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The August 11, 2002, kidnapping and assault of Jason Moyer was as brutal as anything that had ever happened in the played-out coalfields and fallow farms of rural Schuylkill County. As it turned out, it was also one of the most controversial.
Even now, more than a year and a half after the incident, and months after the first of two trials in the case, the community remains deeply divided over whether Mitchell and Nestor were vicious vigilantes, acting on bad information to vent an almost savage fury, or whether their acts were justified, the acts of men who believed that the legal system was unwilling or unable to protect them and their loved ones from a potential predator in their midst.
There is, in some parts of Schuylkill County, still a debate raging. You can read it between the lines of the character testimonials that have been prepared in advance of Mitchell's sentencing hearing next month, and they add their voices to the chorus questioning whether Mitchell was a thug or simply a man who did what needed to be done after a member of his family had, he believed, been violated.
The testimonials, according to his attorney, depict him as a man steeped in the Christian fundamentalist traditions of the region, a man who had little faith in the will or ability of the authorities to prosecute Moyer after Moyer allegedly got Mitchell's 19-year-old stepdaughter drunk and took advantage of her while she was unconscious. After all, as Mitchell saw it, the authorities had their chance to prosecute Moyer and chose to go easy on him.
Mitchell's doubts about the criminal system were, in his mind, validated when the young woman went to police to report the sexual assault. A female detective opted not to charge Moyer. When the young woman admitted that she had two beers before the alleged rape, however, the detective cited her for underage drinking.
To Mitchell, that was an outrage.
Cut a little deeper into the case, and there are other issues, troubling issues that rise from the sordid, and in some respects, sexual nature of the attack against Moyer. There is no question, say experts in the aftermath of sex crimes that the assault against Jason Moyer was a sex crime. "I think he was sexually assaulted," said Lawrence Bergmann, founder of the Columbia, S.C.-based Post Trauma Center, a facility that treats victims of life-shattering crimes, including rape.
Moyer suffered genital torture, his nipple was sliced, and he was forced to sodomize himself, according to police reports. And yet, in their case against Mitchell, prosecutors made no mention of the sodomy and only passing references to the cigarette burns on the man's genitals and the cuts across his nipple. Mitchell was charged with kidnapping and assault, but early on, the justice system dropped any possible sex crimes case against him.
As Andrew J. Serina, the young prosecutor who handled the case put it, "The district justice made a determination that there wasn't enough evidence for that charge to go forward, and I think the way the evidence pans out it'll show that Nestor had more to do with that act than Mitchell." Nestor is facing charges of deviant sexual assault, he added.
But that begs the question, was the case handled differently because Moyer was a man? Serina, for his part, insists that it was not. He maintains that authorities simply pursued the strongest case they had, and they won it.
All the same, say sex-crime professionals, there is ample evidence that nationally, sex crimes against men are treated differently than those against women, and the differences are obvious in every step of the process, from investigation to prosecution, even in the willingness of the victims to come forward.
"Oh, I think there's no doubt, it's very much less talked about,' Bergmann says. "It's extremely difficult for a male to come into treatment for sexual assault.
"In all my years of practice, working with hundreds of people who are traumatized, I can only think of a few men who presented for sexual assault, whether it had been early assault, incest or a later assault," Bergmann continued. "It's a cultural thing. Men are supposed to be in charge and they're not supposed to be able to be sexually assaulted, they're the ones with the penis, and if it happens, we tend to ask questions and blame the victim for the assault."
And it does happen. According to the National Crime Victimization Study, on average, 10 percent of all victims of sexual assault are male. In its annual report for 2002, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics counted 247,730 rapes and in 31,640 cases, the victims were men and 52 percent of those men, or 16,500, were sexually assaulted by people they knew.
In reality, experts say, those numbers actually may be low. In many cases, men, bowing to societal pressure and their own shame, simply don't report the incidents. Overall, federal authorities estimate that 64 percent of all rapes whether the victims are male or female go unreported. And though society has made great strides in reducing the stigma of rape when it comes to women victims, much remains to be done for men who are victims of such brutalizing crimes, says Jamie Zuieback, spokeswoman for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, a victims' advocacy group.
"There are different sets of stigma attached to male and female victims," she says. "I think we always talk about rape as stigmatizing. I think in a lot of ways, that has really changed, particularly for women, you know, the whole idea of it not being her fault."
"But for men there can still be a lot of shame attached to it. And I think a lot of it has to do with how society views men in general. The idea of a man being overpowered by another man carries with it all sorts of different connotations that an adult woman being overpowered by this big bad rapist would not."
In other cases, crimes against men with a sexual component are classified as something else, says Zuieback. "I don't know the laws in Pennsylvania, but interestingly because the definition of rape and sexual assault vary in different states in some states, a man cannot legally be raped because the statutes may specify that rape is vaginal penetration or it may specify penetration by a penis, which in this case means you wouldn't have rape," she says. "On that kind of basic level in cases by necessity male and female victims are treated differently."
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