Rape is Rape

She found the VHS tapes by mistake, and was on the phone with one of her friends when she pushed the “play” button. “Hey, there’s a woman on this tape that looks just like me,” she told her friend, as she watched an unconscious female being raped. And then her world shifted off its axis.
“Oh my God! It is me.”

That’s how “Deb” discovered that her estranged husband had drugged her, raped her and memorialized the event by taping the entire thing. Her husband was eventually convicted of two counts of sexual assault and one count of surreptitious viewing, but the state of Arizona determined that a husband raping a wife was a minor crime, and, as a result, he faced a maximum of only 18 months in jail. If he had raped anyone else, however, he would have been looking at a maximum of 15 years in prison.

As it turned out, he didn’t even get the lesser maximum – he got probation. In fact, he would have faced a harsher sentence if he’d organized a dogfight, or if he’d been convicted of littering. But for drugging and raping his wife, and then videotaping the assault, he got a slap on the wrist and was told to go home and be a good boy.

According to Deb, it felt like she was being abused all over again – this time by the laws of the state. In Arizona, it was less of a crime to rape your wife than anywhere else in the nation. Deb called it the “get-out-of-jail-free card.”

So, she decided to do something about it. Her efforts wouldn’t help her own case, but she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else having to experience the same kind of pain and humiliation that she had experienced.

At that moment, nearly three years ago, this Phoenix woman – her name has been changed to protect her identity – had no idea what to do. Eventually, somebody suggested that she go to her legislator, and that started her on a path that has consumed her ever since. For two long legislative sessions, Deb tried to convince reluctant or hostile lawmakers that “rape is rape” – that being raped by your husband should be just as much of a crime as being raped by a stranger.

But on the day that she started, she was about as unprepared for this kind of experience as anyone can get.

At the time, she’d never spoken into a microphone, other than to sing karaoke.

She’d never given a speech.
She didn’t know the difference between the political parties.
She didn’t know what legislative district she lived in.
She didn’t know who represented her district in the House and Senate.
She didn’t know what a “statute” was.
She didn’t know how a bill became a law.
She didn’t even know where the Arizona Legislature was located.

Since then, all of that has changed. She’s testified in front of several House and Senate committees, sometimes facing malicious comments; she’s learned how the political game is played in Arizona; she’s “ambushed” lawmakers to tell her story; and she’s become a fixture at the state Capitol.

Oh, and by the way, she also got the rape laws changed.

So, let everyone beware – let every wife and husband know – because of this woman and her refusal to go away, rape is rape in the state of Arizona, and a wedding ring is no longer a defense.

The emotions are still so raw that even three years after the unfathomable rape, recounting her story still makes her cry. “This experience has been debilitating,” she says over lunch.

Part of it is the anguish of knowing she’d spent most of her adult life with a man who would do something like this. “I honestly believed he couldn’t survive without me,” she says. “And he never thought I’d leave him.”

Another part is the regret that her mother’s last months were focused on the rape. “This situation governed every discussion

I had with my mother during the last six months of her life.”

She’s also bothered by the fact that this man still has unsupervised visits with their children. As much as anything, though, she struggles with the realization of how naive she really was.

“I thought I’d have to hire an attorney, until someone told me to report it to the police,” she remembers. “The prosecutors took 10 months to bring the charges against him. And then he got probation!”

But underlying all of that is the incredible betrayal that comes with spousal rape – this kind of rape carries with it a special agony. Specifically, the rapist is someone who stood before family and friends and vowed to love, honor and cherish; the rapist is the father of the victim’s children; and the rapist was once the victim’s best friend and lover.

In Deb’s case, she turned her outrage into political action, but she remembers how “devastated” she was at the initial reaction of Arizona’s lawmakers.

“To my face, most were very considerate.” Behind her back, though, or when they spoke during committee meetings, it was something else. “They’d talk about it like the victims weren’t even there,” she recalls. “As though I hadn’t just testified. How did they not get it?”

One lawmaker, according to a longtime lobbyist who was working on the case, called it the “she says no and I go to jail bill.” And another actually said, “Isn’t it part of the deal?”

As long as she lives, Deb will never under-stand how anyone could think that getting raped by your husband is just part of the deal that comes with the marriage vows.

Arizona has never been Johnny on the spot when it comes to rape. In fact, the state didn’t even have a tough rape law until 1977, when sexual assault finally came “into the 20th Century,” according to Bill Hart, executive director of the Arizona Sexual Assault Network. That law basically said that rape applied to “anyone” who didn’t give consent to sex. And the law imposed harsh penalties, saying that rape was a Class 2 felony. But, in 1983, the Legislature took a giant step backward and declared that it was impossible for a husband to rape his wife. And thus, it passed a law that said marriage was an “affirmative defense for sexual assault.” In other words, you couldn’t be convicted of sexual assault against a spouse.

It wasn’t until 1988 that it became illegal for a husband to rape his wife in Arizona, and even then it was just a Class 6 felony – the lowest possible felony. What’s more, that law also required a special criteria for spousal rape – the woman had to prove “force or threatened use of force.”

