Karen Zraick

Tchen was a founder of the organization’s signature initiative: a legal-defense fund for women in all industries who experienced sexual harassment at work. The fund has so far raised more than $24 million.

The previous chief executive, Lisa Borders, resigned abruptly in February, after less than four months on the job, after her adult son was accused of sexual misconduct. Rebecca Goldman, who had served as interim chief executive, will continue as chief operating officer.

Tchen, 63, called it “the role of a lifetime” after more than 30 years of working on diversity and inclusion. She said it was a pivotal moment in which those issues had come to the forefront around the world.

“We are having a global conversation around workplaces, around the role of women and gender equity, in a way that in those three decades, I’ve never seen before,” she said Friday.

The organization is also starting a new project called the Time’s Up Impact Lab, focused on research and policies about sexual harassment and other forms of workplace discrimination. The lab received a significant contribution from Pivotal Ventures, an incubator founded by Melinda Gates and led by Jennifer Klein, a strategist for Time’s Up.

The organization declined to say exactly how much Pivotal Ventures had donated. In an article in Time, Gates pledged to donate $1 billion over the next 10 years to expand women’s power and influence in the United States. She wrote that the group would focus on dismantling barriers to women’s professional advancement; fast-tracking women in sectors such as technology, media and politics; and pressuring companies and organizations to change policies.

A short history of Time’s Up

Time’s Up was founded two years ago amid the fallout from revelations about Harvey Weinstein and other powerful Hollywood figures. Actresses, producers, agents and other women began to meet and strategize about a campaign for gender parity and workplace safety. They were prompted to think about women in other industries by an open letter from female farmworkers with the group Alianza Nacional de Campesinas that expressed both sympathy and solidarity.

Time’s Up was a formidable presence at the Golden Globes in January 2018. Members invited activists as their guests, and most celebrities attending the awards show wore black as a sign of solidarity. Many added pins with the Time’s Up logo.

The legal defense fund was started the same month, and since then, it has connected more than 3,600 workers in dozens of industries to legal or public relations support for sexual harassment cases. They have included farmworkers, wait staff, FBI agents and opera singers. Most had low incomes, the organization said.

The fund is administered by the National Women’s Law Center. Major initial donors included Shonda Rhimes, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep. Nearly 800 lawyers have volunteered free or low-cost legal services.

The other co-founders of the fund are the lawyer Robbie Kaplan; Fatima Goss Graves, the president and chief executive of the National Women’s Law Center; and the communications strategist Hilary Rosen.

Kaplan, who is best known for representing Edith Windsor in the Supreme Court case that forced the government to recognize same-sex marriage, said in a statement that Tchen “is like my long-lost sister — someone I have looked up to since we first worked on a case together years ago.”

While pursuing individual cases, the organization also tried to work with lawmakers and others around the country to amend or introduce legislation related to sexual assault and workplace discrimination. Perhaps its most notable victory so far was a bill signed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York last month to extend the statute of limitations in certain rape cases.

Cuomo was joined at the signing by Kaplan and actresses affiliated with Time’s Up, including Julianne Moore, Mira Sorvino and Michelle Hurd.

The organization has also pushed studios to hire more women directors, producers and executives, and has created projects focused on other industries, like health care and advertising.

A little more about Tchen

Tchen currently leads Buckley LLP’s workplace culture practice, and will leave the firm to become president and chief executive of Time’s Up on Nov. 1. She will continue as a chairwoman of the group The United State of Women, along with Valerie Jarrett, her former colleague in the Obama White House.

At the White House, Tchen headed the Office of Public Engagement and the White House Council on Women and Girls, and served as an assistant to the president and chief of staff to the first lady. Before that, she was a longtime lawyer and partner at the corporate firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher &amp; Flom. In an interview, she made a point of mentioning that she had also been a single mother throughout her career.

Tchen also serves on several advisory boards, and was asked to help two high-profile organizations after gender-related controversies in the last two years. The first was the Recording Academy, which presents the Grammys. Its previous president, Neil Portnow, came under fire for saying that women in music should “step up” to advance their careers, though the vast majority of nominees are male. Tchen served as chairwoman of a task force on inclusion and diversity for the organization.

In March, she was asked to be an adviser to the Southern Poverty Law Center after accusations of sexual harassment and racism surfaced at the civil rights nonprofit. Tchen said both projects were wrapping up.

She will continue to be based in Chicago, where she said Time’s Up would open an office.

