11.1.99
Juries hear Big Dan's rape case
By PAUL EDWARD PARKER
Journal Staff Writer

NEW BEDFORD -- Cheryl Ann Araujo's oldest daughter turned 3 on March 6, 1983, and the 21-year-old mother, both daughters and their father had thrown a party to celebrate.

After the festivities had died down and the girls were put to bed, Araujo left the two-story tenement they called home to buy cigarettes. Her usual spots were closed, so she walked into a neighborhood tavern.

Inside the bar, Araujo bought a drink. She talked to a woman, showing off pictures of her daughters. She played a song on the jukebox. She watched two men play pool.

Then, two men she didn't know asked her to leave with them. She refused and got up to leave. Someone else grabbed her from behind, dragged her to the pool table and threw her down on it so hard it hurt. She was stripped below the waist. While others held her down, several men took turns raping her.

``I could hear people laughing, cheering, yelling,'' Araujo later testified. ``I was begging for help. I was pleading. I was screaming.''

Those moments of brutality led to one of the most notorious and controversial trials of the 20th century, a case known nationwide by the name of the bar where Cheryl Ann Araujo was raped: Big Dan's.

The case was bound for controversy from the start.

Women's groups assailed the treatment of Araujo, whom defense lawyers portrayed as a willing participant in group sex.

Portuguese groups assailed the prosecution, saying the case would never have gone to trial if the defendants had not been Portuguese immigrants.

But the trial -- actually two simultaneous trials, one in the morning for some defendants and one in the afternoon for others -- would make its mark on the American legal system for what, at least according to some, was an accident, an inadvertent happenstance.

A local cable company broadcast the entire trial live from Superior Court in Fall River. Long before Araujo even took the stand to testify, her name had become a household word in Bristol County. Soon, every media outlet covering the case -- newspapers, radio and television -- abandoned long-held policies barring the publication of rape victim's names.

By the time the trial began, almost a year after the rape, Big Dan's was but a nasty memory. Its liquor license had been revoked and the barroom furnishings removed. When jurors arrived to tour the scene of the crime, they visited instead the bakery thrift store that had taken the place of the tavern.

On March 17, 1984, the jury in the afternoon trial convicted Daniel C. Silva and Joseph P. Vieira of aggravated rape.

Five days later, the jury in the morning trial convicted Victor Raposo and John Cordeiro of aggravated rape, while acquitting two other men of the same charge.

Both verdicts sparked outrage in the Portuguese community, which sided with the rapists, even though Araujo was also of Portuguese heritage. Protesters held a candlelight vigil after the first verdicts and 8,000 of them held a march after the second verdicts were in.

Cordeiro, Silva and Raposo were sentenced to 9 to 12 years in prison, Vieira to 6 to 8 years.

Vieira was released on May 3, 1988; Silva on May 15, 1989; Raposo on July 5, 1989, and Cordeiro on Oct. 30, 1989, aboutx 6 1/2 xyears after the four gang raped Araujo.

In 1991, after all four had gotten out of prison and, more or less, put their lives back together, they talked about the case.

``I'm not bitter now,'' said Vieira. ``I was, but now I'm not.''

``It was worse for me than her,'' said Silva.

Raposo said he could not discuss the case until his parole ended. ``I'll call, and I'll tell you everything. I'll tell you what really happened that night.''

Cordeiro was unrepentant. ``I've got no remorse.'' He also professed no ill will toward Araujo. ``If she's alive, I wish her the best of luck. If she's dead, then that's too bad.''

By the time the men who had raped her were freed from prison, Cheryl Ann Araujo had, indeed, died. She, her two daughters and their father -- Araujo's high school sweetheart -- had moved to Miami to escape a hostile community and find anonymity. Araujo had entered school to become a secretary, was making a life for herself and had found some measure of happiness, her lawyer said.

But on Dec. 14, 1986, she lost control of her car while taking her daughters to a Christmas show and struck a utility pole. The girls were injured, but not seriously. Cheryl Ann Araujo died in the crash. She was 25.

