Are you able to voluntarily have intercourse while blackout drunk? Kim Fromme, among the country’s foremost professionals on alcohol-induced blackouts, is not afraid to state therefore, and it has testified in high-profile intimate attack situations from Steubenville to Stanford.

Published on August 7, 2017, at 10:21 a.m. ET

One afternoon in March 2016, Kim Fromme took the stand in a Santa Clara, California, courtroom being a witness that is expert the now-infamous instance regarding the People v. Brock Allen Turner. The jury ended up being tasked with determining exactly what had happened between Turner, a previous Stanford University swimmer, and “Emily Doe, ” a 22-year-old girl whom had no memory of Turner, a complete stranger, intimately assaulting her after a frat party.

In California, it’s illegal to sexually penetrate someone who you understand is not capable of consenting,

While the prosecution desired to show Turner took benefit of an incapacitated, susceptible girl. The protection, arguing that Doe had consented before she dropped unconscious, hoped to inform the storyline of the drunken university hookup. To do this, they needed Fromme.

Fromme, a medical therapy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has testified in, consulted on, or supplied depositions for over 50 unlawful, civil, and army instances since 2009, nearly all that have involved guys accused of intimately assaulting drunk females. In every but a number of those instances, she’s got labored on behalf of this accused, whose solicitors hire her to describe exactly just how studies have shown it is possible to take part in voluntary tasks during an alcohol-induced blackout. More particularly, Fromme will state that a female can have sex while voluntarily blacked down, regardless of if she can’t keep in mind doing this.

Fromme tugs at her locks as she describes just just how hair samples enables you to test for many drugs during testimony in Steubenville, Ohio, in 2013. Continue reading Meet With The Professor Whom Claims Intercourse In A Blackout Isn’t Always Rape →