Should A Statutory-Rape Conviction Warrant The Termination Of Someone’s Parental Rights?
Some of you Steemians may be old enough to remember the television miniseries titled Roots from back in the day. One particularly disturbing scenario in that miniseries featured a situation in which a slave master named Tom Moore repeatedly raped an African-American female slave named Kizzy until he got her pregnant. In the miniseries, she later gives birth to a baby boy and names him George. George eventually becomes friends with Tom Moore, not knowing what this same man did to his mother to beget him or that he even was his biological father.
Later on in the miniseries, Tom Moore does something to anger George and his mother. After George talks to his mother about killing Tom Moore, she finally tells him that this man is his biological father and that he was conceived through rape. Kizzy begs her son not to kill Tom Moore, because The Holy Bible treats patricide as an unforgivable sin. I’m sure glad that I’m an agnostic, because I could not buy into such a puritanical school of thought that easily.
Tom Moore conveys to George that he couldn’t care less that George is his biological son and that he will treat him and his mother as he pleases. Hmm. Who says that there is no such thing as justifiable patricide?
Numerous filmmakers and television producers have explored this same subject of babies conceived through forcible rape. In 1981, the television series titled Little House On The Prairie aired a two-part episode named “Sylvia” in which a masked man rapes a 14-year-old girl named Sylvia Webb (played by Olivia Barash) and gets her pregnant with his baby. At the end of the episode, Sylvia dies because of complications related to her pregnancy.
One slasher/horror film that was released in 2000 made a rape-conceived child a part of the mystery behind its plot. The movie was titled Cherry Falls. Its plot starts off where a 16-year-old girl played by the late Brittany Murphy has a crush on her 27-year-old male schoolteacher. The schoolteacher later turns out to be her half-brother, and it is revealed that the 16-year-old girl’s father had raped the schoolteacher’s mother when she was a teenager and had gotten her pregnant with him. The scene wherein this revelation is made becomes very disturbing when the schoolteacher tells his biological father that his mother repeatedly beat on him when he was still a baby inasmuch as she wanted to vent her rage against her rapist by physically abusing the child she had conceived from the rape. The schoolteacher then blames his biological father for his horrible childhood and brutally murders him with an ax.
The majority of us would absolutely hate our biological fathers for having raped our mothers if we were to find out that we were conceived as a result of that same rape. Not even the Christian teachings of the church could convince any of us who may have faith-based beliefs that we should spend send our biological father a Father’s Day card every year in that event.
Back in the 1990s, there was a major crisis in Bosnia of soldiers violently raping girls as young as 12 years old, even in front of their parents, and getting them pregnant. This region of the world was confronted with a myriad of problems after those children conceived by forcible rape matured into teenagers and eventually young adults. Of course, I will not elaborate on those same problems, because that is another Steemit article for another time.
A. State Legislatures Have Recently Revamped Laws Pertaining To Parental Rights To Exclude Rapists From Having Access To Children They Father With Their Rape Victims
Over the course of this past decade, crime victims activists have been fighting to change laws throughout the United States of America so that rapists will no longer have any sort of parental rights over the children that they father with their rape victims. I find that this mission makes all the sense in the world, because many women and even young girls end up keeping the babies with which rapists have impregnated them. Below is a YouTube video of a young lady describing how she was raped and her reason for keeping the baby that resulted from the atrocity.
A Woman Describes Her Decision To Keep Her Baby Conceived By Rape
Wendy Murphy is a crime victims advocate who has been very active in fighting to change the laws throughout our nation to allow for rape victims to terminate the parental rights of their assailants in the event of a pregnancy that results from their sexual assault. She is an aggressive attorney who is a champion for the rights of victims, especially victims of heinous sex crimes. There is no question that this woman is rough around the edges, but she has a very strong sense of compassion for those whom the criminal justice system has failed. I do not agree with her on everything, but I can confidently say that, unlike Fraidy Reiss of Unchained At Last and Jeanne Smoot of the Tahirih Justice Center, she is a true humanitarian rather than a femi-Nazi extremist only looking to make a name for herself. Moreover, unlike Ms. Reiss and Ms. Smoot, she keeps her distance from shady individuals like the Clintons.
Ms. Murphy represented a young woman in an interesting court case in Massachusetts not too long ago. To give you the gist of what this matter involved, back in 2009, a 19-year-old man named Jamie Melendez raped a 14-year-old girl in her home and got her pregnant. The man had coerced the young girl into having sexual intercourse with him. Therefore, the incident had all the characteristics of a forcible rape. However, the prosecutor and the presiding judge in the matter allowed for Mr. Melendez to plea bargain his criminal matter down to a conviction for four counts of statutory rape, and the judge gave him a slap on the wrist upon sentencing him.
