Misty Roberts, 43, faces sentences of up to 10 and seven years in prison after July 2024 sexual assault at pool party

The former mayor of a Louisiana city has been convicted of raping a 16-year-old boy during a party at her house while she was still in office.

Misty Roberts, 43, faces sentences of up to 10 and seven years in prison after a jury in the municipality of DeRidder on Tuesday found her guilty of two felonies: carnal knowledge of a juvenile – or statutory rape – as well as indecent behavior with a minor.

In October, in an unrelated case, her 40-year-old brother, Brandon Lee Roberts, pleaded guilty to raping two people: an underage girl and a young woman. He subsequently received a 42-year prison sentence.

  • Schadrach
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    18 hours ago

    Going to get ranty here, a bit stream of consciousness, but feel free to engage.

    Lots of signs of some internet education and naturalized perspective going on here.

    I’m being descriptive, not prescriptive - I’m not saying the way society does shit is good or right or inherently natural, just that it is (and I would prefer it otherwise). I know you operate from a model where the fundamental structure of society is “a system of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women” as Sylvia Walby might put it, but that…doesn’t align with reality very well, especially not current reality. It (and related theories) are built on a foundation of Marxist-style class conflict which fits about as well as the demographic breakdown you’re using works as a proxy for socioeconomic status (this is why the similar class conflict logic for race fits better than it does for gender). Which is why if you look you can keep encountering situations in which society does the opposite of what patriarchy would predict, usually with some apologetic to shoehorn things back into position rather than consider alternatives. “The patriarchy hurts men too” is the equivalent of classical geocentrists inventing epicycles and deferents to shoehorn their model back into place when the sky did not behave like it should.

    Let’s try a hypothetical. I’m going to divide adults into three groups based on a demographic axis. One of those groups I’m going to set aside because they either land in between the two groups I want to discuss, have a dramatically smaller population that makes comparisons unfair, or both. The other two I’m going to call A and B. All the following comparisons are relative to A and Bs share of the total population. As are more likely to be stopped by police. As are more likely to be arrested. As are more likely to be convicted when tried. As get longer prison sentences than Bs for the same charge. As are dramatically more likely to be killed by law enforcement. Violence against an A is seen as less serious than violence against a B, especially if a B is the perpetrator. People of either group tend to get higher punishments for hurting or killing a B than an A. Now, is this evidence of As being oppressed? Are As just innately criminal, evil and monstrous? Hell, is this somehow evidence of Bs being oppressed? Or are these stats totally meaningless to that kind of discussion? I’d post sources for those, but that would be telling how I’m grouping people and the whole point is to make you think about how your view of reality is decided by the model rather than the model describing reality.

    “Malagency” is a word …

    Malagency is the concept that society broadly tends to assign men more agency and responsibility than they often have and tends to assign women less agency and responsibility than they often have. That’s it. And it works well to predict what will actually happen in a wide variety of situations where expecting society to behave as “a system of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women” would lead one to expect different results. This is of course fucked up and needs be opposed. But saying we need to kill benevolent sexism (and saying we need to stop minimizing women’s misdeeds is an example of this) will be read as hostile sexism by third parties, see Amy Young’s thesis “Lay misperceptions of the relationship between men’s benevolent and hostile sexism” which suggests that not engaging in benevolent sexism is viewed by third parties as hostile sexism, unless you clearly signpost that your actions are egalitarian in nature. To quote the abstract: “The low BS male target (compared to high BS male target) was judged to be higher on HS, less supportive of female professionals, less good of father and husband, and more likely to perpetrate domestic violence. Ratings of the low BS male target were as equally negative as those of the high HS male target. In Study 2, low BS male targets were judged to be low in hostility towards women only if they explicitly stated that their low BS was motivated by egalitarian values, otherwise men’s low BS was assumed to indicate misogyny.”

    While I’m at it, how do you feel about the 2018 change in the law in KY regarding child custody in contested cases? The move to the notion that judges should start from a position of equally shared custody unless there’s a good reason to be otherwise? I’m curious because most of the backlash against it came from feminist circles, and it’s more or less exactly a policy position that MRAs had been fighting for for most of the prior decade+ using the phrase “a rebuttable presumption of shared custody” to describe the concept.

    I am 100% certain that you do not give a single fuck about young men who are victims of sexual violence. You have even sunk to using their victimization to platform views that reproduce the conditions for that violence to continue. Vile behaviour.

    You would be wrong. Though I’m curious how invoking the notion that men are often assigned by society greater agency/responsibility than they actually have while women are often assigned by society lesser agency/responsibility than they actually have (and that that often applies regardless of who benefits) would “reproduce the conditions for that violence to continue.” The whole point is that male victims (especially those with female perpetrators) are minimized as victims because they are treated as being more responsible for what happened to them while female perpetrators have language around them minimized because they’re viewed as less responsible for their misdeeds. The whole fucking “NICE” meme via South Park was from an episode that was basically a satire of this taken to the extreme. To be clear, this is a problem.

    I know I go after her immediately below this, but Koss’ concept of unacknowledged victims I think impacts men even more than women as a consequence of societal malagency - if you get told by society time and again that only men perpetrate and women are only victims, that men are responsible for whatever happens to them, etc, etc and then something happens to you as a man that is done by a woman, you reframe and internalize it in a way that makes you not a victim and her not a perpetrator. I know that’s how it worked for me, and it took me years and exposure to ideas not in that framing to get over that shit. That was almost 20 years ago, thanks for my daily reminder I’m turning into an old man.

    This line of minimizing female perps extends into the research as well, it’s why for example categories like “made to penetrate” exist and get filed under a subcategory of “other” in some of the research. A lot of the foundational research around intimate partner and sexual violence operated by explicitly minimizing male victims and female perps. See Mary Koss as an example (you may know her as the person who produced the first real study on rape in the US, who came up with the oft-repeated “1-in-4” stat, who coined the term “date rape”, testified before Congress to get VAWA passed, her survey instrument [SES] is still widely used, etc, etc). Once in an interview when asked about male victims of female perps she responded in disbelief with “How would that happen… how would that happen by force or threat of force or when the victim is unable to consent? How does that happen?” and when given an example of a man who had been drugged into compliance declared that that was merely “unwanted contact.” She had also separately stated on the topic “It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman.” If malagency is the fruit of a poison tree that poisons anything it touches as you seem to think, why isn’t anything descending from her work on the topic likewise, aside from that being most of the research on the topic?