Saturday, 15th June 2019
The Face of White Privilege
by David Mack
(ANCHORAGE, Alaska) — The last thing Lauren remembered thinking was that she was going to die.
The man who’d offered her a lift a few minutes before at a busy Anchorage gas station was suddenly on top of her, his hands around her throat.
“I just remember trying to say something and I couldn’t get it out,” she recalled through tears. “I was trying to breathe and I couldn’t take one breath.”
She thought of her family. She thought of her mom, who was living up at one of the Alaska Native villages farther north. She thought of her brothers and sisters, of her little niece and nephews. She would never get to see any of them again.
“Right before I blacked out,” she said, “I just remember thinking, This is it.”
When Lauren woke up, he was zipping up his pants. The man who just moments ago had told her he was going to kill her was asking if she needed something to wipe her face.
“I was confused,” she said, “and when I stand up and I look in the reflection in the car, I see that he came all over my face.”
The man wasn’t really going to kill her, he tried to explain; he just needed her to think he was in order to fulfill his sexual fantasy. He let her grab her backpack from his truck and then he drove away, leaving her shell-shocked and alone in the lunchtime summer sun.
“I remember being just so shocked that he was brave enough to do this in the middle of the day. He was on his way to work,” Lauren said.
“The look in his eyes,” she recalled. “No soul. No nothing.”
The Aug. 8, 2017, attack on Lauren, whom BuzzFeed News agreed to identify with only her first name, horrified Alaskans when it made the local news. But the more shocking part — the part that would cause a political and legal firestorm — would come more than 12 months later.
Lauren’s attacker, a 33-year-old married father named Justin Schneider, has admitted that he had forced himself on Lauren. He admitted that he did it to satisfy his sexual desires. He admitted that he masturbated onto her.
He admitted that he ejaculated on her face. But he was not charged with sexual assault. As a first-time offender, he accepted a deal to plead guilty to just a single count of second-degree assault, and he walked out of the courtroom a free man. “I would just like to emphasize how grateful I am for this process,” Schneider, who declined to speak with BuzzFeed News, told the court. He’d been working on himself, he said. “I’m very eager to continue that journey.”
The case soon became a viral sensation as media and celebrities railed online against the injustice of Schneider’s light sentence.
In one meme shared 47,000 times on Facebook, he was called “the face of white privilege” who had a sexual assault charge “dropped.”
But the reality was much more complicated. The prosecutors didn’t drop the sexual assault charge. They never brought one in the first place — because, they said, the law would not allow them to.
In Alaska, sexual assault has a very narrow definition:
It has to involve either “knowingly touching, directly or through clothing, the victim’s genitals, anus, or female breast,” or knowingly causing the victim to touch either the defendant’s, or the victim’s own, genitals. So because Schneider touched only his own genitals but didn’t touch Lauren’s or force her to touch his, his actions didn’t qualify as sexual assault.
“While the facts of this case were particularly disturbing, Mr. Schneider’s offensive physical contact with bodily fluid such as semen is not categorized as a sex crime under Alaska law,” said John Skidmore, then director of the Criminal Division at the Alaska Department of Law, in a subsequent review of the case.
In the aftermath of Lauren’s case, Alaska lawmakers last month voted to close what has been dubbed the “Schneider loophole.”
But out of 54 US states and territories, 44 of these jurisdictions, including Alaska, do not have a legislated definition of sexual contact that explicitly mentions contact with semen, according to research by BuzzFeed News and AEquitas, a DC-based nonprofit group of former specialized prosecutors who focus on issues of gender-based violence and human trafficking.
In Delaware, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Texas, to name just a few, Schneider might still slip through the same loophole.
Jennifer Long, who runs AEquitas, said unwanted contact with ejaculate is a “humiliating” and “egregious” form of sexual assault.
“There is a past and in some ways present tendency to minimize contact or penetration that doesn’t meet the most stereotypical elements of assault: gunpoint, violence, penetration, ejaculation, injuries everywhere,” she said. “But that’s not necessary in order to be a crime of sexual violence.
“Just because a penis or vagina hasn’t physically touched someone but ejaculate has, it doesn’t lessen the crime or its impact on the victim,” she said.
Schneider’s crime had a profound impact on Lauren. In the months after her brutal assault, and then again amid the media circus sparked by his sentencing, she chose to remain silent. But last month, Lauren made the decision to sit down with BuzzFeed News.
“Now that I’ve had time to process it all,” she said, “I’ve felt it is time for people to hear my side of the story.”
