Bar Exam Question of the Day: Sex By Trick?

An Israeli court has convicted an Arab man of rape on very interesting grounds. Haaretz reports:

Sabbar Kashur, 30, had consensual sex with a woman after he posed as a Jewish bachelor interested in a long-term relationship.

When the woman found Kashur was not a Jew but an Arab, she filed a police complaint that led to charges of rape and indecent assault.

Kashur was subsequently convicted of “rape by deception,” and sentenced to 18 months in prison.

We’ve got a lot of people studying for the bar exam right now. We need to know: Could a person be convicted of the crime of “making a material misrepresentation to a woman to get her into bed because that’s what guys do,” here in America?

Just for a moment, let’s take the racial, Arab-Israeli, Middle East-powder-keg aspect out of this. At the core of this case, do we have anything more than one guy lying to get a girl into bed? Writing at The Stranger, Dan Savage thinks the woman — the victim — should take some personal responsibility:

When we have consensual sex with strangers—when we go home (or to “a nearby building”) with someone we’ve only just met—we’re not just taking a chance on a person we know very little about. We’re taking a chance on our own judgment. With no way to verify the story of the hot stranger—he could be lying about anything—we’re taking a chance on our own bulls**t detectors. And no one’s bulls**t detectors are 100% accurate. So someone who can’t bear the thought of accidentally f*****g the s**t out of an Arab or a Republican or a married man or a guy who makes less than $250,000 a year has no business f*****g complete strangers. That person owes it to himself/herself to get to know the people he/she wants to f**k a bit better before visiting any nearby buildings with them.

Not because it’s okay to lie. But because people do lie.

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Everybody lies to get people into bed. Call it a wonder bra if it makes you feel better, but that contraption is just a wonderful trick to get men to notice you.

In Israeli, lying to get people into bed seems to be quite a problem:

In 2008, the High Court of Justice set a precedent on rape by deception, rejecting an appeal of the rape conviction by Zvi Sleiman, who impersonated a senior official in the Housing Ministry whose wife worked in the National Insurance Institute. Sleiman told women he would get them an apartment and increased NII payments if they would sleep with him.

High Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein said a conviction of rape should be imposed any time a “person does not tell the truth regarding critical matters to a reasonable woman, and as a result of misrepresentation she has sexual relations with him.”

Hmm… so that one time I went to [insert random chick flick] with my wife and her [insert platitude to describe wife’s friends] and then went out to dinner [for hours, days maybe] just so I could get her into bed — that would have been rape in Israel? Wow, thank God I live in New York City, around women who are more than savvy enough to know when they are being lied to.

Still, aren’t there some lies that would get you in trouble even in America? You can’t lie and say you don’t have AIDS when you know you do. You can’t tell somebody that they have to have sex with you or you’ll kill her dog or boil his rabbit. It does seem like the materiality of one’s “deception” would matter, even over here.

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Which, unfortunately, gets us back to the Arab-Israeli aspect of this case. I never have and never will have sex with a Republican (I’m not joking), but if I were in a Minneapolis airport and one of them gave me a hand job, I probably couldn’t claim that my rent-a-boy’s party affiliation was an aggravating circumstance. But Arab-Israeli tensions in the Middle East make our American partisan squabbles look petty.

I’m not sure there is a good analogy for what this case would look like in this country. It’s got to be like telling a Michigan girl that you are a fellow alum when really you are Jim Tressel.

As I said, let’s get all the bar studiers in here to tell us what you can say to get a person into bed, and what you can’t.

Jurists say Arab’s rape conviction sets dangerous precedent [Haaretz]
Trust But Verify [The Stranger]