The 14-year-old rape victim decided to keep the baby girl that had been conceived through rape and raise her. After the court ordered Mr. Melendez to pay child support to her for the baby, he added insult to injury by seeking visitation rights and the likes with the baby girl. Now, the young rape victim had already been through enough pain and agony because of this matter, and it is understandable that she did not want any kind of parental relationship with him. Therefore, she retained Wendy Murphy as her attorney and set out to fight her rapist through the court system.
I may not be a major fan of Dr. Drew Pinski, and, quite frankly, I did not feel sorry for him once his television show got cancelled from the Headline News network. However, he did have an interesting television show when he invited this same young rape victim and Ms. Murphy to appear on it. He referred to the rape victim with the pseudonym of “Jane.” Below is a YouTube video of a clip of that same interview that Dr. Pinski held on camera.
Wendy Murphy Discusses Changing The Laws In Our Nation Regarding The Parental Rights Of Rapists
Ms. Murphy made it clear in the above-described interview that what happened to her client “Jane” was not at all a Romeo-and-Juliet-style romance that was benign in nature à la Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith. Jamie Melendez did rape the young girl. It is very clear that Jane did not deserve all the pain and suffering that Mr. Melendez had caused her from the time he had raped her and afterwards. I found it particularly disturbing that this poor girl was crying every night because of what he had done to her and what he had continued to do to make her life miserable.
Rebecca Nitkin is a criminal defense attorney who specializes in defending individuals accused of sex crimes, especially against minors. She has frequently been one to question the fairness and integrity of many of the sex laws throughout our nation and rightfully so. She once legally represented a 23-year-old man who had gotten into trouble for having a liaison with an 11-year-old girl he had met on the Internet. However, even she found Mr. Melendez’s actions to be despicable and reprehensible, and she also questioned the professional conduct of the judicial officials involved in the matter; and she expressed disapproval over how the laws in Massachusetts were worded in addressing rapists’ parental rights over their rape-conceived offspring by rape. I embedded an interview she provided to CNN in Part G of my Steemit article titled “The Great American Controversy Over Underage Marriage.”
Nevertheless, now that many state jurisdictions in our nation have changed their laws so that rape victims can terminate the parental rights of their assailants in the event that the rape has resulted in an unwanted pregnancy, there is one concern that stays in my mind about certain situations in which the rights of fathers and even mothers could fall easily through the cracks of the American court system. Although my heart goes out to the above-described Massachusetts woman who has endured a myriad of problems and difficulties from the scoundrel who had raped her, there is no denying that there is a major difference between forcible rape and “statutory rape.”
B. The Flaws In The Statutory-Rape Laws Throughout Our Nation Could Cause Innocent Individuals To Lose Their Parental Rights
Forcible rape is a violent act of sexual brutality. Usually, it causes trauma to its victims. Getting raped is a horrendous ordeal that none of us want to go through. On the other hand, “statutory rape” is merely a legal construct that is created in accordance to the societal norms of a given culture, and usually “victims” of it undergo no trauma or suffering from it at all.
Now, I’m not going to deny that the statutory-age-of-consent laws throughout our nation do have their advantages. For example, if a prosecutor is having a difficult time proving that a minor below the statutory age of consent was forcibly raped, he or she can easily resort to charging the minor’s rapist with “statutory rape” and go after him based solely on the math regarding the rapist’s age and his victim’s age so long as the rapist is an adult above the legal age of majority.
Nevertheless, there still stands the problem of the parental rights of a young man being terminated merely by virtue of the fact that he and his baby mama were on opposite sides of the legal age line from each other when they conceived their child. That is, his baby mama was jailbait at the time they conceived a child, and he was barely over the legal age of majority. We are going to explore that same situation herein.
Romeo-and-Juliet-style couples have become very common in the entertainment industry both here in the land of milk and honey and abroad. That is, these are couples in which both parties are usually teenagers but may be on opposite sides of the legal age line from each other at the outset of their romantic relationship.
In the late 1970s, French actress Eva Ionesco was 13 years old and French actor Simon Liberati was 19 years old when they first developed romantic feelings for each other. Ms. Ionesco and Mr. Liberati are now married to each other.
In 1988, when actress Drew Barrymore was 13 years of age, she was dating an 18-year-old actor named Keith Coogan. Ironically, one year earlier Mr. Coogan was in a scene in the movie titled Hiding Out in which he was a high-school student warning his cousin (played by Jon Cryer) not to get into trouble for “statutory rape.”