A yearlong Providence Journal series about life in Rhode Island. Produced in cooperation with the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Essay: The Male Response to Rape

By HP-Time.com;Roger Rosenblatt Monday, Apr. 18, 1983

Between the book reviews and the science notes, the third gang rape of the past two months. This one occurred in the Charlestown section of Boston, where seven young men have been charged with kidnaping a 17-year-old girl and raping her repeatedly for seven hours in an apartment belonging to one of the men. The incident followed the more widely publicized attack in New Bedford, Mass., some weeks earlier, in which four men raped and tormented a woman for two hours on a pool table in Big Dan's bar, while onlookers cheered. That one was preceded by yet another at the University of Pennsylvania; there a young woman has charged that she was gang-raped by five to eight fraternity brothers during a party. Class distinctions need not apply. If one is tempted to construct a hypothesis around shiftless young Irishmen in a poor city neighborhood or the unemployed Portuguese in a depressed fishing port, sociology is obliterated by the party boys from the U. of P., no different in kind or action, just privilege. All subhumans are created equal.

Reading of such incidents, women are horrified because inevitably they identify both with the victims in particular and with the entire condition of victimization, of which gang rape may be the harshest instance. But why do men recoil so strongly? The straightforward answer is that the vast majority of men disapprove of rape, and their disapproval is intensified when a gang is involved. Yet the idea of gang rape is repugnant to men for reasons of identification as well. Few men would associate themselves with those who actually "did it to her." But quite more than a few know what it is to be caught in the middle of an all-male show of power and coercion, and thus to be complicit, even at the fringes, in something their consciences abhor.

Gang rape is war. It is the war of men against women for reasons easy to guess at, or for no reasons whatever, for the sheer mindless display of physical mastery of the stronger over the weaker. In the wake of the reports from Charlestown, New Bedford and the University of Pennsylvania, conjectures are bound to arise about the frustration of contemporary man at the growing independence of women, and there may be some truth to that. But men have never needed excuses to commit rape in gangs. The Japanese in China, the Russians in Germany, the Pakistanis in Bangladesh. Read accounts of what some American soldiers did to Vietnamese village girls of 13 and 14 in places like My Lai, and it seems clear that the subject of gang rape goes a good deal deeper than modern man's humiliation.

One psychological theory has it that these acts are homosexual rituals: men in groups desire each other, yet are ashamed of their urges, and so they satisfy themselves by convening at a common target. Another theory holds that there are situations where men so seek to prove their masculinity to one another that they will do anything, including murder. An American soldier in Viet Nam described how, for no other reason than that a comrade led the way, he shot to death a girl he had raped. Sex and violence have an eerily close kinship as it is. Rape itself may be a form of murder, the destruction of someone's will and spirit. No wonder those same soldiers in Viet Nam spoke of dragging girls into the woods "for a little boom-boom." To "bang" a woman remains part of the idiom. The sound is a gun, the body a weapon. In a "gang bang," murder becomes a massacre.

Upon learning of such things at a distance, most men feel not only revulsion, but also a proper urge to enact society's revenge. Lock the bums away forever. At the same time, they can still imagine what it feels like to be present at the atrocities, even for the briefest instance; every life has analogues of its own. The essential circumstance is that of the mob, always a terrifying entity, whatever its goal. One thinks of lynch mobs before rape mobs, but all mobs have the same appearances and patterns, the same compulsion to tear things down or apart. The object of passion is sighted and pursued. The mob rises to a peak of pure hate, does what it does, then slinks away, its energy spent. Perhaps every mob commits rape in a way. Anybody who has ever seen a mob in action senses its latent sexuality—the collective panting, the empty ecstasy. Even at the outskirts, the voyeur participates. Eventually he may run or protest, but for at least one long moment he is helpless to move.

It is that moment of seemingly hypnotized attention most men know and dread. It is a moment in which they are out of control as individuals—not merely outside the law, but out of biological order. Something stirs, an ancient reflex, as if they are dragged back through history to a starting point in evolution. The mob is a pack, its prey the female. Her difference is the instigator, her frailty the goad. Rape what you cannot have. Plunder what you can never know. Mystery equals fear equals rage equals death. It is she who stands for all life's threats, she who released animal instinct in the first place. Once aroused, why stop to reason or sympathize? The savage surfaces, prevails.

