now, there’s a suspect.
Millicent snorted at that. “Don’t be silly. That’s her brother!”
If there are no Black Swans, then we can make law based solely on the white ones. Now, a 17-year-old is not of the age of consent in California, so the encounter was rape in some form on that score alone. But the DA was aware of the circumstances – the kid lap-dancing one dude and enticing him into the bedroom – and the difficulty in proving gang rape to a jury, any number of which may have known of a No Girl in their own time. The Attorney General concurred. It was not a question of who was believed and who was not, it was all a calculation of what a jury would believe.
I think it’s very likely the girl passed out while or after making out with one lout and the others piled on. But I think it possible, just barely possible, she was excited to be the center of attention and only later, when the party was exposed, did she claim not to remember any of it. I would say most jurists would find reasonable doubt, no matter how insulting to the victim.
Also, the ones deciding are all politicians, and they are all aware of what happened to the over-zealous DA who went after those other louts after the Dartmouth party. The world is not as it is, despite Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or something, but strictly as we perceive it.
I’m not happy about it, but there doesn’t seem to be much I can do, except write on it.