NJ lawmaker introduces ‘rape by fraud’ bill to criminalize lying to get sex

A New Jersey lawmaker has introduced a bill that would make lying in order to obtain sexual favors from another person “sexual assault by fraud,” the Star-Ledger reports.

According to the bill introduced by Assemblyman Troy Singleton (D-Burlington), the crime of “sexual assault by fraud” would be defined as “an act of sexual penetration to which a person has given consent because the actor has misrepresented the purpose of the act or has represented he is someone he is not.”

By way of example, he cited the case of Mischele Lewis, who had been lied to by her boyfriend, William Allen Jordan. Jordan claimed to be a British military official who needed $5,000 to obtain a security clearance, but when the prosecutors attempted to append a charge of “sexual assault by coercion,” the grand jury refused to indict him.

Jordan, Singleton said, “hadn’t threatened her. Quite the contrary. He had seduced her. But he had seduced her through a hoax, through a fraudulent means. And just like Bernie Madoff is in prison because he stole money from people by defrauding them, someone can vitiate your knowing consent by defrauding you in order to have sex.”

“I truly believe that we have to look at the issue of rape as more than sexual contact without consent,” Singleton added.

“Fraud invalidates any semblance of consent just as forcible sexual contact does. This legislation is designed to provide our state’s judiciary with another tool to assess situations where this occurs and potentially provide a legal remedy to those circumstances.”

Prominent New Jersey defense attorney Alan Zegas said that, as written, the bill is far too vague as to its definition of fraud.

“What if a man were to say to a woman ‘I love you’ and engage in sex and he really didn’t love her? It could be as simple as that,” he told the Star-Ledger. “The definition is so broad that it doesn’t put the citizens of the state on fair notice of what it is that constitutes the crime.”

However, as Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld noted in a 2013 article in the Yale Law Journal, “rape-by-deception” should not be rejected by contemporary criminal law, because it is based on an obsolete definition of rape.

“Rape law’s exclusion of almost all sex-by-deception claims followed from the fact that in such cases the woman had willingly had non-marital sex. Though deceived, she had willingly surrendered her virtue and thus could not claim rape,” he wrote.