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The father of Naa (pseudonym) who was raped by two young men from the center of the country who recorded the rape on video and distributed it, does not know who he is more angry with – the accused of rape, or the prosecutor’s office that does not exhaust the law with them. Three months ago he found out that his daughter had been gang-raped about two years ago, and that he had not heard about it, neither from her nor from the caregivers. “I received a call from the boarding school that my daughter is required to come and give testimony about some incident,” he recalls in an exclusive interview for “The Hottest Place”. “It turns out that this incident is a very serious rape incident that she went through, the police will not inform me about this incident at all, I only heard about it through my daughter’s agent. The police found out about it through videos that were distributed on the Internet.”
At that moment, he discovered that the traumatic event is not over, but continues to scar his daughter’s soul: the attackers filmed the rape and the videos were distributed on all social networks. Even today, two years later, they are circulating online. Just two weeks ago, a relative of his was exposed to a group of boys who entered a store in the mall and laughed as she watched the video and poked Naa’s name.
All the dots connected for him. He realized that the shocking videos that were distributed were the source of the bullying and cyberbullying that his daughter went through. “She hid it from us all these years and was left alone with it,” he says, “she was ashamed of what happened to her. We heard calls calling for her. Only when it exploded did we realize what hell she went through inside. It broke us, we fell apart completely.
“My daughter walks around with the trauma of her videos on the Internet and people writing her messages and teasing her and sending her pornographic photos. There was a time when kids would ride here on their electric bikes and call her a ‘slut’. The social anxiety and ostracism my daughter went through is simply shocking.” According to him, since the incident, their daughter has completely changed and she suffers from extreme moods: “One moment she can be calm, and then suddenly she can be impatient and burst out and cry. She’s just not the same girl.”
As if all this was not enough, during the three unbearably difficult months, the prosecutor’s office ordered him to remain silent. A blanket gag order was imposed on the affair. Even though a serious indictment was filed against the two defendants, the voice of Naa and her family was silenced, while the videos that humiliate her are still distributed everywhere. “It feels like the state simply chose a side, to protect the offenders, for reasons reserved with them,” says the father in frustration. “I still don’t understand why the state wants to keep this whole story inside.”
The frustration only increased when Naa was summoned to the prosecutor’s office and was informed that the prosecutor’s office had decided to close the case – backed up, as I recall, by the videos in its possession – with a plea deal with the two defendants. According to details obtained by “The Place”, according to the plea agreement drawn up by the prosecutor’s office with the defense attorneys of the two defendants, the prosecutor’s office will delete from the indictment the section of aggravated rape of a girl under 14 years of age and replace it with a more lenient section of the plea of a minor, with the element of non-consent being deleted. Additional charges such as blackmail will also be dropped.
“Naa will be raped,” says the father firmly. “This is a case of rape par excellence that should go to court with a serious indictment. Those people lured her into the house without her knowing what their true intentions were, closed the door after her, threatened her that they wouldn’t let her out if she didn’t give them what they asked for. During each Hackett also tells them ‘no’ explicitly. What could be more clear than that? This is too difficult a case to be closed with a plea agreement.”
According to the father, the decision of the prosecutor’s office to go in the direction of a plea deal is puzzling when the evidence in the case is so decisive. “The lawyer who sat with us (Mickey Foran – RH, MA) explained that for us closing the case is a victory. The case will be closed, we will forget the event that happened, my daughter will forget the event that happened, everyone can move on. So no! We can’t Moving on. An event happened here. This is not something that can be forgotten. There is no victory here. There is a need for justice and there is a long treatment that my daughter will have to go through in order for her to succeed, if at all, in her recovery. It felt terrible, it felt like we were an object, a mission who want to finish and move on.
“When we left the prosecutor’s office, my daughter cried. And what she said there just shocked me. She said: ‘It hurts me that they think I didn’t say ‘no,’ it hurts me that they think I agreed to all this.” They blame her for being in such a situation. When the attorney asked Naa if she was ready to testify, she said ‘yes’. She explicitly said yes. She wants them to give justice for what they did. She also asked me for the last month to do everything to make them pay for what they did To her. She said, ‘They hurt me, they murdered my soul. I am not ready to accept such a thing now that they are going to an easy settlement with them, there can be no such thing.’
“All they (the prosecutor’s office – MA, RH) want is to make their job easy, tick off the case and move on to the next case. As if the public shouldn’t care about what happened here. But there are people here in the country who rape and don’t pay for the acts Theirs. And the prosecutor’s office takes care of that.”
The prosecutor’s office responded: “After examining all the evidence in the case and meeting with the complainant, an indictment was filed in the case that adopts the complainant’s version in its entirety. Since the indictment submitted graphically describes the offenses committed by the minor complainant, the prosecutor’s office asked the court to approve the publication of a summary (and prohibit the publication of the documents The purpose of the brief is, on the one hand, to preserve the dignity of the complainant and, on the other hand, to protect the public’s right to know. In the procedure in question and before the hearing on the request to approve the brief, the attorney’s office was informed that the complainant was represented and a copy of the request was forwarded to her for review and approval. In the hearing that took place on the issue, the attorney’s office accepted the complainant’s position and did not object Request for permission to publish the details of the case except for the details of the minors involved in the case.
“There was a negotiation between the parties in the case for the purposes of a plea agreement. After the initial offer of the settlement was formulated, the complainant was called to a meeting at the prosecutor’s office so that she could clarify her position on the proposed settlement. During the meeting, the representatives of the attorney’s office stated that the main consideration in formulating the settlement was the best interests of the complainant and the need to save her from viewing the evidence who asked to avoid viewing them during the investigation of the case and the meeting at the prosecutor’s office.
“After the meeting with the complainant and hearing her position, the prosecutor’s office is currently reviewing the plea arrangement and a decision has not yet been made. In light of the above, we cannot go into the details regarding the negotiations in this case, but it is important to emphasize that the main consideration before the prosecutor’s office during the negotiations was the best interests of the complainant.”