In a statement, Rimes and the actress Eva Longoria, both principal founders of Time’s Up, praised Tchen for her dedication and vision.

“She has been with us since the beginning, honoring our commitment to transform work for women everywhere,” Longoria said.

This article originally appeared in

Tina Tchen, Ex-Obama Aide, Will Take Over Time's Up

Time’s Up, the advocacy organization founded by powerful women in Hollywood as the MeToo movement roiled the nation, has appointed Tina Tchen, a lawyer and former chief of staff to Michelle Obama, as its new chief executive.

It was at least the third time the detective, Neil David Kimball of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, was accused of misconduct while on duty, though he was not charged as a result of the first two allegations.

District Attorney Gregory D. Totten of Ventura County, whose office prosecuted the case, said in a statement that Kimball, 46, met the then-15-year-old victim in 2017 when she reported a sexual assault. He befriended her and then sexually assaulted her, according to the statement.

Kimball was originally charged with raping the victim while she was tied or bound. Kimball was also accused of “witness intimidation by threat of force.”

But Patrice Koenig, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office, said that prosecutors later determined they could not prove that Kimball had used force during the encounter, which she said took place in his trailer in Camarillo, in southern Ventura County.

The girl did not report the encounter. Rather, when a different officer took over her case about a year later, her father told the new investigator about the assault, Koenig said.

Kimball pleaded guilty last week to a lewd act with a child and unlawful sexual intercourse, and is expected to be sentenced to three years in prison at his next appearance, on Aug. 8. He must also register as a sex offender.

In a statement, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said that Kimball’s pay was suspended in March and that it was seeking to terminate him immediately. A lawyer for Kimball declined to comment.

Kimball’s plea comes just more than a month after Sara Abusheikh, a Los Angeles fashion designer, wrote in a post on Medium about her experience with the detective after she was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance in 2014, and reported it to the authorities. Kimball was assigned to her case, but she wrote that he never investigated, and instead said wildly inappropriate things to her.

Abusheikh wrote that Kimball teased her about going back to her assailant and suggested she “let him make love to you gently.”

“His only interest in the details of my rape came in the form of perverse, sick questions, and he — most tellingly — suggested he come inside to get high,” she wrote.

She later filed a restraining order against her assailant, which led Kimball to joke that she was paranoid, she wrote. When she reported his inappropriate behavior to his supervisor, word got back to Kimball immediately, she added.

The next summer, after getting help from a rape treatment center, she met with the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, which declined to prosecute the case, she wrote. A deputy district attorney told her Kimball was “a fine detective” and insisted there was no evidence to back up her claim, she wrote.

“And the Special Victims Bureau? It only functioned to protect not one, but two, alleged rapists,” Abusheikh concluded in her essay.

The Los Angeles County district attorney’s office declined to comment on Abusheikh’s post.

Last year, Abusheikh shared screenshots of text messages she said were from Kimball with The Daily Beast, as well as records of email exchanges with lawyers and patient advocates from the rape treatment center. She did not return calls or respond to messages seeking further comment.

Kimball, a 20-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department, was assigned to the Special Victims Bureau in 2013, The Los Angeles Times reported. The bureau has been involved in high-profile cases, including accusations by a young actor that he was sexually abused by Asia Argento, a leading figure in the #MeToo movement, who had herself accused the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She denied the allegations.

In 2009, Kimball was investigated for sexual battery but not charged after an episode at a hotel the previous year, The Los Angeles Times reported. According to the report, which was based on a prosecutor’s memo, the detective had questioned a group of friends in a parking lot. Afterward, women in the group and Kimball went to a hotel room, where some of the women stripped down to their underwear and got into a hot tub as he encouraged them, the memo stated. It also said that one woman accused the detective of grabbing her hand and trying to place it on his genitals.

But no charges were filed. Witnesses gave contradictory statements, there was a lack of evidence and the complainant failed to cooperate with investigators, the memo said.

Greg Risling, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, confirmed that the office had declined to prosecute Kimball over the hotel incident. In an email, he said that no other cases involving the detective were under review.

The Ventura County District Attorney’s Office had also urged any additional victims to come forward, Koenig said, but none did so.

Asked last year why Kimball was selected to serve in the Special Victims Bureau even after the 2008 hotel allegations, the sheriff’s department told The Los Angeles Times it would “conduct a review of the internal process” related to the assignment.

