A former Manhattan court juvenile counselor who pleaded guilty to raping a 15-year-old and sexually assaulting a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old will be formally sentenced to 10 years' probation and no prison time next week. And this has a lot of people understandably furious, especially with the female judge who gave the rapist the softest possible punishment allowed. More than a hundred protesters demonstrated outside Manhattan Criminal Court yesterday, chanting "We're here to say, serial rape is not okay!" DA Cy Vance Jr. agreed with them in a statement regarding the Judge's decision: "This was an egregious breach of the public's trust."
Tony Simmons, 42, worked as a counselor in the city's Department of Juvenile Justice between 2000 and 2008. He admitted to raping Ashley, a 15-year-old who was given 12 months in prison for filing a false police report. She told the News that he nonchalantly raped her in 2005 while she waited in the courthouse basement for her case to be called. "I was very scared. I was terrified. He was a very large man...I knew I was just raped. I knew it wasn't supposed to happen. I didn't think anybody would believe me."
She was too scared to file a report on Simmons, who the kids referred to as Tyson (as inappropriate a nickname as they come?), and who looks like a scarred, villainous mobster from an old Batman comic book in his recent court room sketch. Simmons wasn't caught until another 15-year-old girl came forward to say he had sodomized her behind a locker in the girls holding area, which he stocked with condoms and cookies.
Jane Manning, president of the National Organization for Women in New York, said the three girls who came forward were insulted by the legal system: "I think the judge has fallen prey to the notion that these women matter less because these girls had been in trouble with the law." Worst of all, according to protesters, it was a female Judge who signed off on the no-jail sentence: "These are powerful women. They are not sensitive to the rest of us who don't have the power. I can't believe it was a woman judge who made this decision," said Janice Barringer, 67.
