If Stormy Daniels’s sworn testimony is to be believed, the intercourse that she and Donald Trump engaged in was (1) a first-time sexual encounter, and (2) unprotected. Katharine Baker and I have argued in a piece published in 2005 (less than a year before Daniels and Trump met at Lake Tahoe) that unprotected, first encounter sex is “reckless” and that it might be appropriate to enact a separate crime for this form of sexual misconduct:
A defendant would be guilty of reckless sexual conduct if, in
a first-time sexual encounter with another person, the defendant had sexual
intercourse without using a condom. Consent to unprotected intercourse would be
an affirmative defense, to be established by the defendant by a preponderance
of the evidence. As an empirical matter, unprotected first-time sexual
encounters greatly increase the epidemiological force of sexually transmitted
disease, and a substantial proportion of acquaintance rape occurs in
unprotected first-time sexual encounters. The new law, by increasing condom use
and the quality of communication in first-time sexual encounters, can reduce
the spread of sexually transmitted disease and decrease the incidence of
acquaintance rape.
Unprotected,
first-encounter sex between Trump and Daniels was (if Daniels testified
truthfully) reckless in part because it exposed others – including Melania
Trump to potential infection. Public
policies to reduce the prevalence of unprotected first-time sex can reduce the
epidemiological force of sexually transmitted diseases because a substantial
proportion of sexual pairings never persist beyond an initial encounter. In analyzing the National Health and Social
Life Survey database, we found that 46.2% of all sexual pairings were one-off
encounters:
This
means that if society could somehow induce people to use condoms in all of
their first-time sexual encounters (even if we left unchanged the amount of
sexuality and the degree of condom use in subsequent sexual encounters), we
would suddenly eliminate roughly half the possible nodes of contact for
spreading disease. We might so dramatically reduce the mean number of
connections in the population as to render infections unsustainable over time.
Inducing more
first-encounter condom use would be particularly effective at reducing STDs
because it would specifically target the “superspreaders” – individuals who
have sex with many partners and thereby provide connective nodes for infections
to spread. We found that 10 percent of
most sexually active people reported having 75.4 percent of the total number of
sexual partners. We also found, unsurprisingly, that the most sexually active
had the highest proportion of one-time sex.
Reasonable people
can oppose expanding the scope of criminal liability. But a bigger take-home lesson of our article
was to show that a policy goal of promoting more condom use during
first-encounter sex is laudable. I’ve
separately argued that public health officials should improve messaging on when condom use is advisable.
Preventing STDs
was only one reason that we proposed a crime of reckless sex. We also hoped to make it easier for
prosecutors to secure convictions in circumstances where it has been difficult
to hold acquaintance rapists accountable due to the difficulty of proving
non-consent beyond a reasonable doubt.
The lion’s share of acquaintance-rape is first-encounter unprotected
sex. This does not mean that all
or even most first-encounter, unprotected sex is non-consensual. But it does mean that first-encounter sex is
more likely to be non-consensual if it is unprotected than if a condom had been
used.
This is an
inference that Trump’s own lawyer seemed to understand. She argued to the court that allowing Daniels’s
testimony that the sex was unprotected was prejudicial because lack of condom
use is “a dog whistle for
rape”
(p. 282) – particularly after prosecution had elicited testimony from Daniels
that she insisted on only working a production company that mandated condom
use.
The judge called out defense for failing to object to the condom testimony:
[T]he mention of the condom. I agree that shouldn't have come out. I wished those questions hadn't been asked, and I wished those answers hadn't been given. But for the life of me, I don't know why Ms. Necheles didn't object. She had just made about ten objections, most of which were sustained. Why on earth she wouldn't object to the mention of a condom? I don't understand.
Notwithstanding
the assertion that Daniels’s testimony contained a dog whistle for rape, the
purported encounter would not have been an appropriate basis for prosecution
under our proposed statute. Given her
testimony that sex was consensual, Trump would be able to establish the
affirmative defense of consent by a preponderance of evidence. But we should not forget that the
unprotected, first-encounter sex alleged by Daniels was reckless in our second
sense, in that it unreasonably of increased the risk of STD infection for
themselves and others.