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Audacity of Truth
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- Michelle Malkin
- Wheeling & dealing: Snowe pow-wows with Obama; Landrieu, Schumer, Daschle behind the scenes
- Saturday in the Senate: Cash for Cloture; Reid gets 60; Update: 8:15pm Eastern cloture vote – 60-39; Voinovich absent; Dems invoke Teddy Kennedy; Reid: “Ted would be happy.”
- Another day, another Berkeley tantrum
- Jake Tapper
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The Jamie Leigh Jones gang rape case
ABC News reported a story yesterday about a woman who alleges she was gang-raped two years ago in the Green Zone in Iraq by some of her Halliburton/KBR co-workers:
A Houston, Texas woman says she was gang-raped by Halliburton/KBR coworkers in Baghdad, and the company and the U.S. government are covering up the incident.
Jamie Leigh Jones, now 22, says that after she was raped by multiple men at a KBR camp in the Green Zone, the company put her under guard in a shipping container with a bed and warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.
“Don’t plan on working back in Iraq. There won’t be a position here, and there won’t be a position in Houston,” Jones says she was told.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court against Halliburton and its then-subsidiary KBR, Jones says she was held in the shipping container for at least 24 hours without food or water by KBR, which posted armed security guards outside her door, who would not let her leave.
“It felt like prison,” says Jones, who told her story to ABC News as part of an upcoming “20/20″ investigation. “I was upset; I was curled up in a ball on the bed; I just could not believe what had happened.”
Finally, Jones says, she convinced a sympathetic guard to loan her a cell phone so she could call her father in Texas.
“I said, ‘Dad, I’ve been raped. I don’t know what to do. I’m in this container, and I’m not able to leave,’” she said. Her father called their congressman, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas.
“We contacted the State Department first,” Poe told ABCNews.com, “and told them of the urgency of rescuing an American citizen” — from her American employer.
Poe says his office contacted the State Department, which quickly dispatched agents from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad to Jones’ camp, where they rescued her from the container.
According to her lawsuit, Jones was raped by “several attackers who first drugged her, then repeatedly raped and injured her, both physically and emotionally.”
Jones told ABCNews.com that an examination by Army doctors showed she had been raped “both vaginally and anally,” but that the rape kit disappeared after it was handed over to KBR security officers.
Ted Frank at Overlawyered has examined the allegations and the briefs filed, and provides a good analysis here. My friend and fellow North Carolinian Bob Owens has done some research into the story ABC reported and found some discrepancies, which he discusses here, but even with those discrepancies, he wrote on his website that he believes Jones’ was indeed gang-raped.
I’m inclined to agree, based on what I’ve read, and perhaps you will, too, after reading the journal Jamie Leigh kept in which she wrote about what she alleges happened to her. The story, I think, is just too intricate to be made up – I don’t think we’re looking at another Crystal Gail Mangum. There might be an inconsistency here or there on a minor detail but, as lawyer DRJ writes at Patterico’s blog, it looks like in the pleadings presented by Halliburton/KBR that even they have conceded that it’s entirely possible that a rape did occur in Iraq and at this point are defending themselves against Jones’ assertion’ that they were responsible for her safety but, according to her, were derelict in their duties.
Of course, my mind isn’t closed to any new additional information which may surface, and I certainly think scrutiny of the case is in order, especially considering what happened in the Duke case – I’m just giving you my opinion based the information currently available.
When I first read this story yesterday, my first thought was, oh my gosh … this has a definite ring of truth to it – and I felt sick over it. I didn’t get that with the Duke case. But unlike the far left, who have latched on to this story like they typically do any bad news story coming out of Iraq in an attempt to undermine the mission by broadbrushing everyone for the (alleged) despicable actions of a few, and unlike the radical feminists who have pointed to to this story as “more proof” of their assertions that all men are “evil,” I hope my initial reaction to this story is later proven to be unjustified. What Jones is alleging is just horrific, and something no woman should ever, ever have to go through.