Of course, this happens only occasionally, in the heat of battle or Big Dan's bar or Charlestown or the Alpha Tau Omega house, where boys were boys. But gang rape does not need to recur frequently to remind men of their own peculiar frailty. And that reminder brings terror, not the terror of the victim, to be sure, but one as benumbing in its way: that of acknowledging one's natural potential for violence and destruction. Rape need not be involved. Was not that you, so many years ago, standing on the sidelines while that other boy was bullied in the playground? Or you in the crowd that razzed the old drunk in the park? Or you in the rear when they set fire to the cat? Child's play, possibly, but boy's play primarily; and the child becomes the man. If you have cast off most of the cruelty of boyhood, still some of the fascination with cruelty remains. The fascination is a form of cruelty itself, expressionless, primeval, a fisheye in the dark.

No, that is not you boozing it up in the Charlestown apartment, or you, college boy, or you, Portuguese sailor. But isn't that you, propped neatly behind the desk, growling ever so faintly under your no-starch-in-the collar, reading intently of all the shocking gang rapes?

At the beginning of Julius Caesar, before Caesar's assassination, Casca has a premonition of disaster that he reports to Cicero: "Against the Capitol I met a lion, who glared at me, and went surly by." The implication is that in every civilization, however lofty, a lion always roams the streets; the jungle never entirely disappears. What most men fear is a lion in the soul. Women, too, perhaps, but not in the matter of rape. That is male terrain, the masculine jungle. And no man can glimpse it, even at a distance, without fury and bewilderment at his monstrous capabilities. —By Roger Rosenblatt

April 21, 2009, 7:44 PM

Minority Rules: Sex Ratios and Suffrage

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

The Empire State was the home of the Seneca Falls Convention. Yet New Yorkers lagged far behind residents of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana and Nevada in actually granting women the full right to vote. As did all of New York’s fellow time-zone occupants.

So why did Western states and territories extend suffrage to women much earlier than their Eastern counterparts did? The answer, two economists say, might have something to do with sex ratios.

The fact that population proportions played a role probably isn’t surprising. One would expect states with a higher percentage of women to be more likely to enfranchise their female residents than states with a lower percentage of women. After all, there is power in numbers. Just ask Lysistrata.

But actually, the reverse was true. The jurisdictions that granted women the right to vote earlier generally had lower concentrations of women, a newstudy finds. (Some other factors that correlated with earlier adoption of women’s suffrage were: higher female employment levels; the share of Mormons in a jurisdiction; lower percentage of nonwhites; lower percentage of Irish-born Americans; and a smaller manufacturing sector.)

There are a few potential explanations for why a low female-to-male ratio may have led to earlier women’s suffrage, according to the study’s authors, Sebastian Braun at Humboldt University Berlin and Michael Kvasnicka at RWI Essen.

First, consider the fact that men had much to lose by enfranchising women. Expanding the pool of eligible voters would devalue the importance of each man’s vote, and expanding the pool of eligible voters to women in particular could create a new, and perhaps antagonistic, voting bloc.

The relative scarcity of women in the West may have “reduced the political costs and risks to male electorates and legislators of extending the franchise,” the authors wrote. In other words, Western men sacrificed less power by enfranchising women, since there were fewer women around to dilute male voting interests.

This explanation may also shed light on why other regions with significant minority populations have been slow to grant that minority full voting rights (for example, the authors cite disenfranchised blacks in the American South).

There’s another way to think about this sex-ratio-and-suffrage correlation: Granting women the right to vote may have appealed to Western legislators who wanted to attract more women to their regions. More women probably meant happier male constituents. If the jurisdiction granting suffrage were still a territory, more women (and potential mothers) also enabled the population growth that could help make the case for official statehood.

If legislators hoped to advertise the West as a particularly female-friendly place, though, the reputation didn’t stick. Here’s a map, created by the University of Toronto professor Richard Florida, that shows the surplus of single men or women in different American cities today:

Richard Florida

These figures represent absolute surpluses, not ratios, so the bubbles are not scaled for the size of each city’s population. Either way, though, the map shows that Western cities today skew very male. For comparison, here is amap from 1890 showing “the predominating sex” in different parts of the country.

Memories of the Big Dan's trial remain vivid

By Curt Brown

cbrown@s-t.com

May 08, 2009 12:00 AM

FALL RIVER — Twenty-five years after New Bedford's infamous Big Dan's rape case, the judge, defense attorneys, interpreter and other participants in the trials said Thursday the case still resonates with them.

They gathered at a forum held as part of the 150th anniversary of the Superior Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and said they have vivid memories of the trials, the protest marches by the Portuguese communities in New Bedford and Fall River, the candlelight vigils held by women's groups and the security surrounding the two juries.

