She was not sexually assaulted. She was in a scuffle with police and they got too rough and they bruised her breast, but they did not deliberately grab her breast to sexually assault her. I think it is insulting to victims of sexual assault to try to use this as a defense. You guys need to get a grip.

There was nothing at all about sex with this. The fact that the police got carried away and were too aggressive had nothing to do with "sexual assault". They were aggressive to men and women.

The people who are trying to defend her, are using sexual assault as a political weapon, but they should not be. The real issue here is police aggression toward any protester, male or female.

I don't think she should have been convicted of assault (considering the circumstances), but that does not make this a sexual assault case.

The cop didn't grab her arm, or her shoulder. He grabbed her breast, from behind. He didn't identify himself as police; he attacked her as she was leaving. It should be the cop who is in prison.

Or do you think that women should be so passive, so accepting of violence against our persons that we don't fight back when strangers grab our breasts, hard enough to leave a bruise?

She was not in a scuffle. She wasn't even protesting -- she just stopped by Zuccotti Park to meet up with friends because they were going out for St. Patrick's Day. And she was grabbed from behind by the breast -- which is something other protesters have described as a standard police tactic and part of the police tendency to single out women and minorities for abuse.

You may say it shouldn't be described as "sexual assault" -- would you feel better if it was described as "police brutality with a strong element of sexual humiliation"?

The OP is... to call it partisan and questionable would be putting it mildly.

If you actually dig a little on the internet, and try to find some impartial reporting on the case, you'll see that what the OP baldly presents as unquestionable fact is in fact just McMillan's version, and that there's a video out there which, while it doesn't disprove it (it was shot from a long way away), makes it look far from certain.

Whether I'd call it a sexual assault or not is irrelevant. I might feel that way, or maybe not. But if I did, and it involved my sexual organs, I'd take a pretty dim view of your response. But in either case, Humans still have instincts. We are, still, animals. Under some conditions we act instinctively to preserve our own safety.

Good luck restraining those instincts. It's a bit like trying to force yourself to hold your hand in a fire to prove a rhetorical point.

The cop grabbed her and got a breast. I'm not sure that in the heat of the moment he was aiming for a breast. He might have just been grabbing at anything he could get hold of.

I'm not saying it was not intentional...or even meant as sexual humiliation...just that I don't see the proof that he intended to sexually assault her, or even grab her breast. If she had been a guy, and he grabbed the guy's chest and swung him around and threw him to the ground, it wouldn't be sexual assault, would it? Breasts are just out there in a place that they might get grabbed, when in a physical situation...not like grabbing someone between the legs.

I think people are making too much of this "sexual assault" thing, when in fact they should be focusing on why the cop assaulted her in the first place, if she wasn't doing anything wrong. Why isn't that the issue? Why are cops allowed to treat protesters this way? Whether they are male or female.

I think this jury made a bad decision, but I wasn't in the court room, so I don't know what evidence they had to work with. That should be the issue here. I think the bruise on her breast should have made them think twice about why she elbowed the cop...but apparently the way it was presented in court, that isn't the way they saw it.

There have been plenty of incidents of late, of police abusing their authority to abuse a suspect. Some with sexual abuse present.

I wasn't there, i'm not on the jury that convicted her. Based on the full context of what I saw, I'd probably have acquitted her.

I think it shows that she started it with the elbow to the face. No one had even touched her yet. Maybe this is what the jury saw and based their decision on?

I can't tell what the hell happened, even zoomed in.

She was in motion, that's the best I can tell.

Edit: The officer that stops after she throws the elbow does indeed seem to have gripped her from behind (from her right/back).
Whether that was lawful use of restraint, I have no idea. I also cannot tell how aware she was that it was an officer when she throws the elbow.

Video doesn't help much, in this case.

NY Magazine has this video -- which may not much look like a reflexive reaction to a grope: in fact, it rather looks as if somebody, running past, jumped and turned to elbow someone else in the face

Certainly, I expect you to be mobbed for daring to suggest that Ms McMillan's story should not be accepted unquestionably.

The video puts a new perspective on things. It looks like nobody even tried to touch her before she elbowed the cop in the face.

Where will the OP and all the posters above go now that we have VIDEO!


And people always bitch about video cameras everywhere