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24-05-2023, 03:31 PM
Clémence Michallon
Wed, 24 May 2023 at 12:53 am SGT
In November 2015, Emma Mannion went to the hospital. She had just told her mother she’d been raped, and was there to undergo exams following the assault.
In Victim/Suspect, a new Netflix documentary, Mannion says there was no discussion of whether she wanted to file a report.
“It was just, ‘We’re here to talk about your rape,’” Mannion, who was a student at the University of Alabama at the time, says in the documentary. Three days later, she says she was asked to go to the police station to talk more.
A video shown in Victim/Suspect features a police officer confronting her about perceived inconsistencies in her report of the alleged assault. Mannion didn’t think too much of it at first.
“I was raised to respect and trust authority,” she says in the documentary. “I understood him wanting me to walk through my story again. I understood him asking clarifying questions.”
The interview, according to Victim/Suspect, lasted over an hour and 40 minutes. Eventually, the officer accused Mannion of having filed a false report and arrested her on the spot. He instructed her to “put your hands like you’re praying” while he handcuffed her. She was sent to jail immediately.
Not long before her court date, Mannion read about Megan Rondini, another University of Alabama student. In 2015, Rondini told the police that a man from a prominent local family had raped her. Video footage in Victim/Suspect shows Rondini being interviewed for two hours. “Based on your statements to me, you said that you never resisted him,” the officer said, according to a 2017 report by BuzzFeed News. Rondini told him she did, and provided examples, according to the publication. “Look at it from my side,” the officer said, per BuzzFeed News. “You never kicked him or hit him or tried to resist him.”
In comparison, the police’s interview of the man identified by Rondini, TJ Bunn Jr, is chummy. The officer discusses fishing before moving on to Rondini’s claims. “So, y’all are having consensual sex. She never said no, she never said stop, she was completely into it,” the officer says, which Bunn echoes. When Bunn thanks the police for their “professionalism”, the officer replies: “If it was me on the other side of it, I’d want the same thing done for me.”
Bunn denied the allegations and a grand jury declined to indict him. Rondini died by suicide in February 2016.
......
Mannion and Rondini are some of the multiple women whose cases are at the centre of Victim/Suspect. The documentary comes from the work of Rachel de Leon, a journalist at the Center for Investigative Reporting in Emeryville, California. In 2017, she heard about Nikki Yovino, who took a plea deal after being charged with falsely reporting an incident, after she’d told police she had been raped by two Sacred Heart University football players. When she spoke to Yovino and to Mannion, both women “maintained that the assaults did happen,” de Leon narrates in Victim/Suspect. And so, she kept reporting.
Looking at media reports, de Leon found more than 160 cases of people facing charges after reporting assaults, “mostly from the last 10 years”, across the US. And that was before she went beyond media reports and filed public information requests from police departments.
Mucb better to read full report at: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/women-were-rap...15282.html
Wed, 24 May 2023 at 12:53 am SGT
In November 2015, Emma Mannion went to the hospital. She had just told her mother she’d been raped, and was there to undergo exams following the assault.
In Victim/Suspect, a new Netflix documentary, Mannion says there was no discussion of whether she wanted to file a report.
“It was just, ‘We’re here to talk about your rape,’” Mannion, who was a student at the University of Alabama at the time, says in the documentary. Three days later, she says she was asked to go to the police station to talk more.
A video shown in Victim/Suspect features a police officer confronting her about perceived inconsistencies in her report of the alleged assault. Mannion didn’t think too much of it at first.
“I was raised to respect and trust authority,” she says in the documentary. “I understood him wanting me to walk through my story again. I understood him asking clarifying questions.”
The interview, according to Victim/Suspect, lasted over an hour and 40 minutes. Eventually, the officer accused Mannion of having filed a false report and arrested her on the spot. He instructed her to “put your hands like you’re praying” while he handcuffed her. She was sent to jail immediately.
Not long before her court date, Mannion read about Megan Rondini, another University of Alabama student. In 2015, Rondini told the police that a man from a prominent local family had raped her. Video footage in Victim/Suspect shows Rondini being interviewed for two hours. “Based on your statements to me, you said that you never resisted him,” the officer said, according to a 2017 report by BuzzFeed News. Rondini told him she did, and provided examples, according to the publication. “Look at it from my side,” the officer said, per BuzzFeed News. “You never kicked him or hit him or tried to resist him.”
In comparison, the police’s interview of the man identified by Rondini, TJ Bunn Jr, is chummy. The officer discusses fishing before moving on to Rondini’s claims. “So, y’all are having consensual sex. She never said no, she never said stop, she was completely into it,” the officer says, which Bunn echoes. When Bunn thanks the police for their “professionalism”, the officer replies: “If it was me on the other side of it, I’d want the same thing done for me.”
Bunn denied the allegations and a grand jury declined to indict him. Rondini died by suicide in February 2016.
......
Mannion and Rondini are some of the multiple women whose cases are at the centre of Victim/Suspect. The documentary comes from the work of Rachel de Leon, a journalist at the Center for Investigative Reporting in Emeryville, California. In 2017, she heard about Nikki Yovino, who took a plea deal after being charged with falsely reporting an incident, after she’d told police she had been raped by two Sacred Heart University football players. When she spoke to Yovino and to Mannion, both women “maintained that the assaults did happen,” de Leon narrates in Victim/Suspect. And so, she kept reporting.
Looking at media reports, de Leon found more than 160 cases of people facing charges after reporting assaults, “mostly from the last 10 years”, across the US. And that was before she went beyond media reports and filed public information requests from police departments.
Mucb better to read full report at: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/women-were-rap...15282.html
