(AllHipHop News) In conflicting stories that involve alleged sexual assault, racism, and nepotism, the son of former Def Jam Recordings president Carmen Ashhurst-Watson stands accused of raping a 21-year-old women at Sarah Lawrence College.
According to a report by lohud.com, SLC student and North Carolina native Annie Robertson claims fellow undergrad Garvey-Malik Ashhurst-Watson of Scarsdale New York forced her to have sex with him in September after a night of drinking with friends at a campus dance. She made the public accusation in a Facebook post that included references to “tying nooses” and “hanging your boys up.”
Ashhurst-Watson denies that he forced Robertson to have sex and believes the entire ordeal is an example of a black man being portrayed as a sexual deviant by a white woman playing the victim.
Ashhurst-Watson defended himself in a letter writing in part:
I am also a child of Hip Hop and a member of that community as well. My godfather is one of the founders of the Def Jam Recordings label. In advance of joining the Sarah Lawrence community, my mother was the president of that company. I come from the part of Hip Hop that rejects the misogynistic, ultra masculine images for which the genre has often been rightly castigated. I come from the longstanding progressive tradition of Hip Hop, from KRS-One, Chuck D and Q-Tip, to the present day voices of Talib Kweli, ?uestlove, Toni Blackman, Dead Prez and others. We have learned tolerance and acceptance of other cultures and we frown upon gender bias, sexual discrimination, class discrimination and of course, racism… I suppose that when a young woman of her background accuses a young man from mine, in the area of this country where she is from that should be enough to take the freedom of the young man for a long time… Of course, we all know that a young white woman unjustly accusing a young black man of inappropriate sexual misconduct has happened in the past (a history of which we were all recently reminded in a poem written and publicly posted by my accuser). It wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now.
Robertson, who is openly gay, says she offered for Ashhurst-Watson to spend the night at her apartment so he could catch a train back home in the morning. In her account he then initiated sex against her wishes.
“He started kissing me. I didn’t kiss back. I’m gay, I don’t kiss boys. And at that point I realized what he was doing,” said Robertson. She admits that she never told Ashhurst-Watson to stop until after they both were naked and he began performing a### sex. He eventually did stop and then went to sleep.
Ashhurst-Watson says Robertson told him before entering the apartment that she was a lesbian but “would make an exception in his case.” He claims Robertson then invited him back to her room and had consensual sex. He also denies being drunk or sodomizing her.
Ashhurst-Watson was arrested by Yonkers police and released due to lack of evidence and the inconsistent accounts. Robertson later went to a local hospital where a rape kit was performed 7 hours after the incident, because a female nurse was unavailable to conduct the medical test. The case is still open and charges can still be filed.
What complicates the situation even further is the fact that Ashhurst-Watson’s mother and former step-father both work at Sarah Lawrence College leading Robertson to suggest that their roles at the institution could be playing a part in what she sees as an injustice by the college and the local police.
“The Sarah Lawrence community as a whole is deeply distressed when individual members of our community are suffering or feel oppressed,” said the SLC’s vice president for communications and marketing Gerald Schorin. “But our responsibility as a democratic institution is to follow due process; to do otherwise would be to sacrifice the principles we hold so dearly as a College and a nation.”
Robertson is still unsatisfied with the current outcome of the case insisting she was assaulted.
“Consent is asking someone a question and getting a ‘yes.’ That didn’t happen,” she said.
