The facts of the retrial and acquittal of Ched Evans don’t make it any easier to understand how it happened.

The appeal court judgment – which was made before the retrial, but can only now be reported – allowed new evidence from two witnesses who gave testimony about the complainant’s sexual preferences and the language she used during sex. It led to her being questioned in detail in open court about intimate details of her sex life.

Evans, who has played for Wales and Sheffield United and was a member of the Manchester City youth setup, spent two and a half years in prison after being convicted in 2012 of raping the young woman following a drunken night out in his home town of Rhyl, north Wales.

Following his conviction, a well-funded legal and PR campaign that included the offer of a £50,000 reward for information leading to his acquittal was launched by family and friends. The campaign eventually resulted in the case going to the court of appeal in London, where his conviction was quashed.

So it helps to be rich.

The woman told the jury she woke up naked in a hotel room in Rhyl, north Wales, in May 2011 with no memory of what had happened but fearing that her drinks had been spiked. Friends encouraged her to go to the police, and officers found out that the room in which she woke up had been booked and paid for by Evans. He was questioned, and both he and his friend and fellow footballer Clayton McDonald said they had consensual sex with the woman.

The prosecution said she could not possibly have consented, as she was too intoxicated. She has never alleged that Evans or McDonald raped her.

In court, Evans admitted that he lied to get the key for the hotel room and did not speak to the woman before, during or after sex. He left via a fire exit. It also emerged that Evans’s younger brother and another man were trying to film what was happening from outside the room.

He never spoke to her so how can the sex possibly have been consensual?

I feel sick.

Rachel Krys, co-director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, said: “We are very concerned at the precedent which might have been set. In addition to this, there are reports that the defence offered a ‘bounty’ for such testimony. This is extremely worrying. We will review the case in full and may contact the Crown Prosecution Service and the government about aspects of this case which raise concern.”

Polly Neate, chief executive of Women’s Aid, said: “There is a big risk that this case overall has a negative impact on reporting. Only this week CPS figures revealed a quarter of women are not pursuing cases. If you look at the surrounding maelstrom about this case, it’s easy to see why that is the case.

“A woman’s past sexual history bears no relevance on whether or not they have been a victim of rape. There is a need to challenge pervasive cultural assumptions that equate a woman’s former sexual history with her likelihood of being a victim of rape.”

Not feeling any less sick.

Updating to add – a friend on Facebook tells me the victim never even wanted to prosecute, and she was compelled to testify. Godalfuckingmighty.

The Independent on the Ched Evans retrial.

A former solicitor general has condemned the way the Ched Evans rape trial was conducted.

Vera Baird told the BBC details of the woman’s sexual past should not have been heard in court and the case could discourage people who are sexually assaulted from reporting it to police.

The 27-year-old footballer was cleared on Friday of raping a woman in a hotel room in 2011, only after her sexual history was scrutinised before a jury. Evans was initially found guilty of the rape in 2012.

And you think that might deter women from reporting rape? Just a little?

While he was in prison, Evans’ family and friends offered £50,000 for information that might clear his name and hired private investigators to help free him.

The new evidence concerned two other men who claimed they had sex with the woman around the same time as the alleged rape and who described their encounters as similar to Evans’ account of what happened.

Defence lawyers have been banned from cross-examining alleged rape victims in court about their sexual behaviour or history since 1999, but the Court of Appeal said Evans’ case was exceptional.

Because hey, the guy is a footballer. You can’t be putting them in the slammer, not on the word of some slut.

Lady Justice Hallett ruled it was a “rare case” in which it would be appropriate to allow “forensic examination” of the woman’s sexual behaviour.

“Lady Justice”??? Are men called “Gentleman Justice”? No. So why “Lady Justice”?* Anyway – it was a “rare case” because the accused was a footballer.

Ms Baird, the Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner who played a large role in changing the law in the nineties, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The only difference between a clear conviction of Mr Evans in 2012 and the absolute refusal of him having any leave to appeal at that time, and his acquittal now, is that he has called some men to throw discredit on [the woman’s] sexual reputation.

“That, I think, is pouring prejudice in, which is exactly what used to happen before the law in 1999 stopped the admission of previous sexual history in order to show consent.”

It’s enraging.

At the retrial the jury was told about Evans’s fun night out with the lads, including another footballer, Clayton McDonald.

The men first saw the woman in the early hours of the morning, falling over drunk outside a kebab shop, the court head.

