A California woman was fooled into having sex in a dark room with a man she thought was her boyfriend. The woman had been drinking and fell asleep when her boyfriend left. Another man snuck into her house and began to have sex with her. She thought it was her boyfriend until a passing light revealed the horrifying truth.

Saying that the defendant’s act was “despicable” a California judge ruled that the court could not presume an absence of consent if the woman were not married.

“Has the man committed rape? Because of historical anomalies in the law and the statutory definition of rape, the answer is no, even though, if the woman had been married and the man had impersonated her husband, the answer would be yes,” -Judge Thomas L. Willhite Jr.

The idea that women are not the property of men seems to be hard to drop. Until recently, many state laws did not recognize the possibility of spousal rape. In this California case, a man slipping into a woman’s house and fooling her into having sex while she is drunk does not seem to qualify as rape so long as the woman has not legally bound herself to a man in the state of marriage.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/03/california-appeals-court-_n_2406167.html