The situation you describe is just out-and-out rape, if it’s accurate, and having been to too many sleazy frat parties it sounds hella accurate to me.

Giving a spiked drink, even if “only” alcohol, and then leading someone involuntarily intoxicated to have unresponsive sex with them is rape just as much as dragging someone kicking and screaming into the bushes. There’s no legal question about it, leaving aside the fact she was underage.

It’s not like when a girl and a guy both get drunk together willingly and have sex, and one or both of them doesn’t remember what happened and may or may not have regrets, a situation that Saavendra’s sounds like. The unfortunately problem with that is it’s impossible to prove what really happened if the only two witnesses were both blitzed out of their minds and can’t reliably remember what happened. Which creates a huge problem if one willing, drunken participant claims it was a drink-spiking type situation.

That said what kind of asshole blames the girl for getting pregnant and then stiffs her half of the abortion? Any dude in his right mind would be wiring over the whole amount.

At the very least, he’s an ass for not respecting your wish for a condom. Based on the description HE remembers, that sounds like rape: the condom was the condition for the sex. When he says “passion took us over” it sounds more like passion took him over. But I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Legally, you’re not going to get it prosecuted. But, you should keep badgering him for half the abortion money.

Having sex while drunk is not the dumbest thing in the world someone could do. You shouldn’t feel shame, even if it was just a mistake in the heat of an inebriated passion. Your situation is one of the reasons we have abortion.

I heartily disagree with this. The best friend I ever had was actually a former roommate (and extremely close friend in her own right)’s 50-odd year old mother, whom I worked with for four plus years in my early twenties. One night, on the anniversary of her having lost a nephew very special to her, I brought a bottle of wine over to her and her husband’s house. She and I sat in the kitchen, drinking that bottle and then another, while her husband popped in and out at various intervals to refill his glass of whiskey. Once my friend was nodding a bit, her husband gestured to me behind her head that he had weed. I knew he smoked (as did I at the time) and I knew she did not and vaguely disapproved, so I surreptiously nodded my assent to smoke. My friend went to bed and the son-of-a-bitch held me down, covered my mouth and raped me for what seemed like forever. Just because I was drunk and he was drunk, and what’s more I had stuck around to smoke illict substances with him, does not mean there was EVER the slightest chance I would have EVER consented to have sex with this disgusting old man who doubled as my best friend’s husband and roommate’s father. The thought quite honestly never crossed my mind. Regardless of the fact that he was drunk – it doesn’t negate the fact that, as Antigone says, HE WAS A RAPIST. Getting drunk doesn’t make you more inclined to rape. It may, in some cases, cause confusion and result in missed signals, but drinking does not turn men into rapists. Alcohol could never excuse or be the root of rape. The selfish, ego-consumed wants of a rapist are all that lie at the root of rape.
Quite simply, there can be no standard of pardon or understanding. There are too many people and too many stories in this world for there to be any one absolute judgement, exception or standard. Everyone has tragedies in their lives, some worse than others. We simply can’t make blanket statements and judgements about anyone or anything. Human experience, by defintion, is simply too complex.

All I can do is remember that it’s what fails to make us bitter, given its best efforts, that ultimately makes us better.

Re: sexual and social education

I sort of hit a weird place growing up, between growing up with conservative paranoia and liberal empathy. As kind of a side-effect, I truly do believe that “I am my sister’s keeper” action; not as a legal morality (that’s the government being everyone’s keeper) but as a individual-to-individual case. I’ve knocked on my neighbor’s doors when I hear yelling and shattered glass (and once, I pulled the woman into my place while the cops were called). I keep my eyes open at parties. I ask the neighborhood kids about bruises they get (it’s not as pointed as one might think, it tends to be “that’s quite a bruise, did you get it at your baseball game?) And, I have been called, many, many times (probably rightly) a busy-body. But, since it kept V from getting raped, and my neighbor from getting further hurt (that night), I’ll keep it.