Mr McDonald took her back to the Premier Inn nearby, where Evans had booked a room, text messaging him from the taxi to tell him he had “got a bird”.

They spotted her falling over drunk so they grabbed her and took her to a hotel room. They found a vagina lying around in the street, so naturally they took it to a hotel room so they could put their dicks in it.

Evans insisted he then had consensual sex with the woman before getting up and leaving via a fire exit door when he suddenly realised he was cheating on his girlfriend.

In 2012, a court ruled the woman had not been able to give consent, but on Friday a jury decided unanimously that Evans was not guilty.

Because the fact that she’d had sex before made her consent irrelevant?

And after the verdict, Twitter bullies made the victim’s identity public.

The woman who accused Ched Evans of raping her has been forced to change her name at least five times since 2011, after receiving hundreds of death threats.

Legally, she has the right to lifelong anonymity as a complainant in a sex attack, but has been repeatedly hunted down and exposed by Twitter trolls.

After Evan’s first trial, her name was tweeted by his supporters and then retweeted more than 6,000 times.

Since then, her new identities have been uncovered twice more, forcing her to adopt a new name and move to a new location each time.

Her father has said his daughter has been “living her life on the run” since the incident in 2011.

Oh well, she’s only a woman.

Update: My mistake – high court judges are “Lord Justice” if men so “Lady Justice” if women. Disregard.

Rebecca Solnit again.

So Trump’s position is “I boast about sexually assaulting women, but when women confirm that is true, they are liars, because I was just lying all those times, and you must believe I am telling the truth, because whatever is convenient for me to say in this very moment weighs much more than what they say with witnesses, confirmation, etc., just as I weigh much more than the people I assault.”

I wrote about Bill Cosby and Donald Trump and the way women’s credibility is assaulted if they speak up about being assaulted, before the revelations about their crimes, because it’s the same old same old nearly every woman knows:
The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf — that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be. The daughter of the king of Troy, Cassandra was cursed with the gift of accurate prophecies no one heeded; her people thought she was both crazy and a liar and, in some accounts, locked her up before Agamemnon turned her into a concubine who was casually slain along with him.

I have been thinking of Cassandra as we sail through the choppy waters of the gender wars, because credibility is such a foundational power in those wars and because women are so often accused of being categorically lacking in this department.

Like all those women confirming what he himself said, indeed boasted, of his own free will.

We are still in an era of battles over who will be granted the right to speak and the right to be believed, and pressure comes from both directions. From the “men’s rights” movement and a lot of popular misinformation comes the baseless notion that there is an epidemic of groundless accusations of sexual assault. The implication that women as a category are unreliable and that false rape charges are the real issue is used to silence individual women and to avoid discussing sexual violence, and to make out men as the principal victims. The framework is reminiscent of that attached to voter fraud, a crime so rare in the United States that it appears to have had no significant impact on election outcomes in a very long time. Nevertheless, claims by conservatives that such fraud is widespread have in recent years been used to disenfranchise the kinds of people — poor, non-white, students — likely to vote against them.

I’m not arguing here that women and children don’t lie. Men, women, and children lie, but the latter two are not disproportionately prone to doing so, and men — a category that includes used-car salesmen, Baron Münchhausen, and Richard Nixon — are not possessed of special veracity. I am arguing that we should be clear that this old framework of feminine mendacity and murky-mindedness is still routinely trotted out, and we should learn to recognize it for what it is.

A friend of mine who works in sexual-harassment prevention training at a major university reports that when she gave a presentation at the business school on her campus, one of the older male professors asked, “Why would we start an investigation based on only one woman’s report?” She has dozens of stories like this, and others about women — students, employees, professors, researchers — struggling to be believed, especially when they testify against high-status offenders.

This summer, antediluvian columnist George Will claimed that there is only a “supposed campus epidemic of rape,” and that when universities or feminists or liberals “make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” Young women replied by creating the Twitter hashtag #survivorprivilege, posting remarks such as “I didn’t realize it was a privilege to live with PTSD, severe anxiety & depression” and “#ShouldIBeQuiet because when i spoke out everyone said it was a lie?” Will’s column hardly even constitutes a twist on the old idea that women are naturally unreliable, that there’s nothing to see in all these rape charges, and that we should just move along.

I think I begin to see the pattern.

The Great Barrier Reef is not dead, yet. It’s in trouble but not dead. So far.

Perhaps you have read its obituary by writer Rowan Jacobsen on the website Outside Online.