Currently, social-media influencer Danielle Cohn is dating another social-influencer named Mikey Tua. Danielle is 14 years old, and Mikey is now 18 years old. If you look into their backgrounds, you will find that these two love birds have been there for each other through thick and thin despite that there was a brief interruption in their romantic relationship. Mikey even took Danielle back as his girlfriend, even though another boy had taken her virginity and had even gotten her pregnant. You can get the details of what happened in my Steemit article titled “Teenage Social-Media Influencer Danielle Cohn Is Better Off With Adult Boyfriend.”
All three of the above-described couples have happy moments to describe about their respective relationships. Two of these same couples are currently still together. Unfortunately, Romeo-and-Juliet-style couples do not always have foolproof relationships, and collateral legal problems can ensue as a result.
C. An Alaska Man Is Unfairly Confronted With Losing His Parental Rights Because Of A Frivolous And Malicious Statutory-Rape Conviction Against Him From A Decade Ago
Several years ago I came across a story out of Alaska about a young man whose baby mama and her parents were seeking to terminate his parental rights merely because he and his baby mama were on opposite sides of the legal age line from each other when his baby mama became pregnant with his child over a decade ago. They were both teenagers in love with each other at the time that they conceived their child, and they were your typical Romeo-and-Juliet-style couple. However, the young girl’s parents felt that the man was too old for their daughter, and they did not approve of his relationship with her because of it. Therefore, they pressed criminal charges against him, and he eventually went to prison because of it.
The girl’s name was Angelica Curtis, and she was 13 years old back in 2009. The young man’s name was Jonathan Torres Chim, and he was 19 years old at the time. Now, I know what a great number of you are going to argue about such a relationship. That is, he was playing with jailbait and he got caught. However, the criminal justice system did everyone involved in this situation no real favors. Also, what is to say that Ms. Curtis would still not have gotten pregnant if her baby daddy had been only 14 or 15 years old back when they had sexual intercourse and she was 13 years old? Now there is a little boy caught in the middle of this whole situation involving them. His name is Jonathan Torres, and he is their son.
The local press and the media in Alaska have not been very fair to Mr. Chim, and you can even sense their bias in reading the titles of the stories they have done about this matter. Paula Ann Solis who ran the story about this matter in both the Juneau Empire newspaper and on their YouTube channel even titled both her article and her video interview as “Twice a victim of a rapist.” Therefore, it can be no mystery why Mr. Chim refused an interview with this same news agency. He did the wise thing and told them to communicate with his attorney instead. Below is a YouTube video containing a clip of an interview that Paula Ann Solis of the Juneau Empire did with Angelica Curtis and her parents back in 2016.
Angelica Curtis And Her Parents Are Interviewed Regarding Their Custody Battle With Jonathan Chim
Now, if you have read my previous Steemit articles, you will quickly realize that I have no love lost for teenage fathers who are either deadbeats or abusive boyfriends with their underage baby mamas. I would even like for our United States Congress and our president to pass a law that would draft deadbeat teenage fathers and the likes into the military on their eighteenth birthday. However, there were many things that were so not right about the way that Angelica Curtis and her parents delivered their interview to Ms. Solis.
First of all, at the time of this same interview back in 2016, the son of both Mr. Chim and Ms. Curtis, Jonathan Torres, was only 6 years old. This little boy did not need to be listening to his mother, his maternal grandparents and Ms. Solis repeatedly call his father a “rapist.” Jerry Springer did some outlandish things on his television talk show (The Jerry Springer Show) that aired up until 2018, but even he was confronted with situations on his television program in which he had to have his staff take someone’s little kid off stage to a separate waiting room to protect that child from hearing something that could have inflicted psychological scars on them. Ms. Solis should have done the same with Ms. Curtis’s son before she began interviewing Ms. Curtis and her parents.
Second of all, Ms. Solis was very unprofessional in the way she handled this same interview, and the fact alone that she was biased in the way she reported the story demonstrates that there are holes in the story itself. Ms. Curtis did not show herself to be a good mother by verbally subjecting her little son to the obvious hostility that she harbors against Mr. Chim. I do not hold any higher of an opinion of the little boy’s maternal grandparents in that respect either. According to Ms. Solis’s online article also titled “Twice the victim of a rapist” that describes her interview with the Curtises, Ms. Curtis now has her son asking her whether his father is going back to jail. Therefore, the psychological scars she has inflicted upon her own son are already there.
During the interview, Ms. Curtis admitted that even though she was only 13 years of age when she had sexual relations with Mr. Chim, she went into the relationship willingly and knew exactly what she was doing. She then insisted that her shrinks helped her see the whole situation differently and discouraged her from taking any blame for what ultimately happened. Of course, her shrinks were going to go down that road, because her parents were paying them to throw her a pity party.
Ms. Curtis eventually admitted in the interview that she “should have known better” after she said the same about Mr. Chim. Her sob story is simply not credible, and she doesn’t even come close to convincing me that she was a rape victim.
