A man with a girlfriend and a wife living with him was sentenced to 15 to 30 years in a Vermont prison Wednesday, December 9 for physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing them at their Williston, VT home. Judge Michael Kupersmith sentenced Kaseem Smith in Vermont District Court in Burlington after a plea aggreement in which sex assault charges were dropped in exchange for guilty pleas to two aggravated domestic assault charges.
The charges which lead to the assault charges were two instances in 2007 where Smith hit his "girlfriend" with a walking stick until it broke, and hitting her with hand weights. After that incident, the "girlfriend" fled the house, assisted by her employer and the women's advocacy group Women Helping Battered Women.
Other instances against both women included forcing or coercing the women to either fight or have sex with each other while he watched, having the girlfriend eat her contacts as punishment for disobeying him, and putting a gun in his wife's mouth and telling her not to move because the safety wasn't on.
"You just took whatever happened and hoped it would end soon," said the "girlfriend." The wife said that "You had to do everything Kaseen said to do, otherwise, you were looking for a beating."
Smith, 34, once hosted a show called "KA Live," which aired weekly on Channel 15, a community access channel in Burlington. He is also a former coach for youth football in Essex and youth recreational basketball in Williston.
Smith's lawyers argued that neither woman ever sought medical help as a result of injuries allegedly inflicted by Smith. The two women conceded under questioning that Smith never abused any of their children and was well liked by the kids he coached.
The lawyers also questioned the veracity of some of what the women said Smith did. "A lot of the allegations are easily made, but difficult to disprove," Bill Skiff, one of Smith's lawyers, told Kupersmith.
Smith, in a brief statement just before Kupersmith sentenced him, apologized to his estranged wife and the ex-girlfriend for his conduct. "I'd like to say I'm sorry for the mental and physical anguish I caused the ladies and the kids," he said. "But I'm a peaceful guy now."
Chittenden County Deputy State's Attorney Rosemary Gretkowski said that "Anything less than this sentence would demean the severity and the atrocity of this abuse."
To his credit, Judge Kupersmith said that "Mr. Smith is a chronic batterer and abuser. I consider him to be a major danger to the community... What I have heard is credible evidence of years and years of physical, sexual and emotional abuse perpetrated on two women."
Showing posts with label sexual activity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sexual activity. Show all posts
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Milwaukee man arrested for choking woman to death after sex sentenced to life without parole
(Original Post 9-26-08)
A Northwest side of Milwaukee man is being investigated for links to other crimes after being formally charged Monday with 1st degree murder for the choking death of a 21 year old woman after sex. Sgt. Mark Stanmeyer says Milwaukee detectives are taking a closer look at Calvin Pirtle due to a previous incident involving a girl at the same home where the latest victim was killed.
Pirtle, 29, was charged Monday with first-degree intentional homicide in the death of 21-year-old Yasmine Tatum-Massey, whose body was found [September 17] in a plastic bag in Pirtle’s basement in the 4600 block of W. Mill Road.
According to the complaint, Pirtle told investigators that he and Tatum-Massey had consensual sex and took a shower together before she attacked him with a knife. Pirtle told police he took the knife away from her while choking her, and taped her wrists and ankles before she died, the complaint charges.
Pirtle's girlfriend found the victim's body last week after she was suspicious of Pirtle's insistence that blood found on the floor of their home was his after cutting himself. The girlfriend wanted him to call police, but he flagged down officers and told them about a robbery the week before. They left, assuming the blood was his, and the girlfriend unwittingly helped him clean up the crime scene.
After finding a 32 gallon garbage can with a large plastic bag, the girlfriend called police, who cut open the can and found Tatum-Massey's bruised, strangled body along with bloody duct tape.
Pirtle was charged with 2nd degree sexual assault for luring a girl in a similar manner to the same home in 2007.
The victim, a juvenile, told police she had gone to the same Mill Road home, where Pirtle pushed her to the floor, taped a sock in her mouth, taped her wrists, held a butcher knife to her neck, and threatened to kill her. He then taped her ankles together and raped her, according to the complaint. Pirtle admitted to many of the details.
However, Pirtle was able to plead down to false imprisonment, a misdemeanor which landed him in the House Of Correction in suburban Franklin for a year.
(Update 7-30-09) After being convicted of 1st degree intentional homicide in February, 2009, Pirtle was sentenced to life without parole yesterday.
A Northwest side of Milwaukee man is being investigated for links to other crimes after being formally charged Monday with 1st degree murder for the choking death of a 21 year old woman after sex. Sgt. Mark Stanmeyer says Milwaukee detectives are taking a closer look at Calvin Pirtle due to a previous incident involving a girl at the same home where the latest victim was killed.
