News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
What evidence would there even be after 20 years? Unless there's text message records or something like that I would guess it mostly came down to their word vs his anyway, no?
That's exactly why it was so shocking to see him take such a harsh sentence. Typically in a case like this, the verdict is going to side with the defense because if it didn't, anyone could start throwing wild accusations with no evidence in hopes of a conviction. The fact that it was a twenty year old case with twenty year old evidence and the lawyers couldn't overcome that or even plea bargain him down to a lesser crime tells me that his lawyers weren't really looking out for his best interest, but wanted to get through the system as fast as possible to avoid too bright a spotlight on Scientology.
I'm not disagreeing with you but, if his lawyers were that bad, how has he not appealed based on ineffective representation?
He's a stooge to the Church. He is either a true believer, or the cult has even worse things on him.
Really interesting read, thanks for contributing.
Because that would mean disobeying the cult, I guess.
That sort of appeal has a close to 100% failure rate. How do you know he hasn't tried that and gotten nowhere? On top of that, he'd need to hire new lawyers, which is bound to be slow if he can even manage it.
Man I'm reading this whole thread trying to find out what he did and how they nailed him, yet I'm not finding any more info. Really surprising such an old case and he gets hammered this hard.
They had the testimony of three victims who gave detailed descriptions of the rapes. And he did not testify in his defense to refute their testimony. Typical rape cases are difficult to prosecute when it is the victim's word against the accused's. In this case, there were three women with very similar stories, and he was silent.
If Masterson was brainwashed by the Church of Scientology and they appointed a lawyer who turned him into their sacrificial lamb, one would think that he could plausibly play the victim card. If the government was interested in going after the bigwigs at the CoS, he might be able to get a good deal. Masterson is not particularly important in the grand scheme. A case against the CoS that would finally take down someone big, whether the head of the CoS or a big celebrity like Tom Cruise would be amazing. Even better would be to dismantle the whole rotten enterprise.
Really really interesting summary thanks for sharing
Im not sure what the evidence was, but there was a 3 year investigation, and two other cases were not brought to charge due to lack of evidence. The prosecution case involved the Scientology cover-up, including attempts to get one of the women to sign an NDA