Sugar Ray Leonard's Claim of Sexual Assault And Why I Have A Hard Time Believing It

The Olympic gold medal winner and professional boxer, Sugar Ray Leonard has written a memoir in which he says he was the victim of a gay sexual assault when he was 20. Here is how the New York Times reported it: Two pages later, Leonard delivers the book's bombshell while indirectly addressing a growing concern in the sports industry at large. He reveals publicly for the first time that he was sexually abused as a young fighter by an unnamed “prominent Olympic boxing coach.” Leonard writes that when the coach accompanied him as a 15-year-old and another young fighter to a boxing event in Utica, N.Y., in 1971, he had the teenagers take a bath in a tub of hot water and Epsom salts while he sat on the other side of the bathroom. They suspected “something a bit inappropriate” was occurring but did not want to question a strong male authority figure. Several years later, Leonard describes sitting in a car in a deserted parking lot across from a recreation center, listening intently as the same coach, said to be in his late 40s, explained how much a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics would mean to his future. Leonard was flattered, filled with hope, as any young athlete would be. But he writes: “Before I knew it, he had unzipped my pants and put his hand, then mouth, on an area that has haunted me for life. I didn’t scream. I didn’t look at him. I just opened the door and ran.” He adds that when he first decided to discuss the incident in the book, which is written with Michael Arkush, he offered a version in which the abuser stopped before there was actual contact. “That was painful enough,” Leonard writes. “But last year, after watching the actor Todd Bridges bare his soul on Oprah’s show about how he was sexually abused as a kid, I realized I would never be free unless I revealed the whole truth, no matter how much it hurt.” Later in the Times piece, after citing the numerous incidences of his violence - especially against his first wife - , adultery, drug and alcohol abuse this is said: Greenburg speculated that it was counseling that helped him finally come to grips with the sexual-abuse episode of his youth. “Having to hide a situation like that made it worse, I would think,” he said. “You have these dirty little secrets, and you feel as a man, and one in a tough-guy world like boxing, that you can’t share it with anyone. I would think that would probably affect every aspect of his life.” I've had several discussions about this in the past couple of days with straight men and women who uniformly take what Leonard says at his word. One, a lawyer, said that it had a ring of truth to it. I'm afraid that as a gay man who is intimately familiar with what it's like to have been gay during the time in question and who remembers 1976 very well, I am having a very hard time believing it as reported. My first problem with what he's said is that Leonard has refused to name the man he is accusing, even though he says that the man is dead. Not naming the man carries a number of problems. This casts suspicion on any boxing coach in his late forties who might have been in contact with Leonard during the Olympics and who might have had some connection with him five years earlier. I have no idea how many of those there are but I do know that raising suspicions of this kind should be avoided when possible. Leonard could clear up that much by naming the man he's accusing and ending the possibility of innocent people being hurt*. Furthermore it reinforces the picture of all gay men as sexual predators. "A gay man" doesn't assault someone a specific man does. If that man can be named, he should be and he should face the consequences of his actions, those shouldn't be left hanging as a finger pointed at all gay men. Leonard could possibly dispel any likely doubt by naming the man and seeing what other people could say of him. It's possible that there were other, credible, incidents. Or it could risk none of those coming forth and casting doubt on what he said happened. But, unlike many, many of other stories of sexual abuse by older men on younger men and boys, Leonard's doesn't seem probable to me because of the facts he alleges. First, as things stand, he claims that the assault took place shortly before his all important match at the Montreal Olympics, in the context of a conversation in which the coach was telling him of the importance of winning gold. He says that he had suspected the coach had sexual interest in him since he was fifteen, so for about five years. I have a hard time imagining that a very middle aged gay man would have chosen Sugar Ray Leonard to make a sudden, un-negotiated, physical sexual assault against just as he was about to win a gold medal in BOXING. Boxing, repeatedly and skillfully and forcefully hitting an evenly matched opponent in the face and head in order to inflict damage up to and including knocking him unconscious. Boxing is not track and field, it's not gymnastics, it's the training and practice of how to do physical damage to someone. No matter how physically attractive Leonard was, the possibility that he might beat you to a bloody pulp if he didn't welcome your entirely unannounced, unapproved physical advance would have made him an unlikely man to choose to make one on. His identification of a boxing coach who had been associated with him for at least five years also gives me problems. For someone who had been cultivating an athlete for five years, watching them climb up the extremely steep hill to even get to the Olympics, knowing that any upset could quash their hopes of even getting a bronze, I can't imagine them taking the chance of coming on to their athlete during the very weeks in which they could ruin years of investment of their work and hopes, ruining any benefits that could be gotten from having coached an Olympic champion. Especially if he had the chance to make that advance for the five preceding years. I can't imagine an Olympic coach making their first and only actual sexual advance on an athlete in that context. I can't imagine