A Conversio Virium member after a caning demonstration at Columbia University.

“Sometimes my friends and I stop each other mid-sentence and say, ‘Oh my god, you guys. We go to Harvard. This is so weird,’” Maria, a junior, said recently over Skype chat.

Harvard had been Maria’s dream school for years. (She requested a pseudonym, but not because she’s not proud of her alma mater.) A valedictorian of her New England public high school, she got in on the basis of a 4.0 GPA and started working toward an English major. Last year, she began looking around for some extracurricular activities to enrich her college experience. There were more than 400 student groups to choose from. Maria chose a group called Munch. Her goal was to meet new people, to explore something new, maybe to release some of the pressure that comes with trying to compete in an intimidating hothouse of rampant overachievement.

Maria is petite, with honey-blonde hair and brown eyes. They widened as she ticked off a few of the areas she hoped to explore in her free time: “Bondage, handcuffs, ice play...”

Maria is, she said, less a masochist than a submissive. “So a lot of taking orders and stuff like that,” she explained. “I’m really into the whole exhibitionist thing, semi-public places, mirrors...” In addition to educational meetings on campus, Munch members have occasionally gotten together in private to “play.” Since joining, Maria’s had a chance to explore some of her fantasies. “I’ve been hit with a riding crop, a belt, a paddle, canes, a flogger ... floggers are my favorite.”

The popularity of 50 Shades of Grey has accelerated a mainstreaming of the BDSM subculture already underway—the initials stand for bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism—and the trend has been especially pronounced in our more elite institutions of higher learning. Columbia has a BDSM group. So do Tufts, MIT, Yale and the University of Chicago. Brown, UPenn and Cornell have hosted BDSM educators for on-campus seminars entitled “The Freedom of Kink” and “Kink for All.” It looks like conservatives who have long viewed the Ivy League a bastion of depravity may have a point after all.

But some young members of such groups are finding the subculture is offering them more of an education than they expected, confronting them with serious issues involving consent, disclosure, anonymity, sexual violence, guilt and innocence, crime and punishment.

While the scene’s mantra—“safe, sane and consensual”—is heard so often it might as well be translated into needlepoint, violations of these maxims are common. In the last year, hundreds of people have come forward to describe the abuse they’ve suffered within the scene. The victims are mostly women, and like 50 Shades’ fictional 22-year-old Anastasia Steele, many are also young, submissive and uncertain about their boundaries.

In December, Victoria (not her real name), a 20-year-old English major at an Ivy League school, had decided to skip reading period, apply more makeup than usual and venture on her own to a kinky meet-upshe had read about on FetLife, a social networking service for fetishists. Victoria didn’t have any experience with submissive sex, but she had been drawn to it for years; she sometimes had fantasies about dungeons or about being restrained or embarrassed, and she recalled family trips to Medieval Times having given her an unusual erotic charge.

The meeting was fun. Victoria had interesting conversations about neurobiology and religion and, of course, about kinky sex. It was near the end of the evening when a man walked in whom she recognized; he had tried to form an S&M club on her campus a few years before. Eric had a doughy, impish face and slicked-back hair, and he wore his cell phone in a carrier on his hip.

A week later the two went to a “play-party.” After some reluctance, Victoria agreed to negotiate some tentative participation, defining safe words and off-limits actions. But once the two were alone in a corner, she said, Eric put a knife to her throat and began groping her. Victoria was shaken, but she couldn’t help doubting herself. Maybe this was how it was supposed to be, she figured.

The next day, when Eric asked her to send him an email stating what had happened and describing it as consensual, she complied. “At the time, I felt like this must be normal,” she said. “Now it seems obvious he was just building up a defense.”

The BDSM scene can be violent by nature. Physical and psychological power, and the lack thereof, are at the heart of the erotic experience. As a result, sexual assault can be harder to define and harder to prove. But that’s not to say it doesn’t happen. Indeed, awareness of the problem seems to be growing, and controversies around the issue have been roiling the tight-knit fetish community all year.

Kitty Stryker and Maggie Mayhem were up late one night, chatting online. Both are known as sex-positive activists and celebrities within the sadomasochism world. That night, they began to swap sexual-assault stories and realized the experience was more common than either had known. The pair began collecting similar tales online, and it wasn’t long before they had amassed more than 300 anecdotes. The stories ranged from more benign assaults (unwanted groping) to tales of being drugged and raped. Many of the victims described abusers who were well-known members of the community, people who hosted parties or helped to organize the scene.