Ms. Curtis? You talked about how when you were in therapy at 17 and 18 years old, you told your therapist that you didn’t see how it was right for a young man in his late teens to get a 13- or 14-year-old girl pregnant. Okay. You may have established that such conduct may not be the norm here in the land of milk and honey according to society. However, you still fell short of proving that Mr. Chim raped you when you were that young.
Ms. Curtis can harp on and on about how Mr. Chim should have known better as she did so in the interview, but, at the end of the day, she still failed to prove that he was really, in fact, a rapist. Upon having sexual intercourse with Mr. Chim when she was a teenager, Ms. Curtis was in love with him and she did not suffer the trauma that a real rape victim suffers as was described in Simcha Fisher’s article titled “When a teenage girl reports being raped.” Therefore, she and her parents are riding completely on the coattail of the defects in the laws pertaining to the termination of parental rights of rapists in their state jurisdiction, because she and her parents are basing their arguments completely upon the fact that Mr. Chim was six years older than her when she became pregnant with his baby at 13 years old.
Nowhere in her interview with Ms. Solis did Ms. Curtis indicate that Mr. Chim actually forced her, coerced her, seduced her, lured her, enticed her or even as so much groomed her into having sexual intercourse with him back when she was 13 years old. She is trying to redefine a consensual act of teenage sex as a violent act of sexual brutality against her, and clearly she did not suffer that kind of atrocity at the hands of Mr. Chim.
Now, I completely get it. Many American parents probably don’t want their 13-year-old daughter dating someone six years her senior, because they have been indoctrinated to view Romeo-and-Juliet-style relationships as taboo in our culture. Ms. Curtis was below the statutory age of consent in her state jurisdiction at the time that she had sexual intercourse with Mr. Chim, who was barely over the legal age of majority back then. However, it does not give her and her parents the right to make him out to be another Phillip Garrido, and it should not give them the right to terminate his parental rights over his son, Jonathan Torres. If Ms. Curtis didn’t want to get pregnant with his baby, she could have easily said no to him and broke up with him; and she could have walked away from the situation. Many teenage girls do so.
What angers me about this whole interview is here this poor man, Mr. Chim, only wants to be a good father to his son, and Ms. Curtis and her parents are using every dirty trick in the book to remove him completely from his son’s life. Ms. Curtis told Ms. Solis that Mr. Chim went to jail. Yeah, he got locked up for three years, because her parents brought criminal charges against him because of his romantic relationship with their daughter back in 2009; but it doesn’t mean that his parental rights over his son, Jonathan Torres, should be terminated altogether.
The only thing that Ms. Curtis proves in the interview with Ms. Solis was that Mr. Chim made an improvident decision to cross over the legal age line when he had sex with her back when she was 13 years old. However, she never succeeds at proving that he is a dangerous and predatory rapist who deserves to lose all of his parental rights. She is every definition of Me-Too-Movement fraud here in the land of milk and honey. Also, Mr. Chim is not a pedophile or a child molester, and he is no danger to children or even to his own son.
Ms. Curtis claimed in the interview that it was Mr. Chim’s idea to get her pregnant when she was 13 years old inasmuch as he was going to be locked up soon. I have to question whether such events happened in this same order. After hearing some of this woman’s nonsense, I began to wonder if her parents had Mr. Chim arrested for “Attempted Sexual Abuse Of A Minor” after they found out that he had gotten their daughter pregnant so that they could get him out of their lives for a substantial enough period of time that they could wrongfully accuse him of being absent from their grandson’s life on an intentional basis. Mr. Chim served 3 years in prison according to Ms. Solis’s article also titled “Twice the victim of a rapist.”
Ms. Curtis eventually alleged in her interview that Mr. Chim stopped wanting to be involved in their son’s life at some point in time. Of course, she’s going to badmouth him in his absence any way she can, because she knows that he and his parents are not going to submit to her and her parent’s shenanigans. She also wants to do so in an effort to make her sorry, pathetic self look good in some way, when all she really accomplishes is psychologically scarring her own son in making him hear her insult and belittle his father.
If Mr. Chim was such a negligent and uncaring father as Ms. Curtis alleged, he would not have been happy to see his son while he was still incarcerated as described in Ms. Solis’s above-described online article in the Juneau Empire. Moreover, Mr. Chim’s parents would not be supporting him in his custody battle against Ms. Curtis and her parents over the little boy.
Ms. Curtis did nothing in the interview to hide the fact that she is a puppet to her parents. She is clearly an unfit mother. Therefore, the court would be making a very big mistake by allowing her to get full custody of Jonathan Torres and to cut the little boy’s biological father completely out of his life. That is, Ms. Curtis would have ample opportunity to do more psychological harm to this child than she has apparently done up to this point in time.
