This week, Lydia Cuomo revealed that she was the woman who was brutally raped at gunpoint by a police officer, because she wanted Albany to change the NY State definition of rape. Currently, rape only counts as vaginal penetration—anal and oral penetration aren't considered rape, only sexual assault. While Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas and State Senator Catherine Young proclaimed their support of expanding the definition, now the Daily News reports that Young "blindsided" Cuomo by proposing an alternative bill.
It's a little confusing, but it seems that Young's new bill says that rape should be counted as any vaginal contact, whereas before rape was defined as vaginal penetration, which is sometimes harder to prosecute. The thinking is that if the definition of rape would be expanded to include anal and oral penetration, then, a Daily News editorial explains, then there would "be three distinct crimes, with different standards of proof, under one umbrella definition."
Prosecutors told Young it would be harder to get rape convictions if anal and oral penetration were included:
One prosecutorial source explained that studies have shown juries don’t consider forced oral sex to be rape, so expanding the definition of rape might make it more difficult in some instances to obtain convictions.
“Colloquially, people want to call everything rape, and that’s fine. But that could end up backfiring in court,” the source said.
Young said her new bill would make it easier for prosecutors to convict on rape charges by lowering the burden of proof from the current requirement of vaginal penetration to simply vaginal contact. By this new standard, Young said, [Cuomo's rapist, officer Michael] Pena would likely have been convicted of vaginal rape.
A mistrial had been declared on the rape charges. Pena later pleaded guilty to rape, when the threat of a re-trial loomed. He is now serving 75 years in prison.
Lydia Cuomo supports Young's new bill, but has been telling media outlets, "He raped me at the end of the day, and he’s not being called a rapist. He is a rapist, and you need to call rape, rape.... Sexual assault sounds so vague and I don’t think the word ‘sexual’ should be involved in it at all. There’s nothing sexual about it — detest, disgusting violation of someone.... You just assume that those things are rape. I don’t I’d ever thought, like, ‘Oh the sodomy, that’s not going to be rape,’ because in my mind it very clearly was."