“What we found is that the abuse was systematic,” said Ms. Stryker, who regularly goes by a pseudonym. “People had these stories, but when they went to report them to community leaders, they were dismissed as drama. Not only that, but people were ostracized for reporting. It becomes clear how easy it is for an abuser to swoop in on a newbie.”

Meanwhile, Andy, a 24-year-old law student who lives in New York City, also began collecting abuse stories, publishing them directly on FetLife. Andy is something of a New York scene fixture, known for throwing massive BDSM galas that include such attractions as “glitter bathtubs” and fake-blood tableaux modeled on the TV series Dexter. A transgendered male, he quickly collected hundreds of anecdotes, many from fellow New Yorkers, some of which called out abusers by FetLife username. “I knew the people they were naming,” Andy said. “There were party organizers and influential people that users were saying had done horrible things to them,” he said. Publishing these accounts on the social network had a galvanizing effect. Every time someone “loved” a post it showed up on their feed. Soon, everyone on the site knew who was being accused of what—though they didn’t always know the identities of the accusers.

When FetLife employees caught wind of the posts, they began removing usernames. Employees warned that lodging criminal accusations against users violated the site’s terms of service. CEO John Baku then got involved, stating that he was sorry for everyone who’d experienced abuse and suggesting that victims go to the police. (Mr. Baku declined to comment for this article.) The CEO’s involvement spurred hundreds of comments from users, many siding with the site’s administrators and warning of an epidemic of false accusations. Others backed Andy, arguing that the community should police itself and support victims. BDSM is illegal in some states, and many practitioners do not feel comfortable going to the police.

“The types of abuse that happen when you are new and vulnerable are happening to us now,” Andy said. It was a fall afternoon, and he was sitting in an East Village cafe, wearing a fedora, white suspenders and a black Janelle Monae shirt. “There are people in the New York scene that everyone knows are bad news, and people tell you but no one does anything about it. Since FetLife has emerged, we’ve had this giant influx of young people coming into the scene who haven’t been around long enough to hear the whispers.”

As word spread about the multiple accounts of consent violation, the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF) launched a survey. “We haven’t closed it yet, but so far we have 5,000 responses, and over 30 percent of them had have their previously negotiated limit violated, which I think is horrific,” said spokesperson Susan Wright. “There is still confusion between consensual BDSM and assault.”

As the debate around naming abusers wore on, FetLife stuck to its policy.

Things got more complicated when Mr. Baku himself was accused. The story came to light on the personal blog of a woman named called SinShine Love. “Let it be clear,” she wrote, “the reason John sees no problem with any of this rape apologist bullshit is because he has a foggy ass notion of consent and acceptable behavior himself. And because he personally benefits from people like me staying silent.”

Mr. Baku issued an apology for his behavior on FetLife, stating that he was drunk the night in question, though he didn’t specifically admit to abuse.

“We enforce the idea that you can say no to anything,” said Holli, a leader of Columbia University’s BDSM group, Conversio Virium. “There are a lot of young, inexperienced people that come to us for guidance and an introduction to the scene. A lot of them become easy targets for people to prey on at play parties. Sometimes young people like to say ‘Yes, yes, yes’ to everyone they encounter at a fetish party or event, but if you say ‘yes’ when you mean ‘I’m not so sure about this,’ the lines about whether actual consent was given start to blur.”

Samantha Berstler, a student at Harvard who had studied the scene, supports Conversio Virium but questions the group’s willingness to admit non-students. “Why not just put a big neon sign on the door that says, ‘Vulnerable young nubile college students, many without strong support networks in the city yet, please come take advantage of them?’” she wondered.

Every time she logs into FetLife she sees the same story, Ms. Berstler added. “Someone else I know is writing that a relationship was completely abusive, and of course she was young and a college student and pretty and new.”

Consent is paramount at Harvard’s BDSM group, Munch, said the group’s leader, who asked to be identified as Michael. Right now, the university is considering giving the group its official backing, provided it adopts specific policies to educate members on how to deal with abuse. “We are working on developing standardized policies,” he said. “Right now that mostly exists with the function of an email list—anyone who joins the list gets a spiel.”