In the interview, Ms. Curtis did nothing to hide the fact that she was a head case long before she ever met Mr. Chim. She claimed that she was recently diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Hmmm. I’m sure that Mr. Chim has suffered much more than you have, Ms. Curtis. He had to shower with violent criminals for three years in a penal facility, and he had to keep himself from falling prey to all the violent sodomites that linger in such places. You and your parents obviously want to take that one last stab at him to ruin his life as much as you can by separating him from his son forever.
In the interview, Ms. Curtis stated that, by virtue of the fact that she could legally label Chim “a rapist,” he should, therefore, lose all his parental rights over their son. He was specifically convicted of “Attempted Sexual Abuse Of A Minor” for having sexual relations with Ms. Curtis when he was 19 years old and she was 13 years old. Because I am not a lawyer, I do not know if that kind of charge actually rises to the level of defining someone as being a rapist. Perhaps it does so in the eyes of the law there in Alaska. However, I cannot rely on Ms. Curtis’s word of honor, because her story had so many holes in it that one could not be sure whether she was telling the truth or not.
If I were in Mr. Chim’s shoes, I’d either be taking that little boy and heading for the hills where nobody could find us or fleeing with him to one of those nations that are not signatories of the Hague Abduction Convention such as Indonesia. Currently, it appears that the law has been on his side regarding his custodial rights over his son, Jonathan Torres, so far, but it concerns me that his luck may take a turn for the worse in the near future if Angelica Curtis and her parents get their way about the whole situation.
In the interview, Ms. Curtis insisted that Mr. Chim had to have known that he was breaking the law when he had sexual intercourse with her back when she was 13 years old. However, she offered nothing in her statements to conclude that Mr. Chim actually victimized her in a sexual manner.
In the interview, Ms. Curtis had the audacity to speculate that Mr. Chim would eventually get some other 13-year-old girl pregnant “today” if the opportunity ever presented itself to him as though he were some kind of sex addict who obsessed over getting 13-year-old girls pregnant. Oh, brother! You have no evidence to prove such an accusation, Ms. Curtis. Moreover, Mr. Chim is now a happily married man. How do I know? I once had occasion to communicate with his *wife via YouTube. (*Note – Mr. Chim apparently married a woman other than Ms. Curtis sometime after his release from prison.) She told me that he was a good father and that all he wanted to do was to be in the life of his son – Jonathan Torres.
In the interview, Ms. Curtis complained that Mr. Chim continued to deny any wrongdoing. Well, Ms. Curtis, if you keep on accusing him of being another Phillip Garrido, naturally your actions will put him on the defensive in that you are not being honest with the public at large or with yourself.
I was relieved that Ms. Curtis stated in her interview that she did not plan on having any more children, because she’s not a very good mother with her son as it is. Mr. Chim’s attorney has even presented such facts to the court.
Near the end of the interview, Ms. Curtis put on a phony sobbing act as she walked away from the camera, except that she didn’t show any tears in her eyes despite that Ms. Solis claimed in her article titled “Twice a victim of rape” that Ms. Curtis did shed tears. This woman is a drama queen, and we all need to be leery of her tactics as one.
What really angers me about this whole situation is that it is in the same state jurisdiction (Alaska) as the legal situation that first transpired between Levi Johnston and Bristol Palin a decade ago. If you read my Steemit article titled “Idaho Wisely Rejects Underage Marriage Bill,” you will find that Levi Johnston clearly raped Bristol Palin when she was no older than 16 years of age. Mr. Johnston has been a deadbeat teenage father for a long time, but the court system in Alaska has coddled him in his demands for custody of his and Bristol’s son, Tripp.
Jonathan Torres Chim, on the other hand, did not really rape Angelica Curtis, because she had every opportunity to walk away from her relationship with him when she was a teenager and she chose not to do so. He is trying arduously to stay in his son’s life, and his parental rights are being sabotaged because of a defect in the laws of his state jurisdiction that address the termination of rapists’ parental rights. It is a coincidence that Bristol Palin’s son, Tripp, and Jonathan Torres are both almost the same age. The major difference is that Tripp has a swine for a father, whereas Jonathan Torres has a father who really cares about him and doesn’t want to lose him forever.
Then again, here in the land of milk and honey, Levi Johnston could never have done any wrong to Bristol Palin according to society, because he is only four months older than her and our criminal justice system simply couldn’t care less about underage boys raping teenage girls as described in my Steemit articles titled “Underage Boys Usually Get Away With Rape,” “Could Deadbeat Teenage Fathers Be Worse Than Suspected Online Predators?,” “Do Teenage Girls Really Find Older Men Repulsive?” and “Idaho Wisely Rejects Underage Marriage Bill.” Mr. Chim, on the other hand, was always guilty until proven innocent in a court of law as far as society was concerned, only because he was unfortunate to be on the opposite side of the legal age line from Ms. Curtis when he had sexual intercourse with her on a mutual basis back in 2009. In sarcastic words, let’s give a toast to all of the American double standards in our culture and in our criminal justice system, because those are what seem to control our way of life here in the land of the free and the brave.