The department did not respond to a question about the outcome of that review.

Grier Weeks, senior executive at the National Association to Protect Children, a nonprofit in Knoxville, Tennessee, that pushes for child protection laws, said that the sentence was too light considering the severity of the crime.

“There should be more severe penalties for people in positions of authority or trust who assault a child,” he said. “It’s something that has to be treated as the most serious type of assault.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/us/los-angeles-police-rape-allegation.html" id="ae289413-c926-3679-af71-309761454dd1">The New York Times</a>.

Girl who made abuse claim is sexually assaulted by the detective sent to investigate

A Los Angeles County sex crimes investigator accused of raping a teenager after having been assigned to investigate her previous sexual assault allegations has pleaded guilty to lesser charges, and is expected to be sentenced to three years in prison.

The day marked a profound transformation. A dangerous journey that once took months could now be completed in a week, revolutionizing the fractured country’s economy.

The leaders of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads came together to celebrate the joining of the tracks, and Leland Stanford, the business tycoon and political leader who founded Stanford University, drove a ceremonial golden spike into a tie to unite them.

But many of the workers who had built the railroad were all but invisible at the ceremony, and in its retelling for many years afterward. They included about 15,000 Chinese immigrants — up to 90% of the workforce on the Central Pacific line — who were openly discriminated against, vilified and forgotten.

Now those workers are being written back into the history of the railroad, thanks to the dogged efforts of their descendants and of scholars. At the 150th anniversary of the golden spike ceremony on Friday, and at associated events held last week in Utah, thousands gathered to recognize a more complete picture of the monumental feat.

“I felt such elation,” said Connie Young Yu, a San Francisco-based author and historian with the Chinese Historical Society of America. In her speech at the ceremony on Friday, Yu paid tribute to the Chinese laborers’ courage and sacrifice.

Yu’s great-grandfather helped build the railroad, and her mother was the only descendant of the Chinese workers at the 100th celebration of the golden spike ceremony in 1969. The centennial was a bitter disappointment for the descendants of the Chinese railroad workers, she said. The president of the Chinese Historical Society was nudged off the list of speakers, and the transportation secretary, John A. Volpe, failed to mention the Chinese workers.

“Who else but Americans could have laid 10 miles of track in 12 hours?” he famously asked.

In fact, it was Chinese and Irish workers who achieved that feat. In the years that followed, the Chinese workers would face rising anti-immigrant sentiment and violence, and would be barred from citizenship by the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

At a ceremony on Friday, Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao, the first person of Chinese descent to hold the position, paid tribute to the diverse workforce. In addition to Chinese workers, there were many Irish immigrants, Civil War veterans, Mormons, African-Americans and Native Americans, Chao said.

Native American communities, of course, were also forcibly displaced by the railroad and the westward expansion it enabled. An exhibit on the Chinese workers, on view at the Smithsonian through next year, also highlights the experiences of Native Americans.

Chao said that the achievements of the Chinese workers were poignant because many did not have the opportunity to become citizens, and so little record of their existence survived.

Yet the engineering feat they undertook was “every bit as consequential as the digital revolution that binds the world” today, she said.

The renewed focus on the contributions of the Chinese workers is due in large part to Gordon H. Chang, a historian at Stanford University, who has spent decades researching the workers’ history and codirects the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project.

Chang noted that for many descendants of railroad workers, the 150th anniversary events marked the culmination of a lifelong effort to recover the history of their families and communities. But for him, it’s also a beginning.

“I’m quite enthusiastic that because of the attention to this history, more people are going to come forward to contribute bits and pieces and documentation,” he said.

The Chinese workers took on some of the most dangerous and difficult work, including cutting across the Sierra Nevada mountain range, Chang has written. Hundreds are believed to have died. But their experiences were largely unrecorded.

Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a professor of English and the humanities at Stanford, carried out painstaking research to fill that gap, drawing on historical photographs and material objects, interviews with descendants of the workers, newspaper accounts and business records.

That the research center is at Stanford University is notable. Leland Stanford — a key investor in the Central Pacific line — had disparaged Chinese immigrants, calling them “an inferior race,” years before he employed thousands of them.

They were paid lower wages than white workers, even as they worked longer hours, took on the most treacherous stretches of track and became renowned for their work. Leland Stanford would come to greatly admire them, Chang has written.

