Discussion: Dozens Come Forward About U Madison Student Charged With Sex Assault

A search warrant filed in Dane County this week said Madison police have also been contacted by “dozens of other females” since Cook was charged in the Oct. 12 case.

Officers searching Alec Cook’s Madison apartment found a black book with names of women he had met, Madison police investigator Grant Humerickhouse told the Star Tribune.

“The entries went on to document what he wanted to do with the females,” Humerickhouse said. “Disturbingly enough, there were statements of ‘kill’ and statements of ‘sexual’ desires.”

Looks like the cops have turned this into a legal clusterfuck already.

Who could possibly blame you or anyone for not pressing charges. Most woman would rather deal with their pain in private than risk being humiliated and degraded for a second time – in public. Men who have been raped by other men fare even worse.

It’s definitely push back time folks.

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What a terrible experience, and it happens far, far too often. If guys hear about such things often enough, some of them at least will not take advantage of women, even when drink, drugs or just fatigue would provide the opportunity.

As for the authorities, how did it make you feel to be taken so lightly over a serious incident?

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It’s absolutely of merit to highlight a case like this to reinforce that if more people come forward sexual abusers can actually be put away, and that the police will actually pursue your case and can find evidence.

Usually I’d prefer the reporting be done on the actual trial rather than on social media posts, but we’ve crossed the Rubicon on the issue of social media entwining with the news.

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I don’t think I actually ever spoke with the authorities–it was just the medical professional who did the exam. They might have brought in a counselor, but I don’t exactly recall. I’m not even sure whether/how the incident itself was reported to law enforcement. I remember being very concerned about how much the exam would cost, and fortunately it was an expense the state covered.

It was a very confusing time. The antiviral meds I had to take as a precaution (for maybe a month, I think, or maybe it was just a week) made me feel sick all the time and I was reeling, suspecting my drink the previous night had been poisoned, and feeling betrayed by two other people who were around that night and were either unaware of what was going on or didn’t care or try to intervene. And yet I struggled for those 60 days over what to do, because I wanted to have the incident documented in case this guy ever did the same thing to other women, but from the sparse information offered to me at the time, my options seemed frustratingly inadequate. I was just a year or two out of college, and I didn’t know about the process or any other options I might have had.

Here’s something that will curdle your blood. It details a student’s attempt to bring her rapist to justice and how resistant the system is to going after these sick perverts. It shouldn’t require the victim to have such fortitude, persistence, and intelligence as this brave young woman has.

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Just terrible.

I think there is value in exposing the more egregious cases. Consider that many have made exactly the same argument about individual cases of police brutality towards black men. It’s something that is not news to most black people, but it’s far too easy for the rest of us to ignore the problem if we aren’t subjected to it. Decent men don’t usually witness tons of women being harassed or assaulted, but based on the number of women who have experienced it, it’s very common. Decent men have a role to play in recognizing that this is an issue and not looking the other way like Billy Bush did. Fathers have a role to play in understanding what their daughter might experience and helping them defend themselves and understand it isn’t their fault. And in teaching sons not only “don’t be Donald Trump” but “don’t be Billy Bush.” Problems that are widespread across society can be mitigated through social norms, but only if we understand the problem, and it’s pervasiveness.

Good point. The NYT’s story provides the same problem solving value and it has the benefit of being far more egregious because the idea that a University would actively punish women who reported sexual assault with honor code violations is very, very egregious and reflects an active decision to punish victims of sexual assault. That BYU agreed to enter the 21st century is real news.

In the old days editors had to worry about the literal costs of publishing a story, so they chose wisely. They chose the stories that their local readers would care about. These days they only have to worry about the number of clicks a story might generate. Sex sells so we get a lot of clickbait stories that don’t really have national interest. What I find odd is the TPM editor’s selection of the Wisconsin story over the BYU story. Maybe they thought the picture would generate more clicks.

I just think this is an odd editorial hill to die on. The BYU story is good, I agree, but TPM always has a mix of stories of various levels of importance.

By the way, a related reason that it’s helpful to highlight stories that are so pervasive as to seem not newsworthy that I didn’t fully touch on: When you have a problem that mostly affects one group, like women or black men, many of the people who don’t witness it have a hard time believing the stories. So, it’s easy for men who otherwise like Trump to assume these women are making things up. That happens on local levels too, which is why women are scared of not being believed when they report sexual assault. But on top of that there is a bit of a psychological defense mechanism that comes into play for some people. If you’re a white guy who never had trouble with the police, you don’t want to believe that some police have been treating black men terribly and getting away with it. You want to believe in a just world. Wanting a just world is nice I guess, but it can be rapidly twisted into something else-- denying the problem. Police have been treating black guys like shit for a long time. It was completely ignored until the Rodney King beating was captured on video, and Black Lives Matter has only made some progress nowadays because video evidence is so hard to deny.

As far as sexual assault goes, a lot of men cling to a notion that rapists are thugs lurking in dark alleys. Much like the notion that children are kidnapped and molested by strangers in a van. The truth is that sexual assaults and child abduction and abuse mostly are perpetrated by people known by the victims. This also holds for murders, by the way. This is a very hard thing to accept if you want to believe the world is just, that good and evil are obvious, and that people who don’t go looking for trouble usually don’t find themselves in trouble. That is, if you have the luxury of not being forced to accept it by dealing with it head-on. By highlighting many cases like this, it serves a similar purpose to showing all those videos of black men being killed by police. It puts the problem in people’s faces and makes them deal with it the way many women already are forced to. For many people, the first reactions to recent police shootings was to deny a problem, claim it was an isolated incident, or attack the victim’s character. That’s also what is often done to women who come forward to report sexual assault. After enough police tapes came out, a lot more people started to own up to the problem, even in some surprising places (RedState for instance). That doesn’t mean it’s a solved problem by any means, but you can’t solve something that most people refuse to acknowledge, either. I view sexual harassment and assault of women as a similar problem that we, as a society, still need to do a lot more work to mitigate. Many years ago much of this predatory behavior was considered completely normal, especially if the victim was single. Over time feminism helped change most people’s view on this, and laws were strengthened. But that only goes as far as society is willing to take it. There are still enough men with deeply regressive attitudes to make things hard for women, but they don’t all do it as overtly as before, if they don’t think those around them would be on board with it. In many cases, the behavior is simply still considered OK among their social circles. And many men just act opportunistically without thinking about “inconvenient” issues like consent. The point is that the only way to make most men understand that this is still a major problem is to beat us over the head with cases like this. We aren’t the ones getting groped, and most women don’t go around telling all their male friends about the time that acquaintance at a party slipped them a roofie. We can’t solve the problem without understanding it. And we can’t even count on the victims getting justice without forcing people to acknowledge that yes, this is a very common problem that can happen to any woman.

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