I find this entire ploy of the Curtises to misuse the court system to remove Mr. Chim from his son’s life altogether way too convenient for them. Why? Because if Mr. Chim had only been 13, 14 or even 15 years old when he got Ms. Curtis pregnant back in 2009, the Curtises wouldn’t have had even one legal leg to stand on in their current quest to terminate Mr. Chim’s parental rights. That is, the law would have protected Mr. Chim from being charged with “Attempted Sexual Abuse Of A Minor” by virtue of the Romeo-and-Juliet provision in the statutory-age-of-consent laws of his particular state jurisdiction because of his and Ms. Curtis’s closeness in age difference.
Ms. Curtis’s parents are basing their deluded perception of Mr. Chim being a rapist purely on the math as for what his age was and their daughter’s age was at the time that they conceived Jonathan Torres. Now, if Mr. Chim had been an older man in his sixties or seventies and their daughter had only been 9 years old when he got her pregnant, then I would be their biggest advocate in their quest to terminate his parental rights over their grandson. However, he and their daughter were both teenagers at the time that he got their daughter pregnant with their grandson, and he is not a danger to their grandson in any way or to anyone’s child.
According to Paula Ann Solis’s above-described article, Ms. Curtis’s father, Miles Curtis, said, “I don’t think it’s fair that if you commit a crime you should be able to get something out of it.” My response to his complaint is, “What would you be saying, Mr. Curtis, if Mr. Chim had only been 13, 14 or 15 years old back when he got your daughter pregnant?” Once again Ms. Curtis’s father is basing his argument completely on a legal line that was crossed rather than on an actual atrocity or act of sexual brutality that took place.
In that same article, Ms. Solis reported:
Chim has seen his son throughout the years, too. He first saw his son through a glass window when the Curtis family took the baby to LCCC. Miles said he took the boy to see his father because his family is forgiving and wanted to do what they thought might be best at the time. From Miles’ perspective, Chim looked like a caring father back then, proud of his new son, but later Chim would lose interest in his son and never acknowledged the severity of the crime he committed against Angelica. Miles said Chim and Chim’s family tell Angelica often — still to this day — that nothing criminal took place because the sex was consensual between Angelica and Chim. Again, Angelica was a 13-year-old girl at the time, and not capable of consenting to a sexual relationship with someone so many years her elder, which is acknowledged in Alaska law and something Miles is of course emphatic about. Alaska statutes make it illegal for anyone 17 years of age or older to engage in sexual activity with someone 13, 14, or 15 years of age and at least four years younger than the defendant.
Okay. Let me point something out here. Mr. Chim was only two years outside the protective window that the Romeo-and-Juliet provision allowed in the statutory-age-of-consent laws in Alaska. However, he did nothing that would make him a danger to his own son. Because the Curtises are latching on to this whole age-factor smokescreen, it is only understandable that Mr. Chim and his parents are going to be resistant about them making Mr. Chim out to be some kind of career sex criminal. The Curtises are also conveniently making Mr. Chim out to be a runaway father so that the court will not focus on the fact that their daughter is not exactly mother material herself.
What is so interesting about this story from Alaska is that when Montel Williams had his television talk show called The Montel Williams Show so many years ago, he was quite vocal about the fact that he was all in favor of parents terminating their teenage daughter’s baby daddy’s parental rights altogether in the event of a pregnancy if the baby daddy was significantly older than the underage girl and had abused her in some way. At the same time, he periodically would have an adult man in his late teens or in his twenties on stage who was confronted with a possible criminal charge of carnal knowledge of a minor or the likes after having fathered a child with a teenage girl; and when such a man showed that he really cared about his child, Mr. Williams would become his biggest advocate in spite of his pending troubles with the law.
In a nutshell, a statutory-rape conviction or the likes is simply not as black and white as a forcible-rape conviction in determining whether a father’s parental rights should be terminated altogether. The statutory-age-of-consent laws differ so drastically from state jurisdiction to state jurisdiction in our nation that there simply is no one-size-fits-all formula to address the question of whether someone convicted of having sexual intercourse with an adolescent minor should face the dread of losing all of his parental rights over their child whenever a pregnancy has entered the picture. In my humble opinion, somehow it doesn’t seem right that a teenage boy-minor, who is a deadbeat father, gets to keep his parental rights over a baby he fathered simply because he is lucky enough to be the same age as the baby’s mother, whereas a man slightly over the legal age of majority stands the possibility of losing all of his parental rights merely because his baby’s mother was slightly below the statutory age of consent in their state jurisdiction at the time of the baby’s conception, despite that he may be a very good father to their child.