Victoria could have used the support of a good student group. After she and Eric broke up, she told her friends about the darker elements of their relationship—how he would repeatedly threaten to rape her and how maybe sometimes what he did actually seemed like rape, and how he once casually suggested he might be a serial killer. She said she had sometimes felt forced into sex acts, including electrocution and “fire play.”

Everyone agreed that this was abuse, but when she talked about reporting it, they waffled.

The NCSF has been working on new community guidelines about what constitutes consent and what doesn’t. Ms. Wright says she’s also been developing an app with FetLife that will direct members who have been abused to the authorities, as well as a new program that helps victims report to the police in general.

Meanwhile, despite FetLife’s best efforts, alleged abusers are still being publicly identified. A tech-savvy member of the BDSM community named MayMay recently developed an app that puts a yellow square around the profile photo of anyone who has been accused of abuse, along with a description of their alleged misdeeds. The yellow square can only be seen within the app, a free download.

After her breakup with Eric, Victoria sought out the help of a therapist and was diagnosed with PTSD. Eventually, she decided to press charges.

“I met a lawyer and we just picked the three most obvious instances of rape,” she recalled. “He said it wouldn’t make sense to file a report of 20 instances. I was worried that if I made the report, Eric would come attack me or kill me, and I didn’t want to put my life in danger unless I was certain something would come of it.” Victoria’s lawyer went to a friend who was a DA and asked what he would do with such a case.

Victoria was sitting in the school library weeks later when she received the email from her lawyer. The DA said he would throw the case out. BDSM scenarios are just too complicated to prosecute, he said.

One afternoon, Michael again met with school administrators about Munch gaining official recognition as a student group. Michael and two other group leaders sat and waited for their turn to be seen. Other student group leaders had arrived late and were wearing shorts. Michael and the other Munch members had worn suits. They were nervous.

The meeting was tense, but Michael felt it went well. “One of the big concerns that they had were issues of consent, and I’m proud to say we did a good job of representing ourselves as a group that takes consent very seriously,” he said. He hopes that Munch can become a leader in larger discussions about sexual abuse on campus, taking its consent-is-paramount model to the “vanilla” world. Harvard will make a determination about the group’s official status at the end of November.

editorial@observer.com

Joshua Flecha, released on molestation charges

On Tuesday, we reported that the NYPD had arrested a second man in relation to the +20 sexual attacks in the Park Slope/Sunset Park area since March. The 32-year-old Midtown bartender Joshua Flecha was caught trying to break into a car...or at least that's what detectives thought until they realized that he was actually looking at a pornography on his phone and pleasuring himself. One correct identification by a witness relating to a May 7th attack, and it looked like between Mr. Flecha and Adolfo Martinez (the first man arrested last week, who has already confessed to a groping), the case might be shut.

Except...

Except now the 37-year-old woman who had positively ID'd Flecha in a lineup is recanting her testimony, telling the police that she will no longer cooperate with them, she wasn't sure, and the NYPD should "not call her again." This strange turn of events has left the NYPD with no choice but to let Mr. Flecha go. (Though he will still be charged with possession of marijuana.)

As for Mr. Flecha, he told reporters outside the precinct yesterday:

"I am 100% innocent...This was torture. I've been living a nightmare. ... I just want to clear my name."

More damning than NYPD's inability to catch this guy is the victim's words themselves...in their hurry to shut the case on Flescha, it sounds like they went over the line with the witness. A victim of sexual assault needs to be treated with kid gloves, not interrogated. Why else would she be telling the police not to call her back?

The Park Slope sexual assault suspect poster

Now that everyone in New York has learned that at least 20 incidents of sexual assault have occurred in the Park Slope area since March, it's bound to drive real estate way down.  But don't worry: the NYPD have caught a second suspect in just as many weeks in relation to the incidents. According to The New York Times' City Room blog, 32-year-old Queens resident Joshua Flecha was approached by a plainsclothes police who thought he was breaking in to a car. Turns out, he was just masturbating onto a car:

Officers discovered Mr. Flecha holding a cellphone that was playing a pornographic video; his fly was unzipped and he had marijuana in his possession, Mr. Browne said.

