In southwest England in 1292, Isabella Plomet brings a legal complaint against Ralph de Worgan, a local physician. She alleges that he abused his medical position to drug and rape her.
Drug- or alcohol-facilitated sexual assault is perceived by many as a recent concept, with campuses and anti-rape activists mobilizing to raise awareness. But this remarkable case, recently discovered by medieval historian Gwen Seabourne — with its distant echoes of the Bill Cosby trial — shows how a 13th-century jury recognized sex with an intoxicated person as assault and punished the perpetrator accordingly.
The records suggest that de Worgan was something of a predator. Isabella had originally gone to Ralph complaining of pain in her lower leg. De Worgan was apparently told her that he could cure her, but only if she traveled with him to the neighboring town of Ross-on-Wye. Like a good patient, she obeyed her doctor’s orders — “stuck to his advice” (adhesit consilio, in the original Latin) — and agreed to the trip.
Once they arrived, he gave her a narcotic drink commonly used to anesthetize patients before surgery and told her to drink it. And when Isabella was incapacitated from the drink, Ralph raped her. According to her testimony, recorded in the court record’s summary of the jury’s findings regarding her lawsuit, “Ralph gave her a beverage which he called ‘dwoledreng’ (dwale-drink) to drink. Afterwards he had sex with her against her will.”
It is important to note that Isabella seems to have been unmarried, and the case record contains no mention a husband, father, or brother. Rather, it focuses on the harm done to Isabella herself, “against her will.” And the case hinged on the jury believing her testimony over that of a learned doctor and landowner, even though she was not from a noble or prominent family.
The jury finds Ralph legally responsible for threatening and assaulting her. They order him to pay a hefty fine, the equivalent of one cow or 66 days of work, and they imprison him until he is able to scrounge up the funds to pay it. As Seabourne, a professor of legal history at the University of Bristol, argues in a 2016 article published in Social History of Medicine, the case is extraordinarily significant because it demonstrates that medieval society recognized that sexual assault could be facilitated through intoxication and understood that not all rapes require a weapon or overt physical violence.
How could a 13th-century jury understand what some Americans today fail to grasp?
The jury’s decision shows that intoxication-facilitated sexual assault — central to numerous prominent assault cases in recent years including the Steubenville rape case; the Vanderbilt football team gang rape case; Stanford swimmer Brock Turner’s assault of an unconscious woman; and 14-year-old Daisy Coleman’s rape in Missouri, the subject of the recent Netflix documentary Audrie and Daisy — is not a recent concept spawned by a feminist campaign to police everyone’s drunken fun. Rather, Plomet v. Worgan shows that drugging someone in order to have sex with them has long been viewed as a serious crime. The record does not include whatever argument de Worgan might have made in his defense.
This week, over 700 years after Isabella Plomet’s successful suit against Ralph de Worgan, Bill Cosby goes on trial at Montgomery County Courthouse in Pennsylvania for drugging and assaulting Andrea Constand. Thirteen years ago, in January 2004, Cosby invited Constand to his home to dinner, according to her complaint. He knows Constand through her job as director of women’s basketball operations at Temple University. He is the university’s most famous and generous alumnus, speaking at commencement nearly every year and serving on Temple’s board of trustees, and he considers himself to be Constand’s professional mentor.
That night, Constand voices her mounting stress over the demands of her job; she feels “drained” and “emotionally occupied,” she tells him. Cosby offers her three blue pills with a glass of wine. He tells her that the pills are an herbal supplement to help her relax, and Constand swallows them. Shortly thereafter, in Constand’s words, “I was unable to speak or move; I was paralyzed.” “I can’t even talk, Mr. Cosby,” she tells him. Cosby guides her to a couch, insisting he is helping her lie down and relax, and sexually assaults her instead. When she wakes up, disoriented and half-dressed at four o’clock in the morning, he offers her a blueberry muffin. (Cosby says that the sex was consensual, and has disputed numerous aspects of Constand’s account. He has said the “three pills” were three half-pills of Benadryl, for instance.)