According to Ms. Solis’s above-described article, Alaska State Senator Berta Gardner appears to be deeply involved in ensuring through legislative action and the likes that rapists don’t ever get custody of or even visitations rights with the baby that they conceive by rape. I am not denying that she does have a noble cause. However, my opinion of her quickly plummeted after I read therein that she actually viewed Jonathan Torres to be a child of rape and that she would go out on a limb for the Curtises in their custody battle against Mr. Chim and his parents.
Now, I realize that a great number of feminists are going to be furious at me for what I’m about to state herein. Nonetheless, if I were to come face to face with Alaska State Senator Gardner, I would tell her that extending her state laws regarding the termination of rapists’ parental rights to include individuals who have been convicted of carnal knowledge of an adolescent minor could be as detrimental to the best interests of women as it is to the best interests of men.
D. Allowing Statutory-Rape Convictions To Be Used Legally To Terminate Parental Rights Could Harm Women As Much As It Could Men
What most people in our nation do not seem to realize is that if an underage boy rapes an adult woman, he and his parents can bring statutory-rape charges against her in many state jurisdictions of our nation regardless of whether or not he is ultimately convicted of forcibly raping her. An online publication titled “The Paradox of Statutory Rape” by Russell Christopher and Kathryn Christopher explains this same travesty of justice in detail.
Now, let’s just say that a 14- or 15-year-old boy forcibly rapes a 38-year-old woman and she becomes pregnant with his baby. As I have pointed out in my Steemit article titled “Can Children Sexually Victimize Adults?” and in other previous Steemit articles of mine, the American juvenile justice system usually goes easy on underage defendants for these types of crimes. Therefore, there is a good chance that the underage rapist will get off the hook for what he did. However, if he and his parents press charges against the adult female rape victim for “statutory rape,” the court system may decide to come down hard on that woman and convict her of that crime. If the situation were to play out that way, the woman’s rapist and his parents could seek to have her parental rights terminated altogether and she would be forced into turning the baby she conceived through rape over to her underage rapist and his parents. Now, how messed up is that scenario?
There are way too many problems with our nation’s statutory-age-of-consent laws to render people who have been prosecuted under them to the mercy of self-serving individuals like Angelica Curtis and her parents. It is interesting that Alaska State Senator Berta Gardner found out that under the laws in her state jurisdiction pertaining to the termination of rapists’ parental rights, some courts require that a child of rape be in imminent danger or be the subject of an adoption before such laws can be applied, and there is nothing to show that Jonathan Torres Chim is a danger to his son, Jonathan Torres. In that sense, it could explain why the Curtises are so desperate to employ every dirty tactic they can think of to rip Mr. Chim from his own son’s life forever. I do not doubt Alaska State Senator Gardner’s honorable intentions in securing the law to address the termination of rapists’ parental rights, but I do not feel that she is fully educated on the topic and, therefore, her actions could prospectively open a can of worms for innocent individuals.
Ms. Curtis alleges that Mr. Chim got her involved in drugs and subjected her to emotional abuse when she was 13 years old as though he had some kind of hold over her back then. He and his parents deny any such allegations. We all must remind ourselves that Ms. Curtis has a criminal history, whereas Mr. Chim’s only real crime was falling in love with the wrong girl at the wrong time. Nevertheless, it does not make Mr. Chim a rapist, and Alaska State Senator Gardner needs to realize it.
According to Alex McCarthy’s online article titled “Custody case goes before Supreme Court,” this matter regarding Jonathan Torres’s future with his biological father, Jonathan Torres Chim, is currently pending a decision from the Alaska Supreme Court that would determine whether or not Mr. Chim will continue to be a part of his son’s life. Ms. Curtis has constantly referred to Mr. Chim as her tormentor, but somehow I believe that she is the one who has been unleashing misery on his life as well as the life of their child.
Looking at all the facts and arguments of this case, it does not surprise me that Wendy Murphy has not gotten involved in this matter at all. At least her above-described Massachusetts client who goes by the pseudonym of Jane was an actual victim of forcible rape despite that the defendant in that matter pled his case down to a conviction for four counts of statutory rape.
Hopefully, Mr. Chim’s attorney, Fred Triem, will nip this case in the bud. If he loses this case, I would not blame him and Mr. Chim for appealing it to the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, D.C. inasmuch as this matter does strongly present itself as an issue of national importance that necessitates judicial discretion from the highest court in our nation. Mr. Triem is correct in his assertion that Angelica Curtis is on a vendetta against Mr. Chim. She could save herself and so many other loved ones a load of agony if she let this matter go. She complains that Mr. Chim at one time had her under his control, but it appears to me that it is really her parents who have had her under their control for many years; and she is like a dog that has taken on the face of its owners.