Pirtle, 29, was charged Monday with first-degree intentional homicide in the death of 21-year-old Yasmine Tatum-Massey, whose body was found [September 17] in a plastic bag in Pirtle’s basement in the 4600 block of W. Mill Road.
According to the complaint, Pirtle told investigators that he and Tatum-Massey had consensual sex and took a shower together before she attacked him with a knife. Pirtle told police he took the knife away from her while choking her, and taped her wrists and ankles before she died, the complaint charges.
Pirtle's girlfriend found the victim's body last week after she was suspicious of Pirtle's insistence that blood found on the floor of their home was his after cutting himself. The girlfriend wanted him to call police, but he flagged down officers and told them about a robbery the week before. They left, assuming the blood was his, and the girlfriend unwittingly helped him clean up the crime scene.
After finding a 32 gallon garbage can with a large plastic bag, the girlfriend called police, who cut open the can and found Tatum-Massey's bruised, strangled body along with bloody duct tape.
Pirtle was charged with 2nd degree sexual assault for luring a girl in a similar manner to the same home in 2007.
The victim, a juvenile, told police she had gone to the same Mill Road home, where Pirtle pushed her to the floor, taped a sock in her mouth, taped her wrists, held a butcher knife to her neck, and threatened to kill her. He then taped her ankles together and raped her, according to the complaint. Pirtle admitted to many of the details.
However, Pirtle was able to plead down to false imprisonment, a misdemeanor which landed him in the House Of Correction in suburban Franklin for a year.
(Update 7-30-09) After being convicted of 1st degree intentional homicide in February, 2009, Pirtle was sentenced to life without parole yesterday.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Sexual activity peak between Christmas and New Year's Day
By Frank Greve McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — 'Tis the season for making whoopee.
The Christmas-New Year's period produces a year-high spike in sexual activity and conceptions in the United States, according to biorhythm researchers and makers of sex-related products.
They attribute the increase to holiday leisure and New Year's resolutions to have children. New Year's irresolution fueled by alcohol and partying is another contributing factor.
"Right before New Year's Eve is our highest sales peak," said David Johnson, group product manager for Trojan brand condoms, the leading U.S. seller.
As expected, the holiday urge surge also expresses itself as a peak in U.S. births in September, according to David Lam of the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center in Ann Arbor.
Holiday intimacies aren't just an American rite, according to Gabriele Doblhammer of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Heavy Christmas-New Year's sex "is characteristic of all Christian cultures in which it has been evaluated," she and co-researcher Joseph Lee Rogers found.
A quartet of British public health researchers went so far as to liken the Christmas-New Year's period to a "festival on fertility" in a 1999 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Such festivals, they wrote, are "associated with increased opportunities for socializing and a generally more hedonistic approach to life."
Recognizing the risks entailed, the British Health Education Authority once ran a condom ad before New Year's with the tag line: "Just in case old acquaintances aren't quite forgot."
What about the notion that spring is the season of love?
Among partners chronically pressed for time, intimacy flourishes in the rare leisure of three-day weekends, analysts said. Accordingly, the long July Fourth, Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends also produce spikes in condom sales, Trojan's Johnson said.
So does the run-up to Valentine's Day, he added.
"And before Mother's Day, there's a small peak."
The centrality of holidays to the timing of conceptions in the United States is relatively new, Till Roenneberg, of the Institute for Medical Psychology at the University of Munich, said in an interview.
Until the 1930s, fluctuations in temperature, sunlight and humidity yielded much larger seasonal fluctuations in U.S. conception, he said. They still do in less developed countries. In industrialized countries, Roenneberg continued, people increasingly are shielded from sunlight by indoor work and from temperature and humidity variations by heating and air conditioning.
Once the natural fluctuations, which influence human sperm and egg quality, are muted, lesser factors such as three-day weekends become visible, he said. Roenneberg's findings derive from studies of birth date trends in 166 regions of the globe. The data come from as early as 1669 and total more than 3,000 years of human experience.
WASHINGTON — 'Tis the season for making whoopee.
The Christmas-New Year's period produces a year-high spike in sexual activity and conceptions in the United States, according to biorhythm researchers and makers of sex-related products.
They attribute the increase to holiday leisure and New Year's resolutions to have children. New Year's irresolution fueled by alcohol and partying is another contributing factor.
"Right before New Year's Eve is our highest sales peak," said David Johnson, group product manager for Trojan brand condoms, the leading U.S. seller.
As expected, the holiday urge surge also expresses itself as a peak in U.S. births in September, according to David Lam of the University of Michigan's Population Studies Center in Ann Arbor.