“I am painfully aware that Leland Stanford became one of the world’s richest men by using Chinese labor,” Chang wrote in an opinion piece published Friday in The Los Angeles Times. “But I also try to remember that Stanford University exists because of those Chinese workers.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="9f939fd3-c09a-3ac9-aa65-1914ca2de099" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/golden-spike-utah-railroad-150th-anniversary.html">The New York Times</a>.

Chinese Railroad Workers Were Almost Written Out of History. Now They're Getting Their Due.

It was a seminal moment in American history: the inauguration of the first Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869, in Promontory, Utah.

Chinese railroad workers were almost written out of history, now they're getting their due

While it was only a short test flight — less than 3 miles in total — the team that created the drone at the University of Maryland says it was a worldwide first and a crucial step in its quest to speed up the delicate and time-sensitive task of delivering donated organs.

The team’s leader, Dr. Joseph R. Scalea, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said he pursued the project after constant frustration over organs taking too long to reach his patients. After organs are removed from a donor, they become less healthy with each passing second. He recalled one case when a kidney from Alabama took 29 hours to reach his hospital.

“Had I put that in at nine hours, the patient would probably have another several years of life,” Scalea said Tuesday. “Why can’t we get that right?”

To carry out the project, Scalea’s team of medical experts worked with colleagues in aviation and engineering at the university, as well as the Living Legacy Foundation of Maryland, which oversees organ donations. He performed the transplant along with two other surgeons at the University of Maryland Medical Center, Dr. Rolf N. Barth and Dr. Talal Al-Qaoud.

The woman who received the kidney, Trina Glispy, a 44-year-old nursing assistant from Baltimore, said she had begun to lose hope before she got a call on April 18, when she learned she had matched with a donor.

Glispy, who has three children, had discovered her kidneys were failing in 2011, when a patient kicked her at work and her leg swelled dramatically. She started on dialysis three times a week, for four hours each time, draining her energy. It became hard to do the physical labor required at her job at a Veterans Affairs hospital, which she had loved.

So she was thrilled and relieved when she got the call, fittingly, during a dialysis session. The surgery went smoothly, and 11 days later, Glispy said she was doing well. She expressed gratitude as she recalled her worst fears during her years of treatment.

“I feel very fortunate, especially after watching so many people pass being on dialysis,” she said. “I’m seeing a lot of people die and I’m like, ‘It’s taking so long, it might not happen for me either.’”

Dialysis can be taxing on the body and does not cure kidney disease. Life expectancy for patients on dialysis varies greatly, but the average is five to 10 years, according to the National Kidney Foundation. Kidney transplants can improve life expectancy and quality of life, but many people who get one eventually need another.

The United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the American transplant system, says that although the need for organs still far exceeds supply, donations are at historic highs. From January to March, 9,500 transplants were performed, from 4,500 donors.

But there are still about 75,000 people who are cleared to have surgery and are waiting for organ donations. Including those not currently eligible for surgery, more than 113,000 people are waiting for organs.

The shortage of organs has lethal consequences. In 2017, the agency said, more than 6,500 candidates died while on the waitlist, or within 30 days of leaving the list for personal or medical reasons without receiving a transplant. That makes the notion of an organ becoming less healthy during transit all the more galling, Scalea said.

The drone used had backup propellers and motors, dual batteries and a parachute recovery system, to guard against catastrophe if one component encountered a problem 400 feet in the air. Two pilots on the ground monitored it using a wireless network, and were prepared to override the automated flight plan in case of emergency. The drone also had built-in devices to measure temperature, barometric pressure and vibrations, among other indicators.

Scalea called the flight “proof of concept that this broken system can be innovated.”

He added that current organ transport is “data-blind,” meaning doctors often cannot see an organ’s progress in transit. The drone allows timely updates on its progress, the way you might track an approaching taxi on your phone.

“We can monitor in real time,” Scalea said. “It’s like Uber for organs.”

The drone flew over 700 hours in 44 test flights before this journey, he added. The exercise allowed the team to overcome logistical and regulatory hurdles involved in transporting a viable organ, and it will now focus on flying “farther and faster,” he said.

Dr. Christopher Marsh, director of the transplant program at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla, California, and a member of the American Society of Transplantation, said it was too early to pass judgment on the reliability of delivering organs by drone. But surgeons would be keeping a close eye on developments, he said.

Marsh, who was not affiliated with the test, noted that the technology could be helpful to avoid traffic in big cities.