For some reason, I cannot stop thinking about that blueberry muffin, about how and why one would casually give someone a blueberry muffin hours after assaulting them, how someone could be expected to choke down a whole blueberry muffin after waking up groggy with her sweater “bunched up” around her neck and her bra undone. One day I see a trampled blueberry muffin lying on the sidewalk and I think of Bill Cosby and Andrea Constand.
When Constand brings a civil case against Cosby the next year, he settles the case for an undisclosed sum of money, while denying guilt. It is only now, well over a decade after the assault, that the case will finally see a criminal trial.
I am struck by the links between Andrea Constand and Isabella Plomet, separated as they are by 700 years and an ocean, because they demonstrate the long historical sweep of this particular kind of violence, and shed valuable light on how drug-facilitated sexual assault is (or was) handled by two different, but linked, legal systems.
Both Constand and Plomet sought legal action against their assailants despite the uphill battle they faced because they were incapacitated and assaulted, in cultures where intoxicated women are routinely held responsible for the things that men do to them while they are under the influence. (And in cultures where male victims of drug-related sexual assault are often erased from the narrative altogether.)
In the Middle Ages as today, women’s drunkenness was associated with the removal of their capacity to say “no” to sex: As one very popular medieval proverb puts it, “A drunken cunt has no door bar.” And as Chaucer’s Wife of Bath observes, “In wine-filled women is no resistance/ And lechers know this by experience” [In wommen vinolent is no defence—/ This knowen lecchours by experience].
Our own culture is not so very different: Until September 2016, California law stated that assaults in which the victim was intoxicated or unconscious could be given lesser sentences than ones where more overt force or weapons were used. And in April 2016, an Oklahoma court ruled that state law failed to criminalize oral sex with an individual who is unconscious from drinking.
Both Isabella Plomet and Andrea Constand — allegedly, in the latter case — were targeted by men who took advantage of them at particularly vulnerable moments: Constand was drained and suffering from job stress, Plomet in pain from her injured leg. Both were assaulted, or allegedly assaulted, by men close to them who abused their power deliberately to hurt them — Cosby apparently wielding his immense fame as an entertainer as well as his high-ranking role with Constand’s employer, and Worgan misusing his professional position as a healer.
Both women were drugged (or allegedly drugged) by men they trusted, and both were assaulted (or allegedly assaulted) after they had been rendered physically incapable of refusal. And that is one of the cruelest things about intoxication-facilitated assault: Victims are attacked only after the possibility of resisting has been entirely removed from their grasp. It is like moving all the knives just out of reach. The substance is the tight cord used to bind them, the thief that steals the keys to the car that they would have used to escape.
I am also struck by the differences between then and now — which do not conform to the narrative of unbroken progress since the 13th century. Isabella Plomet was awarded monetary compensation by a jury in June 1292 while Andrea Constand’s case took years and years to find its way to a jury. Plomet’s story disrupts our narratives about sexual violence and historical progress.
Nowadays we like to use the term “medieval” to name spectacularly brutal violence, as shorthand for wildly unequal gender relations, for extreme restrictions on women’s sexuality. We imagine that “medieval” means rampant and indiscriminate sexual violence like that on display on Game of Thrones (which is set in a fantasy world, but one with clear roots in European history), peasant women being raped by their feudal overlords in a “first night” ritual, as in Braveheart. We imagine it means women being stoned for adultery, forced to wear chastity belts, unable to prosecute their rapists in court.
We do not think about how the medieval might show us what justice can look like for victims of intoxication-facilitated sexual assault, or how it can teach us strategies by which survivors can seek reparation, or how it can shine harsh floodlights on our own repeated failures to hold perpetrators responsible for their actions. Even members of a long-ago society knew it was a grievous wrong to exploit an individual’s intoxication in order to override their consent and take sexual advantage of them. The medieval is not only a map of where we have been as a culture, showing us the genealogy of our current laws and social attitudes; it is also a mirror that shows us how much we have not yet learned, how very far we still have to go. In this case, I am interested in how the medieval can challenge us to do better, to be more just.
