Contributor: Josh Hall
Early in 2013 it became public knowledge in the BJJ world that there were terrible allegations of rape levied against two members of Lloyd Irvin’s “medal chasers” by one of their female teammates. Matthew Maldonado and Nicholas Schultz were arrested, indicted, and put on trial for the alleged rape. News broke that the attack had been caught on video, and many people in the BJJ world started to distance themselves from Team Lloyd Irvin. A snowball effect ensued, with side stories popping up regarding unethical and allegedly criminal conduct from different members of the gym. Brent Brookhouse has done some great journalistic work on the story throughout the year, and you can find out many more details on the case here.
It became a forgone conclusion in the combat sports world that both men would be convicted of the crime, as there was surveillance video footage of the alleged rape as well as video from the cell phone of Matthew Maldonado. This case became a stark reminder that there are no certainties in the legal world, as Maldonado was acquitted of all but one lesser attached charge after 5 days of jury deliberation. On October 28 he was released from prison on his own recognizance. One day later he was acquitted on the final remaining charge, and the BJJ community was left in shock.
It was not quite as easy for Schultz, as there was more visual evidence against him, but by November 4 he had been acquitted of all the major charges he faced. The jury did hang on two of the lesser included counts, and Schultz will have to return to court on December 3 for a status hearing where the prosecution will decide whether to retry him on the remaining counts (lesser included charges to “Second Degree Sex Abuse- Incompetent With Aggravating Circumstances” and “First Degree Sex Abuse- Force With Aggravating Circumstances”). This is only speculation in my part, but I would be shocked if the prosecution doesn’t decide to dismiss the remaining counts. After such a spectacular failure in a publicized trial it seems highly unlikely that any further prosecution will ensue.
The big question that remains: How does an acquittal happen in spite of video evidence? Everyone wants the answer to this key question, but without seeing the video for ourselves it is impossible to make an accurate assessment. The only thing we have to go on is second hand information from the very few people that have actually seen it (and even fewer willing to speak about it). You can read the entire criminal complaint here, complete with graphic descriptions of the video evidence (CAUTION: THIS IS A VERY DISTURBING READ, AND CAN SET OFF TRIGGERS FOR VICTIMS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT)
I’m not even going to get into the lurid details listed in the complaint here. Just reading it makes me feel like I need a shower, and there is no point in breaking the alleged assault down point by point. It would be an exercise in futility that would help exactly no one. I have done a lot of research and writing about sexual assault (against adults and children), and the alleged details of this particular case still bother me in a way that is hard to put into words. If they are even half true, a terrible miscarriage of justice has occurred. However, without having seen the video personally, I cannot confirm the veracity of the allegations.
One of the few people that have spoken out about the video is Aaron France, a Washington D.C. police detective and an instructor at BETA academy (a former affiliate BJJ school of Team Lloyd Irvin). France made a lengthy post about this that went viral on his Facebook page after Maldonado was acquitted, and I encourage everyone to read it in its entirety. Here is an excerpt from his statement:
“I didn’t sit through most of the trial. I had the opportunity to drop in every now and then, while on down time during other trials and court matters that I had to attend. I did get to see a few things, and at one point during all of this, I had the opportunity to view the surveillance footage of the garage. What I saw was deplorable. The video depicted Schultz and Maldonado carry the victim into a parking garage. They brought her over to a wall of the garage, removed her pants, and had sex with her. I will keep some of the details to myself, but one of them was in front of her, and one of them was behind her. During this, one of them hands her a phone, which we later learned was used to capture a video where the victim is heard telling them to stop.
At a certain point in the video, Maldonado leaves, and Schultz continues. As I recall, Maldonado briefly returned, at which point Schultz was kneeling over her, forcing her into oral sex. She turned her head away numerous times and at one point Schultz drops her head onto the pavement. After that is said and done, Schultz leaves. The victim is laying on the pavement, half-naked, at 3 am, when it was 38 degrees outside. Metropolitan Police Department Officers found her because someone heard her yelling for help, after being alone on the pavement for something like 40 minutes.