“We’re entering a new world,” he said. “Things change, so we have to be open to that.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/health/drone-delivers-kidney.html" id="fa3b780b-55e6-3fe0-a9a1-cfc00c8305f8">The New York Times</a>.

A custom-made drone delivered a kidney recently to a Maryland woman who had waited eight years for a lifesaving transplant.

Like 'Uber for Organs': Drone Delivers Kidney to Maryland Woman

The Bible was among hundreds of rare books, maps and other items, worth about $8 million in total, that the authorities have said were stolen by the archivist in charge of the collection over nearly 20 years.

Prosecutors say the archivist, Gregory Priore, 62, sometimes walked out of the building with the items in plain sight. He then sold the works to a prominent book dealer, John Schulman, 55, whose shop was a block away and who had appeared as an expert appraiser on the television show “Antiques Roadshow,” according to an affidavit.

The two men were charged last year with numerous counts of theft, conspiracy and other charges, and await trial. Robert G. Del Greco Jr., a lawyer for Schulman, said his client maintained his innocence, but declined to comment otherwise. A lawyer for Priore did not immediately return a call on Friday.

FBI officials said they had given the Bible to the office of the Allegheny County district attorney, Stephen A. Zappala Jr., who is prosecuting the case and will use the Bible as evidence.

The Bible is similar to one known to have been carried to North America by the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, Robert Jones, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office, said at a news conference Thursday.

“One can only imagine the journey this particular Carnegie Library Bible has taken,” Jones said.

Using sales records, investigators last year traced the Bible to a museum focused on American pilgrims in Leiden, Netherlands, said the museum’s director, Jeremy Bangs.

Mike Manko, a spokesman for the district attorney, said the museum bought the Bible in 2015 through a private seller for $1,200, and that it was currently appraised at $5,500.

Bangs, an American historian who has lived in the Netherlands for decades, said he had acquired the Bible from a reputable seller for exhibitions, scheduled to take place in 2020 and 2021 in Massachusetts, on the books that Pilgrims owned.

The Bible was translated by English Protestant exiles in Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary Tudor, the museum’s site notes. It is also called a “Breeches Bible” because of its unusual translation in Genesis 3:7 — “Then the eyes of them both were opened, and they knewe that they were naked, and they sewed figtree leaues together, and made themselues breeches,” the site states. The King James Bible does not use the word “breeches.”

An addition to the book’s cover, which Bangs said was most likely made in the 19th century, reads “Holy Bible —- Breeches Edition.” It is weathered, with evidence of mold on some pages, and loose binding.

Bangs said that investigators initially contacted him last year and asked him to mail the Bible back. Given its delicate condition, he questioned whether the request was real, he said.

After learning more about the Pittsburgh case, Bangs said he contacted the Dutch police, who assigned an investigator trained in handling artwork to take possession of the Bible and transport it to the U.S. Embassy. The FBI said its own Art Crime Team helped to bring the Bible back to the United States, covered in Bubble Wrap and nestled in a protective container.

Manko said investigators were making progress in recovering other works as well. An initial search turned up 24 items, and 18 “cannibalized” or partial items, from a warehouse. Since then, investigators have recovered 18 books and 293 maps, plates and pamphlets, worth about $1.6 million, he said.

The case has shocked the rare-book world. Until the theft was discovered and Priore was fired in 2017, he had been the sole archivist for the collection of rare books in the Oliver Room at the Carnegie Library, which is Pittsburgh’s public library system. Schulman was a respected member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America. The organization said he once led its ethics committee.

Over the years, Priore would carry items out of the library and drop them off at the shop, the affidavit states. Priore sometimes used an X-acto knife to remove part of a book and sell it individually, prosecutors contend. The affidavit states that Schulman paid Priore up front and then resold many of the items.

Priore said he needed the money to “stay afloat” and pay tuition for his four children, and accused Schulman of spurring him on, the affidavit shows.

“I should never have done this,” he told investigators. “I loved that room, my whole working life, and greed came over me.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/us/geneva-bible.html" id="a97b48c0-ec50-347b-a999-b3afca04fe04">The New York Times</a>.

400-Year-Old Bible Stolen From Pittsburgh Library Is Recovered in the Netherlands

A 1615 Geneva Bible stolen two decades ago from the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh in a long-running theft scheme has been recovered from a Dutch museum, the FBI announced Thursday.

