Can you really voluntarily have sexual intercourse while blackout drunk? Kim Fromme, among the country’s foremost professionals on alcohol-induced blackouts, is not afraid to express therefore, and it has testified in high-profile assault that is sexual from Steubenville to Stanford.
Published on 7, 2017, at 10:21 a. M august. ET
One afternoon in March 2016, Kim Fromme took the stand in a Santa Clara, Ca, courtroom being a witness that is expert the now-infamous situation associated with the individuals v. Brock Allen Turner. The jury ended up being tasked with determining just just what had occurred between Turner livejasmin ebony, an old Stanford University swimmer, and “Emily Doe, ” a 22-year-old girl whom had no memory of Turner, a complete complete stranger, intimately assaulting her after a frat celebration.
In California, it’s unlawful to sexually penetrate someone who you realize is incapable of consenting,
As well as the prosecution desired to show Turner took benefit of an incapacitated, susceptible girl. The protection, arguing that Doe had consented before she dropped unconscious, hoped to share with the storyline of the college hookup that is drunken. To take action, they needed Fromme.
Fromme, a medical therapy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has testified in, consulted on, or supplied depositions for longer than 50 unlawful, civil, and armed forces instances since 2009, nearly all which may have involved men accused of intimately assaulting drunk ladies. In every but a small number of those instances, she’s got done behalf associated with accused, whose solicitors employ her to describe exactly just how studies have shown it is possible to take part in voluntary tasks during a blackout that is alcohol-induced. More especially, Fromme will state that a female can have sex while voluntarily blacked down, regardless if she can’t remember doing this.
Fromme tugs at her locks as she describes just just how hair samples could be used to test for several medications during testimony in Steubenville, Ohio, in 2013.