Holiday intimacies aren't just an American rite, according to Gabriele Doblhammer of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. Heavy Christmas-New Year's sex "is characteristic of all Christian cultures in which it has been evaluated," she and co-researcher Joseph Lee Rogers found.
A quartet of British public health researchers went so far as to liken the Christmas-New Year's period to a "festival on fertility" in a 1999 article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Such festivals, they wrote, are "associated with increased opportunities for socializing and a generally more hedonistic approach to life."
Recognizing the risks entailed, the British Health Education Authority once ran a condom ad before New Year's with the tag line: "Just in case old acquaintances aren't quite forgot."
What about the notion that spring is the season of love?
Among partners chronically pressed for time, intimacy flourishes in the rare leisure of three-day weekends, analysts said. Accordingly, the long July Fourth, Memorial Day and Labor Day weekends also produce spikes in condom sales, Trojan's Johnson said.
So does the run-up to Valentine's Day, he added.
"And before Mother's Day, there's a small peak."
The centrality of holidays to the timing of conceptions in the United States is relatively new, Till Roenneberg, of the Institute for Medical Psychology at the University of Munich, said in an interview.
Until the 1930s, fluctuations in temperature, sunlight and humidity yielded much larger seasonal fluctuations in U.S. conception, he said. They still do in less developed countries. In industrialized countries, Roenneberg continued, people increasingly are shielded from sunlight by indoor work and from temperature and humidity variations by heating and air conditioning.
Once the natural fluctuations, which influence human sperm and egg quality, are muted, lesser factors such as three-day weekends become visible, he said. Roenneberg's findings derive from studies of birth date trends in 166 regions of the globe. The data come from as early as 1669 and total more than 3,000 years of human experience.
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
New Australian book about women's sexual attitudes show interesting sexual habits
ONE in five women have featured in a home-made sex tape, a new survey of women's attitudes to sex has found.
But judging by some of the 2000 responses author Joan Sauers received to her online study exploring the sex lives of Australian women, many now regret it. "It was exciting when we were doing it. When I saw the tape I just felt fat," one 30-year-old teacher from Victoria wrote.
Ms Sauers's book, Sex Lives of Australian Women, to be released tomorrow, covers the gamut of emotions and experiences including sexual fantasies, the pros and cons of threesomes, the changing face of sex as women get older, and, of course, orgasms.
Women contributed anonymously to the online survey apart from their age, state and occupation, and while some of the findings appear skewed towards a younger, more internet-savvy population (one in four say they look at pornography at least once a month, for instance), it is the honesty of their responses that is striking, Ms Sauers says.
"I think women do talk to each other more than men do about their sex lives, but there are the really personal things we don't even tell our best friends, and I think this is where the anonymity of this survey provides important material," she says. "It became a place where women could vent about what was right and wrong about their sex life, and I got 7000 pages of material."
Ms Sauers, who two years ago wrote Sex Lives of Australian Teenagers using a similar online survey, says there are two big surprises in the results.
"The first was that younger women in their 20s felt the most guilt about cheating on their partner while older women tended to be more forgiving of themselves," she says. "I think it shows the older we get, the more complicated our sense of moral relativism becomes.
"And second, I was stunned to find the number of women who still don't know it's illegal to be forced to have sex by their husband. They still have this sense of debt that part of the marriage vows include having sex even if they desperately don't want to."
The book covers sexual fantasies and finds a liaison with another woman is the prevailing imaginary encounter for 57 per cent of the women surveyed.
But judging by some of the 2000 responses author Joan Sauers received to her online study exploring the sex lives of Australian women, many now regret it. "It was exciting when we were doing it. When I saw the tape I just felt fat," one 30-year-old teacher from Victoria wrote.
Ms Sauers's book, Sex Lives of Australian Women, to be released tomorrow, covers the gamut of emotions and experiences including sexual fantasies, the pros and cons of threesomes, the changing face of sex as women get older, and, of course, orgasms.
Women contributed anonymously to the online survey apart from their age, state and occupation, and while some of the findings appear skewed towards a younger, more internet-savvy population (one in four say they look at pornography at least once a month, for instance), it is the honesty of their responses that is striking, Ms Sauers says.
"I think women do talk to each other more than men do about their sex lives, but there are the really personal things we don't even tell our best friends, and I think this is where the anonymity of this survey provides important material," she says. "It became a place where women could vent about what was right and wrong about their sex life, and I got 7000 pages of material."
Ms Sauers, who two years ago wrote Sex Lives of Australian Teenagers using a similar online survey, says there are two big surprises in the results.
"The first was that younger women in their 20s felt the most guilt about cheating on their partner while older women tended to be more forgiving of themselves," she says. "I think it shows the older we get, the more complicated our sense of moral relativism becomes.
