New York has taken a significant step in addressing sexual assault by expanding its legal definition of rape. Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law on Tuesday, aiming to encompass various forms of nonconsensual sexual contact that were previously not adequately covered.
The existing, narrow definition of rape played a role in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation case against former President Donald Trump. In a federal civil trial last May, the jury rejected Carroll’s claim that Trump had raped her in the 1990s, instead holding the former president accountable for a lesser degree of sexual abuse.
The current law’s definition of rape is limited to vaginal penetration by a p*n*s. The newly signed law seeks to rectify this limitation by expanding the definition to encompass nonconsensual anal, oral, and vaginal sexual contact.
Governor Hochul emphasized the importance of this expansion during a bill signing ceremony in Albany, stating that it will facilitate the prosecution of perpetrators and make it easier for victims of rape to bring cases forward.
The revised law is set to take effect on September 1, and it will apply to sexual assaults committed on or after that date.
“The problem is, rape is very difficult to prosecute,” Hochul said. “Physical technicalities confuse jurors and humiliate survivors and create a legal gray area that defendants exploit.”
In Carroll’s case against Trump, which stemmed from an encounter at a Manhattan luxury department store, the judge later said that the jury’s decision was based on “the narrow, technical meaning” of rape in New York penal law and that, in his analysis, the verdict did not mean that Carroll “failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”
While various states define rape in different ways, every state criminalizes oral, anal, and vaginal sexual contact that is nonconsensual, according to Sandi Johnson, a senior legislative policy counsel at Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network.
Prior to its new law, New York defined penetration of the v*g*na or other bodily orifices with anything other than a p*n*s as “sexual abuse” rather than “rape.”
Many other states continue to place unwanted oral or anal sexual contact in a category other than rape.
Johnson said New York’s new guidelines validate what has happened to survivors. Calling a criminal sexual act anything other than rape “kind of sanitizes it,” she said.
At Tuesday’s bill signing, state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who sponsored the legislation, said the new changes would also make it easier for members of the LGBTQ community to hold perpetrators of s*x crimes accountable.
“We can’t have our laws ignore the reality that so many New Yorkers, particularly LGBTQ New Yorkers, among others, have experienced,” the Democrat said.
“Before today, many of those assaults wouldn’t be able to be classified as rape in New York state,” he said. “But now we fixed that language.”