The first case involved Sgt. Robert Stamm of the Virginia Division of Capitol Police, who had been assigned to protests calling on Gov. Ralph Northam to resign over a racist yearbook photo that surfaced in February.

Anti-Fascists of the Seven Hills, which said it was based in Richmond, Virginia, wrote online in February that Stamm came to its attention because he had a large Band-Aid covering his neck while patrolling. The group found photos on social media of Stamm with tattoos, flags and banners that used white supremacist symbols and images, it said in a blog post.

It also said he was linked to the Asatru Folk Assembly, an extremist group that invokes pre-Christian Nordic religion and culture and has spread through the Virginia jail system. In 2015, the FBI foiled a plot by members of the group to attack black churches and synagogues as part of a plan to incite a race war in the Chesterfield area.

Stamm was suspended after the group published its post. On Wednesday, Col. Anthony Pike, the Capitol Police chief, announced in a statement that Stamm had been “separated from his employment.” He did not explain what had led to the firing.

In the second case, Daniel Morley, a school resource officer with the Chesterfield County Police Department, was fired Thursday following an investigation into allegations that he was affiliated with the group Identity Evropa, also known as the American Identity Movement. Members of that group helped plan the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Antifa Seven Hills had identified Morley as a “pledge coordinator” for the group, which recruits on college campuses and elsewhere. Antifa said Morley was responsible “for guiding new applicants through the vetting process” and had been a member since 2017.

Morley was suspended in March while the department investigated the claims. Col. Jeffrey Katz, the police chief, wrote on social media Thursday that investigators had authenticated the online postings and activities.

“The views espoused by and attributed to Mr. Morley violate county and departmental policy and our organizational values; his continued employment is antithetical to the expectations of our personnel and those we serve,” he wrote.

The anti-fascist group also alleged that Stamm and Morley knew each other, and in March it posted what it said was a photo of the two together.

Efforts to reach both men Thursday night were unsuccessful.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/18/us/white-nationalists-virginia-police.html" id="cf9eacd3-a34a-3d78-aa4a-9c2927af34c8">The New York Times</a>.

Two Virginia police officers who worked for different agencies were fired this week after an anti-fascist group linked them to white nationalist organizations.

2 Virginia Police Officers Are Fired Amid Allegations of Links to White Nationalists

The footage appeared to have been shot two years earlier, on Jan. 1, 2015, hours after the couple had hosted a New Year’s party at their Minnesota home. It showed her husband forcibly penetrating her with an object as she slept in their bed, their 4-year-old son asleep beside her, according to a criminal complaint. She was motionless as he attacked her. She believes she had been drugged.

Teeson, now 39, told the police about the video when she found it. But under a state law known as the “voluntary relationship defense,” some of the most serious sex crimes charges cannot be brought against an accuser’s spouse or domestic partner. Her husband ended up being charged with a misdemeanor, not a felony.

While marital rape has been a crime in all 50 states since 1993 — a milestone achieved after years of dogged campaigning by women’s rights activists — the overwhelming majority of states still have loopholes on the books that can make it difficult, or even impossible, to prosecute such cases, according to data compiled by AEquitas, a nonprofit in Washington that assists prosecutors in gender-based violence cases.

Those loopholes can take many forms, involving the statute of limitations, use of force, age or the victim’s capacity to consent. In Minnesota, sex with someone who is physically helpless, as Teeson was, cannot be prosecuted as rape if the two people are married or domestic partners.

Though she was devastated to learn of the arcane law in Minnesota, Teeson quickly threw herself into the fight to change it, meeting with lawmakers and testifying at the state Capitol.

In February, her campaign scored a major victory. A bill to repeal the voluntary relationship defense unanimously passed the state House. Lawmakers gave Teeson a standing ovation.

“It felt very powerful to be able to speak because I’ve been silent for so long,” she said.

The bill is now making its way through the Senate, where it is sponsored by Sen. Michelle Benson, a Republican. The full Senate is expected to vote on the bill before the summer recess begins May 21. A spokeswoman for Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, said he would sign it if it passes.

Rep. Zack Stephenson, a Democrat and the chief author of the House bill, credited Teeson as the driving force behind the legislation. He is a local prosecutor, and he said he was “flabbergasted” when he heard her story.

“This is not a controversial issue,” Stephenson said. “It’s something that should have happened a long time ago.”

