Today in criminalize all the
things: a New Jersey lawmaker wants to make it illegal to lie
to someone in order to tempt them into sex. Assemblyman Troy
Singleton’s (D-Burlington) bill would create the new crime of
“sexual assault by fraud”, defined as “an act of sexual penetration
to which a person has given consent because the actor has
misrepresented the purpose of the act or has represented he is
someone he is not.”
“I truly believe that we have to look at the issue of rape as
more than sexual contact without consent,” Singleton said. “Fraud invalidates any
semblance of consent just as forcible sexual contact does. This
legislation is designed to provide our state’s judiciary with
another tool to assess situations where this occurs and potentially
provide a legal remedy to those circumstances.”
No no no just no: we do not need a legal remedy for
people having bad judgement. Is it a shame that some people
misrepresent themselves to get people to sleep with them? Sure. But
not every aspect of social and sexual relationships can be a matter
for government concern. What’s next, making it a misdemeanor to use
outdated photos on your Tinder profile? Criminalizing push-up bras?
Throwing people in jail who say they’ll call the next day but
don’t?
The situation Singleton says spawned his proposal involves
Mischele Lewis, a woman defrauded by a man claiming to be a British
military official. The pair had sex and Lewis also paid the man,
William Allen Jordan, $5,000 for an alleged security clearance.
When Jordan turned out to be a scam artist, Lewis pressed charges
and he wound up pleading guilty to defrauding her. Justice
served, right? Not in the warped worldview of New Jersey
prosecutors, who apparently can’t stand the idea that some areas of
interpersonal dynamics aren’t within their prosecutorial reach.
The state originally wanted to charge Jordan with sexual assault
by coercion—a charge a grand jury refused to indict him on. Now it
seems Singleton has stepped in to try and ensure they won’t be
disappointed again. His proposed crime of sexual assault by fraud
would be punishable by 5 to 20 years in prison. Singleton said he
wants to allow for judicial discretion because “we don’t want
unintended consequences.”
But giving the state broad discretion to adjudicate lies between
lovers would yield a hotbed of unintended consequences, not to
mention the (obviously intended, yet despicable) consequence of
furthering the creep of law enforcement into all areas of our
lives. Furthermore, it’s not necessary to broadly criminalize
deceiving someone into sex to hold people accountable in cases like
a recent notorious one in California, wherein a man snuck into a
sleeping woman’s room after he saw her boyfriend leave and sexually
penetrated her. The woman awoke, assumed it was her boyfriend, and
went along with it until she saw the man, at which point she fought
back and fled. The man was legally liable for starting sex with her
while she was asleep and thus unable to consent—i.e., committing
rape, no extra statute needed.
“Rape-by-deception” has been “almost universally rejected in
American criminal law,” according
to Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld. Yet it’s “a live and
intensifying issue.” In 2010, Massachusetts tried to pass a bill
criminalizing having sex with someone after “having obtained that
person’s consent by the use of fraud, concealment or artifice”; it
was rejected. California passed a rape
by fraud law in 2013, following the case described just above.
Tennessee also prohibits all “intercourse induced by deception,
accomplished by fraud, and obtained by ruse,” as do Alabama and a handful of other
states.
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