Wyoming Man Orchestrates Craigslist Rape, Internet Found Responsible

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I love Craigslist. I’ve bought and sold, obtained jobs (including this job) and tried to get rid of my cat. If you knew her, you’d want to get rid of her too. “Gray cat. Excellent mouser. Needs a country home.” Translation: my cat keeps bringing snakes into my house and doesn’t use the litterbox. Craigslist has provided me with a wealth of entertainment – from voyeurism to Bon Jovi and Lil Wayne impersonators, just to name a few.

Now I’m seeing Craigslist in a new and frightening way due to this news story, which I just discovered. To get revenge on his ex-girlfriend, a Wyoming man allegedly impersonated the woman on Craigslist and asked for “a real aggressive man with no concern for women” to fulfill a rape fantasy. He used her e-mail address and her photo. She was raped the next week by a man who saw the ad. After one more search I found the same thing happened in North Carolina. These incidents have opened a personal, global, legal and ethical Pandora’s box.

So, how many people, companies and intangible things do we arrest here? Clearly the ex-boyfriend, for allegedly posting the ad. The harshest charges should be levied against him.  And the rapist? He told detectives that he committed the rape, which he thought was consensual, given the ad on Craigslist. How can we possibly know what he was thinking when the crime was committed? Did he at some point realize that something was very wrong? Or did he think it was all part of the act? Any way you look at it, he did exhibit sociopathic tendencies, but I think a mental hospital would be more appropriate for him than prison.  Do we arrest Craig? He didn’t do anything. He made a website. But lots of people want to hold him responsible.

I had heard about the Craigslist killer and the prostitution, but I rationalized everything as situations I would never find myself in. I didn’t want to sell my body or meet and date random people, or do anything else of questionable judgment. Nothing bad could happen to me, I figured, since I would never cross the line into illegal or dangerous activity. When buying and selling, I always arranged to meet in a public place with my husband (a former Marine) there, just in case anyone had any sinister plans.

Now, anyone with an insane vendetta can orchestrate your rape online. By “now,” I really mean any time since the internet was created. I remember my very first internet experience quite well. I was 13 and my dad had just purchased Juno, which at the time was an e-mail service that came with chat rooms. I entered an innocuous-sounding one and was immediately propositioned for sex. Conversely, I found myself lying about my age to a 20 year-old with similar music tastes. He arranged to pick me up and take me to a show in Philly. At the last minute I confessed my actual age, professing my deep love of riding bikes to the pool with my friends. He never talked to me again and I pouted for a few days. Surprising that I ever visited the “series of tubes” again.

Clearly this mess disturbs me, but so do comments made by Natrona County District Attorney Mike Blonigen, who is prosecuting the Wyoming rape case. “[This kind of incident is] probably only possible in our modern age,” he said.”If I were king, I’d like to see them not run these personal ads….This is a debate we’ve had for a long time: . . . Do we censor the Internet?”

Let me think. Child pornography? Al-Qaeda? Social networking posts from U.S. military? Of course we censor the internet. That subject is not open to debate. He should have said “how much do we censor the internet?” In fact, what he meant was “we should censor the internet, especially the things on it that I don’t like,” since if he was king, he would do it. Blonigen’s blabbering harkens back to a simpler time – a time when we had kings and killed blasphemers, and rapists had to find their victims the old fashioned way (it was her fault anyway, the tramp).

Since prostitution is mostly illegal (although I don’t think it should be), Craig should have his minions monitoring the adult services section more closely. A visit to my local board provided me with all kinds of thinly-veiled offers from prostitutes. Hey, in these “tough economic times,” we all need to make a living. But if Craig wants to keep his business, he needs to make it legal. I don’t see how the adult services forum could really foster anything legal – maybe Craig should just scrap it. That’s not censorship; it’s a business decision to act as a responsible corporate citizen. But again, that’s up to Craig (or the U.S. courts), not Mike Blonigen, who represents one county and imagines what beautiful things could happen if only he had a shiny crown.

One issue I don’t want to get lost is that of responsibility in the Wyoming case. The ex-boyfriend should go to prison; the rapist should go to a mental hospital. Though I can’t imagine any other scenario where I would come to this conclusion. And Craig? Well, I don’t think it was his fault that I got solicited for sex at 13 in a chat room. He didn’t invent IMs or dating services or even classifieds. And I don’t think he’s to blame for this gut-wrenching revenge story – though if I were Craig, I’d post a few ads for monitors and lawyers in the employment section.

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About the Author

Kristine Empire is a narcissistic freelance writer in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She likes vintage clothes, kills every plant she touches, has a phobia of grocery stores, enjoys getting shout-outs on college radio, and her favorite city in the world is Prague.

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