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Would the Rape Allegation Against Nate Parker Play Out Differently Today?

The director of early Oscar favorite 'The Birth of a Nation' was acquitted after a 1999 rape allegation, but that was another era when it comes to how sexual assault is discussed in America.

Vanguard Award recipient Nate Parker speaks onstage at the Sundance Institute on August 11, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/WireImage)

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On August 20, 1999, 19-year-old Nate Parker was supposed to meet a fellow Penn State student for a date at a restaurant inside a local Day's Inn. When the woman arrived at 10 PM, though, Parker was nowhere to be found. To kill some time, she drank several Sex on the Beach cocktails purchased by a both a stranger and a friend, as the Daily Beast reported.

When Parker eventually materialized around midnight, his date was already sloshed.

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What happened after that may have ultimately derailed the woman's life and helped lead to her suicide 13 years later. According to court records, Parker convinced her to come back to his apartment, where he and another man took turns having sex with her. The woman pressed rape charges soon after, claiming she was slipping in and out of consciousness and unable to consent. Parker was ultimately acquitted of rape, and his roommate and fellow wrestler, Jean Celestine, eventually had his own conviction overturned.

But the story has reemerged in the past week because the accused co-wrote the early Oscar favorite The Birth of a Nation—and we now know the victim committed suicide with sleeping pills in 2012 at age 30.

"She feared for her life," her brother told Variety, citing the victim's allegation that Parker and Celestine harassed her in the weeks after the incident. "She became detached from reality."

The case still matters because The Birth of a Nation has been heralded as a triumph for black artists and black stories in a medium largely controlled by and in service to white people. Some critics are now grappling with whether they can separate the artist from the art, especially when the film, which follows Nat Turner and his 1831 slave rebellion, uses a gang rape as one of its central plot points. The allegations have also resurfaced amid a national conversation about rape culture on college campuses, and at a time when intense scrutiny is being applied to the way sexual assault allegations against both celebrities and student athletes are handled.

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It's important to keep in mind that both men were ultimately deemed not guilty, and that the United States has a long and well-documented history of wrongfully accusing black men of raping white women. Parsing all of this is particularly difficult for black women, who as one writer for the Atlantic put it, feel like they "have to choose between their blackness or their womanhood when they're partaking in these conversations."

Often in college sexual assault cases, the trial boils down to the opposing testimony of two very drunk people. But Parker's case was different: A third person who was there that night, Tamerlane Kangas, testified that the sex may not have been consensual, as the defendants claimed. Instead, Kangas painted a harrowing picture of an unconscious victim who wasn't moving at all and said the two men invited him, too, to have intercourse with her—but that he didn't feel it was "right."

"The defense will try to characterize every case as a he-said versus she-said case, but usually there's evidence to corroborate," says John Wilkinson, an attorney at the legal group AEquitas, which helps prosecutors build sexual assault cases. "That's pretty powerful corroboration."

The former prosecutor told me that if he were working the case, the fact that Parker told the woman she was too drunk to go back to her apartment, as court records suggest, would have signaled to him that there may have been a plan in place to isolate his victim and build her trust.

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Unlike many cases involving athletes at major universities, investigators did seem to do their due diligence, however. For instance, they apparently had the woman call Parker under the guise of a pregnancy scare to try to collect more information and a possible admission of guilt––a policing tactic that requires a court order in Pennsylvania.

But Wilkinson believes the defense had a powerful weapon in the fact that Parker and the woman both said they had consensual oral sex the night before the alleged rape. Pennsylvania's rape shield law prevents the admission of an alleged victim's sexual past as evidence. There is an exception, however, for cases where there was a previous relationship between the accused and the victim.

"That is always gonna be a tough issue for jurors," Wilkinson says. "I know sexual assault happens in relationships, and it happens in married couples, but that is tough for jurors to understand. I can't say that today anything would turn out differently."

What's more difficult to know is whether Parker's career would have advanced the way it has if the allegations emerged in the modern era of internet feminism, when high-profile rape cases at major athletic programs are part of the national dialogue.

Thomas Doherty, a cultural historian at Brandeis, says the contrast between the current reexamination of the allegations against Parker and the way the public reacted to director Roman Polanksi winning an Oscar in 2003 after being charged with drugging and sodomizing an underage girl decades earlier is telling.

"He won an Oscar and, in some quarters, was considered a victim of overzealous US prosecution" Doherty told me. "My sense is that Parker would be subject to less opprobrium if he had been acquitted of manslaughter."

Meanwhile, Hannah Brancato, the co-founder of FORCE, an artistic collaborative focused on upsetting rape culture, maintains that despite the progress being made, a handful college athletes gaining some notoriety over rape allegations doesn't amount to much. She says the reason Stanford rapist Brock Turner, for instance—who unlike Parker was convicted—got so much attention is because his victim wrote a letter that went viral. Most survivors don't get that sort of audience.

"We've come a long way in the last few years, but unfortunately the number of cases that we hear about in the media are a very select few of the horrifying number that happen every day," she told me.

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