Texas Judge Allows Former Baylor Frat President To Sidestep Rape Charge
A judge in Texas on Monday accepted a plea bargain that allows Jacob Anderson, a former Baylor University fraternity president accused of raping a woman at a fraternity party, to avoid serving jail time, marking at least the third time the judge has approved probation for men accused of sexually assaulting Baylor students.
McLennan County Sheriff’s Office via AP
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McLennan County Sheriff’s Office via AP
A judge has accepted a plea agreement under which the former president of a Baylor University fraternity, accused of raping a female student, will serve no jail time and won’t have to register as a sex offender.
The deal allowed Jacob Walter Anderson, 23, of Garland, Texas, to plead no contest on Monday to the lesser charge of unlawful restraint. In pleading no contest, a defendant does not admit guilt and does not offer a defense.
The woman who brought the charges expressed outrage at the decision.
“He stole my body, virginity and power over my body,” she said in court, according to a family spokesman, the Associated Press reports.
“I not only have to live with his rape and the repercussions of the rape, I have to live with the knowledge that the McLennan County justice system is severely broken,” the family statement quoted the woman as saying. “I have to live with the fact that after all these years and everything I have suffered, no justice was achieved.”
The McLennan County’s district attorney’s office, which dismissed four counts of sexual assault against Anderson, told the alleged victim’s family it was not confident enough to take the case to trial, according to NPR’s Wade Goodwyn.
Goodwyn reports the alleged victim told Judge Ralph Strother she was furious the prosecutors who struck the plea agreement did not attend the hearing. “If I had the courage to come back to Waco and face my rapist and testify, you could at least have had enough respect for me to show up today,” she said.
Strother, on at least two other occasions in the past couple of years, dealt leniently with men accused of raping or sexually assaulting Baylor students, AP reports.
The offer of a plea deal was made public in August, according to the Waco Tribune-Herald. Baylor is a private Christian university in Waco.
“The way the victim’s family found out about the plea deal is they read it in the local newspaper,” Goodwyn reports.
Upon learning the news, the woman and her family urged Strother to reject the plea agreement and send the case to trial, according to the Tribune-Herald.
At the time of the alleged rape, the woman was a 19-year-old Baylor sophomore.
NPR does not name individuals who are the alleged victims of sexual assaults, with some exceptions, such as when the individual goes public with her or his identity.
In the affidavit for Anderson’s arrest, the alleged rape victim told police Anderson raped her in February 2016 when she attended an off-campus party hosted by his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta.
After sipping some punch, “she became disoriented and felt very confused,” according to the affidavit. Anderson led her to a secluded area on the grounds so she could get some air, and then repeatedly raped her, leaving her unconscious, alone and “lying face down in her own vomit.”
Anderson was kicked out of Baylor and the fraternity was suspended.
Baylor University has been roiled in recent years by charges of sexual assault by its students, including the 2016 scandal involving members of Baylor’s football team. As Goodwyn reported, the scandal led to the firing of Baylor’s president, Kenneth Starr, and its head football coach, Art Briles.
Huawei Executive Granted Bail In Canada, Former Canadian Diplomat Is Detained In China
Supporters Ada Yu and Wade Meng (no relation) stand outside the British Columbia Supreme Court on Monday before the bail hearing for Huawei Technologies CFO Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver.
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Updated at 7:03 p.m. ET
A Canadian judge ruled Tuesday a Chinese tech executive, detained at the request of the U.S., can be free on bail while awaiting an extradition hearing.
The judge said Meng Wanzhou must meet stringent conditions aimed at making sure she doesn’t flee Canada for China.
The Vancouver judge, William Ehrcke, said Meng must post bail of $10 million Canadian ($7.5 million U.S.), according to Reuters. A portion of the money must be paid by other people, who presumably don’t have the vast resources of Meng’s family and would take a greater hit if she absconded.
Other conditions include handing over her multiple passports to the court, wearing an electronic monitor and not leaving home overnight.