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11 Responses to “The Jamie Leigh Jones gang rape case”
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I agree that it looks true from what I’ve read.
And whomever did the despicable or covered it up should be held accountable to the max.
Psycho criminals are in lots of organizations and I don’t get why some taint the “company” or the mission.
GM, or Halliburton, or Republicans are names. If there are people who are evil or criminals they should be held fully accountable.
Hopefully justice will be served.
That won’t take away her trauma, of course.
I’m not sure we’ve heard the end of this story. My first reaction is disbelief (although not a willful suspension of, just a gut reaction). Gang raped in the Green Zone?? It’s not like we haven’t heard elaborate made up stories from war opponents before, like the New Republic soldier.
I try to give women the benefit of the doubt but this sounds fishy to me.
And why would a rape kit administered by Army medics disappear? Army medics wouldn’t hand over a rape kit to the perpetrators. This falls under the jurisdition of U.S. government/military and they would conduct/maintain the evidence. Its’ a criminal charge, not an in-house company issue. A violent federal crime conducted on foreign soil under U.S. jurisdiction wouldn’t lend itself to this sort of conduct.
Sorry to keep repeating myself!
I could be wrong, my point is that is sounds suspect. But I could be wrong. I’ll have to follow this story..
I’m with you Amy. If this story is legit (as opposed to this woman just being a crackpot) -then get a rope! But the rush to tar & feather the eeeeevil Haliburton in connection with this makes me decidedly wary.
Let’s wait and see.
What raises a red flag about this story, to me, is the statement she makes early on in her chronological accounting of her employment with KBR in Houston in which she tells of her immediate supervisor using his influence to ‘extract sexual favors’ from her early on in her employment, but then, at a later time, she ‘gains evidence of his harrassment’ and asks to be removed from his supervision. To me, this sounds like she acquiesced to his requests for the ’sexual favors’, at least for a while (instead of reporting him immediately?) – and then decided she’d had enough of it and got a change in her work environment. What isn’t stated in her story is the fact that later on, the same supervisor tried to get re-assigned out to Iraq to be her supervisor again. Huh??!! You get slapped down and disciplined corporately for sexual misconduct with an employee, and then months later, you try to go back for more? Either there was much, much more to this situation that isn’t being told by Ms. Jones, or this supervisor of hers is incredibly stupid. It does bring to mind a personal experience I once had.
Years ago I worked in a industrial environment , primarily male, where a young woman was employed as ‘administrative assistant’ (secretary) . Almost immediately after her hire, it became obvious that this young woman had no qualms at all about handing out sexual favors to the bosses in the office to get what she wanted – pay raises, time off, short hours, etc. It was a well known goings-on in the office, and eventually, she pushed the envelope too far, and had to be let go. Of course she then tried to sue the company for sexual harrassment. One of the top managers lost his job over it and I don’t know what she got as compensation. I do know for a fact that she was a willing participant in the so-called harrassment – she propositioned me several times explicitly, but gave up after a few “Thanks, but no thanks”.
Oh, yeah, and the fact that Hollywood is jumping to make a movie made about her ‘experience’ doesn’t help the credibility factor much with me either. To me, this story just doesn’t pass the smell test, at least initially.
I can only hope that justice is served in this matter, whatever that may be.
Don Surber took some undeserved heat for his position on this issue. While I am more suspicious of the allegations than he is, I am willing to wait for an investigation before saying anything more.
And it is possible that ABC got it right for the same reason that a stopped clock gives accurate time twice a day.
Well, at least I’m not the only whose suspicious. It just doesn’t sound right for the reasons we’ve discussed above.
I feel guilty doubting a woman but it smells as fishy as the Baghdad Diarist.
One report i read is that it was a single person she was accusing of rape. She had a torn pectoral muscle adn a burst implant.
Then lawyers got involved, it went ot gang rape, then on to KBR and Halliburton, in which Halliburton was not even associated with KBR at the time.
Other reports I heard is she recieved immediate medical treatment from KBR and was shipped out.