This rape no crime
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
You have to see this through three sets of eyes.
There's Frankie Rodriguez, 19, hot stuff, a right-handed pitcher last season for the Red Sox' Single-A Carolina League affiliate in Lynchburg, Va. Scouts look at him and see the majors. His career prospects are soaring. He can taste success.
Of course, he attracts fans. Young, pretty girls cheer him on the field and wait for him after the game. He has his choice. On the night of Aug. 24, he gives a pair of girls who've followed him from game to game all summer long, a ride home. One of the girls says she doesn't want to go home, that she'd rather go to Rodriguez's apartment instead. When she gets there, she asks her friend to leave Rodriguez's bedroom so that they can have sex. Afterward, he drives both girls home.
The girl, in the meantime, is only 14. She doesn't look 14 - not on the night of Aug. 24. She doesn't act 14, either. She is a product of the times. She "loves" Rodriguez the way girls have always loved stars. She knows everything about him, knows his stats, his moves, waits on his every word.
She wants to prove her love so she has sex with him. This is behavior she has learned from TV, movies, from the world in which she lives.
She goes home feeling "kind of happy." That's what she testifies in court, that's what she insists, even after her mother presses charges.
The mother discovers what her daughter has been up to when she finds a letter written by her daughter's friend about what happened on Aug. 24. She calls the police and files a complaint charging Rodriguez with statutory rape. Does she do this out of anger and motherly love? Or does she, perhaps, see dollar signs in the form of a big, fat Red Sox settlement? Time will tell.
For now there is just the law, archaic Virginia law, under which there are only two defenses for statutory rape: that the alleged sexual intercourse didn't take place; or that the defendant was married to or intended to marry the victim.
Since neither applies in Rodriguez's case - he freely admits having sex with the girl - he's looking at a long prison term. Though he had no idea he was committing an illegal act, though he insists he didn't know the girl was under age, (she testified before a grand jury that she didn't tell him her age) though she went willingly and gratefully with him to his apartment and to his bed, his life is on the rocks, his career on hold.
Once upon a time in America a case like this wouldn't have made it to first base. This girl's mother wouldn't have dared to press charges because her daughter's behavior would have been on trial.
But now the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that her behavior isn't a factor at all. She is a girl. She is 14. Therefore, she is the victim.
But Rodriguez is a victim, too. He's just a kid himself - 19 and climbing to the top of the world. Girls adore him. Girls hit on him. He takes them home because this is what the world has taught him. This is how heroes behave.
Maybe he should have known she was 14. But how?
"It's hard to tell with girls," he told a police investigator. "They put on nice clothes and makeup."
And they pretend to be older than they are.
The saddest part of all this - aside from the fact that Rodriguez could end up in jail, which would be a real crime - is this mixing up of love, sex, infatuation, power and pleasure.
Rodriguez lives in the spotlight. The 14-year-old stepped into it in the only way she knew how. It's a pitiful sign of the times. But it's not a crime.