Fortunately, there are state jurisdictions in our nation that have reworded their statutory-age-of-consent laws so that individuals who have a confrontation with them will not necessarily be branded as rapists. For example, some state jurisdictions have renamed the criminal offense of “statutory rape” with a less harsh name such as “Consensual Relations With A Minor,” “Carnal Knowledge Of A Juvenile,” or even “Contributing To The Delinquency Of A Minor.”
The problem is that the definition of “rape” differs from state jurisdiction to state jurisdiction here in the land of milk and honey, and the American criminal justice system continues to stand on a slope that gets slipperier than before all the time in terms of how “rape” should be defined. Also, keep in mind that ignorance of age is not always a defense against an accusation of “statutory rape” or the likes, and this inadequacy in our state laws across the nation leaves men vulnerable to losing their parental rights if their underage baby mama and her parents arbitrarily decide that they don’t want him in his child’s life.
I looked at an online publication titled “Parental Rights and Sexual Assault” by the National Conference of State Legislatures, and I found that many state jurisdictions in our nation have made the mistake of writing their laws regarding the termination of rapists’ parental rights to include their application to individuals who have had sexual intercourse with an adolescent below the statutory age of consent despite that they did nothing to harm that individual. With these new laws, all of us American men may find ourselves going back to the old days when the American courts always awarded custody of children to their mother no matter what the circumstances were.
What I did find interesting was that the laws in Arkansas pertaining to the termination of rapists’ parental rights mandate that a rapist must include a child he conceived by rape in his last will and testament. However, as far as I am concerned, EVERY PARENT in our nation should be legally prohibited from disinheriting their children under any circumstances.
D. My Conclusion To This Topic
While it is completely understandable that state jurisdictions throughout our nation have placed statutes on their law books to provide rape victims with the legal ammunition they need to terminate the parental rights of their rapists over the child that their rapists fathered with them, these new laws have also come with their fair share of flaws. In certain state jurisdictions of our nation, women have acquired the right to terminate the parental rights of their baby daddy if their child was conceived when these women were even one year shy of the statutory age of consent in their state jurisdiction and their baby daddy was convicted of a sexual offense because of it.
Even though “statutory rape” is merely a legal construct that is created in accordance to the societal norms of a given culture, the American court system can easily treat a conviction for it no differently from a forcible-rape conviction upon deciding whether or not to terminate the parental rights of the older parent over a child that was conceived outside the confines of the law in some way or another. Because state jurisdictions throughout our nation have not cleaned up their statutory-rape laws by a long run, even adult women who have been raped by underage boys are currently being exposed to the danger of losing custody of a child that was conceived from the rape under these new laws across the nation that give rape victims the legal ability to terminate their rapists’ parental rights over the child that has resulted from the rape. Many state jurisdictions in our nation still allow for underage rapists to bring a statutory-rape charge against their adult victims. Therefore, it is clear that such cracks in these laws could lead to some really serious problems for innocent bystanders.
The outcome of the matter of Angelica Curtis vs. Jonathan Chim that is currently pending in the Alaska Supreme Court could establish a precedent that courts in other state jurisdictions of our nation may use to determine whether or not someone who has been convicted of a sexual offense should lose their parental rights over a child that may have been conceived outside the confines of the law in some way or another. That is, the Alaska Supreme Court’s decision in this matter could become what is called a persuasive authority in state jurisdictions of our nation where no court decisions have been made on this same matter. In that event, Angelica Curtis’s victory in this same court case could spell out disaster for the rights of fathers throughout our nation insofar as our judicial system could end up returning to the old days back when mothers were always awarded custody of their children regardless of the circumstances.
In the meantime, we Americans need to wake up and smell the coffee. Contact your elected officials and ask them to clean these laws up and revamp them so that they only protect true rape victims and their offspring rather than allowing for all the Angelica Curtises of the world to misuse them for their own self-serving purposes.
Also, if any of us are summonsed to jury duty for a frivolous and malicious statutory-rape trial or the likes, defendants who have the misfortune of being absorbed into these same cases depend on us now more than ever to apply the doctrine of jury nullification to the verdicts in those matters. That is, we, as jurors, have the ability and the legal right to vote “not guilty” for any defendant in a statutory-rape trial or the likes, even if we know that the defendant actually violated the statutory-age-of-consent laws in their state jurisdiction. In doing so, we could be actually sparing that individual from losing all of his parental rights over the child he previously conceived with his underage adolescent baby mama somewhere in the future. It’s time for all of us Americans to act.
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