Our Rogues’ Gallery report chronicles, among other themes, the regressive attitudes of many of this year’s far-right Senate candidates toward women’s rights. Not content to be merely anti-choice, candidates like Sharron Angle and Joe Miller say abortion should be illegal even in cases of rape or incest. Angle most famously expressed the far-right attitude toward the right to choose when she said teenage rape victims should try to make “lemonade” out of “what was really a lemon situation.”

Colorado’s Ken Buck has been among the staunchest opponents of a woman’s right to choose, saying he’d sponsor a constitutional amendment to make abortion illegal and would try to prevent organizations like Planned Parenthood from receiving government funds.

 

Now, from the Colorado Independent, comes a story of Buck’s refusal to prosecute a rape case when he was a district attorney. One of the reasons? He thought the victim had earlier had an abortion, and was somehow retaliating against her assailant by attempting to prosecute him. In the end, Buck chalked the whole thing up to what he called the victim’s  “buyer’s remorse”:

He said the facts in the case didn’t warrant prosecution. “A jury could very well conclude that this is a case of buyer’s remorse,” he told the Greeley Tribune in March 2006. He went on to publicly call the facts in the case “pitiful.”

If he had handled it with a little more sensitivity, the victim, who does not want her name used, says it is possible she may have accepted the decision and moved on. But Buck’s words — as much as his refusal to prosecute — still burn in her ears.

“That comment made me feel horrible,” she told the Colorado Independent last week. “The offender admitted he did it, but Ken Buck said I was to blame. Had he (Buck) not attacked me, I might have let it go. But he put the blame on me, and I was furious. I still am furious,” she said.

It wasn’t just his public remarks that infuriated the woman. In the private meeting, which she recorded, he told her, “It appears to me … that you invited him over to have sex with him.”

He also said he thought she might have a motive to file rape charges as a way of retaliating against the man for some ill will left over from when they had been lovers more than a year earlier. Buck also comes off on this tape as being at least as concerned with the woman’s sexual history and alcohol consumption as he is with other facts of the case.

“She is very strong about her feelings,” said Forseth of the victim. “She believes a grave injustice has been done and that she is a victim of the system.

“What’s most troubling to me about this case,” Forseth continued, “is the way he talks to her in that meeting. There is just so much judgment, in his voice, toward the victim. I would think a district attorney would be an advocate for victims and offer some support, but instead he offers indignation and judgment.”

The suspect in this case had claimed that the victim had at one point a year or so before this event become pregnant with his child and had an abortion, which she denies, saying she miscarried. The suspect’s claim, though, is in the police report, and Buck refers to it as a reason she may be motivated to file charges where he thinks none are warranted.

“When he talks about the abortion as the reason she wants charges filed, that has nothing to do with the law or this case,” Forseth says. “That is his personal bias coming into play. He’s bringing his own personal beliefs and judgments to bear on this case, when he should be acting as a victim’s advocate.”

If Buck can’t represent a rape victim without publicly insulting her, it’s hard not to ask: how can he represent an entire state in the Senate?