TRIGGER WARNING - F/up On Abuse By Geddert

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Yes, that’s true. Congress codified the Palermo Protocol when Bill Clinton was President in 2000 in the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. So that would be the federal version of the state trafficking law under which Michigan charged , or was going to charge, John Geddert. Will the Feds start trying to apply it in this kind of context? I doubt it, its just too much of a stretch, but who knows. I would not have predicted Michigan doing what they did. I do not think we are going to see a flurry of this, I think the Michigan AG was just really incensed at Geddert’s behavior and frustrated by the lack of applicable state law she could apply to really bury him. (truly no pun was intended)
 
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Will his wife be investigated to? Was she? I find it hard to believe that she knew nothing about the man who should not be named and about her husbands behavior to his gymnasts
 
Agreed ! Geddert is worse than I thought. Geddert is horrible and repulsive ! Geddert is a no good son of a b**** !!

José M.
 
@Dex Jaja can tell us for sure but I believe most states don’t consider it a crime to have knowledge of a crime but fail to report it. And some states I believe can’t force spouses to testify against each other.
 
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So, the b*ard Geddert killed himself. On one hand, good riddance ! On the other hand, instead of facing the consequences of his wrong actions like a man, the chicken sh coward and sissy killed himself to escape. Geddert is a loser !

José M.
 
Yes, that is substantially correct. I believe all states have spousal privilege. And almost no states have criminalized witnessing a crime but failing to report it. Two or three have criminalized failure to report certain crimes under certain circumstances. Under federal law – one very very very rarely applied – it is a crime to know AND affirmatively conceal. But affirmative concealment would almost always be covered under lying to law enforcement anyway. (Tip – do not ever lie to the feds. They really do not like it).

Look, prosecutors are not going to charge John Geddert’s wife. Any more than they are going to start investigating and charging the parents of the gymnasts he abused, some of whom surely knew about this, at least to some extent.

Geddert was the target of the investigation and rightly so. Just like Nassar. I do not think any of us wants to live in a country where law enforcement starts prosecuting everyone who knew someone else was committing a crime but failed to report it. Just think about the consequences once that starts getting out of hand.
 
Generally, it is just bad policy to apply laws in largely unanticipated ways. A hallmark of our legal system – criminal and civil – is notice. You do not want law enforcement jumping out of the bushes and surprising people when they tell them that their behavior is criminal in ways the statutes on their face and in the way they had been applied could not have warned about. It starts reeking of authoritarianism. It gets scary. Geddert was, however, an extreme case and it was ok to take extreme measures. The sex assault charges themselves would have put him away for life if convicted on them but there is never any assurance of that. The Trafficking charges were insurance. And also warning to others behaving in similar ways. But the legislature has to start crafting laws to fit these situations.
 
JaJa said:
The sex assault charges themselves would have put him away for life if convicted on them but there is never any assurance of that. The Trafficking charges were insurance. And also warning to others behaving in similar ways. But the legislature has to start crafting laws to fit these situations.
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Dana Nessel’s prosecution has been quite aggressive. She charged MSU’s president, Lou Ann Simon, with obstruction of justice. The specific statements were IMO hard to construe as being deliberately misleading. And unsurprisingly a judge dismissed the charges.

She did the same thing to Geddert and I suspect the human trafficking charges would have been thrown out too. I’d also like to see criminal laws for this type behavior. In addition to making gymnasts compete with fractures, coaches in many sports will encourage extreme weight cutting and hiding concussions.
 
Very damning picture of the abuse. And that was only what was reported. He was truly a deranged person–stepping on their toes for punishment? WTF? And to be insensitive, he used the gun 20 years too late.

(Not generally an issue here, but don’t anyone be posting who they think the complainants are, let them come forward if they want to)
 
The difficulty with any law trying to make intimate partners of predators in particular culpable by extension is that it would be an incredibly effective tool for abuse for anyone so inclined. And of course being predators, they are so inclined.

Not all these men victimise their female partners (and I am talking about male abusers specifically here, not sure how it works when the woman is the predator). Some of them draw a distinction between women they want to protect and women who are fair game, but lots don’t. We already know this from other examples within legal systems, and we also know that women who are afraid of the authorities are less able to protect themselves against abuse: anyone who’s done any legal work with undocumented migrant women, for example, will have found that out pretty quickly.

Now I have no idea what was going on in the Geddert household, so I am certainly not saying Katherine was mistreated in any way. But I also wouldn’t care to bet anything of value that she wasn’t.
 
He built a gymnastics family??? Are they out of their minds???

On the other hand I hope there are no protestors. He left a wife and children, all of whom as far as we know are totally innocent in this, may have been victims themselves, and should be left alone to grieve.
 
That doesn’t seem like it would be conducive to anybody’s welfare, so I hope not.
 
JaJa said:
He left a wife and children, all of whom as far as we know are totally innocent in this, may have been victims themselves, and should be left alone to grieve.
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I’m not arguing that people should harass the family or something, they absolutely should not and that is horrendous, but if they wanted to be left alone to grieve, maybe having a big public event celebrating him instead of a quiet, private memorial wasn’t the best idea.
 
I would suggest that his family has possibly not really come to terms with what he did. He’s still their husband, dad, grandfather, this wonderful, incredible person who was unfairly targeted and victimized, so much so to the point of taking his own life. And so he’s this amazing person gone too soon who they want to celebrate. Funerals are as much for the living as they are for the dead.

I mean, I cannot imagine trying to process the information that has come out about this man in the past decade in their situation. Even if they were victims of his abuse and intellectually know he did horrible things, we know people compartmentalize, that it can twist their understanding of right and wrong, how they relate to that person, the list goes on. And here they are, seeing those incredible shocking charges at the same time they now have to deal with his death and provide support to one another? Yeah, I might take the “let’s celebrate the wonderful guy I remember and not think about the ugly stuff” route, too.
 
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