The forum was held in Fall River Superior Court, where the two trials were held in 1984.

Six Portuguese immigrants were charged with the gang rape of a woman who had gone into the Big Dan's bar in New Bedford's North End to get cigarettes on March 6, 1983, and was assaulted on a pool table. The simultaneous trials of the six men were held one year later.

The case attracted national and international publicity and was the basis for "The Accused," a movie starring Jodie Foster, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the victim.

William G. Young, the former Superior Court judge who presided at both trials, decided to try the six defendants in two separate trials before two sequestered juries — one trial was held in the morning and the other in the afternoon. The trials lasted about a month and were broadcast live on television.

Young, who is now a federal judge, said he feels the juries in both trials returned the correct verdicts in all six cases. Four men were convicted of aggravated rape, while two were acquitted.

"They got it right," he said. He said the juries found the defendants who "touched" the victim guilty and acquitted the two who "did not" touch the victim.

But Young criticized himself, saying he made a mistake when he allowed the victim's name to go out over the airwaves. "It's a terrible mistake. I regret it to this day," he said.

However, his law clerk at the time, James Ring, now a private attorney, said the judge was being too hard on himself, saying it was impossible to prevent the victim's name from getting out.

Ring also was highly critical of the media, saying there were "breathtaking distortions of reporting" that were "muddled together" in news reports of the trials.

He also said he thought the media behaved poorly. "The level of seriousness among the press didn't match the seriousness in the courtroom," he said.

Robert J. Kane, who prosecuted one of the trials and is now a Superior Court judge, and others complimented Young's handling of the case and said the judge made sure the defendants received a fair trial.

"He gave the face to justice," he said.

"You knew that he was in charge of the case," said Kenneth Sullivan, one of the defense attorneys, now retired and living in Florida. "There was going to be no nonsense."

Lloyd MacDonald, a member of the Superior Court bench and the forum's moderator, said some did not feel Thursday's forum should be held because it could reopen old wounds.

Maria Tomasia, the city's elections commissioner, said she has vivid memories of the hateful and hurtful remarks people made against the Portuguese.

She said the trial came during the height of the Portuguese immigration to New Bedford, which she said ran from 1960 to the mid-1980s.

Many people blamed the Portuguese immigrants for the area's troubles. "We were the scapegoats of society," she said.

She said her husband, John Tomasia, formed the Committee for Justice, which sought to ensure that the defendants received a fair trial.

Zita Lovett, who interpreted the trials for the defendants, recalled the enormous pressure and stress she felt from "interpreting on the spot" during the trials for the defendants.

Lovett, who was pregnant at the time of the trials, said she worried she was going to make a mistake and it would be picked up because of the wide coverage.

She said she only had "nano-seconds to come up with the word."

She said she focused on "the words" and felt relieved when a Portuguese-speaking person from the United Nations praised the job she did.

Peter Cordeiro, who was chief court officer and chief of security during the trials, talked about the difficulty of maintaining the security for the two juries.

He said this was especially difficult when one of the juries returned its verdict while the other trial was still ongoing.

GOP Grudgingly Admits That All Types of Rape Are Pretty Bad

2/3/11 at 12:30 PM

43Comments

For decades, federal law (known as the Hyde Amendment) has prohibited federal money to be used for abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or the health of the mother. But a firestorm erupted a few days ago when Mother Jones reported that the GOP was considering narrowing the rape exception to include only "forcible" rapes — an undefined term that seemingly wouldn't include, say, an abortion for a 12-year-old who was willingly impregnated by a 40-year-old. Hey, just make lemonade out of those lemons, right little girl?

While at least one Democratic congresswoman blasted the new wording as "a violent act against women," one of the bills co-sponsors, pro-life Democratic congressman Dan Lipinski,claimed no intention to change the status quo.

"The language of H.R. 3 was not intended to change existing law regarding taxpayer funding for abortion in cases of rape, nor is it expected that it would do so," Lipinski said in the statement. "Nonetheless, the legislative process will provide an opportunity to clarify this should such a need exist."

Apparently the legislative process — as well as, we suspect, a few days of awful PR — has indeed clarified the issue, as the GOP has now decided, fine, we'll make it all rapes again.

At least the whole embarrassing issue gave The Daily Show the chance to explain how "rape rape" differs from "merely rapish," "rape with benefits," and a "rape-mare."

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