www.phillymag.com/articles/features_he_said_they_said/page1
Philadelphia Magazine > * Features: He Said, They Said Philadelphia Magazine He Said, They Said Authorities call Jeffrey J Marsalis the worst serial rapist in Pennsylvania history. So how could two juries find an admitted liar more believable than the 10 women who accused him?
Illustration by Matt Mahurin Like the rest of them -- like the other attractive, successful, well-educated young women who authorities believe were drugged and raped by Jeffrey J Marsalis -- Rachael says her memory began fracturing at the bar, several hours into the night. Until then, on a weeknight in late March 2004, the conversation had flowed well as she and Marsalis hopped from one Center City Irish pub to another, drinking beer and wine, though Rachael, herself a natural talker, was surprised to find a date more voluble than she. He'd spoken so far of growing up outside Seattle, and of his mother, an educator whom he said President George HW Bush had given a position with the US Department of Education. And though it wasn't like her, Rachael had even found herself fighting back tears as he relived a particularly wrenching experience from the ER at Hahnemann Hospital, when he'd been forced to inform an elderly woman choppered in from a horrific car crash and fighting to live that, in fact, she would not. Perhaps, Rachael had told herself, all this would come with the territory: Trauma surgeons -- let alone CIA agents and astronauts -- are presupposed to be, and even forgiven for being, self-interested. Earlier, around sunset, they'd hugged upon greeting each other for the first time in three-dimension, at Love Park, their predetermined meeting place. com profile, photos that would seem to corroborate the remarkable professional arc he'd claim to her and the others, from suit and tie to scrubs and white coat to orange astronaut jumpsuit and helmet; their first phone conversation, which lasted a couple hours, quickly turned intensely sexual, something she did not protest. Originally from upstate New York, Rachael, then 23, had recently moved here after graduating from Penn State with a degree in psychology, to earn her master's in counseling from Villanova. Attractive and petite, with thick sandy hair and green eyes, she'd joined the popular dating website a few months earlier because she felt isolated. She was "flattered," she says, when she first received the cyber "wink" from then-30-year-old DrJeff (his name on his profile). Now, three glasses of wine later, she sat slumped against the wall on the floor of a handicapped stall in the ladies' room at the pub Fad, on Locust Street. "It was like I was there but I wasn't," as if she was "floating, my ears felt like they were full of cotton." Like several other women I would speak with, she describes herself, at that moment, as devoid of thought: "It was just almost like I was dreaming but I was awake." She asked for her purse: "All I kept thinking about was my purse." Her purse in hand, her head slumped, she fixated on the seams in the pavement, which blurred before disappearing completely.
You drugged them b/c you are so afraid of women you are afraid they won't like it when you have sex with them, so you drug them and rape them out of your own fear that you will never please them. You have major issues of hatred for your mom, and you are afraid of her for ways she abused you. So you see every woman you ever meet as capable of hurting you like your mom did. At the same time you are afraid to grow up and actually make something of yourself so you lie to these women to get them to date you, and knowing all you are is a lie, you then realize you can never ever satisfy the types of women you rape. Really you are angry at your mother and you need major therapy, which you may or may not get in jail when you end up there. I have been in therapy 2 years trying to understand the rape that happened to me in the fall of 1999 (8 years ago), my senior year in college. I too re-engaged with my rapist hoping to "make it go away" or "regain control," to actively suppress it. I was embarrassed, I didn't want to admit something that trashy and gross happened to me. I didn't think anyone would someday want to marry a woman who was "RAPED." I was so removed from what happened to me, I didn't even get it that my rapist had INTENDED to cause me HARM. Plus, no one I knew was willing to call it rape, much less to do something about it, or help me do something about it, and the rapist himself (just like Marsalis) did all he could to convince me it wasn't rape, but rather my twisted imagination. So it was not just me who made the whole situation fuzzy and hard to understand. And though I never named him, everyone including the prof, knew exactly who I was talking about. Somehow my description of my confusion, powerlessness, and that fuzzy desire to regain control after the fact made him stop pursuing me (as I'd intended) after my reading, but about 6 weeks later he made a final attempt to try to seduce me. I couldn't believe this RAPIST had no shame, no comprehension of my disgust, no fear of reprisal, and obviously no regard for my personal well-being. But as I now understand it better in therapy, I see that it was never about anything but power to him from the start. But still, he somehow convinced himself it didn't happen, just as I wanted to convince myself it didn't happen. When he spread rumors around the school that I raped him, that is when I wrote my paper. But none of these apply to a rapist, who is only after taking power from someone with intent to harm them by it. When he tried to approach me again 6 weeks after my class reading, it was him trying to seize power and malign me all over again (luckily I walked away). And that's why RAPE is, a CRIME OF POWER and VIOLENCE, not a crime of passion or sex. And it was clear from the article that this sick individual, Marsalis, is all about power. His combination of lies, drugs, and raping is a SICK SICK method of trying to destroy the women with whom he comes into contact. The most powerful and disturbing evidence about this case is Marsalis's obvious INTENT to RAPE (ie intent to HARM) his victims! How did the jury glaze over the use of "DATE-RAPE DRUGS" and not count that as a strike against him? When Marsalis drugged these women, he did it before they even left the bar, or restaurant, or wherever. He didn't even give them a chance to WILLINGLY have sex. The ISSUE here is that he didn't want them to willingly have sex, he WANTED to RAPE them. This is not about "sour grapes" on the part of the women involved. The term "sour grapes" implies regret or envy for a missed opportunity. The only opportunity these women missed was the opportunity to say "NO" when he drugged them so they could say yes when he wanted sex from them. Marsalis seemed to be doing a fine job of convincing these women he was a real catch and in defense attorney, Hexstall's, painfully invalidating words, they would have "wanted to get down" with "Dr. The point of the trial was not the fact of whether they would concede before they passed out, or after they passed out, but rather that they DID NOT CONCEEDE the time he RAPED them. He drugged them regardless of whether or not they were a "sure thing"--he drugged them because he WA Answering Lee's Question of "WHY?" I had no choice but to assume I deserved it, because after all, no one would treat their CHILD badly if it wasn't deserved, right? Like many women, the ill-treatment, or neglect from my father (or male role-model) growing up, later on landed me in bed with a deceiving ego-maniac, high on cocaine (something I'd never seen), who was going to do whatever he wanted to me regardless of my will. My father, who used to tickle me until I peed my pants long after I said "STOP," would shame me for getting upset about it. When I tried to tell my own Dad that what he did was hurting me, he made fun of me for being "too sensitive" and ordered me to "cut it out." I never learned it was okay, or that I was allowed to do it. And when the time came for it to save me from being raped, I couldn't even figure out how I felt. I just lay there, taking it, just as I'd had to t...
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