No, but I saw some headlines, probably inspired by that, so I hit the googles.

“For those of us in the business of studying and understanding what coral resilience means, the article very much misses the mark,” said Kim Cobb, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “It’s not too late for the Great Barrier Reef, and people who think that have a really profound misconception about what we know and don’t know about coral resilience.”

Cobb spoke to the LA Times about the state of the world’s largest reef system, and why there is reason for both concern and hope.

The Great Barrier Reef had a massive bleaching event, but coral reefs can recover from those. (The trouble is, they can recover from them if the water temperature cools, and that doesn’t seem to be the trend…but maybe Cobb will tell us something hopeful.)

Coral is an animal, and the animal exists in symbiosis with photosynthetic algae. The algae provides food for the coral in exchange for a great home. But when the water gets too warm, the algae become chemically destructive to the coral.

When that happens, the coral convulses and spits out puffs of algae to protect itself. That removes all the color from the coral tissue which is transparent, allowing you to see right through to the underlying skeleton. So you are not necessarily seeing dead coral, you’re really just seeing clear coral without its algae.

But that’s still worrying because algae is the food source, so if it’s gone too long the coral will starve to death.

But, if the water temperature comes back down, it will welcome the algae back. The key is that the water temperature change has to be relatively quick.

Ice cubes?

It was El Niño events that turned the temperature up for nine months, which is a long time to starve.

Has the Great Barrier Reef been through anything like this before?

It has had very severe bleaching events associated with large El Ninos like we had last year, but the problem is we are seeing baseline ocean temperatures getting warmer every year. When you pile a strong El Nino on top of this ever warming trend, you get more extreme and more prolonged bleaching episodes.

That’s what I was thinking – the rising baseline temperatures. So then we get to the part where she explains why it doesn’t mean total coral death, and it’s not all that optimistic.

So how can you remain hopeful about the fate of Great Barrier Reef and other reefs in the Pacific?

I work on a research site in the Christmas Islands that is literally smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and which was much more devastated than the Great Barrier Reef. It was worse off than any reef in the world with up to 85% mortality. But even in the face of that whole-scale destruction, we saw individual corals that were still alive, looking like nothing had happened.

I cling to that. I know from my own site that there is a lot more resilience baked into the system then we can hope to understand right now and that out of the rubble will come a reef that may not look exactly like it looked before, but may be better adapted for future temperature change.

Or not.

In news of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and freedom of protest, and freedom of the press –

This Monday afternoon, as the sun hits its peak over Mandan, North Dakota, the award-winning journalist, and host of Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman will walk into the Morton County–Mandan Combined Law Enforcement and Corrections Center and turn herself in to the local authorities. Her crime: good, unflinching journalism.

Goodman had the audacity to commit this journalism on September 3, when she was in North Dakota covering what she calls “the standoff at Standing Rock”: the months-long protests by thousands of Native Americans against the Dakota Access Pipeline. The $3.8 billion oil pipeline is slated to carry barrel after barrel of Bakken crude through sacred sites and burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, and tribe members fear it could pollute the Missouri River, the source not only of their water but of millions of others’, should the pipe ever rupture.

Goodman went there to report when all the major news media had totally ignored the subject.

Clutching a large microphone, she captured the scene as hundreds of protesters tried desperately to stop a crew of bulldozers from tearing up the earth—the earth, they said, that belongs to nobody—only to be confronted by a force of private security contractors wielding attack dogs and pepper spray.

“People have gone through the fence, men, women, and children,” Goodman reported, her voice taut, then rising, louder and more intense. “The bulldozers are still going, and they’re yelling at the men in hard hats. One man in a hard hat threw one of the protesters down…!”

She continued reporting as the security contractors attacked the protesters.

“Why are you letting the dog go after the protesters?” Goodman could be heard shouting at a security contractor as a woman screamed in the background. “It’s covered in blood!”

Within hours of the attack, Democracy Now! had turned its footage into a seven-minute video that it released as a web exclusive. Three days later, Goodman followed up with an extensive report—“Dakota Access Pipeline Co. Attacks Native Americans with Dogs and Pepper Spray”—that she broadcast live on her show. The video quickly went viral, pinging across Twitter and Facebook (where it was viewed more than 14 million times) and landing, ultimately, on the same big news stations that, until that moment, hadn’t bothered to cover the protests: CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR.

It was a few days later that the Obama administration put a temporary halt on the project.