A victim of an attack in May later picked Mr. Flecha out of a lineup for a sexual assault committed at the entrance to the Seventh Avenue F train. In that case, the assailant grabbed her breast and then exposed himself and masturbated in front of her, according to the spokesman.

The first man arrested in association with the attacks, Adolfo Martinez, is still being held without bail after confessing to fondling an 18-year-old last week. Leading us to wonder: does that mean it's finally safe to go back to Park Slope, or is the NYPD trying to sell the public on a multiple-molester conspiracy?

Thompson.

“Let me just say this: I don’t seek out the high-profile cases, but any lawyer who would tell you they don’t want a high-profile case wouldn’t be telling you the truth,” said Kenneth Thompson. “If you look at my background, yes, I’ve done some high-profile cases, but I’m not a high-profile guy.” He was sitting behind his desk in the sleek law offices of his firm, Thompson Wigdor, which currently represents Nafissatou Diallo, the victim of an alleged sexual assault at the hands of ex-I.M.F. chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

A month earlier, however, at an impromptu press conference on the steps of the Manhattan Supreme courthouse, a high-profile guy is exactly what Mr. Thompson looked like. He spoke in the cadence of a seasoned trial attorney as he described the alleged events of May 14. In graphic detail, he narrated the account of the assault Ms. Diallo alleges to have suffered at the hands of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in room 2806 of the Midtown Sofitel.

“She was told no one was inside that room,” Mr. Thompson intoned, “and she went into that room believing that no one was inside that room. And then Dominique Strauss-Kahn came running out of one of those rooms, naked, towards her. And he grabbed her breasts first and started to attack her. He then grabbed her vagina with so much force that he hurt her. He grabbed her vagina with so much force that he bruised her vagina. When she went to the hospital later that day, the nurses who examined her saw the bruises on her vagina that were caused by Dominique Strauss’s hand …

“We believe that the district attorney is laying the foundation to dismiss this case, anyone can see that,” he added with finality. “We don’t have confidence that they are ever going to put Dominque Strauss-Kahn on trial.”

Repeating points for emphasis, and stopping to emphasize to reporters “and this is important,” he shaped the sordid story. It was uncomfortable to hear—no doubt his intention. By the 10-minute mark, Mr. Thompson was really hitting his stride with a full-blown jeremiad on abuse of power. He was the heir to a tradition of very public lawyers, men like Johnnie Cochrane and Sanford Rubenstein, who seem to materialize any time a case—particularly a racially charged case—hits the front page.

Despite his claim to the contrary, Mr. Thompson seems particularly adept at having high-profile clients find him. In recent years, he has represented Sandra Guzman, a former editor at The New York Post who sued the paper for wrongful termination, alleging discrimination; Sherr-una Booker, the woman who accused an aide of Gov. David Paterson of domestic abuse; victims of the midtown steampipe explosion; families of the victims of the 2008 Upper East Side crane collapse; and state Democrats named in last year’s Aqueduct scandal. But the D.S.K. case is Mr. Thompson’s breakout moment.

To say that Mr. Thompson was trying the case in the press would not be strictly accurate. He was not technically a litigant in the case. But what he was clearly doing was trying to get the case to trial, using the press. In his mind, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance was on the verge of dropping the charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn, and Mr. Thompson was using one of the few tools left at his disposal to strong-arm Mr. Vance into proceeding with the prosecution. “The district attorney has an obligation to stand up for this rape victim,” Mr. Thompson insisted.

The D.A.’s office was frustrated with the move. “It became clear that his motivation was not doing what he could to help prosecutors build a criminal case,” said a source close to the matter. “If anything, he seemed determined to work against it. Publicly promoting his own agenda vastly overshadowed advocating for his client.”

The offices of Thompson Wigdor more closely resemble a digital ad agency than a law firm. The space, designed by the small Williamsburg architectural firm Studio Tractor, is all clean lines and Modernist aesthetics. Mr. Thompson’s office is devoid of the usual legal paraphernalia—shelves of law books, for instance—usually associated with a lawyer’s office.

With his large carriage and expressive face, Mr. Thompson, is a man of considerable presence. He recounted his life story. which at times had the ring of an introduction at a dinner in his honor. “You’re looking at some one who was born and raised in the city,” he told The Observer. “I’m as New York as they come.”