None of this is speculation. This is my recollection of the video, which I viewed with my own eyes. I do not believe that either of them are innocent, or that they were falsely accused. There has been a very small subset of people acting as an advocate for Maldonado’s “innocence” claiming that he believed this was a consensual encounter.
Ask yourself; if this happened to your wife, your daughter, your girlfriend, your sister, or even a close female friend, would you advocate Maldonado’s innocence? Most of you would be calling for blood. Some of you would even take it yourselves. So if we were to look at Maldonado’s behavior, put criminal implications aside and give him the benefit of the doubt, here’s the best thing we can say about him… He had sex with a woman who was intoxicated to the point where she could not walk, and afterwards he treated her like a piece of trash, by leaving her half naked on the cement floor of a parking garage, in the middle of the night, when it was barely above freezing.”
You can read the statement in its entirety here.
I am going to focus here on the last piece in the excepted section of Detective France’s statement. Even if you hypothetically give Maldonado and Schultz the benefit of the doubt regarding consent and paint the situation in the best possible light, they had sex with a teammate who was so drunk she could not walk on her own, then left her half naked in a freezing parking garage after they were done with her. Even if you subscribe to the “she was into it” theory (UGH), it is a pretty safe assumption she did not want to be thrown away like garbage to possibly freeze to death. She was found in the garage screaming for help, which doesn’t sound like the end to a fun sexual encounter between friends.
At this point you have to be wondering how all of this led to an acquittal on all of the major charges. I wish I had a solid answer to that question, but sadly I cannot provide one. The only thing I have seen regarding the position of the jury is this:
“One juror said they watched the surveillance video of the incident 100 times and he said he was leaning guilty but there was too much reasonable doubt as to consent.”
“Blurry images … you really couldn’t tell heads or tails what was going on so it made it very difficult,’ the juror says.”
From this statement we can reasonably infer that the jurors did not take intoxication into account, and made the entire case about her consent (even though that cannot be given in a state of intoxication). Surveillance footage is rarely the highest quality, and the blurry video was apparently all the jury needed to find reasonable doubt. However, the fact that there was a mistrial on two counts for Schultz establishes that some of the jurors felt wrongdoing had occurred in some fashion, and they were willing to deliberate for more than a week before finally announcing they were hopelessly deadlocked on the remaining charges. This also means there was at least one juror that felt that Maldonado and Schultz had done no wrong, and there was no changing his/her/their mind(s). I don’t know what the split was for the hung jury and won’t speculate on that.
BJJ blogger Georgette Oden has covered the case in great detail, and she received correspondence from someone else that watched the video in question at the trial. Here is an excerpt from her post regarding a possible reason for the jury’s verdict:
“Just dealing with one small fragment of what this this viewer described as the survivor moving her body in a certain way as evidence of consent. That is a definite physical movement [xxx]. But there are many layers of interpretation going into that description. Was it volitional movement? was she swaying from intoxication or fatigue or momentum from his force? was she moving moving backwards towards something behind her versus away from something in front of her? LOTS of ways to interpret what is seen– not even really getting into WHY the movement happened.
Then if you KNOW what the movement really was, the MOTIVE for the movement is still not crystal clear. Let’s assume the survivor moved, and moved towards the assailant, volitionally and not for any other reason like swaying from fatigue or intoxication… let’s say for argument’s sake moving her body closer to his…. the next step the viewer may take is to assume that this means the survivor was consenting. But not to be too graphic– I’ll just say that in my years of experience as a sexual assault crisis counselor meeting survivors in emergency rooms immediately post-assault, I have heard more than one survivor say that the most painful part of rape is the sawing back and forth, and that they tried to move closer to avoid as much of that motion as possible.
