In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, a shocking cover story by Daniel Engber focused on recent criminal proceedings in New Jersey, a case of sexual assault against a disabled person. Anna Stubblefield, a philosophy professor at Rutgers, was accused of assaulting D.J., a severely disabled man she assisted with “facilitated communication.”
Engber reported that in 2011, Anna (and D.J.) came forward to D.J.'s legal guardians, his brother and mother, about their physical relationship. His brother and mother are his legal guardians because D.J. is considered to have the mental capability of a toddler from cerebral palsy.
"What made them so upset - what led to all the arguing that followed, and the criminal trial and million-dollar civil suit - was the fact that Anna can speak and D.J. can't; that she was a tenured professor of ethics at Rutgers University in Newark and D.J. has been declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler."
Engber details how Anna has sought over the last few years to prove D.J.'s mental capability. Engber reported that D.J. was diagnosed by psychologist Wayne Tillman, who ruled that "`His comprehension seemed to be quite limited,' `his attention span was very short' and he `lacks the cognitive capacity to understand and participate in decisions.' D.J. could not even carry out basic, preschool-level tasks."
But that was set aside for a new kind of political correctness: that the disabled are being oppressed by the able, just as whites oppress blacks, even when they think they’re being virtuous:
‘‘Even in well-intentioned quests to be antiracist,’’ she wrote, ‘‘white people all too often invade or destroy the space of nonwhite people.’’ The same essay lays out what could be a thesis statement for her whole career: It is crucial, she wrote, for white philosophers ‘‘to wrestle with the horrors and conundrums of whiteness.’’
Those ‘‘horrors and conundrums,’’ as Anna saw them, formed the nexus of oppression she had sworn to fight in all its forms. As the years went by, her mission seemed to broaden and merge into her mother’s. By 2007, Anna had begun to argue that a person’s intellect — and the degree to which he or she is ‘‘disabled’’ — could be as much a social construct, as much a venue for tyranny, as race, gender or sexuality. It was, after all, white elites, she wrote, who first devised measures of I.Q. ‘‘as both a rationalization and a tool of anti-black oppression.’’
With this shift in her scholarship, Anna began to wrestle not just with race but with disability; not just with racism but with ableism. If poor, black Americans were the most vulnerable members of society, she wrote in 2009, then poor, black, disabled Americans — men like D.J., born with cerebral palsy, raised by a single mother, seemingly unable to communicate — were the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Voiceless in both fact and metaphor, she said, they were the ones ‘‘whom we push so far to the margins of our society that most of us, regardless of race, do not even notice when they fall off the edge.’’
By the time that warning made it into print, Anna had been working with D.J. for about a year. This was her mitzvah and her tikkun olam. She was helping to repair the world.
By 2007, Anna had begun to argue that a person's intellect -- and the degree to which he or she is `disabled' - could be as much a social construct, as much a venue for tyranny, as race, gender or sexuality. It was, after all, white elites, she wrote, who first devised measures of I.Q. `as both a rationalization and a tool of anti-black oppression.'"
If poor, black Americans were the most vulnerable members of society, she wrote in 2009, then poor, black, disabled Americans - men like D.J., born with cerebral palsy, raised by a single mother, seemingly unable to communicate - were the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. Voiceless in both fact and metaphor, she said, they were the ones `whom we push so far to the margins of our society that most of us, regardless of race, do not even notice when they fall off the edge.'"
Engber framed the family of D.J. as either manipulating him or wanting him to be dependent. While they initially believed the therapy was working, their revulsion to Stubblefield's confession, led to them rationalizing that "D.J. could not have given his consent to any love affair, they later told the authorities, because he suffers from profound mental disabilities, just as the psychologists had always told them. His `messages' must have been a sham.as Wesley would later say during the three-week trial for sexual assault that concluded this month in Newark, `she was having some sick, twisted fantasy.'"
Engber offered some balance from Howard Shane, a speech pathologist and Harvard Medical School professor, who has worked to review the literature on Facilitated Communication. His research concluded, "In almost every case, it seemed that the messages nonverbal people typed were not their own. One early review of this research found just four subjects whose communications might be valid out of 126 people tested. A subsequent review of 19 studies of facilitated communication performed during the 1990s found zero validations across 183 tests."
Finally, Engber gets to the "good part" when he discusses how Stubblefield and D.J. confessed their mutual love.
They went back and forth on this question. ``He grilled me on how much I really loved him, how committed I was to him, how I felt about my husband,'' Anna wrote in an account of their relationship that she compiled six months later at her lawyer's request. D.J. wanted to know if she would someday marry him. ``I said: `Please, I love you very much, but please don't ask me that just now. I need time to think through everything.' He said that he was sorry. He didn't mean to push that hard. It was childish of him.''
Engber got so caught up in the `love story' that he details the sexual encounters and activities that Stubblefield performed with D.J. This part of the narrative is reminiscent of cheesy romance novels, where D.J. would say the right things, and Stubblefield would do his bidding. After the frank description of their sexual activities, Engber gets back to how Stubblefield just knew F.C. would work and that she could help make it work. She wrote that scientific opposition to F.C. met "'the criteria to count as hate speech.' She conceded that there were studies showing that the method didn't work, but there were others that indicated just the opposite. The skeptics' dismissal of F.C., she argued, "their insistence that it never works, could be taken as a form of ableist oppression."
Engber did detail the brand changes that have occurred, with organizations trying to use spin control to fight the impression that Facilitated Communication wasn’t scientific. "In 2010, the Facilitated Communication Institute in Syracuse changed its name to the Institute on Communication and Inclusion. `We need to do more on F.C., but we can't call it that,' said John Hussman, a major donor to the institute who runs a $6 billion mutual fund and whose son uses the technique. He had just given a talk on the neuroscience of what is now often termed `supported typing.' `We have to come up with some other name to fly under the radar and maintain credibility,' he said."
In a twist of fate however, Stubblefield's leftist perspective of the world was turned against her, as the prosecution alleged that she was now using her privilege – “white privilege”? – as D.J.'s communicator, to sexually abuse him. "Anna didn't know it yet, but her relationship with D.J. and the `least dangerous assumption' from which it began - that he was mentally sound and thus capable of consent - had put her in a very dangerous spot."
In a story where a victim cannot vocalize consent, and we have seen cases where that is enough to charge someone with rape, the bent in this story to humanize and even wash away the sin of abuse by Stubblefield is undeniable.
Because the judge "ruled that facilitated communication failed New Jersey's test for scientific evidence," Engber writes that the anecdotal evidence that the defense was going to use, was thrown out. The jury found Stubblefield guilty of 2 counts of first-degree sexual assault, and Engber opines "D.J. was incapable of giving his consent, and Anna's faith in D.J.'s typing - learned from her mother, sustained through academic conferences, reaffirmed by friends and colleagues - could not excuse her. In the language of moral philosophy, she was, at best, ``culpably ignorant,'' lost in a fog of good intentions."
Engber ends the piece, noting how Stubblefield was escorted out of the courtroom. "As she stood, she tried to speak, but her body shook and her throat closed up amid the sobs. The word ‘justice’' could be heard, but nothing more."
Yes, justice. Justice for victims unable to defend themselves and unable to prevent their attackers.