The fight to criminalize marital rape stretches back decades

While the issue of marital rape came up as early as the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, it was eclipsed by the push for voting rights, said Lynn Hecht Schafran, director of the National Judicial Education Program at Legal Momentum, a women’s legal defense organization.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that women’s rights activists started campaigning for states to criminalize marital rape, a difficult goal in male-dominated state legislatures. By 1993, they had succeeded in all 50 states, though the laws and legal precedents vary widely.

Laura X, a Berkeley-based activist who worked on campaigns in dozens of states as director of the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape, said activists were fighting against the notion that men were somehow entitled to their partner’s bodies.

“It was a principle that nobody should own another person that drove most of us through those decades,” she said.

American statutes on marital rape were carried over from English laws, which drew on writings by the 17th-century jurist Matthew Hale on “contractual consent.” Schafran said they were tied to the notion that rape by an intimate partner was somehow less painful.

“In fact, the opposite is true,” she said. “The loss of trust is devastating.”

Hurdles to prosecution persist in most states

AEquitas, which maintains a comprehensive database on marital rape laws, said hurdles to prosecuting sexual misconduct involving spouses or partners existed in 41 of 58 jurisdictions it reviewed. Those include the 50 states, the District of Columbia, U.S. territories, and federal and military law.

That is piled on top of the difficulties of prosecuting intimate partner rape at all. Cases are rarely reported, there are often no witnesses, and many victims struggle with testifying against a former partner.

Yet many instances of sexual violence occur within intimate relationships. An estimated 9 percent of women are raped by an intimate partner at some point, and an estimated 16 percent experience other forms of sexual violence by their partner, according to federal data.

“It’s long overdue to treat rape in the marital setting with the same seriousness as rape that occurs outside of it,” said Sunu Chandy, legal director for the National Women’s Law Center.

“I’m glad to see Minnesota is making strides in that direction, and I hope other states will follow suit.”

A stark illustration of the problem

In March 2017, Teeson discovered a trove of videos that her husband had secretly filmed. They included clips of her getting dressed, of the two of them having sex, and of his co-workers in the bathroom, she said.

The files, which she had found on an unfamiliar flash drive, shocked and terrified her, but they also gave her some much-needed clarity: She had to seek a divorce from her husband, Matthew Charles Heger.

The couple had started dating in college and were married for 12 years. She worked for a hospitality sales association, and he worked at a local bank. They had two young children.

Yet while they may have looked happy to outsiders, her husband had been verbally abusive and had tried to pressure her into sex acts she wasn’t comfortable with, Teeson said.

Heger’s lawyer, Nicole A. Kettwick, said that while he feels remorse over the videos, he disputes Teeson’s characterization of their marriage.

Teeson turned the flash drive and the family’s laptop over to the police. A few months later, as part of the divorce proceedings, her lawyers recommended that she review a copy of the laptop’s contents herself. That was when she discovered the video of herself being assaulted.

Teeson said she had to call the police repeatedly before she could get an appointment to give her statement. A spokesman for the sheriff’s office said he could not discuss the handling of the case.

In September 2017, Teeson got the call she had been waiting for from the Anoka County Attorney’s Office. She was told that Heger had been charged with a felony count of criminal sexual conduct in the third degree and could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted. She felt mixed emotions, including a sense of safety.

But hours later, the office called again, to tell her that the felony charge had been dropped. Heger’s lawyers had made the office aware that Minnesota still had a little-known marital rape exemption law on the books.

Heger was ultimately charged with two misdemeanors in Teeson’s case: criminal sexual conduct in the fifth degree and interference with privacy at home using a surreptitious device. He pleaded guilty to the latter in October and was sentenced to 45 days in prison. The sexual conduct charge was dismissed as part of his plea agreement.

Heger was separately sentenced to 30 days in prison on charges related to the tapes of his co-workers. He received a total of four years of probation and had restrictions placed on his online activities, among other conditions.

Paul Young, chief of the criminal division at the Anoka County Attorney’s Office, said he and his colleagues were taken aback when they learned the statute would prevent them from pursuing the original charges.

“We understand the frustration and disappointment,” Young said, adding that the case “certainly merited” more serious charges.

“But we were limited,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/us/marital-rape-law-minnesota.html" id="f8d7088c-0389-3320-a203-d64d4d47a9f1">The New York Times</a>.

Inside One Woman's Fight to Rewrite the Law on Marital Rape

Jenny Teeson was in the middle of a divorce when she found a video of her husband sexually assaulting her in her sleep. The discovery turned her into a leading advocate for overturning archaic laws that can make it nearly impossible to prosecute men for marital rape.

