Back to Nicole

Back to the Nicole issue. Two articles.

Deconstructing Nicole's Affidavit
By Carlos H. Conde

Nicole’s statement was not a “recantation” or a reversal of what she said during the trial. The media, of course, quickly concluded that, because this does not seem to fit with the earlier narrative, it must be a reversal.

But nowhere in the document did Nicole say that she was not raped. In fact, she even said, “I did not immediately tell my boyfriend that I was raped by Daniel Smith. All I said was that something bad happened to me.” She said she was too drunk and, as such, she “can’t help but entertain doubts on whether the sequence of events in Subic last November of 2005 really occurred the way the court found them to have happened.” She had doubts about the “sequence of events,” not on whether Smith had sex with or raped her.

She also said: “My conscience continues to bother me realizing that I may have in fact been so friendly and intimate with Daniel Smith at the Neptune Club that he was led to believe that I was amenable to having sex or that we simply just got carried away.”

These passages do not change the fact that 1) Smith had sex with her inside the van, 2) that she was too drunk to know, let alone control, what was happening and 3) that having sex with a very drunk person, as Katrina Legarda put it on ANC this afternoon, is never consensual. “Having sex with a drunk woman is rape. It’s like necrophilia,” Legarda said.

Indeed, Nicole’s narration of events based on her affidavit may even bolster her claim that she was too inebriated that night and Smith and his friends took advantage of her condition. Whether she found Smith attractive, whether they became touchy-feely with each other — this is all beside the point, which is that she was too drunk to know what was happening, too weak to control her faculties or rein in her impulses.

So what was the point of the affidavit?

Reading and rereading Nicole’s it, I am convinced that, more than anything else, it was meant to depict Smith in a benign light, that he was not the monster that this case has made him out to be. It also depicted US servicemen as a friendly bunch — “We treated them as family,” Nicole said, whose own family lived inside a military camp in Zamboanga where they interacted with US troops on a regular basis.

Without a doubt, the point of the affidavit was to influence the justices of the Court of Appeals. They could use the “recantation” angle to paint Nicole as a liar. But they will conclude from reading Nicole’s statement that Smith and company were not monsters, that they did not set out to the Neptune Club looking for prey, that they were just a rowdy group of middle-class American boys out to have some fun, that this was all a misunderstanding.

A misunderstanding that, because of Smith’s conviction, has dire implications for the United States. The United States will never yield control of its forces to the authority of other governments, judicial or otherwise. That would be anathema to their geo-political ambitions and interests. Thus, Washington will never allow a “mere understanding” between drunk and horny people to mess things up by setting a precedent that can threaten the way America deals with other countries.

The Court of Appeals will look at Nicole’s affidavit, as well as the fact that she is now in the US for good, as an affirmation of the notion that she is getting on with her life and that this had been a mistake, a bad night for Nicole and the servicemen, who are not monsters after all, according to Nicole herself. They will think that the cost of upholding a conviction — the cost to Smith and to the interests of the Philippines and the United States — is too high a price for both nations to pay for a night of wild partying that went awry.

Which is why the Court of Appeals will overturn Smith’s conviction, and the Supreme Court ruling ordering the Americans to remand Smith to Philippine custody will be rendered moot, and everything will be honky-dory.

Which is why the United States will keep doing what it is doing.
http://www.pinoypress.net/2009/03/18/deconstructing-nicoles-affidavit/

Nicole is Not the Enemy
By Inday Espina-Varona

It was, in the parlance of negotiators, a lose-lose situation. Nicole, the woman raped by American serviceman Daniel Smith, the woman whose face the Inquirer bared cruelly on its front pages today, knew what awaited her.

And she was right. The insults, the slurs, the indignation rained as heavy as they did when PR hacks hired for the defense of Smith (and the government he serves) tried to justify a crime by painting Nicole as a woman of loose morals.

That Nicole practically damns herself the same way now does not excuse the stone throwing.

A woman of loose morals can be raped. Indeed, a woman seen by society as one with loose morals is most vulnerable to rape. A society that fumes at a woman’s attempt to live by her own rules will turn its eyes away and close its ears when men decide to impose the most humiliating punishment they can on this singular, defiant woman.

