I have seen women beaten and abused throughout my life. But I was trying to think of a time when I actually did this (grabbed a woman’s pussy), “grab” let us agree, means that she did not want you to touch her there. My friends and I all abused alcohol and drugs when we were in high school. I do remember being in a tussle with one of my girl-friends, during a party atmosphere, everyone was doing everything. We knew we weren’t boyfriend/girlfriend, but we were fooling around anyway, mostly kissing, pressing up against each other. I believe if memory serves, just for a short time. At a point though, she leaned back and looked into my eyes and I stopped, and she said, you are not [having sex with] me! And I heard her, and I said, but why not? We’ve come this far, probably pointing to that thing sticking up in the front of my jeans. But she said no. And we did not do it. While we were tussling around there, I could have grabbed her in that area. But I don’t really think I did, unless she gave encouragement for more. We were friends all four years in that long-ago time. We parted amicably after high school. We both had other love interests at the time, too.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say. First, thank you for writing this essay describing what it is like to be assaulted in the particular way that dumdum worded it on the “bus tape”. Second, I do not have that gene. I don’t hurt women, physically hurt them. I never have; I doubt I will start in my 50s. I’m very liberal. I’m against the death penalty, because of all the cases that we have conclusive evidence that the government executed the wrong man. When you kill the wrong person, you lose the right to kill people, as a form of punishment, in the name of us, the citizenry of that government. Period. That’s what I think.

I also think there is a certain man who says, “bitch, if you leave me, I will kill you”. Those men DO kill those women. All the time, each year. My brother and I used to compare the worst stories we ever heard about that. I remember one of my entries in our contest, to this day (and this was 20 years ago, while in my 30s). A man who had said that to his woman was walking across a bridge, lifted her child and threw her off the bridge, and jumped after her. So he was dead, too; it was a large bridge. But those are the types of people I am talking about. I have met so many of them. Another person from around my hometown that I left at age 19 and never went back except for visits, St. Louis, will get out of prison this year.

Most everyone in my generation knew him. One of his girlfriends “ghosted” on him. Her parents put her in their homemade witness protection plan, after the first time he hit her, or beat her up (I don’t know what he did) and told her bitch I’ll kill you if you ever leave me. They recognized he was the real deal. The woman-hater genotype. Without warning, but with precise planning, they packed all evidence of her, burned anything about him/pictures, love-letters, etc. There was no trace of either of them in the parents’ home. Next time dickhead came over, there were like “patty who?” They moved her to another state, I really don’t know if they changed her name, and she went to an out-of-state college, and I assume lived a happy life, or found another one of him (good-looking star athlete woman-hater) because these things tend to have a cycle.

The next girlfriend, the police came over, he was nowhere to be found. He had a solid alibi in another town, if not state. But two of his friends were there, and his father, a well known member of the community who was a millionaire and paid for all his son’s errors. They said they came over looking for him, and found his girlfriend lying dead beneath an upper floor balcony. They couldn’t get hold of him (we didn’t have cell phones back in the day; amazing, right?) so they called his dad. They had it all cleaned up before he arrived back home the next day, and he went to the funeral and cried a lot. The case for which he gets out of prison after 25 or 27 1/2 years, I think this year, was for killing his wife. Only this time, it was in a crowded bar, with a hundred witnesses. He saw her dance with another man. He left, went next door and got a stead knife from the restaurant, came back, and stabbed her enough times to kill her. Many patrons tackled him, and as police pulled them off, the last three in the pile were, the accused, his wife, and the bloody knife.

His father still paid a million dollars or whatever for the best defense his son could have, so he was one of the 1%-ers in our criminal justice system who actually have a trial! (Look that up some time; it’s fascinating, the other 99% are plea bargain where they just keep you in a terrible place and say “take the deal or else you get double the time” until you take the deal). The woman-murderer got 55 years, so you do 27 1/2 of that, maybe minus another 6 months “good time” in the state of Illinois — this was right across the river from St. Louis), so he gets out soon. This was about 1990-or ’91 I think.

I do not know why such people have a gene in their bodies, or is it nature or nurture? Are they just raised to treat women like shit, and beat them if they don’t “mind” you? We will never know, perhaps. But these are the cases that shake my unstinting opposition to the death penalty. The only way to deal with such men is to kill them, I believe. Everyone cannot move their daughters like a Federal Witness Protection Squad. We do not all have that kind of money to make someone disappear. (You can “ghost” someone and disappear digitally, to them. And that is a good first step! But this needs to be physical ghosting, as well.)

So I believe a woman should have the right to kill a man, if he says “bitch if you ever leave me, I’ll kill you” even once, to her. And if it’s gotten to the point of an Order of Protection by the police? That woman should NEVER be charged with a crime for killing that cocksucker the next time she spots him lurking out on the street in his car, or serial killer panel van.

Thank you again for the great essay. I digressed, a lot. When I started I just wanted to say, thank you for telling your story. And I agree that POS Tr*mp should never be president. I think he should be deported to wherever most of his money is stashed overseas.