I look forward to justice for Andrea Constand. I await the age-old victim-blaming arguments that Cosby’s lawyers will use to smear and disparage and defame her — she wanted it, she’s a liar, it was consensual, she’s only after his money, she chose to go to his house, she chose to take the pills, she should have known what he was going to do, it’s all her fault.
I hope fiercely that a modern jury will have the discernment that a medieval jury did, that it will recognize that the workings of power and force and violence do not always require a knife or a gun. And I hope even more fiercely that we can do better by the survivors of sexual violence — recognizing, as that 13th-century jury did, that intoxication is no justification for assault. Let us honor Andrea Constand’s bravery — and, before that, Isabella Plomet’s — with righteous action.
Carissa Harris is an assistant professor of English at Temple University specializing in medieval literature.
Yes I am angry. I’m furious. How dare you take my whole life away from me the way you did. For years I beat myself up about it; thinking all this was my fault. But its not and it never was. Its yours and it always will be. And guess what? 5 years on and I’M STILL GAY. So yeah that thing you were trying to prove? Proved absolutely nothing. I’m now 18 years old, I still struggle to sleep some nights, I still remember your face clearly, and sometimes I don’t think I can do this. But you know what? I can do this and I will. Not just for me, but to prove to you that I can survive all the pain, hurt and confusion you put me through. And I will say this loud and clear because I’m not afraid of you anymore, you can’t hurt me. I am a survivor, not a victim and I will conquer this fight and come out so much stronger
Please share!! By survivors for survivors is the MOST valid and best type of resource for anything sexual assault/abuse/trauma related.
LIFE IS ALREADY DIFFICULT ENOUGH FOR US AS SURVIVORS OF ABUSE AND ASSAULT. THE LAST THING WE NEED IS PEOPLE WHO ARE PURPOSEFULLY TRYING TO PREY ON OUR WEAKNESSES OR MAKE US FEEL LIKE IT WAS DESERVED BECAUSE IT WAS 100% NOT. THE OPINIONS OF THOSE PEOPLE DO NOT MATTER. YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE BEEN THROUGH, YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED, YOU KNOW YOUR TRUTH, YOU KNOW YOURSELF. THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS. YOU DO NOT NEED TO PROVE YOURSELF TO ANYBODY. PEOPLE WHO WOULD EVEN THINK TO PUT YOU DOWN BECAUSE OF YOUR TRAUMA OR PURPOSEFULLY ENXOURAGE IT HAPPENING AGAIN ARE HORRIBLY SICK AND HAVE THEIR OWN VERY EXTENSUVE ISSUES AND HEALING TO DO, THEIR HATE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU OR THE VALIDITY OF YOUR TRAUMA. YOU ARE 100% VALID. YOU KNOW YOU ARE TELLING THE TRUTH. YOU KNOW HOW REAL IT IS. YOU KNOW THAT THEY COULD NEVER UNDERSTAND. YOU ARE SO STRONG.
I knew it! I knew Romeo was taking Maryanne! Two underdogs in the finales!
Maryanne’s story arc this season had been all about her being quirky and wearing her heart on her sleeve. She’s so likable and has engineered some strong plays at the end. (Hello, getting Omar out at Final Six.)
Romeo’s been flying under the radar around so many strong players. He’s had his name put up so many times, but has squeaked through safely.
The only questions left are who wins fire and who has had the best edit this season. My money is on Maryanne. She’s got a good overall story and an endearing edit.
If Maryanne had turned around to play her idol for Lindsey (after Mike played his idol for her and everyone (but Lindsey) voted for Lindsey), then that would have been a MOVE.
