Eric Schneiderman, Consent and Domestic Violence

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/nyregion/consent-sexual-assault-rough-sex.html

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When four women accused Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, of physical assault this week, he suggested that they were describing consensual sexual encounters.

The allegations against him were new. That defense was not.

Those accused of committing violence against their partners often seek to dismiss those claims, sometimes by arguing that the partners were willing participants in sexual role playing or “rough sex.”

Here’s a look at the legal and other issues raised by such claims.

In a written statement to The New Yorker, included in the article revealing the choking and slapping allegations against him, Mr. Schneiderman denied committing any assault.

“In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity,” he wrote. “I have not assaulted anyone. I have never engaged in nonconsensual sex, which is a line I would not cross.”

Many men before him have said the same when confronted by such accusations.

In 2014, for example, several women accused Jian Ghomeshi, a well-known Canadian musician and former radio host, of biting, punching, choking and smothering.

In response, he described the activities on Facebook as consensual — “a mild form of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” he wrote. (He was ultimately acquitted of sexual assault.)

There is a bright line between pain caused by unwanted sexual or domestic violence and pain that can come during some kinds of consensual sexual activity among willing participants.

“If it’s not consensual, then it’s not ‘rough sex.’ It’s abuse,” said Susan Wright, the founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, an advocacy organization for a diverse range of sexualities and sexual preferences.

Consent should be given early and often, she said. Limits, risks and how to stop sexual activity should be discussed beforehand. And assumptions should never be made.

“I know some people think it’s not sexy or spontaneous to actually talk about sex before you have it,” she said. “They’re absolutely wrong, because it’s the best foreplay in the world to talk about the things that turn you on and find out what things turn the other person on.”

Even with consent, if sexual activity causes serious harm, it crosses the line to assault, she said.

In seeking to explain away their crimes, violent perpetrators have long claimed that victims “asked for it.”

But the “rough sex defense” gained notoriety under that name after being used in a high-profile trial in New York in the 1980s.

The trial revolved around the death by strangling of Jennifer Dawn Levin in the summer of 1986.

The night before a bicyclist found her body behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ms. Levin had met up with Robert E. Chambers Jr. at Dorrian’s Red Hand, a bar on the Upper East Side. The pair left the bar together at about 4:30 a.m. before walking to Central Park.

Mr. Chambers was immediately suspected in her death and soon became known in the tabloid newspapers of the day as the “Preppy Killer.” Until pleading guilty to manslaughter in 1988, he had long insisted that the death was an accident: He said that he had suffocated Ms. Levin by mistake after she hurt him during consensual sex.

The New York Daily News highlighted his defense in the front-page headline the following day: “Girl’s slaying suspect: SEX PLAY ‘GOT ROUGH.’”

The trial turned into a media sensation. In the end, Mr. Chambers spent more than a decade in prison.

Two of the women told The New Yorker that Mr. Schneiderman had choked them. Choking is one of the most common forms of domestic violence, according to experts, and it can predict more serious violence to come.

According to one often-cited statistic, those who have been choked by an intimate partner are about seven times as likely to be killed by an intimate partner.

Jarringly in retrospect, when Mr. Schneiderman was a state senator from Manhattan in 2010, he introduced a bill to make intentional choking to the point of unconsciousness a violent felony. The measure was welcomed by law enforcement officials, and it is now New York state law.