PHILADELPHIA — In a rare rebuke, a bar association has criticized a judge for refusing to uphold sexual-assault charges against a man accused of letting friends rape a prostitute he had hired. The judge said she considered the case “theft of services.”
Municipal Judge Teresa Carr Deni heightened the furor when she defended her decision to a newspaper. “She consented, and she didn’t get paid,” Deni told the Philadelphia Daily News. “I thought it was a robbery.”
Deni also told the newspaper that the case “minimizes true rape cases and demeans women who are really raped.”
Dominique Gindraw was accused of ordering the victim at gunpoint to have sex with three men, but Deni dismissed the rape and sexual-assault charges Oct. 4. She upheld conspiracy, robbery, false imprisonment and other charges against Gindraw.
The chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association issued a statement Tuesday questioning Deni’s understanding of the law.
“The victim has been brutalized twice in this case – first by the assailants and now by the court,” Chancellor Jane Leslie Dalton wrote. “We cannot imagine any circumstances more violent or coercive than being forced to have sex with four men at gunpoint.”
The 20-year-old victim testified that she worked for an escort service that advertised on Craigslist. She went to a North Philadelphia home Sept. 20 to meet Gindraw, who agreed to pay her $150 for sex. He then said that a friend was coming with the money and that the friend would pay her another $100 to perform sex acts.
Instead, three men arrived, and Gindraw pulled a gun and ordered the woman to have sex with all of them, she testified. “He said that I’m going to do this for free, and I’m not going nowhere, and I better cooperate or he was going to kill me.”