Yet, on September 8, Goodman received the news that Morton County, North Dakota, had issued a warrant for her arrest. The charge: riot, a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine.

She’s a journalist, and she was there reporting. There’s good evidence for that, such as the video and extensive report mentioned above.

When asked to explain the grounds for arresting a working journalist, Erickson told the Grand Forks Herald that he did not, in fact, consider Goodman a journalist. “She’s a protester, basically,” Erickson told the newspaper. “Everything she reported on was from the position of justifying the protest actions.” And in The Bismarck Tribune he later added, “I think she put together a piece to influence the world on her agenda, basically. That’s fine, but it doesn’t immunize her from the laws of her state.”

It’s worth pausing here for a moment to contemplate the full and chilling absurdity of this statement: According to Erickson, a woman who appeared at a protest carrying a microphone emblazoned with the name Democracy Now! and trailing a video crew; who can be heard in the resulting video report identifying herself to a security guard as a reporter; and who then broadcast the video on the daily news program she has hosted for 20 years is not actually a journalist.

By that logic, Lizzy Ratner points out, Ida Tarbell and I. F. Stone weren’t journalists…which is a reductio ad absurdum, because they decidedly were journalists.

So far, North Dakota is refusing to drop the charges.

Remember what I said about seeing women as the same kind of thing as a hamburger when you’re hungry? Dave Holmes at Esquire has the same thought.

Twenty years ago he saw a woman get sexually assaulted on the subway. She was on her way to work at the Fashion Cafe, wearing its uniform of tight T shirt with the logo and a miniskirt.

Here’s where my memory snaps into high-definition: The train approached the Rockefeller Center stop, and she moved toward the exit. A man, seated in the spot nearest the doors, looked her up and down. And then, as the doors opened, he got underneath her skirt and grabbed a handful of her.

It was not a pat, nor a goose, nor a pinch. He got all the way in there, for a full second. It was a grab that had steps to it. Movements. He seemed to know what he was doing, how to maximize that second. He had been here before.

So had she. I saw it in her face: This again. She swatted his hand away with her book, and joined the flow of people off the train. I saw her shoulders tense up as she walked away to start her shift.

What I remember most vividly was the look on the man’s face. Through this entire thing—this entire sexual assault—he looked utterly satisfied. He looked like a hungry bro in a fast-food commercial, about to take a big, well-deserved chomp out of that Carl’s Jr. half-pounder. He looked like he was about to take something that was his. Something he had earned. It was the worst smile I had ever seen, and I can still see it.

Because hey – there she is, wearing that thing that leaves her crotch just hanging there like fruit, ready for him to grab. Why would he not grab it? It’s public property isn’t it? Telling him not to grab it would be like telling him not to walk on the sidewalk. It’s there, it’s public, it’s available.

It is still happening all around us; we hear a man boast about the right to touch any woman’s body any way he wants to, because he has more money than she does and is on television, and we dismiss it as just the way men talk. We hear the stories of actual women who back his own boasts up, and we diminish their seriousness, because, well, there is rap music, so, you know.

For the love of God, some of us—even actual elected officials—continue to support the man’s candidacy for the President of the United States of America.

Women of the world, we have failed you. We have thoroughly, unfailingly, systemically failed you.

The question now, before we even begin to address forgiveness, is: Can we stop?

Some of you? Yes. More than that?

Well, I won’t say it.

Clementine Ford tells us about a thing that happened.

[E]arlier this week, a woman posted a lengthy diatribe to Facebook calling out a man who had engaged in threatening behaviour on public transport. The woman described him harassing three fellow female passengers, pressing into their personal space and insisting they give him high fives. After intervening, she took a photograph of the man and shared it alongside her Facebook post. It was quickly reposted by numerous people, including myself.

Shortly afterwards, unqualified rebuttals started appearing claiming this man had an intellectual disability. This was soon framed as him being autistic, with numerous people (who were not there) deciding this meant his behaviour was harmless and it was the nasty feminazis who were really at fault. Abusive comments (including the belief that she should have been raped and murdered by Adrian Bayley) were then hurled at the woman who wrote the original post. In deeply unsurprising news, she was also besieged with ‘dick pics’ – because of course, the best way to prove that gendered harassment of women doesn’t exist is to send unsolicited photographs of your penis alongside violent commentary.

