Restraining order issued against public defender after threats of sexual violence

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Alex Limkin, now pre­sum­ably a for­mer employee of the Pub­lic Defend­ers Office, was slapped with a restrain­ing order after grab­bing a col­league and express­ing a desire to choke and rape her to another mem­ber of the department.

Is this what our tax dol­lars are pay­ing for? Is it too much to ask to ensure that those we are sup­ply­ing to our indi­gent fel­low cit­i­zens for legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion meet at least a min­i­mum of soci­etal standards?

Alex has an impres­sive his­tory– he’s a lawyer, and he’s served in the Armed Forces. He pub­lished a series in the Weekly Alibi relat­ing his expe­ri­ences in Iraq dur­ing our lat­est for­ays there, and his men­tal recov­ery since. Accom­plished, brave…insane? Per­haps his expe­ri­ences in wartime did dull all of this emo­tions, maybe he doesn’t think women deserve any respect.

It’s hard to truly dis­cern someone’s inten­tions in a sit­u­a­tion like that, but it seems to me that Alex and Mel Gib­son belong together, ide­ally far away from any power, money or women.

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    2 Responsesto “Restraining order issued against public defender after threats of sexual violence”

    1. Lisa says:

      I know Alex and the accuser and you should not judge him. If you are con­cerned for the judi­cial sys­tem you would under­stand inno­cent until proven guilty! Do you know him or the per­son accus­ing him? Or any other details for that mat­ter? If you do not maybe you should think before express­ing your unin­formed “thoughts”.

    2. Chuck says:

      We’re not in court and we never will be. It’s been more than a year with no charges filed, which is fine. (These days, we expect a video­tape of the encounter before the law gets involved.) This is the court of pub­lic opin­ion– anony­mous online opin­ion, at that.
      “Inno­cent until proven guilty” is a stan­dard from crim­i­nal law that we use when we’re tak­ing away someone’s free­dom. We ought to have a much lower stan­dard for social dis­ap­proval, which is what the post talks about. If we were will­ing to shame any­one we sus­pect of inap­pro­pri­ate sex­ual advances, we would nip a lot of these behav­iors in the bud. Maybe we wouldn’t need as many rape tri­als.
      Of course,same rules apply to Lisa’s com­ment: she gets to use deri­sive quotes around the word “thoughts” and assume the Senorita doesn’t know any­one involved and if that’s enough to change someone’s opin­ion, then so be it. But when it comes to what goes on when two peo­ple are alone, I for one don’t know any man well enough to be sure he’s blame­less, nor any woman well enough to be sure she’s lying.

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