ROUGH GRAINY JUSTICE

By Steve Grant

August 16, 2001

Every film-maker wants to be noticed, touch a nerve, provoke a storm. Next week the Edinburgh Film Festival will host the British premiere of Raw Deal: A Question of Consent, which, since its unveiling early this year at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival, has been doing just that.

It's shocking, sexually explicit and real, a documentary which has divided audiences, and made its student director and producer two of the hottest properties in the US. Not surprising, given that the production company, Artisan Entertainment, brought us The Blair Witch Project.

Raw Deal is an examination of the alleged rape suffered by exotic dancer and convicted prostitute Lisa Gier King at a fraternity house party at Gainesville's University of Florida campus some time between 26 and 27 February, 1999. The film's producer, 22-year-old Alfred Spellman, calls the film "an anthropological look at college fraternities", and this piece is certainly no Animal House, but a warts-and-all examination of an event that became all the more sensational because it was videotaped.

Spellman and director Billy Corben, both Florida seniors who have been making home movies since they were 14, have used around 35 minutes of footage from the party, reproduced in all its grainy ugliness - videotape which was made available to the public after King's allegation and under Florida's ludicrously named Sunshine Law. Copies have been sold on the internet for $ 20 each. Many have called this a disgrace; others have accused the film-makers of exploiting misery in the name of profit.

But the catch is that King herself, who supports the film and calls it a lesson to be learned by all students, reported a "rape" by a named undergraduate, then found herself under arrest for making a false report after local police viewed the video footage, edited by the students themselves and containing no material from a second camera which the police didn't even realise was in the room.

If you take The Accused, Sex Lies & Videotape and Jerry Springer then you are still nowhere near the mark. T he case has infuriated feminists, dogged police and state politicians, and raised again the eternal question of when is a rape not a rape. King and fellow-dancer Disa Holly were hired to appear at a select party for members of the Delta Chi fraternity, young, clean-cut rowdies expected to go through various initiation rites to gain entry to the society and be rewarded with hard relaxation in the process. King, a mother of three, and certainly no sexual first-year, was taking Prozac on prescription and there had been much carousing. Both women performed lap dances, sexual activity with students did take place, and King is seen mooning for the camera alongside shots of erect sexual organs. King tells the boys that she's in control, but at some time after Holly had left, she claims that she was violated by one of the partygoers, Michael Yarhaus.

What makes the video footage even more tantalising is that it is largely inconclusive. King has claimed that the sex leading up to the rape was largely simulated, and the footage involving her and Yarhaus similarly remains open -ended. King says at one point, "I don't want this", but at other times seems to be a willing participant in proceedings. Is Yarhaus, who has refused to appear in the film, being aggressive or merely playful? Ultimately, the only clear evidence of the offence is King's repeated claim that she was the victim of a rape. And the verbal boasts of several fraternity members about "going to rape some white trash whore", something for which frat bigwig Tony Marzullo at least had the decency to apologise to Corben and Spellman on camera, although he spoiled it somewhat by classifying King as a "bottom-of-the-barrel prostitute".

Which brings us back to Jodie Foster in that bar backroom. This is a case which is very much about American class snobbery - a nice college boy and a lap dancer with previous convictions, albeit married and paying her way through college. King has said that without the support of family, friends and women's groups that she would probably have taken her own life by now. Intriguingly, the frat-house party scenario is a staple of American hardcore pornography, one example showing a mature and obviously practised Hispanic woman servicing a dozen or so young and eager men with stockings on their heads. The water is muddied even further by the fact that the investigating officer who turned King from alleged victim to offender was a woman - Alice Hendon, an Alachua County investigator with 18 years of experience. Hendon, who appears in the film, was turned round by the video evidence, but the police investigation was undoubtedly flawed even though King was given a rape test. The second video camera was missed, Yarhaus's explanation that abrasions on his back were due to a fall went virtually unchallenged, and the video handed over by students had been edited by them in advance.

It wasn't a fine hour for state attorney Rod Smith either. Smith refused to comment on his handling of the case, which resulted in King being accused of "falsifying a report" a mere two days after her complaint. Some months later, after the public debate that ensued, the charge was reduced to one of "dancing without a licence", although again one is baffled that King's co-entertainer, Disa Holly, was not arrested for the same violation.

Director Billy Corben took a year off from college to work on the feature, which is his first, and which really got off the ground when King agreed to do a series of lengthy taped interviews. She believes that he and Spellman "have made a much better job of investigating the case than the police ever did".

And while some media women have been appalled by her behaviour on that fateful night, King has also become a focus of protest for feminist groups, notably the National Organisation for Women (NOW). Florida NOW president Candi Churchill has called for King to be wholly exonerated: "The three to four men, including Mike Yarhaus, who were in that room that night should have been arrested, not Lisa," she has said.

"That tape does not prove she wanted to be penetrated by Mike Yarhaus and it does not prove that she lied about being raped." Churchill also points out that it was King who "had her name blasted all over the papers, TV and radio".

Corben and Spellman are currently at work on three movie projects, and their film, reputed to have cost around $ 350,000 to make, could net them a seven -figure sum if interested parties such as MTV, Lions Gate Films and Aristan Entertainment clinch a deal, although the material involved precludes major studios and arthouse outfits such as Miramax from taking it on.

Recently on Channel 4 the gang-rape drama Men Only caused some controversy and attracted above-average viewing figures. But Raw Deal is the real deal: offensive, infuriating, it shows the cold and merciless hand of young men determined to find an answer, however many there happen to be.