Since then, the story has appeared on a handful of particularly vitriolic and paranoid men’s rights websites with the spurious claim of autism continually repeated. This is despite the fact none of these sites can actually provide the man’s name or indeed testimony from anyone other than untested ‘witnesses’ (who’ve done nothing to prove they were there). The Daily Telegraph‘s Tim Blair eagerly jumped in with a piece, offering up the bulk of his evidence in the form of a link to a fact-free blog post on the pustular website, Age of Shitlords – and yes, that is a name men seeking to be taken seriously are legitimately going by.

Does that sound familiar? It’s Elevatorgate all over again. There were lots of men – and a few women – insisting that Elevator Guy was autistic, on the basis of absolutely nothing except their desire to exculpate Elevator Guy and culpate his target.

And so now, the kinds of men who abhor ‘social justice warriors’ and fervently defend their right to use words like ‘retard’ – indeed, the kinds of men who support Donald Trump, a walking clusterfuck of offence who not only admits to sexually assaulting women but is on camera mocking a disabled journalist – are suddenly leaping on the opportunity to discredit women’s experiences once again by pretending they suddenly care about the disabled community. Of course, none of them seem able to correctly define autism, with phrases like “mentally handicapped” and “mental illness” being used as catch-alls. But what does that matter when there are bitches to roast for being oversensitive attention seekers?

It must be nice to live in a world where the experience of being harassed on public transport (and in public, generally) is so rare and so neutered that you can easily assume those who assess a situation as such view the world through, as one man put it, “an extremely narrow gaze”. It apparently isn’t relevant that women are constantly instructed to take precautions that safeguard us from harm. That we are told to be on the lookout for strange men and avoid interacting with them. That if we don’t follow this highly sensible and not at all pointless advice that we are ‘asking for it’ and should know what to expect. None of this matters – because the moment we do take measures to protect ourselves and give a heads up to other women too, we are accused of demonising all men and ruining the lives of individual ones.

Heads they win, tails we lose.

Obama points out that Republicans don’t get points for disavowing Trump at this late date, after enabling him and all his horrors for months.

They know better, a lot of these folks who ran, and they didn’t say anything, so they don’t get credit for, at the very last minute, when finally they guy that they nominated and they endorsed and they support is caught on tape saying things that no decent person would even think, much less say, much less brag about, much less brag about or joke about, much less act on, you can’t wait until that finally happens and then say, ‘Oh, that’s too much! That’s enough!’ and think that somehow you are showing any kind of leadership and deserve to be elected to the United States Senate! You don’t get points for that!

The rising generation of baby Trumps:

A young design and technology teacher has used the TES community forums to reveal how male students used their mobiles to take “upskirt” photos while she was leaning over in class.

The 23-year-old – who said she felt “violated” and “threatened” – was concerned that the images would be shared across social media.

The incident took place as she taught more than 20 boys. “My [teaching assistant] noticed a few of my male students acting suspiciously,” the teacher said.

“It turned out, after further inspection…that the boys had been taking photos of up my skirt while I…leaned over to support students [working on] computers.”

She continued: “I’m mostly worried about keeping the authority in the class, and, to be honest, I’m feeling a little violated/threatened by the boys.”

Can we just stop? Can we just stop treating women as prey? Can boys and men just stop carrying on as if women’s bodies are something they’re entitled to steal or capture by stealth in whatever ingenious way they can think of? Can boys and men just stop all this assault and trickery and degrading p0unces, and accept that however sexually hungry they are, they don’t get to make that a woman’s problem against her will?

Unions argue that more needs to be done to tackle the sexual bullying of teachers in schools. They say:

• Space must be found in the curriculum to teach students about inappropriate behaviour;
• Teachers and school leaders should be properly trained on equal opportunities;
• Phones could be turned off in class to prevent such incidents;
• Schools should have clear policies when it comes to sexual bullying.

They fear that pupils’ frequent use of mobile phones and social media to view and share sexually explicit pictures could be exacerbating the problem by endorsing sexualised gender stereotypes.

Ya think?

Mary Bousted, general secretary of the ATL teaching union, said: “This is a very shocking case. It couldn’t be more serious. It’s using sexism to undermine her authority as a teacher and it’s degrading her as a woman.

“I get the sense that things are going backwards. Sexual harassment in too many places has become acceptable. These actions can ruin lives.”

Imagine teaching in that environment.

Here’s a nice animation of Stephen Law’s Evil God Challenge, by Steph Hope for CFI UK.

[Note: I know Stephen and his teeth are not like that!]