Here's the Episode Explaining Dr. Phil's Disturbing Rape Tweet

By Madeleine Davies  |  September 12, 2013 | 11:00pm
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In late August, tv therapist/old timey Goldrush villain Dr. Phil caused a bit of an uproar when he tweeted, “If a girl is drunk, is it ok to have sex with her? Reply yes or no to @drphil #teenaccused.” Unsurprisingly, a lot of people found that question pretty un-fucking-chill and were reasonably peeved about it, leading Dr. Phil to release a statement saying that the tweet pertained to a Dr. Phil episode that his crew was currently shooting about a teen boy who had been accused of raping his highly intoxicated classmate. The first part of that episode aired today.

Will it make you hate Dr. Phil and his hapless tweet any less? Probably not, but let’s give it a go anyway.

The teen boy Dr. Phil interviewed was Matthew Bishop, a 17-year-old high school football player from Hendersonville, N.C., who was accused of gang rape by a 16-year-old classmate who claims that Bishop — along with his friends Vincent Joseph Curto, Tyler Scott Garren and Justin Wesley Ponder — all had sex with her when she was too drunk to consent.

Bishop obviously claims otherwise, telling Dr. Phil, “I’m not a rapist. I had consensual sex with a girl, and she wanted to. She isn’t telling the truth.”

He tells Dr. Phil that the victim only accused him and his friends of rape after her father found out that she had had sex with all four boys in one night. Of the night of the alleged assault, Bishop admits to watching the girl drink up to four shots of alcohol over a half-an-hour period, which even Bishop’s father — who happens to be a cop — agrees would put her well past the point of intoxication.

Bishop repeats over and over that the victim “knew exactly what she was doing,” although that doesn’t exactly gel with his dad’s defense that the young woman’s extreme drunkeness makes her account of the night unreliable.

Dr. Phil counters, “She had three or four shots, and you say she is not a reliable historian because of that. [Matt] had 10 or 12 shots. So, how can you regard him as a reliable historian?”

Or how can you say that a girl drunk enough to not remember what happened to her was sober enough to consent to sex?

Regardless of Matthew’s guilt, one thing is for sure — his parents have some really fucked up ideas about gender, sex and rape.

“Girls have sex being drunk all the time,” his mother Dianne argues. “So, if you’re going to go ahead and say that every girl who’s ever been drunk has been raped, then that is unfair; that is not true.”

To Dr. Phil’s credit, he shuts down Dianne’s bullshit almost immediately, saying “You’re setting up a paper tiger here, Dianne. We’re not saying, nor is every girl who’s ever had sex while drinking or drunk, saying that they were raped. But you now have a girl who says, ‘I was given alcohol. I got drunk, and I wound up having sex with three or four boys and did not want to.’ That’s rape.”

If you need me, I’ll be taking a shower with all my clothes on.

[Dr. Phil]

 
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