The survey also found that 1 in 4 Americans have skipped treatment because of the cost, and that nearly half fear bankruptcy in the event of a health emergency.

There was a partisan divide when respondents were asked whether they believed that the American health care system is among the best in the world: Among Republicans, 67 percent of respondents said they believed so; that number was 38 percent among Democrats.

But Democrats and Republicans had similar responses about putting off medical treatment. Asked if they had deferred treatment because of the cost, 27 percent of Democrats said they had, compared with 21 percent of Republicans and 30 percent of independents.

Respondents from across the political spectrum also reported pessimism about their leaders’ abilities to reduce health care costs. About 70 percent of respondents said they had no confidence in their elected officials to bring prices down. And 77 percent said they were concerned that rising health care costs would damage the American economy.

“Our data shows an American public that’s beaten down from this really serious issue,” said Dan Witters, a senior researcher at Gallup.

At the same time, 64 percent of respondents said they were mostly satisfied with their experiences in the health care system. When asked if they were satisfied with how well the system was serving Americans generally, only 39 percent said they were.

The survey’s authors noted that Americans’ feelings were complicated and at times conflicted. But one thing was clear: High health care costs had created significant anxiety.

Even among households earning $180,000 or more a year, a third of respondents said they were concerned about the specter of personal bankruptcy due to a health crisis. (There has been fierce debate among researchers about the extent to which health care costs can be blamed for bankruptcies.)

Many American families earning less than that, of course, feel the effects of high health care costs acutely. They are forced to cut back on other expenses to pay for health care, or skip appointments and prescription refills, creating health risks down the road.

Twelve percent of respondents said they had borrowed money for care, including 11 percent of those with health insurance, who may still face high deductibles and other out-of-pocket expenses.

Most survey respondents said they believed that Americans were paying too much for health care relative to what they receive. Asked to choose between a hypothetical freeze in their health care costs or a 10 percent increase in household income, 61 percent of respondents chose the freeze. Those in low-income households were most likely to choose that option.

“When we’re talking about health care and the debate right now, it usually bifurcates between the financial impact of health care or the health outcomes themselves,” said Tim Lash, chief strategy officer for West Health, a nonpartisan nonprofit that aims to lower health care prices.

“But those two things intersect at access,” which can have dire health consequences, he said.

The organization believes that Congress should allow Medicare to negotiate directly with drug companies; that there should be more transparency about the prices of medicines and procedures; and that the health care industry should shift toward “value-based care” — in which doctors are paid based on patient outcomes — rather than the current “fee-for-service” model.

Lash noted that other wealthy countries spend much less on health care than the United States does, while achieving better outcomes in areas like life expectancy and infant mortality. Although about 87 percent of Americans have health insurance, according to data from Gallup, an individual’s plan may not cover all costs associated with treatment.

President Donald Trump, who has sought to undo the Affordable Care Act, tweeted about high deductibles under the law on Monday morning, promising that “Good things are going to happen!” and tagging several Republican lawmakers.

The administration asked a federal appeals court to invalidate the law last week, while Democrats announced a health care bill that builds on the Affordable Care Act and seeks to lower premiums, among other goals.

The partnership between West Health and Gallup, the analytics and consulting company, was a first. The survey results are based on phone interviews conducted in English and Spanish in early 2019 with a random sample of 3,500 adults across the country. The margin of error ranged from 1 to 2 percentage points for results based on the total sample, and 3 to 5 percentage points for results based on subgroups such as political identity or income level.

Gallup and West Health said they will conduct similar surveys in the coming years.

This article originally appeared in <a id="c8f13079-9178-4436-8771-40981fd18eea" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/health/americans-health-care-debt-borrowing.html">The New York Times</a>.

Americans Borrowed $88 Billion to Pay for Health Care Last Year, Survey Finds

Americans borrowed an estimated $88 billion over the last year to pay for health care, according to a survey released Tuesday by Gallup and the nonprofit West Health.

Americans borrowed $88 billion to pay for health care last year, survey finds

The survey also found that 1in 4 Americans have skipped treatment because of the cost, and that nearly half fear bankruptcy in the event of a health emergency.

Americans borrowed an estimated $88 billion over the last year to pay for health care, according to a survey released on Tuesday by Gallup and the nonprofit West Health.

Karen Zraick

Articles written by the author

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