‘Rough sex’ defense back in the spotlight
A young British woman was found dead in a suitcase in New Zealand about a year ago. Grace Millane (above), 22, had been traveling the world after graduating with a university degree in advertising and marketing, exuberantly posting about her adventures on social media. While in New Zealand, she met a man on Tinder; he killed her that night. But it was an “accident” he pleaded in court, a consensual act of “rough sex.”
“This case is about being strangled to death,” prosecutor Brian Dickey told an Auckland jury. “You can’t consent to your own murder.”
On Friday, the jury handed down a guilty verdict after three weeks of testimony. The man will be sentenced in February. (Media has withheld his name, as mandated by law.) New Zealand law gives mandatory life imprisonment for murder. But while in this case the “rough sex” defense didn’t work, it has been increasingly used over the years, leading to not-guilty verdicts and light sentences.
We Can't Consent to This, a British women’s rights group, told news outlets that 59 men on trial for murder have used the sex-gone-wrong defense in the UK since 1972. The group also says the use of the defense is up tenfold in less than 20 years. Ten out of 20 cases using the defense in the past five years ended in lighter manslaughter charges and either no conviction or one that wasn’t criminal, angering anti-violence advocates.
“If it’s not consensual, then it’s not ‘rough sex,’” Susan Wright, founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, told The New York Times in 2018. “It’s abuse.”
In December 2018, a British millionaire named John Broadhurst, 41, pleaded guilty to manslaughter after killing his girlfriend, Natalie Connolly, 26, during “rough sex.” Connolly had suffered “40 separate injuries, including serious internal trauma, a fractured eye socket and facial wounds, and was bleeding heavily,” according to The Independent.
Broadhurst was only sentenced to three years and eight months.
“When women die, the man gets to tell the story,” Fiona Mackenzie, founder of We Can’t Consent to This told The Independent.
The “rough sex” defense was first highly publicized in the murder of Jennifer Levin, who was found strangled in Central Park in 1986. Robert Chambers, known as the “Preppie Killer,” argued that their sex had been consensual and it just got a little out of hand. The jury became deadlocked, so prosecutors made a deal that he would be convicted of a lesser charge than murder—manslaughter. He served 15 years in prison.
In May 2018, four women accused then-New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman of physical assault. They said he slapped and choked them. He countered by saying everything he did was in the context of consensual sex.
In 2014, a number of women accused Jian Ghomeshi, then a Canadian radio host, of “biting, punching, choking, and smothering” them, The New York Times reported. “In response, he described the activities on Facebook as consensual—‘a mild form of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ he wrote.”
The day after the New Zealand man killed Grace Millane, but before he buried her body in the suitcase, he squeezed in another Tinder date. That woman told the court that he’d described to her how a man he knew had killed a woman during “rough sex,” seemingly trying out his narrative on her. “‘It’s crazy how guys can make one wrong move and go to jail for the rest of their lives,’” she said he told her.
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