The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield, Revisited (Published 2018) (2024)

On a recent Monday in a crowded Newark courthouse, the former Rutgers philosophy professor Anna Stubblefield admitted she touched the penis of a man with cerebral palsy who could not legally consent. In an earlier trial, which I wrote about for The Times Magazine in October 2015, Anna was convicted on two counts of raping the same victim; last summer, that verdict was overturned on appeal. Her guilty plea has now forestalled a second trial, and barring some surprise at the sentencing in early May, she will receive no further time in prison beyond the nearly 22 months she has already served. It seems that this long, complicated story has come to a demoralizing end.

At the prompting of her lawyer, Anna told the judge that she had intentionally touched the victim’s “intimate parts for the purposes of mutual sexual gratification.” Her guilty plea acknowledged little that was substantive about the case: It did not stipulate, for example, that Anna’s adulterous affair with “D.J.,” a nonverbal man who has been diagnosed with profound physical and mental disabilities, might have been founded on a suspect premise: that he was able to communicate by using a keyboard with her help. It did not concede that D.J. lacks the mental powers of a normal, 37-year-old adult, or that Anna could have been the unwitting author of his typed-out messages, through a sort of Ouija-board effect. It did not walk back the implication that D.J. had in some way played the part of the seducer. Rather, Anna copped only to a narrow, legalistic proposition: that she “should have known that the victim had been determined to be ‘mentally defective’ to the point of being incapable of providing consent.”

In other words, she found a way to cut her losses in the courtroom without denying D.J.’s competence or admitting any doubts about the realness of their love. This was to be expected, I suppose. From my position in the gallery, reporting on the trial, it always seemed to me that Anna was entrapped by the grandiosity of her good intentions. As an academic, she devoted much of her career to social-justice activism and the philosophy of race and disability, warning in her published work that men like D.J. (who is black) were like “the canary’s canary” in the coal mine — “the most vulnerable of the vulnerable” — and subject to both white supremacist and ableist oppression. In teaching D.J. how to type, using a widely disavowed method known as “facilitated communication,” she believed she was restoring his right of self-determination: empowering him to take college classes, present papers at conferences and eventually express his longing for the older, married, white woman who had been his savior.

I sensed there was no escaping from this narrative. Spending all those hours next to D.J. at the keyboard, Anna had written both of them into a romance: the activist professor who sacrificed her family, career and eventually her freedom; and her lover, who now would be remanded to a prison cell of silence as a result of their affair, his inner life discounted and ignored. With each step she took in their relationship, it was as if she sank a little deeper into a quicksand of delusion, a kind of erotomania. If she reneged on any claims she had made about D.J.’s intellect, and his capacity to give consent, she would be admitting not only to what might be criminal behavior but also to the idea that she had become a vector of white, able-bodied supremacy — that she was the boogeyman she had sworn to fight.

Which is why Anna’s guilty plea left me discombobulated. It made sense strategically, of course, yet I had still imagined she would go to trial for a second time and renew the fight to prove that D.J. has a voice. I figured that she’d never walk away, however rational it might be to do so, if that meant D.J. would be left behind. Had Anna fallen out of love with D.J., and with her role as the tragic hero in his life? I hoped she might explain, as she left the courthouse building. “Do you believe that D.J. is ‘mentally incompetent’?” I asked.

Her eyebrows knitted for a moment, but she didn’t give an answer.

“We have no comment,” her lawyer said.