There’s a line in the Green Mile. To paraphrase: people who think themselves enlightened can perpetrate the most horrific deeds. By commission they do this; likewise, by omission.

Like many friends, I, too, would like to see a lopsided, onerous treaty provided rescinded. A country may open its doors to troops of a military ally if it helps build up its own defense capabilities; what makes the VFA unjust are the provisions clearly skewed towards the bigger power. Until the VFA treats erring American troops like erring Filipino troops, it remains unacceptable. (One might point out that too many erring Filipino soldiers have walked away scot-free but we can’t have everything and just a slight evening out of the field is enough for me.)

But yearning for a noble goal – abolition of an onerous treaty – does not mean it is right for us to drag Nicole through the mud once more. There is no more self-serving, selfish comment than to wail we’ve been had because Nicole issued an affidavit virtually clearing Smith.

So she crumbled. So she groveled before might and the power of the American dream. So what? A close reading of the affidavit shows she doesn’t say the rape NEVER happened. She just spouts what the defense wants her to say.

Many raped women have crumbled in the face of much, much less – say, the tears of an apologetic husband or boyfriend, or the pleas of a family tired of braving the sneers and leers, or just the mounting bills of a legal battle; or maybe just the pleas of one man’s mother, and/or the promise of marriage to make an “honest” woman of her — with all the subtext of she-was-asking-for-it.

We in the media and people’s organizations know of tortured folk recanting on earlier testimony. It doesn’t make them allies of evil men; it simply means there were factors heavy enough to crush determination and courage.

Was it naïve of Nicole to expect aid from the Philippine government? Maybe. But many Filipinos do expect government or government officials to help them. Why are there long lines of supplicants at the gates of mayors and congressmen and governors?

Besides, it’s not just the government. People’s orgs and NGOs – even the media – are there to succor the afflicted. But our attention spans are also as short as the public’s. We are not evil; we just have other, “more important” things to attend to.

How many times have we in media done a round of mea culpa when discussing human rights? We admit we cannot always keep the lights shining on one particular case – and that often starts the slide to defeat. That does not make us in the media bad; we know the many reasons for this situation. If we can accept this, why cannot we accept the loneliness and bewilderment of the violated, their impatience and their hopelessness?

Likewise, I have been around these circles of aid-givers enough to know that there is some residual middle-class desire to expect people we help to be docile and grateful, when in truth the task of working for justice does not guarantee good manners and right conduct among those we seek to aid.

Oh yes, there are many do-gooders who can barely mask their pinched noses as they go about giving aid, and there are those whose faces turn red and mouths turn down when they are met with less than obsequious thanks in their tours of duty or because the people they help just can’t be bothered by the higher isms of the day. That’s not to denigrate aid givers as evil; just to make them out as truly human, the same way the people they serve, Nicole included, are just as human.

The truth is, Nicole has walked a long, long way in this ordeal; longer than most women who have suffered rape.

Just a little over a week ago, I had to double check some documents from the Bacolod police because they initially seemed exaggeratedly negative. Of 36 cases of acts of lasciviousness report last year, only six were filed with the fiscal. Of 943 cases of violence against women, only 13 were filed in court. Of 26 rape cases, only six were filed. In the case minors, the ratio was nine of 34 rape cases ending up in court.

Nicole, at least, braved cross-examination and the harsh glare of the media spotlight, including the baring of her real identity name.

She mustered the strength for this because many of us supported her – whether because rape alone was enough to stir us to outrage or because she was a vehicle to reach a higher goal.

And now she has crumbled. Why are we so irate? How many friends do we know who voluntarily joined this or that cause but dropped out after sometime? Do we sneer and call them traitors? Don’t we even share meals with those who now serve the government, no matter if the thought of this government makes us puke?

How many on Facebook were once firm believers in this or that cause? Nobody pressured us to join those causes, right? Did we face a mob when we decided to leave?

Well, Nicole never volunteered for the cause. She had to be raped to join it. She never asked to be poster girl for nationalists; she was made one by virtue of rape.

There are a million and one reasons for despair and hopelessness. A noble cause cannot always hold one above the waters. Nor will a lynching make our cause more right.

Nicole is not the enemy. Let’s not treat her like one.
http://www.pinoypress.net/2009/03/19/nicole-is-not-the-enemy/