Today is 6 weeks post op! I should be healed, right? Wrong! The physical limitations and the mental scars are still very fresh. I have not had a pain free day in over 6 weeks, my emotions are up and down. My emotions range from anger, anxiety, depression, eating disorder thoughts/urges fear (of my health and my future), sadness, self love/hate, and everything in between. Even though there’s a lot of negativity in there I’m still remaining more positive than negative because I don’t like feeling negativity and combatting my thoughts (not invalidating how I feel) is a battle of its own. I practice self love by nourishing my body, by taking walks in the rain like I did today just to get fresh air and get moving, by taking longer showers because it feels amazing, by following up with as many doctors I need to for my health. I know this will be a long journey, I know my new “normal” will be nothing from prior to my surgery and I’m okay with that as I love the person I’ve become and the future me I have yet to meet as I know I will be stronger than ever #mastectomy #postop #breastcancer #survivor #recovery #fightlikeagirl #bopo #bodypositivity #loveyourself #ednos #edwarrior #prorecovery #positivevibes #positivity #fuckcancer #selflove https://www.instagram.com/p/BnKQUTVFOxY/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1pa1ziyiy2oy9
#inktoberday5 which iiiisss better late than never! I chose from @raqueltraveillustration & her ‘witches and familiars’ prompt list, which today was #snake then, as per, my random added prompt from ‘The Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects’ was ‘palladium.’ So now I’m confused, right? Does everyone know what a ‘palladium’ is, or am I just super uneducated? So, ignoring the metal, I found out that a palladium is a cult object, a statue or painting etc, specifically either carried into battle for blessings, protection etc, or, more often, as a protective object for a specific place. So I’m all over this with Ms. Snake yo, especially today, especially right now. The venom of Ms.Snake, like a witch who knows their herbs, can poison, heal and regenerate, or alter consciousness. So I designed a Snake for survivors today, all of us feeling, you know, just feeling a lot. ✨Snake, lend us any venom we need to protect our selves, our beloveds and our sisters from those who would hurt us. Lend us nurturing rest & comfort in your dark womb, regeneration as we shed old skins, & altered, wider sight, so we can see how to grow, come together, rest, grieve, build anew, everything we need to envision better✨ so mote it be, amen, aho. I’m giving away prints of this for whoever would like one, so Snake can be where she’s needed. I’ll not get them out just yet as I’m a little buried by life, but as soon as I can, I do love you so, & if you would be kind enough to pay postage from Texas! much love, precious ones, do be gentle with yourselves today ✨ . . . . . #inktober #witch #witchcraft #witchart #witchaesthetic #magicart #feminist #sisterhood #survivor #metoo #believesurvivors #believewomen #inkdrawing #spell #witchbitch (at Houston, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/BonpnLHlRZP/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1841t6k36qrr4
People talk about forgiveness like it’s this nonchalant choice you suddenly make in one second before you meet your friends at Panera for lunch and not this excruciating, gradual, meticulously tended to, bloody, sweaty, insane, bone scraping, tooth grinding rebirth of the self.
Medusa was one of the daughters of Keto and Phorkys, who were sea gods. However, Medusa was mortal, while her sisters Stheno and Euryale were immortal.
She had been blessed with a striking beauty, and incredibly long and glorious hair. Poseidon, God of the sea, soon became enamoured with the young Gorgon and forced himself on her in a temple of Athena.
Athena was outraged at Medusa and transformed her hair into a bed of serpents, changing her into the grotesque monster we know today.
The young Gorgon could not look at another human being without them being turned to stone, and lived a sad lonely existence, taking out her anger on any traveller who visited her.
Medusa’s death is perhaps the most famous part of her story. Greek hero Perseus was sent out by a king to bring back the head of the Gorgon as a gift. He killed her while she slept by using Athena’s shield as a mirror so he could behead her without looking in her eyes. However, her power was not dimmed in death, and her head had to be kept covered in a sack called a kybisis so no one else was turned to stone.
For many, the myth of Medusa is linked to the struggle and re-birth of a woman dealing with sexual assault and trauma. In the myth, Poseidon forces himself onto the young Medusa and she is punished for his actions. A re-examination of this Greek myth sees many people identifying with Medusa as a victim rather than a villain, and wearing the image as a symbol of survival. One possible meaning of the Medusa tattoo is as a representation of strength after trauma or sexual assault.