In 2001, the Arizona Coalition Against Domestic Violence tried to repeal the exemptions and raise the penalties to match the other rapes. The organization found a lawmaker to sponsor the bill – a requirement, because citizens alone can’t introduce legislation in Arizona – but Hart remembers they were laughed out of the caucus, where one lawmaker called it the “honey I have a head-ache bill.”

In 2002, the coalition couldn’t find a sponsor for the bill. In 2003, they didn’t even try to find a sponsor, knowing it would be dead on arrival. Then, in 2004, Deb showed up on the doorstep, unaware of anyone else’s efforts, but anxious to get someone to listen to her story.

After one person was nice enough to tell her who her district representatives were, she approached Representative Clancy Jayne, R-Phoenix, and he agreed to sponsor the bill. But when she approached her local senator, Dean Martin, R-Phoenix, not only would he not “sign on” to the bill as a sponsor, but he wouldn’t answer her phone calls, either, Deb remembers.

Jayne organized the effort to make spousal rape a Class 2 felony, just like all of the other rapes. It was introduced into the 2004 legislative session with 20 co-sponsors in the House, one-third of all the House members. In general, if the right names are on the list – with Republicans in control, it’s essential that most of those names be Republican, and they were – that can be a good sign. In this case, though, it wasn’t.

While the bill in 2004 had almost unanimous support among Democrats, as well as healthy support among some Republicans, it was strongly opposed by a small group of the GOP. The most significant was Eddie Farnsworth, the House majority leader from Gilbert. Hart remembers a conversation that took place one day on the Capital Mall. As he remembers it, Farnsworth told him, “Some would argue there are conjugal rights that exist within a marriage.” Hart says he responded by saying, “Some would argue that that idea comes from the days when women were seen as chattel.”

When Deb confronted Farnsworth herself, she asked him, “Don’t you have any daughters?” and she was told he had seven. She wondered why that hadn’t made him see the light. But, apparently, it never did.

Ironically, rape is an issue that has profoundly touched the Farnsworth family.
One of Eddie’s nephews, Albert Stephen Farnsworth, was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2003, when he was 21 years old, for kidnapping and raping a 12-year-old Gilbert girl as she was walking to school.

In addition to the opposition in the Legislature, there was the fear that repealing the exemptions would “inspire women to come forward with false charges.” Deb heard lawmakers argue that “women will be vindictive, and wives will say they’ve been raped just to get back at their husbands.” She also heard them argue the opposite. As Mark Andrews, R-Mesa, worried out loud: “It would seem like even less reporting would go on, because now [the victim] figures that it’s a much more serious penalty that my husband is going to face, and I’ve got kids, and he’s going to jail for 10 years.”

Hart remembers how hard it was for Deb to realize she was dealing with a Legislature that was displaying everything “from simple ignorance to downright misogyny.”

A crucial lawmaker that held the “vindictive” worry was Steve Tully, R-Phoenix, who was chair of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He wouldn’t even let the bill be heard in his committee without a com-promise – he wouldn’t support raising the penalty to the Class 2 level, but he would support bringing it up from a Class 6 to a Class 4 felony.

“This was a defeat, but still a small victory,” Hart remembers. “We had to compromise, or the bill was dead.”

That bill passed the House Judiciary Committee unanimously, and then it went to the Human Services Committee. Deb testified again, and so did a woman who was raped on her wedding night.

“The women on the committee were crying,” Deb remembers, as the bill passed the second committee unanimously.

Having passed two House committees, the bill then went before the full House, where it again passed unanimously – an al-most unheard of accomplishment. (Farnsworth didn’t cast a vote.) Things were looking very, very good.

From there, it went to the Arizona Senate. Its first stop was the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Jim Weiers, R-Phoenix, was chairman. From his comments in the committee hearing, Deb worried that he wasn’t even going to let the bill have a hearing. But then she “ambushed” him in the hall. “We sat on a couch in the Senate lounge for a half-hour and he changed his mind,” she explains.

He not only let the bill be heard – it got another unanimous vote for approval – but he came to see the value of the bill, which would be crucial later on.

The bill then had to clear the Senate Rules Committee, before the entire Senate could vote final passage. That’s when it ran up against Robert Blendu, R-Litchfield Park.
For two months, he held the bill, refusing to let it come to a vote. (This is why committee chairs are so powerful – they can single-handedly kill legislation by simply stuffing it in the bottom drawer.)

Some speculated that Blendu was being vindictive because the bill’s sponsor had been part of the “moderate Republican” bloc that helped pass a state budget that was strongly opposed by the right-wing Republican leadership. Deb was told “paybacks” have become more common in the Legislature as the level of civility has dropped, and she didn’t think that was fair.

Nonetheless, even when Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts started blasting Senator Blendu in print, he wouldn’t bend to pressure, and personally killed the bill. To explain himself, he started saying things like: This was just a “feel-good measure” without any substance; there shouldn’t be a separate law for spousal rape (as though he didn’t understand that that’s exactly what the bill was trying to change); lawmakers were secretly lobbying him not to let the bill out because they had been “forced” to vote for it, as though all of those unanimous votes had somehow been coerced.