him risking his professional standing. In 1976 any credible rumor of an Olympic boxing coach coming on to his unwilling athletes half his age would have been the end of any career in sports. In the media atmosphere of the mid-70s, especially the sports media, risking an athlete pressing charges would have be enormous. Several of those who objected to my doubts pointed out that the alleged attacker was a boxing coach. But he was a boxing coach in advancing middle age, hardly a match for a young man about to win Olympic gold, someone who had systematically fought and won against increasingly able and skilled opponents in peak condition to reach the stage when he was about to fight against another, super elite boxer. I'd guess that an experienced boxing coach who had seen what Leonard had done to other boxers might have had more reason than most to not want to risk provoking an attack by him in the summer of 1976. There were far less dangerous men to come on to in Montreal that week. The wider context of my having problems with the idea of a gay man doing that in 1976 is directly due to the fact that it was and remains possible for someone to beat or murder a gay man and to either get off without charges or to have a murder charge reduced to manslaughter by claiming a sexual assault. In many cases the mere allegation of an unwanted, gay sexual advance could get a man out of a charge of assault before it went to court. It was common knowledge that many gay bashers got away with it by telling that kind of story to the police and prosecutors. If you doubt that is the case, there are law review articles debating whether or not the use of the "Gay Panic Defense" should be allowed to be raised by the defense in murder cases** or if that practice should be abolished. Let me stop right here and repeat that. Today it is being debated whether or not to allow defendants in a MURDER CASE to claim they, usually brutally, killed a gay man because he made a pass at them. Today. Never mind in the mid-1970s. In the mean time, right now, it is quite possible to use a claim of gay assault to get off on a very brutal killing, in which the physical evidence doesn't support the defendant's story that a sexual assault took place. Not in the deep South, in Illinois. the first state to decriminalize gay sex. I will be writing about this apparently little known part of the law. Little known by straight folks, apparently, but very well known to gay men. Just as women can become the accused in a rape case, gay men murdered by straight men can be blamed for their own murders, qualified for unofficial capital punishment for doing something straight men do to women every day. I will be writing about that more, soon. It seems to be unknown to a considerable part of the straight, liberal, self defined non-homophobic, blogosphere. * When Scott Brown said that he had been abused at a much younger age I said, a number of times, that he should have named the man, who, as far as I know, he hasn't yet. I don't remember anyone who was critical of me making the same point at the time. ** As the law now stands, a nonviolent homosexual advance may constitute sufficient provocation to incite that legal fiction, the reasonable man, to lose his self-control and kill in the heat of passion, thus mitigating murder to manslaughter. The author argues that this homosexual-advance defense is a misguided application of provocation theory and a judicial institutionalization of homophobia. Provocation defenses have their origin and rationale in tangled theories of justification and excuse, both of which divert attention away from the killer and onto the behavior of the deceased victim. The homosexual-advance defense appeals to irrational fears, revulsion, and hatred prevalent in heterocentric society, focusing blame on the victim's real or imagined sexuality. In allowing the defense, the judiciary reinforces and institutionalizes violent prejudices at the expense of norms of self-control, tolerance, and compassion that ought to reign in society. The defense affirms homophobia and undermines the ability of courts to produce fair verdicts by creating a lower standard of protection against violence afforded to an identifiable class of victims. The author concludes that we ought to expect more from our courts: judges should hold as a matter of law that a homosexual advance is not sufficient provocation to incite a reasonable man to kill. Murderous homophobia should be considered an irrational and idiosyncratic characteristic of the killer rather than a normative social aspiration incorporated as the homosexual-advance defense into the standards that govern jury decision making. Note: It seems to me that a lot of the people who I've discussed this with seem to believe that the problems Leonard had with violence, drugs, alcohol and other things as an adult are attributable to this one incidence he alleges. I don't buy that at all. A far more obvious motivation for him hitting his first wife is in his training in systematic violence, the brutality of boxing which he practiced professionally and for which he was lauded and which made him a hero to millions of people. I can't imagine that not instilling a sense of permission in at least some elite boxers. Boxing is permitted, systematic and intended brutality. When a boxer practices brutality outside of the ring it should be the first thing suspected as a motivation, not an incident which could be as much an attempt at self-exoneration as it could be a factual account of what would be considered quite differently, by society and the media if it had been a man doing the equivalent to a woman. Even if every word Leonard said about this incidence is true, that doesn't excuse anything else he's admitted he did. Accusations [Anthony McCarthy] I'm not going to speculate as to why it has apparently become the default assumption on some liberal blogs that some accusations are not to be questioned but that is a position that is so wrong, so impractical and so, plainly, nuts it can't be allowed to stand unchallenged. There is nothing about any accusation that puts it or the details it contains