at doesn't mean she means that she wants to be tied to a bed for twenty hours and tortured" (B3). The 20-year-old victim, said he used an e-mail to lure her out on a date. When they met, she said that Javanovic lured her up in his apartment for twenty hours, burned her with candle wax, bit her until he drew blood and sodomized her with a baton (B3). If a new trial was to be enacted it would undermine the whole point of the rape shield law which came about to encourage rape victims to come forward by tightly restricting which aspects of their sex life could be brought to trial. Sherry Colb, a professor at Rutgers University Law School in Newark, said the issue was whether the woman consented to specific sex acts, not what she wrote in e-mail messages, and that the messages that were shown showed the girl's interest in sadomasochism and the others were not simply needed (B3). Colb stated, "This evidence would have further nauseated the jury toward the victim, and have them feel this victim wasn't worth convicting someone for" (B3). In response to this case Anne Bliske, executive director of the New York State Coalition Against Sexual Assault, stated, "Our contention is that no matter what, if a victim is clearly saying no, that's it, at this point the act is no longer consensual" (B3).For twenty years, Canadian courts have been arguing for the issue of consent in sexual assault cases. As long as a complainant could be "undressed" in court by revealing her sexual history or describing what she was wearing, not wearing, or how much she had to drink, the accused could rely on sexism to revictimize the victim in court. For this reason the unanimous Supreme Court of Canada ruling in the "Bonnets and Crinolines Case" as it came to be known, on February 25, 1999, was a major victory because it dismissed the notion of implied consent and affirmed that no does mean no" (Penni 12). Canada's rape shield law was altered under the Charter of R...
