Be Careful You Never Get Caught in The Spider Webb

So yesterday and last night, a fight erupted on this blog between David Webb, close friend and confidant of Joey Dauben, and just about everyone else.  David was a friend of Joey's and covered his entire downfall from Joey's and only Joey's point of view.  Court observers report that Joey and David were very chatty and in fact Joey conversed more with David than he did anyone else in the courtroom including his parents.  Kind of hard to pretend you are some unbiased reporter covering a trial of a man charged with sexual assault of a child and do that.

Anyway, David wrote something that he should never write...an opinion piece.  Especially if that opinion is coming out of his head.  His story was a wrap up of the Joey trial and conviction where he blames alcohol as the main factor in the rape.  So lets have some background info for all the new people.  Here is the boys testimony (and since Joey perjured himself on the witness stand on at least two key points, there really isn't any question about who's testimony was considered truthful  the jury took less than two hours to convict on all counts).  Now keep in mind this is the testimony from a then 14 year old virgin:

"The young man said he thought Dauben was an assistant to the Messianic church’s rabbi when Dauben arrived at the camp that day. The boy said he and two other teens ended up the evening talking to Dauben around the campfire, after all the parents and the rabbi had drunk heavily and gone to bed.

Dauben allegedly pulled out a bottle of Wild Turkey, poured red Solo cups of whiskey and challenged the teens to see who could drink the fastest. The other two kids went to bed shortly thereafter and Dauben asked the alleged victim if he wanted to go out on the lake on a raft. While on the raft, Dauben began describing sexual encounters and asking the boy about his own experiences. The boy told the court that he was a virgin at the time.

After being on the raft, Dauben and the boy went to the public showers at the park, where Dauben said he was going to masturbate. When Dauben walked out into the shower area naked, the boy said he felt “awkward. But I didn’t want to seem uncool.”

“I was doing what I thought was normal,” he testified. “I didn’t want to seem weird, so I went with it.”

The victim said Dauben initiated sex acts with him.

During this portion of the testimony, Dauben, who sat at the defense table farthest from the witness stand, took off his glasses and dropped his head into his hand, covering his eyes. Later, he shook his head as the boy continued."   from the Corsicana Daily Sun

So David Webb writes his opinion piece with the headline "Alcohol, underage companionship, lead to disaster"

In this article he has one very disturbing paragraph:

"It didn’t matter that the teenager, now 20, testified he willingly participated in the sexual activity, and that he came from a broken, troubled home that probably contributed to him being alone late at night drinking with an adult 12 years older than him"

That certainly sounds like he was making an excuse for Joey by blaming it on the booze and the kid having a troubled home as the reason he was raped.  So we gave David a chance to clarify himself on this blog and to our horror, he meant it exactly as we thought he did.

Here are some of his quotes from last night:

"He indicated that he went along with it, and he didn't object. He had many chances to have walked away from the situation and never did. There was one time that he said he was standing outside of the shower house and returned back inside where Joey was because he "didn't want to be alone." My guess is that it is possible if he had ever said no, nothing would have happened. Perhaps, it was the effect of the alcohol he drank. I don't know."

"He didn't have both a biological mother and father looking after him to prevent him from being out by himself at a lake park drinking alcohol. His father apparently was drunk inside a tent asleep with the teenager's stepmother, with whom the youth didn't get along with well. The youth and his stepmother regularly argued, including while they were at the camping trip, according to the testimony."

"I feel sorry for the youth. I also feel sorry for Dauben. I think that if neither one of them had been out there drinking alcohol that night none of this would have ever happened. That's my OPINION, which basically is what one imparts in a column."

"The teen was not raped. It was consensual sex by his own admission. He never said no. The only reason it was classified as a child sexual assault is that he was not old enough to give his consent. It is the adult's responsibility not to engage in sex with someone who is under the legal age of consent, but there was no force or violence involved."

"I do not excuse Joey Dauben of the crime. I wrote a column that was actually intended to remind people that they need to be careful about what they do when they are drinking alcohol in the company of underage youth. Your hysterical wife, the author of this blog and you and have turned it into something entirely different. Shame on you."