Born in Harlem, he was brought up in Co-op City by a single mother who worked as an N.Y.P.D. patrol officer (an assignment made possible by a class action suit filed by female officers, who had until then been relegated to desk duty in the department). He produced a copy of I Can Be Anything, a sort of self-help career book from the ’70s. A paperclip-marked page has a picture of his mother in uniform, smiling proudly for the camera.

He did reasonably well at John Jay college, and excelled at N.Y.U. law, where he met Ron Noble, then an evidence professor, but now the head of Interpol, based in Lyon, France. When he was tapped to head the federal investigation of the raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, Mr. Noble choose the young Mr. Thompson to join him in D.C. “It was clear to me that he was going to have a distinguished career in the courtroom and that he was going to be on the side of justice,” Mr. Noble told The Observer.

“He allowed me to write a section of the report,” recalled Mr. Thompson, “which was a big deal. And since the head of the Secret Service reported to him, I was able to go to the White House on occasion, and that was a big deal.” He emphasizes this last phrase in such a way that conveys that the privilege was a big deal to him, but also a big deal.

Then came the Abner Louima case. By 1997, Mr. Thompson had done three years as a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York (after having turned down a job in the Manhattan D.A.’s office, ironically.) “I was at my desk late one night, and I knew the guy who had the case from the beginning. I went to law school with him,” Mr. Thompson recalled. “[He] called me up and told me he had a client who was sodomized by the police, and I’m like, ‘Yeah right, okay, I’ll talk to you later.’ He said, ‘No I’m serious, I want you to set up a meeting with your boss.’ And so, weeks later, the Louima case was all in the papers.”

Mr. Thompson, the most junior member of the prosectution team—which included Alan Vinegrad and Loretta Lynch, both of whom would go on to become the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District—was chosen to give the opening statement. “They made a decision to give it to me. I didn’t lobby for it, didn’t expect it,” he said, “but I knew it was going to be the most important assignment I’ve ever had. And when I walked to the court house that day, I was with my fiancée, who is now my wife, there were 20 news vans outside in Cadman Plaza. It was very intimidating, but I went in and gave that opening statement.”

Mr. Thompson’s address to the jury was plainspoken, graphic and meant to inspire discomfort (not unlike his courthouse-steps account of the Strauss-Kahn case).

“Justin Volpe and Charles Schwarz began to inflict their own special brand of punishment,” he recounted to the jury, “their own special brand of brutality, their own special brand of torture. Justin Volpe pushed Mr. Louima down to the floor of the bathroom and Abner Louima’s face ended up next to a filthy toilet bowl. There was Abner Louima, lying there, handcuffed behind his back, pants down to his knees.” And it only got more gut-wrenching from there.

As Mr. Thompson’s own website points out, no less than Jimmy Breslin reported that he “delivered an opening statement that will be remembered.”

“Zach Carter [the U.S. attorney at the time] had hundreds of prosecutors. Why did they choose me?” Mr. Thompson asked himself aloud. “I think they knew that when I speak,” he answered, “I speak in an earnest way to the jury. I don’t talk over jurors, I talk to them, as if we’re all stuck on the 5 train. I say, ‘The guy got out the car, and he punched the guy right in his face.’ I talk to them like that. I don’t go, ‘The guy exited the vehicle and the assailant perpetrated … ’ I don’t talk like that. I am me.”

The Louima case was a watershed moment for Mr. Thompson, a high- profile case in which he not only stood quite clearly on the side of justice, but also one in which he, and the other members of the prosecution, won. “That Louima case to me was the case that really shaped me as a trial lawyer,” he said. “I knew at that point I could try a big case. I had done the trial with these great prosecutors and I held my own. “

But it wasn’t only when he found his legs as a big time trial attorney, but also where he made his first forays into dealing with the press. By his own admission, he took to it gamely. “It was the first time I’d ever spoken to the press,” he remembered, though it’s hard to imagine there was a time before he spoke to the press. “You see that picture right there,” he gestured toward the back wall of his office. “Zach Carter spoke, and then a reporter said, does anyone else have anything to say, and I said, ‘Yeah I do.’ I said, ‘If you’re looking for a hero, look no further than Abner Louima,’ and I made some other comments. Pretty audacious, but I felt that that needed to be said.”