So, the framework of the audience will play a huge role in the interpretation. If you are watching to establish a list of reasons you could claim consent (i.e. if you’re New Defense Attorney come to watch Heavy Hitters Showing How It’s Done) then you will see movement where there is none… or you’ll see movement towards penetration instead of swaying from drunk fatigue, as examples, and then that movement will register in your mind (like the so-called minds of the Phil Proctor-esque idiots yammering on the internet) as “backing it up.”
(http://georgetteoden.blogspot.com/2013/11/q-on-trial-and-videos-part-one.html)
When the case comes down to the interpretation of the movements of an intoxicated woman on a grainy video, it becomes a little easier to understand the verdict, although it is no consolation for people that feel that the victim did not get justice in this case. If a juror was looking for a reason to acquit, after listening to the defense and watching the video the waters seem to be sufficiently muddied enough to find a “not guilty” verdict.
The sad truth out of all of this is that this case has highlighted a sad part of the society we live in. Rape culture is a very real thing, and it reared its ugly head throughout the process of the trial long before there was a verdict. For more on rape culture, Wikipedia actually does a very good job of summing it up succinctly.
Upon first news of the arrest, comments began to pop up about how the victim was a slut, a lying bitch, and many more comments along those lines. Post-verdict some people actually wanted the state to file charges against the victim for trying to ruin these poor men’s lives. If you think I am exaggerating, you can see some specific examples here.
To pick out a couple of notable quotes (with my personal take on them):
“There is a new trend of accusing men of rape if they have sex with a woman who has had too much to drink.”- JR Gore
No, JR. That is rape by definition, but thanks for playing.
“This woman should be imprisoned.”- Reed Shelger
Rape is already one of the most, if not the most underreported crime in the United States. Victim blaming is one of the hallmarks of rape culture, and an acquittal does not mean by any measure that jurors thought the victim falsely accused the defendants. It simply means the case could not be proven, nothing more.
“Obviously my position is not a popular one among this crowd, and I have nothing to gain from this debate. I’ll just say, none of us really knows what happened. They were all young, drunk, and dumb. And I suspect she felt stupid the next day and decided to claim she was raped, and I don’t think its fair. I agree they are bad friends if they left here there intentionally.”- Reed Shelger again (Writer’s note: In the screenshots in the above link Shelger says he is friends with Schultz, then says here he has nothing to gain in the debate. Right…)
So, Reed, in your words, none of us know what happened but the accuser should be jailed? That is one hell of a position to take. As for the victim feeling stupid the next day, she was found in the garage an hour later, half naked and freezing while screaming for help. But what else can be expected from a man that isn’t even convinced Schultz and Maldonado are even bad friends for what went down?
And, my personal favorite:
“I don’t see any blogs about the accuser’s background or anyone standing up to say what type of person she is. Who is to say she didn’t want to have a threesome, have her boyfriend find out, he kick the shit out of her and to save face cry rape? Prove it didn’t happen that way! Isn’t that the courts job? Not some internet bloggers job?”- Michael Dill
Somehow this woman’s boyfriend showed up at the parking garage to kick the shit out of her for having a threesome (I can only assume this man has psychic powers), and yet none of this is on the video (I can only assume he is invisible as well). This can literally be disproven by reading anything about the case, but for some, rape apology has no boundaries.
I don’t think there is much more to say here. There will likely always be questions that none of us aside from people who witnessed the trial can answer. Even then, clearly interpretation of the video plays a huge factor and that varies from person to person. I would love to stand on my feminist soapbox and state that I am 100% certain that this verdict was solely a result of rape culture, but I simply can’t do that. From an emotional standpoint this whole situation makes me sick, but a gut feeling doesn’t get a conviction in a court of law. I can say with confidence that the actions of Maldonado and Schultz this past New Year’s Eve were morally deplorable (even if not found to be illegal), and I will vocally boycott any gym that has anything to do with either man.
Not guilty does not always mean innocent.
-Josh can be reached at [email protected] or @jhall282.
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