Ehrcke said he believed under those conditions, the risk that she wouldn’t appear when required could “be reduced to an acceptable level.” He set her next court appearance for Feb. 6.
Ten days after Canadian authorities detained Meng, China reportedly detained a former Canadian diplomat — ratcheting up tensions in this diplomatic row.
The International Crisis Group said Tuesday it was aware of the reports that its North East Asia senior adviser Michael Kovrig had been detained. “We are doing everything possible to secure additional information on Michael’s whereabouts as well as his prompt and safe release,” the Brussels-based organization said in a statement. Kovrig was formerly a diplomat to Beijing and Hong Kong, as well as the United Nations.
Canada Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said he was “deeply concerned” about a Canadian citizen detained in China, but did not identify the person, Reuters reports.
While China has not discussed Kovrig’s detention, Bob Rae, former premier of Ontario tweeted that he finds the reason obvious: “Of course it’s clear. It’s called repression and retaliation.”
This wouldn’t be the first time that China has held a Canadian as part of larger geopolitical events. In 2014, a Canadian couple was arrested and detained seemingly as retribution for the U.S. seeking the deportation from Canada of a Chinese national accused of stealing U.S. military secrets. The husband, Kevin Garratt, was imprisoned for two years.
In Meng’s case, the U.S. seeks her extradition to stand trial on fraud charges. Meng, the chief financial officer at telecom juggernaut Huawei, owns two multimillion-dollar homes in Vancouver. Her lawyers offered those properties and a cash payment as bail, amounting to about $15 million, The New York Times reports.
She also offered to pay for the costs of her own security, and suggested her Chinese husband and the head of a security firm could be her sureties to guarantee her presence in court, an idea that the judge questioned.
“Is it appropriate to name as a surety someone who is not ordinarily resident in Canada, even though they might have the status which would permit them to reside in Canada?” said Justice William Ehrcke, according to the Vancouver Sun. “The purpose of naming a surety is that they act as the jailer for the person during the period of release. So that’s an important responsibility.”
In a letter, the U.S. Justice Department argued strongly against Meng’s release, warning that she would likely flee back to China, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S. The Justice Department also pointed to Meng’s access to enormous wealth: She is the daughter of Huawei’s founder, Ren Zhengfei, whom the U.S. says has a net worth of $3.2 billion and is the 83rd richest person in the world.
The Justice Department says that around April 2017, Huawei (and Meng) became aware of a U.S. criminal investigation into the company, and so its executives began avoiding traveling to or through the U.S. Meng traveled to the U.S. “on numerous occasions” from 2014 to 2016, but made no further trips to the U.S. after March 2017.
Meng has used seven different passports — four from China, three from Hong Kong — in the past eleven years, U.S. authorities say, adding that she may have more they don’t know about. “Even if Canadian authorities seized Meng’s travel document that she used to arrive in Canada, she could use any number of additional travel documents to flee from Canada,” they write.
Her husband, Liu Xiaozong, denies in his affidavits that Meng has extra passports, and says she needed the new ones, the Sun reports:
“His wife, he says, travelled so frequently between 2007 and 2016 and required so many visas that ‘the pages in these passports for such visas were utilized, requiring the acquisition of the replacement passports.’
Other passports were ‘broken,’ invalidated and replaced to reflect changes in her name after their marriage.”
As NPR’s Shannon Van Sant has reported, the U.S. alleges that Huawei used a Hong Kong-based subsidiary called Skycom as a shell company to circumvent U.S. sanctions on Iran:
“Meng’s arrest has become a flashpoint in relations between the U.S. and China, and came on the same day President Trump and China’s President Xi Jinping agreed to a 90-day truce in a trade war between the two countries.
“Huawei is China’s largest telecom equipment maker. Its sales recently surpassed Apple, making Huawei the world’s top supplier of mobile phones. U.S. intelligence agencies have warned Americans not to buy Huawei phones because of concerns over espionage, and pressured allies to not use Huawei technology.”
The Sun reports Meng is being held at the Alouette Correctional Centre for Women, about 20 miles east of Vancouver.
