For instance, if there was somewhere that a burned lover could turn to if she discovered that the man who told her he was childless not only had a 10-year-old, but also a pregnant side chick? That would be considered a crime if the bill passes.
Or if the person they're sleeping with showed them photos of a beautiful home he claimed to own but in reality was living in his parents' basement?
In other words, if a woman is duped into having sex they could have the man arrested.
Mischele Lewis, a 37-year-old suburban-mom-turned-activist is the inspiration behind this bill in New Jersey.
This bill was actually introduced late last year to make "sexual assault by fraud" a punishable offense.
The bill defines it as "an act of sexual penetration to which a person has given consent because the actor has misrepresented the purpose of the act or has represented he is someone he is not."
"I think it's important because trying to deceive anyone for the purpose of sexual gratification is just wrong," Lewis said. "Every person has the right to knowing consent. And before they consent to be intimate with anybody, they should absolutely know 100 percent who it is that they are being intimate with.
"Whether it's as simple as say they slip off their wedding ring and then they engage in a relationship with someone, but the man or woman has no idea that the person they are with is married," she added. "Lying to someone else for any reason is never OK, whether it be [for] a job, a relationship, criminal history, parental history, marital history . . .. When did we become a society that thinks it's completely acceptable to lie to other people on a daily basis and think that's morally OK?"
Should it pass, such a bill would open up a whole realm of possibilities for tricked lovers.
"On the one hand, we want law enforcement to have the law on their side in order to go after sexual predators who try to lure victims into sexual situations through deceit," pointed out Kathleen Bogle, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at La Salle University. "On the other hand, many people lie to get sex and we may not want to cast too broad of a net in pursuing these situations through criminal law.
"Most people would agree that lying to obtain sex is immoral, but only a fraction of those scenarios should be punishable by criminal law," she added.
She's right about not clogging up the legal system.
But there's such a thing as principle. As Yale law professor Jed Rubenfield wrote in a 2013 edition of theYale Law Review, "Rape-by-deception is almost universally rejected in American criminal law. But if rape is sex without the victim's consent - as many courts, state statutes and scholars say it is - then sex-by-deception ought to be rape, because as courts have held for a hundred years in virtually every area of the law outside of rape, a consent procured through deception is no consent at all."
Meanwhile, Lewis, whose dating horror story was chronicled in the Daily News last year and later on NBC's "Dateline," is recuperating from the shock of discovering that the man she met on an online dating site back in 2013 was a con artist.
Not only had the man she knew as Liam Allen lied to her about his legal name, but instead of being some sort of secret agent of the British government, as he claimed, he had served time in the U.K. for bigamy. He also had failed to register as a sex offender and had been convicted of indecent assault of a minor.
But back when she was falling madly in love, Lewis, a labor and delivery nurse, knew nothing about Jordan's nefarious ways. When she was handing over $5,000 for a phony security clearance, she had no clue that she was just Jordan's latest victim.
In November, he pleaded guilty to third-degree theft by deception and was ordered to pay restitution. He's currently serving a three-year prison sentence in New Jersey.
In November, he pleaded guilty to third-degree theft by deception and was ordered to pay restitution. He's currently serving a three-year prison sentence in New Jersey.
No comments:
Post a Comment