"If Joey Dauben had not been drinking alcohol, I don't believe that any of this would have ever happened. Even if he was drinking alcohol, if he had not been in the company of a 14-year-old alone it would not have happened. What is so hard to understand about that? I a not blaming the victim. I am blaming his parents for not taking better care of him."


I will let the readers come to their own conclusions I just thought it was important to let everyone read David in his own words.

David Webb Blames Joey Dauben's Demise on Alcohol

http://therarereporter.blogspot.com/2013/01/alcohol-binge-underage-companionship.html

David Webb is the Joey apologists that stuck by Joey's side all the way to the end.  Yes he did cover the trial itself in a balanced manner but leading up to it, he acted as the mouthpiece for Joey as his stories always reflected the Joey Dauben slant.  He even went along with the Joey/Presley "we are about to get married" lie and watched it blow up in his face as she didn't even bother staying for the trial.  Anyway, he makes a few good observations, but on the whole he still doesn't understand who Joey Dauben is.

David's opening statement says it all:  "After sitting through a surreal, six-day child sexual assault trial recently I came away with the knowledge that the least likely of people can fall victim to disaster if they are foolish enough to consume alcohol with a minor who legally cannot give consent to sexually activity."

-least likely?  fall victim?  Its alcohol's fault?

"It seemed impossible that the youthful, charming Dauben who came from a humble background and seemed so driven to be someone someday could succumb to a fate so sinister that it would destroy his life."

-humble is an understatement.  Why was this impossible?

"To the best of my knowledge Dauben was straight, but apparently anything can happen late at night when two people are drinking alcohol alone." 

-well first of all your knowledge of Joey is very limited, in fact its limited to only what Joey told you.  There goes the blame alcohol excuse again.

"It didn’t matter that the teenager, now 20, testified he willingly participated in the sexual activity, and that he came from a broken, troubled home that probably contributed to him being alone late at night drinking with an adult 12 years older than him"

-ummmm, what a horrible statement.  If we are to believe the victim's testimony I would not go as far as say he "willingly participated", I would say the boy wanted out of there but he just didn't say no loud enough to stop Joey.  At no point in time did I hear anything that sounded like the boy wanted this.  What the hell does the broken home have to do with him being alone that night?  IT WAS A CHURCH CAMP!!!!!  It was the responsibly of the organizers to oversee the boys that night, not the parents.

"The Texas youth did not make an “outcry” about the sexual contact with Dauben until the summer of 2008, a year after it happened, when he told a friend, who told a pastor, who told the youth’s father."

-yeah but he did tell someone shortly after the event, and actually this is fairly common in most rape cases that the victim, especially a young boy who had a hard time understanding what happened,, would be scared to come forward.

"Another peculiar element of the saga emerged when I learned a sizable number of people had complained that the blogger unfairly and unjustly accused them of sexual assault and other crimes and improprieties.  A group of people went so far as to start a blog where they could support each other and vent their rage about Dauben’s outrageous reporting."

I and I alone started this blog and I have never been accused by Joey Dauben of anything, much less sexual assault   Can you get anything right David, I mean anything?

"When Dauben took the stand against his lawyer’s advice, the jury obviously saw a deeply troubled man who might be suffering from paranoid delusions and denial. He repeatedly broke down and cried on the stand. It was unclear whether Dauben’s mental problems began prior to the crime he committed six years ago or if they began later, slowly festering afterwards as fear enveloped him about the crime."

-Ahh, finally a sentence we can all agree with

"It’s hard to make sense of Dauben’s relentless, reckless pursuit of villains unless his fear about being discovered led him to it in an effort to divert suspicion from himself. In turn, the subjects of his reports and others in the community probably became fearful of him, leading to complaints to law enforcement authorities and the Ellis County charges. It became a vicious cycle that eventually ensnared Dauben."

-the first sentence is true, the second has no evidence to support that claim.

"Some of the last words Dauben said to me in the courtroom before the bailiff led him off in handcuffs were, “I’m going to take responsibility for this.”

-Joey has no idea what the world responsible means, so how can he take it?