Lauren is now 27 years old. A wave of long, dark hair sweeps down the side of the gray zip-up hoodie she’s wearing when we meet in a windowless room at her lawyers’ office in downtown Anchorage. She occasionally pulls the sleeves of her sweater over her hands to fiddle with the cuffs as she talks. She’s carrying a cracked iPhone and a plastic bag full of junk food:
Reese’s Pieces and two bottles of a yellow energy drink. She radiates exhaustion.
Lauren’s lawyer Jim Davis had helped set up the interview, saying he felt she had reached “a more stabilized place” in her recovery and was ready to talk. But on the appointed day, she was extremely fragile and hesitant. “I wish you were here,” she texted her girlfriend. “I’m nervous.”
After a short pep talk, her lawyer introduced her only as Jane — as in Jane Doe, which is the way she’s identified in legal documents. She is guarded at first, but after 15 or so minutes, she decides to lower the gate.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Lauren.”
Her voice cracking as she sniffed back tears, and while stopping at several moments during the interview to compose herself, she began recounting the worst day of her life.
Lauren spent her first eight or so years in Anchorage, a city of roughly 300,000 people — the largest in Alaska — framed by the icy, muddy waters of the Cook Inlet to the west and, to the east, by a ring of glorious, snowcapped mountains that seem to jut up from nowhere.
“I think when a lot of people come to Alaska, they’re just taken aback by how beautiful it is,” she said.
“Especially up in the villages,” the vast, remote areas where she had moved in second grade, “where I’m from, there’s no trees anywhere. It’s just all tundra.”
Moving to her mother’s small Native village had been a big shock for a city kid.
“It was very — almost like a culture shock for me because of how small it was,” she said. “I was used to being able to go to the mall and different high school pools, and at the village there’s one high school and no malls at all.”
Her grandmother lives in one of the Native American reservations down in the Lower 48, as Alaskans like to call the mainland states, along with lots of her cousins.
“They would ask if I lived in an igloo,” she said of the people she met down south, “or if I rode dog sleds to school.”
Drawn back to Alaska’s big city as an adult, Lauren made a home for herself once again in Anchorage, where she still has family.
It was a visit to her uncle that brought her to the Spenard neighborhood on Aug. 8, 2017, but as it turned out, he wasn’t home, so she walked to a nearby gas station. She was cursing her luck, having just missed the bus back across town, when a white Toyota SUV pulled up.
“He says, ‘Hey, what’s your name again?’” Lauren recalled. “And I said, ‘Do we know each other?’ And he says, ‘I’m Dan.’”
The man was tall — over 6 feet 2 inches, she believed — and had a short, scruffy beard in the same reddish color as his hair. He was wearing a long-sleeved red shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His shirt was neatly tucked into his blue jeans. He looked smart, like he was heading to work.
She couldn’t remember if she knew him or not, but he was offering her a lift. She was reluctant at first, but he seemed friendly and she needed to get across town. Plus, she didn’t want to seem ungrateful.
“Against my better judgment,” she said, “I got in.”
Rick Allen, who was Anchorage district attorney at the time of Lauren’s case, said that in Alaska, where distances are long and conditions can be harsh, picking up strangers is no big deal:
“If someone approaches you and says, ‘Hey, can you take me 2 miles down the road?’ and you’re going that way, you just do that stuff.”
The man asked Lauren if they could make a brief stop so he could pick something up from his other car. She agreed, and he pulled onto a short, unpaved side street in a quiet residential area, where tall trees and leafy scrub provided plenty of cover.
He asked Lauren to get out while he loaded the SUV. “When I get to the back of the car, he tackles me down to the ground, and I remember just getting so scared,” she recalled through tears.
“He just totally blindsided me.”
The man told her he’d kill her if she screamed. She promised not to.
“Then he looks at me in my eyes and he says, ‘Let me kill you anyways,’” she recalled, tears streaming down her cheeks. “And then he starts choking me.”
When she regained consciousness, Lauren realized she’d lost her flip-flops in the struggle.
Barefoot and extremely shaken, she moved to the side of the path, suddenly worried he was going to run her over.
But amid the terror, she displayed remarkable composure. When he gave her the cloth to wipe what police later called “a huge splotch of ejaculate,” she was careful not to wipe it all away, so there would be some left for police to test.
She also remembered to ask for her bag, which had her cellphone inside.