"And second, I was stunned to find the number of women who still don't know it's illegal to be forced to have sex by their husband. They still have this sense of debt that part of the marriage vows include having sex even if they desperately don't want to."
The book covers sexual fantasies and finds a liaison with another woman is the prevailing imaginary encounter for 57 per cent of the women surveyed.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Guardian story about lap dancers
There is a story in the Guardian (UK) about women being lured into the world of lap dancing. Like prostitution, lap dancers are objectified, sexually assaulted, and many women's groups and others believe that tolerance of this activity as a sanctioned way for men fo "get off" leads to the belief that women who dress "inappropriately" are asking for it.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Ooh la la! "Sexually predatory" French women more assertive in bed than in 1970
The tag line "Sexual Predator" drew me to this article, but alas, I was fooled;) This is only a article about the changing French sexual landscape since 1970.
Are women just like men?" asked Le Nouvel Observateur yesterday, which released extracts of the Study on Sexuality in France, a 600-page tome that brings together 12,000 in-depth interviews with people of all ages conducted during 2005-06.
One of the biggest changes in recent years, according to the report, was that male and female sexual behaviour had become increasingly similar.
The proportion of monogamous French women dropped from 68% in 1970 to 34% in 2006, with the average number of sexual partners for women rising from 2 in 1970 to 5 in 2006.
French women's first experience of sex is now almost as early as that of the opposite sex: in 1950 there was a two-year difference, but the gap has narrowed to four months, to around 17 and a half. Meanwhile, more women remain sexually active for longer than previously: nine-out-of-10 women over 50 are sexually active today, compared to just 50 per cent of that age group in 1970.
"The good old dichotomy (male predators, females patiently awaiting the warrior's return in front of the cave entrance) is in big trouble", said Le Nouvel Observateur.
Female sexual emancipation has been a hot topic in France ever since President Nicolas Sarkozy met Carla Bruni, the Italian model and singer. The couple married last month.
Ms Bruni recently declared monogamy "terribly boring" and spoke in relaxed fashion about her numerous past conquests, including Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.
"I am a tamer [of men], a cat, an Italian", she told Le Figaro last year.
"I am faithful... to myself. I am monogamous from time to time but I prefer polygamy and polyandry [its female equivalent]."
At the same time, she reinforced old stereotypes that link status and virility, by reportedly declaring: "I want a man with nuclear power."
Despite the changes in female behaviour observed in the study, some things have not altered in 40 years. Men found it easier than women to disassociate sex from love, but the research suggested this was due to nurture rather than nature. The study said: "Young women are still educated to consider their entrance into sexuality as a sentimental-relationship experience."
The abstinence rate for men under 35 is twice as high as for women, and for men under 24, is 20%. The researchers also state that French people are more comfortable with sexual expression, rather than lovemaking.
Are women just like men?" asked Le Nouvel Observateur yesterday, which released extracts of the Study on Sexuality in France, a 600-page tome that brings together 12,000 in-depth interviews with people of all ages conducted during 2005-06.
One of the biggest changes in recent years, according to the report, was that male and female sexual behaviour had become increasingly similar.
The proportion of monogamous French women dropped from 68% in 1970 to 34% in 2006, with the average number of sexual partners for women rising from 2 in 1970 to 5 in 2006.
French women's first experience of sex is now almost as early as that of the opposite sex: in 1950 there was a two-year difference, but the gap has narrowed to four months, to around 17 and a half. Meanwhile, more women remain sexually active for longer than previously: nine-out-of-10 women over 50 are sexually active today, compared to just 50 per cent of that age group in 1970.
"The good old dichotomy (male predators, females patiently awaiting the warrior's return in front of the cave entrance) is in big trouble", said Le Nouvel Observateur.
Female sexual emancipation has been a hot topic in France ever since President Nicolas Sarkozy met Carla Bruni, the Italian model and singer. The couple married last month.
Ms Bruni recently declared monogamy "terribly boring" and spoke in relaxed fashion about her numerous past conquests, including Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton.
"I am a tamer [of men], a cat, an Italian", she told Le Figaro last year.
"I am faithful... to myself. I am monogamous from time to time but I prefer polygamy and polyandry [its female equivalent]."
At the same time, she reinforced old stereotypes that link status and virility, by reportedly declaring: "I want a man with nuclear power."
Despite the changes in female behaviour observed in the study, some things have not altered in 40 years. Men found it easier than women to disassociate sex from love, but the research suggested this was due to nurture rather than nature. The study said: "Young women are still educated to consider their entrance into sexuality as a sentimental-relationship experience."
The abstinence rate for men under 35 is twice as high as for women, and for men under 24, is 20%. The researchers also state that French people are more comfortable with sexual expression, rather than lovemaking.
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