beyond the bounds of questioning. If you don't want your accusation to be questioned, don't accuse someone because they have every right to question it. I am going to point out that even for those who objected to what I said yesterday, it's not the default assumption depending on who is making the accusation and who is being accused and what they're being accused of. The objections made in yesterdays comments carried loads of accusations. I'm going to present three instances, one which comes pretty close to home, of specific cases of false accusations and will mention one of the most outrageous examples of mass injustice in recent decades, for which I have no intention to apologize so don't bother asking for that. There is the infamous Charles Stuart case in Boston. In October, 1989, emergency took a call from Stuart who said that he and Carol DiMati (Stuart), his pregnant wife, had been assaulted and robbed in their car, shot by an unknown "black man". His wife died in the hospital, the child who was taken prematurely suffered seizures and died within days. Charles Stewart was treated in the hospital and the Boston Police immediately started looking for the unknown black man, breaking down doors and, it was rumored, some heads in the frenzied search for a particularly brutal murderer as the grieving widower recovered in the hospital. The Boston Police soon fixed on Willie Bennett who Stuart would later identify as the killer in a stand up line. The police figured they had done their job. Raymond Flynn, the mayor of Boston, Mike Barnicle, the prominent columnist and most of the movers in Boston and the region all said they'd gotten the man who had viciously killed a young, pregnant woman and the child she was carrying, in one of the most publicized cases in memory. Only, as some will remember, Stuart's brother, who had helped him cover up the crime, soon cracked and what really happened came out. Charles Stuart, who was upset that he was going to become a father and that he would suffer a decrease in standard of living when his wife stopped working, had shot his pregnant wife to collect the insurance and then inflicted a wound on himself in order to place the blame on a stereotypical scary black man. Charles Stuart, knowing he would be arrested jumped off of the Tobin Bridge and died. A similar thing happened a few years later in the Susan Smith case, in which a young mother claimed that "a black man" had carjacked her car with her children in it, setting off another manhunt for the man who abducted two white children. As you might remember about a week later she confessed that she had drowned her children in the car so she could take up with a man who didn't want them. I don't know the details of what the manhunt consisted of but it's not hard to imagine rights may have been violated and an innocent man could have eventually been arrested. I would bring up the rash of false charges of ritual child abuse from the 1980s and 90s that put many, innocent women and men in prison and which destroyed their lives before they were exonerated. But I'm sure that would be objected to by a number of possible political cliques. It's a long, outrageous episode of mass delusion and legal opportunism based in outrageous, outlandish accusations that were clearly not questioned sufficiently to find the truth. That truth came well after the false charges produced many victims, many of them who never recovered their lives after those were mad. But that would take far, far longer than I've got to present in this post. And there is the recent case in the town next to mine, in Maine, in which an unidentified young boy's body was discovered. The accusations there weren't specific and they weren't made by authorities, they were far more informal and potentially far more dangerous. The police didn't release the cause of death for a number of days and rumors were rife. A number of those rumors speculated that the boy had been the victim of a pedophile, who I guarantee you was almost always identified or assumed to have been an unspecified "gay man". Which is one of the reasons many of us living here would have been somewhat on edge until the case was solved. You will remember that eventually the boy's mother, who is clearly mentally ill, was arrested for the killing of her son. And that's the problem with an accusation against a person identified with a group, black men, gay men, etc. An accusation against an unspecified member of the group is an accusation against more than one person who could match that description. When did it become politically impermissible to ask questions about an accusation? How do any of the people who think that any accusation is beyond question expect to find out who ISN'T guilty as accused under that rule? A personal note: I'm tired of people complaining that my posts violate some kind of unwritten prohibition, putting ideas and questions I choose to raise off limits. I'm especially tired of complaints asserting that those ideas and questions violate some kind of unwritten rule for writing on a feminist blog. I have never agreed to limit my thinking to fit any kind of index of prohibited ideas, I've never been asked to. I would like any feminist bloggers or writers to point out what list of ideas they've agreed to not bring up in their writing. Show me the list of prohibited topics and ideas. There is no rule anyone can make or make up on the spot that is going to keep me from saying what I think should be said. If you can point out a factual or logical problem with what I say, feel free. If you can point out any inconsistencies or hypocrisies in what I write, please, correct me. If you have any rational, grown-up objection to anything I write about, that's within the bounds of criticism that anyone who writes something for public display opens himself up for, the kind of correction any rational person should welcome. But I'm not going to limit anything I write on the basis of political or intellectual fashion or to conform to someone's idea of what's allowable to be thought or said except my own. Note: These are the two posts I wrote the weekend of June 11, 2011.