Then, as Schneider drove away, “I just remember thinking to myself, Get his license plate, get his license plate.” The moment his car rounded the bend, she reached into her bag, called 911, and blurted out the plate number.
At the hospital, a detective showed Lauren six photos of different men. She had no trouble picking him out.
“I just remember those eyes…those eyes,” she said. “You don’t forget the face of someone who you thought was going to kill you.”
Women in Alaska are in more danger of being murdered by a man than women in any other state.
A 2016 study by the Violence Policy Center found the rate was nearly three times the national average. And one-third of Alaskan adult women have experienced sexual violence, according to a 2015 survey from the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center.
The statistics are even worse for indigenous women like Lauren. Murder is the third leading cause of death among Alaska Native women, according to Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
On some reservations, women are 10 times more likely to be killed than in other counties. Almost half of them have endured rape, physical violence, or stalking, the federal government found in 2012. One in three Native women will be raped in their lifetime.
The problem is not confined to reservations or Alaska Native villages. The Urban Indian Health Institute, a division of the Seattle Indian Health Board, has found records of 31 indigenous women or girls who had gone missing or were murdered in Anchorage between 1975 and 2018. Only Seattle and Albuquerque, two cities with roughly double the population of Anchorage, had more cases.
“In terms of sexual assault and violence against women, unfortunately that’s a problem all over Alaska,” said Allen, the former Anchorage district attorney.
“That’s a problem in rural Alaska, it’s a problem in urban Alaska, and it’s just something that we are all ashamed of and want to try to improve.”
Janel Gagnon, a volunteer with No More Mat-Su, an anti–domestic violence group operating in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley outside of Anchorage, moved to the state three years ago from Portland, Oregon, but was born in California. Before moving north, she had three big fears: cold weather, bears, and moose.
“I’ve come to love the cold, I’ve never seen a bear, and I’ve only seen a handful of moose,” she said. “But do you know what I’m afraid of now? I’m really afraid of the people.
“Those statistics mean you have a lot of perpetrators walking around, and they must be perpetrators we all know,” she said. “Why aren’t we talking about them? Because then we’d have to talk about people that live next door.”
Following his assault on Lauren, Justin Schneider drove himself to his job at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, one of the busiest cargo airports in the world, where he worked as an air traffic controller.
When he finished later that night, he drove the 30 minutes home to Eagle River to be with his wife and two children.
He was arrested the next day.
Lauren felt relief when she heard the news. Part of her had feared he would somehow find her and “finish off the job.”
But she was particularly shocked to learn what her attacker did for a living. “My first thought was this guy’s pretty much in charge of people in the air — this psychopath,” she said.
“Obviously there’s something in his head that gets off on the act of killing, and it just blew my mind that he was in charge of all those lives in the air. It was just insane.”
Just a week after her attack, Lauren testified in front of a grand jury.
Schneider was indicted on three felony charges: kidnapping, along with assault in the second and third degree. The kidnapping charge alone carried a sentence of up to 99 years in prison.
But he also faced a misdemeanor charge for what’s known as first-degree harassment.
This, it turned out, was the only charge prosecutors felt they could bring against him for masturbating and ejaculating on Lauren’s face.
Under Alaska law, a person is guilty of first-degree harassment if they subject another to “offensive physical contact ... with human or animal blood, mucus, saliva, semen, urine, vomitus, or feces.” As written, the law covers the act of being hit with ejaculate, but not of being masturbated on.
(The statute, like many similar laws across the country, is primarily designed to protect prison guards from inmates hurling cups of bodily fluids at them from their cells. Some of these statutes explicitly limit the scope of victims to law enforcement officers and emergency responders.)
Essentially, then, Alaska’s law regarded what Schneider did as equivalent to spitting in someone’s face.
Andrew Grannik, the then–assistant district attorney in Anchorage who handled the case, was not willing to speak about it, according to a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law. But Grannik’s former boss, Allen, told BuzzFeed News he recalled Grannik coming to him to discuss the case.
“I think I might have even grabbed my statute book and said, ‘Surely that’s a sex offense. I mean, that has to be a sex offense, right?’” said Allen.
“And he says, ‘No, Rick, I’ve looked at it every which way and it’s not a sex offense.’ And I went through the statutes with him and he was right.”
The prosecutors were at a loss.
“I’m a lawyer who’s been doing this kind of work for 20 years,” said Allen, “but I had never been faced with this kind of fact scenario before. None of us had.”
Would You Like To Know More?
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/davidmack/alaska-sexual-assault-loophole-masturbate-ejaculate-semen
