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28 Pace L. Rev. 683 (2007-2008)
Consent to Harm

handle is hein.journals/pace28 and id is 691 raw text is: Consent To Harm Vera Bergelson* The case of People v. Jovanovic, dubbed by tabloids the cybersex torture case,1 began in November 1996, when Jamie Ruzcek, a twenty-year-old Barnard student, reported to the po- lice that she had been sexually assaulted by Oliver Jovanovic, a thirty-year-old doctoral candidate at Columbia University.2 The alleged assault happened during the first live date be- tween Jovanovic and Ruzcek, which took place after weeks of their on-line conversations and e-mail correspondence.3 Accord- ing to Ruzcek, Jovanovic had hogtied her for nearly twenty hours, violently raped and sodomized her, struck her repeatedly with a club, severely burned her with candle wax, and repeat- edly gagged her with a variety of materials.4 Jovanovoic was prosecuted, convicted of kidnapping, sexual abuse, and assault, and sentenced to a term of 15 years to life.5 He was released after twenty months in prison when the appel- late court ruled that the trial judge improperly denied admis- sion of portions of Ruzcek's e-mails to Jovanovic, in which she discussed her sadomasochistic interests and experience.6 The * Professor of Law, Robert E. Knowlton Scholar, Rutgers School of Law-New- ark; J.D., University of Pennsylvania; Ph.D., Institute of Slavic and Balkan Stud- ies at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. This article will be published in substantially the same form as a chapter in a multi-authored book, THE ETHICS OF CONSENT: THEORY AND PRACTICE (Franklin G. Miller & Alan Wertheimer eds., 2009). This article is based, in part, and continues the discussion of problems re- lated to consent to harm started in Vera Bergelson, The Right to Be Hurt: Testing the Boundaries of Consent, 75 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 165 (2007). I am grateful to the participants of the Victims and Criminal Justice System symposium at Pace Law School for their thoughtful comments and to the deputy director of Rutgers Law Library, Paul Axel-Lute, and my research assistant, Linda Posluszny, for their massive help in researching this project. 1. Jovanovic v. City of New York, No. 04-8437, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 59165, at *1 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 17, 2006). 2. Id. at *4. 3. People v. Jovanovic, 700 N.Y.S.2d 156, 159 (App. Div. 1999). 4. Jovanovic, 2006 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 59165, at *4. 5. Id. at *9. 6. Jovanovic, 700 N.Y.S.2d at 159. 683

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