If Deb had felt like making a joke, she would have joked about how she was powerful enough to force 89 members of the Legislature to bend to her will. But she wasn’t laughing. The defeat of the bill made her sick – she took it as a personal assault on her and what she’d been through.

But, as the old saying goes: That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And Deb felt pretty strong by the time the 2005 legislative session began in January.

Who would have ever guessed that Robert Blendu would become the hero in this story, but that’s exactly what happened in the 2005 session. As he faced re-election in the fall of 2004, his opponent was hounding him about the spousal-rape bill, and he was being forced to defend his position. Eventually, the time came when he realized that it wasn’t defensible. Two weeks before the election, he called Hart at the Sexual Assault Network and told him he intended to sponsor a bill that made spousal rape the same as any other rape.

“When we saw the bill, it was a straight repeal of the old law,” Hart says in astonishment. He couldn’t have been more delighted. Likewise, Deb was ecstatic.

This time around, the bill originated in the Senate, under Blendu’s sponsorship, and was assigned to the Senate Judiciary Committee headed by John Huppenthal,
R-Chandler. Although the committee agreed to raise the penalties to a Class 2 felony, they insisted on maintaining the requirements on force. Blendu said he’d accept those amendments to get the bill out of the Senate, and it ultimately passed.

Over on the House side, a familiar face became a friend. Jim Weiers – who’d had the heart-to-heart talk with Deb the year before – had given up his Senate seat and run for the House in the last election, and ended up with the powerful position as House speaker. One of his duties as speaker is to assign bills to various committees – a move that can signal doom or success, depending on the politics of the committee chair. If he had followed tradition and sent the spousal-rape bill to the House Judiciary Committee, it would have been doomed.

That committee was headed by Eddie Farnsworth, the same lawmaker who wouldn’t even cast a vote on the issue the year be-fore, and probably would have never let it get to a hearing.
However, Weiers proved himself a champion by not sending the bill to Judiciary, and instead assigning it to the House Human Services Committee, where chair Pete Hershberger, R-Tucson, was a known advocate.
Nonetheless, the committee defeated the bill. Representative Warde Nichols, R-Chandler, one of the co-sponsors of the bill the year before, voted “no.” So did Representative Laura Knaperek, R-Tempe; Mark Anderson, R-Mesa; and John Allen, R-Scottsdale. Deb was so upset that she ran out of the room in tears.

Senator Blendu, who was at home sick, was just as stunned by the outcome. He told Hart he would have shown up on a stretcher if he’d known the bill was in trouble. So, Senator Blendu called Representative Nichols to find out what was going on. Nichols had apparently misunderstood the bill, and agreed to call for its reconsideration (something only a person on the prevailing side of the vote can do). Meanwhile, Knaperek wanted data. How many cases had there actually been? How did this number stack up with other states?

She was told that in the last five years, 30 cases had been filed, but only 17 had been prosecuted, including Deb’s. She was also told that a law like Arizona’s had been declared unconstitutional by two other states – rapists had argued that they were getting harsh sentences, while husbands who raped their wives weren’t. It was the opposite side of the coin, but it argued for exactly the same thing – rape is rape.

Then, into the fray came Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas, who personally called key Republicans and helped “turn it around,” Deb says.

The committee’s reconsideration of the bill turned out to be a godsend. The bill be-fore them still included the requirement that wives had to prove force. However, the committee decided not to impose that extra demand, and passed a straight repeal of the spousal-rape law. In the full House, there were only four votes against it – three Republicans and one Democrat: Republicans Ed-die Farnsworth, Chuck Gray (Mesa) and Russell Pearce (Mesa), and Tucson Democrat Ted Downing. The Senate concurred with the House, and the bill went to the governor.

In May of this year, Governor Janet Napolitano signed the bill into law.
Although the fight had been long and hard, its passage flew under the radar for many, including the media. A month after it was signed, Channel 12 reported on a spousal-rape case up in Flagstaff, and said officials hoped it was the kind of case that “will help change the state law.”

Hart worries that if the media doesn’t even know about the change, there’s much to do to ensure that wives and husbands understand there are new rules now.

Deb looks back on the two years she spent getting the law changed and realizes how much she didn’t know. “I was probably naive enough to believe it was easier than it was,” she says. “I was not intimidated by the Legislature in the beginning, because I didn’t know any better – I became intimidated when I saw the power one man can hold.”
Hart remembers that when he first met Deb, he suggested she call herself a “survivor.” And he can still quote her response: “No, call me a ‘victim,’ because until this statute is changed, I will continue to be victimized by the law.”

These days, she agrees that she’s a survivor. “I feel an overwhelming sense of calm that we’re now all protected,” she says with pride. “No one else will ever go through my experience.”

Although she doesn’t want to be identified – The Arizona Republic withheld her name in its news stories, as well – she’s proud of what she’s done. So is the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, which has given her its Distinguished Service Award for 2005. And so is the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which has named her Woman of the Year.

“I am moving forward,” she says. And she’s continuing to work on her degree, although, she says, “I’ve switched my major to political science from business because of this experience.” She’s also raising her children, and she’s still fighting her ex-husband over unsupervised visitation, which she finds unbelievable – under the circumstances.