Grace Millane was 21 years old when she was fatally strangled, stuffed into a suitcase, and buried in an area west of Auckland, New Zealand, in December Those facts are not in dispute, the Guardian reports. Millane, a British woman backpacking in New Zealand, was killed on December 1, , according to the Guardian. The accused is a year-old New Zealand man who met her on a Tinder date. In this case, the crime alleged is murder, but attorneys for the accused clearly want to argue that what happened on December 1 was part of a pattern for the victim, not an act of cold-blooded killing.
Defense attorneys routinely employ myths about rape to get juries on their side, politics professor Caroline Heldman wrote at Vox in These myths are not supported by evidence, and when defense attorneys and others endorse them, it can discourage survivors from coming forward, Heldman writes. But the way they cover it matters. Similar forces were likely at work in coverage last month of allegations that Rep.
Katie Hill had inappropriate relationships with staffers. And several women he met through Tinder said they cut off contact with him because he made them uncomfortable. Survivors of sexual assault, for instance, are often blamed and smeared by defense teams and the media.
Later in , when Christine Blasey Ford came forward to say that Brett Kavanaugh, then a nominee to the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her, right-wing media outlets dug or attempted to dig into her past. Nor are female murder victims safe from this kind of digging. The effect is even more pronounced when the victims β unlike Millane, who was white β are trans women of color. Since Millane was white, her story was bound to get more attention than the stories of many missing or murdered girls and women of color.
But her family is still confronted with media coverage that treats her private sexual history as though it somehow justifies her death. Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Skip to main content The homepage Vox Vox logo. The homepage Vox Vox logo. Become a Member. Vox Vox logo She was fatally strangled.
