On the eve of Parker’s anticipated movie release, the facts of the rape case resurfaced. Penn State settled that case for seventeen thousand five hundred dollars. The lawsuit claimed that the men hired an investigator who showed other students her photo, that they followed her around campus hurling sexual epithets, and that they made harassing phone calls to her room. In 2002, the Women’s Law Project filed a federal Title IX lawsuit against Penn State on behalf of the complainant, who had dropped out of school, for allegedly failing to protect her from harassment by Parker and his friends following her rape allegations. The case had created a campus rift in which black student groups perceived the allegations as racially inflected, while women’s groups supported the complainant. Parker was not disciplined, but, after the trial, he transferred to the University of Oklahoma. (Four years later, after Celestin had already served time in prison, his conviction was vacated because of a finding that his counsel was ineffective.)Ĭampus disciplinary proceedings resulted in Celestin’s expulsion from Penn State for two years.
#Nate out in public gay porn trial#
The verdicts mean that the jury concluded, from the trial evidence, that the men thought that the complainant was conscious, and that she did consent to sex with Parker, but not with Celestin. The trial jury acquitted Parker of all criminal charges, but convicted Celestin, who is a co-writer of Parker’s film, of sexual assault, which is a lesser charge than rape. Parker motioned to Kangas and Celestin to join him, Kangas said, and Celestin did, but Kangas chose to leave, because he “didn’t believe that four people at one time was-you know, it didn’t seem right.” The two accused men told the police and the campus disciplinary board that the complainant was conscious and actively initiated the sexual encounter between the three of them. if he thinks he’s being threatened now, to continue in his course of conduct and see what will happen.” At the 2001 trial of Parker and Celestin, Kangas testified that, from a doorway, he saw Parker on top of the complainant, while she was still and silent.
In a court hearing, one officer stated, “I told him. Then police investigating the case threatened him. The one other person who was at the apartment that night, Parker and Celestin’s friend Tamerlane Kangas, at first claimed that he had seen nothing. The two men insisted that she did consent. In 1999, when Parker was a nineteen-year-old wrestler at Penn State, he and his teammate Jean Celestin, both black, were arrested and tried for having sex with an eighteen-year-old white female student at their apartment while she was too intoxicated to consent.
It is hard to avoid the sense that, in creating his film, Parker was reflecting on the rape accusation for which he was tried fifteen years ago. In his film, the revolt is partly inspired by a gang rape of Turner's wife. Parker counters this fantasy by showing an act of sexual violence against a black woman by white men. The title is appropriated from the famous 1915 silent film of the same name, which is set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and in which black men (often played by white actors in blackface) are portrayed as wanting to sexually coerce white women. Parker stars in, wrote, produced, and directed the film, which tells the story of Nat Turner’s life and the slave rebellion he led in 1831. A poster for Nate Parker’s new film, “The Birth of a Nation,” to be released in October, shows a photo of Parker’s head hoisted in a noose fashioned out of a twisted-up American flag.