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.