Tag: sexual abuse

Fake black Dolezal accuses brother of sexual abuse

Even as Rachel Dolezal, the Spokane NAACP president whose parents outed her as white, resigned from the organization on Monday ahead of a “Today” show interview, another Dolezal was thrust into the spotlight.

It was revealed Monday that Dolezal’s older brother Joshua Dolezal is awaiting trial on charges he sexually abused a black child — charges that the Dolezal family, in their own television appearance, implied Rachel Dolezal may have helped orchestrate. Joshua Dolezal is contesting the charges and is free on $15,000 bail while awaiting trial, according to the Denver Post.

Joshua Dolezal’s troubles could explain at least one piece of the complicated puzzle behind this saga, the question of why Rachel Dolezal’s parents would expose their daughter to such public humiliation and perhaps legal jeopardy.

Joshua Dolezal, 39, is the eldest child of the Dolezal clan. Rachel is his only biological sibling — Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal have four adopted children, some of whom are black. Joshua now faces four felony counts of sexual assault in Colorado, according to reports in the New York Daily News, the Denver Post and other local outlets that have been confirmed by The Washington Post.

The alleged incidents of sexual assault, according to a Clear Creek County affidavit in support of an arrest warrant obtained by the Daily News and reviewed by The Post, occurred at Lawrence and Ruthanne’s house in Colorado “in 2001 or 2002.” The victim, whose name was redacted in the affidavit, “was 6 or 7 years old,” and Joshua Dolezal was “19 years older.”

Among other accusations: On two occasions, according to the affidavit, Joshua Dolezal allegedly forced the victim to perform oral sex on him. On “7 or 8″ other occasions, Dolezal performed oral sex on the victim.

“Don’t tell anyone or I’ll hurt you,” Joshua allegedly said.

The affidavit included claims that an older incident of alleged abuse of another victim in 1991 had a racial element.

“The family had a subscription to National Geographic magazine,” it read. “… Joshua Dolezal showed [redacted] his collection of photos of topless and naked African women.”

It continued: “Joshua Dolezal was turned on by the black body and was curious about black women sexually.”

The abuse was reported in 2013, and Joshua Dolezal was arrested last year. The victim, according to the affidavit, “wanted to report the incident now because Joshua Dolezal has a one year old daughter and [redacted] does not want the daughter to be victimized.”

Dolezal will be tried in August, as ABC 7 Denver reported.

The allegations against Joshua Dolezal are significant because, in interviews with The Post and other outlets, the Dolezals alleged Rachel orchestrated them to win custody of her brother Izaiah. Izaiah, who is black, lives with Rachel Dolezal in Spokane — and Rachel says he is her son, the family alleged.

The parents of Rachel Dolezal, the civil rights activist under fire for her disputed racial identity, say they don’t know what caused their biological daughter to call herself African American.

Lawrence and Ruthanne Dolezal, without specifically addressing the charges against their son, broadly denied such behavior as well as Rachel Dolezal’s allegations that she was physically abused as a child.

“If she’s alleging there was abuse in our family from years past, then it’s false and there’s no need to comment on anything of that nature,” Lawrence Dolezal told The Post last week. “That’s just utter falsehood.”

“The allegations are totally false and malicious,” Ruthanne Dolezal told Megyn Kelly of Fox News when she asked about them Monday. “They’re fabricated.”

“Rachel Dolezal dismisses the controversy as little more than an ugly byproduct of contentious litigation between other family members over allegations of past abuse that has divided the family,” the paper said. “She’s particularly suspicious of the timing, noting that the allegations broke on her son’s birthday and come as the Colorado lawsuit … nears a key juncture.” While she referred to a lawsuit, the charges in Colorado are criminal.

Though it’s not clear when and how the Dolezals became so divided, insight into the warring family comes from an unlikely source: the published writing of Joshua Dolezal, the accused.

Joshua Dolezal is an English professor at Central College, a private liberal arts college in Pella, Iowa. His work, much of it nonfiction, has appeared in respected publications such as the Kenyon Review, and the University of Iowa Press published his memoir — which includes many references to his sister Rachel.

“Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging” offers the most complete picture heretofore of Rachel Dolezal’s broken marriage. According to Lawrence Dolezal, she was married to a black man, Kevin Moore, and the couple divorced in 2004.

Joshua Dolezal saw signs of trouble. In many passages, Rachel Dolezal is portrayed as the victim of an unhappy marriage whose husband won’t let her and their young child leave the house — a woman who does what her spouse says when he says it.

Joshua Dolezal was angry. “I murdered him hundreds of times in my sleep,” he wrote of his former black brother-in-law. Eventually, the couple separated.

Of course, a memoir isn’t a fact-checked, reported news story and the ex-husband has been unavailable for comment and has not responded to numerous published accounts of her claims. But Joshua Dolezal said he did his best.

“To remember is to reconstruct and interpret,” he wrote in an author’s note, “and this is as truthful a story as my memory can tell.”

Source: Washington Post

From America’s black father to accused sexual predator

Bill Cosby has dominated headlines for much of the last month as accusations of sexual assault pile up.

More than a dozen women have accused Cosby, many of whom say he drugged them first.

Their stories paint a starkly different picture of the black father beloved by millions as Dr. Huxtable — the sweet, sweater-wearing dad on the sitcom, “The Cosby Show.”

New York Times columnist David Carr meanwhile has taken a number of writers and mediates — including himself — to task for turning a blind eye to the numerous allegations of sexual assault leveled against Bill Cosby, and he’s already elicited one mea culpa in response.

In addition to admitting his own accountability, Carr called out Ta-Nehisi Coates, who penned a lengthy essay on the comedian in The Atlantic in 2008; Kelefa Sanneh, who wrote a New Yorker profile on Cosby in September; and Mark Whitaker, who wrote an extensive biography on Cosby published just two months ago; noting that they all failed to properly address the accusations, despite the fact that they were “carefully and thoroughly reported” in Philadelphia magazine, People magazine and Today in 2005 and 2006.

“We all have our excuses, but in ignoring these claims, we let down the women who were brave enough to speak out publicly against a powerful entertainer,” Carr wrote in a Monday column. “Mr. Whitaker has said he didn’t want to put anything in the book, which he wrote with Mr. Cosby’s cooperation, that wasn’t confirmed — which of course raises the question of why he wouldn’t have done the work to knock down the accusations or make them stand up. And given that the accusations had already been carefully and thoroughly reported in Philadelphia magazine and elsewhere, any book of the size and scope of Mr. Whitaker’s should have gone there.”

Whitaker took to Twitter on Monday afternoon to respond to Carr’s column, admitting that he should’ve investigated the allegations more thoroughly.

Carr noted that Coates also revisited his Cosby coverage on The Atlantic’s website and admitted that at the time he wrote the piece, he “believed that Bill Cosby was a rapist,” but included only “a brief and limp mention of the accusations against Cosby.” Coates went on to write, “I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough. I take it as a personal admonition to always go there, to never flinch, to never look away.”

Sanneh does not seem to be active on Twitter, but appeared on an MSNBC segment over the weekend to discuss the Cosby allegations, telling host Melissa Harris-Perry, “It’s easy to look at the Huxtable family and say ‘oh, that must be what Bill Cosby is like’ … Just because a comedian has politics we agree with, just because a comedian makes work we agree with, doesn’t mean, necessarily, they’re not capable of what Bill Cosby’s accused of.”