After the Diallo case, Mr. Thompson made the not-unusual move to private practice, joining the large corporate firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius as an employment-discrimination attorney. (“My wife said, ‘We gotta make some money.’”), but after several years, he left there, along with fellow attorneys Douglas Wigdor and Scott Gilly, to form the independent firm Thompson, Wigdor & Gilly.

Over the years, Mr. Thompson’s cases got bigger, and his skills both in the courtroom and in the press seemed to have kept pace.

“He connects with juries,” said a former Thompson Wigdor partner, Andrew Goodstadt. “He connects with members of the media. I mean, you saw him standing out in front of the court house on D.S.K. I mean for a 35-minute uninterrupted CNN interview where you use the word vagina 20 times in four minutes.”

“He is certainly gifted in the way he expresses himself in court,” said one seasoned litigator who has opposed Mr. Thompson in court, “but I think that the handling of the case ... there’s certainly things that he does—and I’ve seen it with my own eyes—where it is very much in a gray area. And there are hard-and-fast ethical rules, and he pushes the envelope. And there’ve been instances where I’ve seen judges’ eyes go up, because he pushes the envelope so far that it was clear that he crossed the line.”

In fact, earlier this year, Thompson Wigdor was sanctioned by a Manhattan judge for failing to disclose facts to opposing counsel, which resulted in the departure of named partner Scott Gilly.

“I think the entire Thompson Wigdor model,” said Mr. Goodstadt, “is not as not always as chummy with opposing council as some lawyers are. But they do it all in the interest of their own clients.”

“I think it’s more so there’s tremendous financial gain. There’s tremendous ego wrapped up in it,”  the seasoned litigator said. “I guess you’ve got to litigate against him once, and then you just realize he’s so full of shit.”

Still, both Mr. Thompson’s skill and aspirations may lie as much beyond the legal realm as within it.  As attorney for Sherr-una Booker, a client he took on virtually pro bono, Mr. Thompson was less a legal resource than a trusted adviser and spokesperson, dealing with the press and managing the message. I didn’t feel like I could trust many people,” Ms. Booker told The Observer. “People were just hounding me, on top of me, and just all over me … I felt confident and secure, and as soon as he stepped in, Ken understood how to deal with the media. He had a rapport.”

Mr. Thompson’s standing in the black community has also been ascendant. He is a member of the Christian Cultural Center, a hugely influential, predominantly black megachurch in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn. With a congregation of more than 30,000 members, it is not a bad place for an ambitious lawyer to get to know the borough’s power base. It was there that Ms. Diallo first appeared in public, at a July 28 press conference.

“Ken has been with us for about 10 years,” said the church’s pastor and CEO, A.R. Bernard. “He and his family became part of the ministry when he really began to get high-profile cases. I remember that Louima case. We sat and talked, and I spoke to him as a mentor, and that really began a much closer relationship than pastor and casual parishioner.

“In a large congregation such as ours, many of those cases came as a result,” added Rev. Bernard. “You take the case with the steam pipe explosion, right? Regular family of our church. You take another case with Macy’s,” he said referring to a class action suit filed by Mr. Thompson’s firm against the department store chain, which also came to Mr. Thompson through the church. Democratic State Senator John Sampson is also a congregant.

“I will say that we’ve discussed it,” said Rev. Bernard, when asked about Mr. Thompson’s political prospects. “That’s as far as I’ll go.” According to Rev. Bernard,  Mr. Thompson “keeps a small circle of relationships, purposely. And he has to, especially with the aspirations that he has going forward in terms of serving people.”

“I think its just kind of assumed,” Mr. Goodstadt added.

For his part, Mr. Thompson denies any immediate political ambitions. “Down the road, maybe, when I’m 60,” he said. “I got small kids, I’ve got a brownstone in Brooklyn.”

I’m a lawyer,” he added emphatically.

In the meantime, Mr. Thompson, on behalf of Ms. Diallo, has filed a civil suit in Bronx Supreme Court, seeking unspecified damages from Dominique Strauss-Kahn. “I look forward to trying this case,” said Mr. Thompson, in trial lawyer mode once again. “I really do. I look forward to standing in front of a jury describing how a hard-working woman who came here from Africa because of the promise of America, who never had any issues for three years at that hotel walked into that room after she was told no one was in there and was violently attacked … I looked forward to telling that to a jury, because one thing I have is that faith in the jury system.”

bgallagher@observer.com