Lying to get sex may now become a crime

If you have ever lied to someone just to get them
to sleep with you, you better read this before you
land in prison...lol. There's a new bill that's
being looked into in New Jersey that would make
having sex with someone by lying to them a
crime. It's called Sexual Assault by deception.


For instance, if there was somewhere that a
burned lover could turn to if she discovered that
the man who told her he was childless not only
had a 10-year-old, but also a pregnant side
chick? That would be considered a crime if the
bill passes.
Or if the person they're sleeping with showed
them photos of a beautiful home he claimed to
own but in reality was living in his parents'
basement?
In other words, if a woman is duped into having
sex they could have the man arrested.

Mischele Lewis, a 37-year-old suburban-mom-
turned-activist is the inspiration behind this bill in
New Jersey.
This bill was actually introduced late last year to
make "sexual assault by fraud" a punishable
offense.

The bill defines it as "an act of sexual penetration
to which a person has given consent because the
actor has misrepresented the purpose of the act
or has represented he is someone he is not."

"I think it's important because trying to
deceive anyone for the purpose of sexual
gratification is just wrong," Lewis said.

"Every person has the right to knowing
consent. And before they consent to be
intimate with anybody, they should
absolutely know 100 percent who it is that
they are being intimate with.

"Whether it's as simple as say they slip off
their wedding ring and then they engage in
a relationship with someone, but the man
or woman has no idea that the person
they are with is married," she added.

"Lying to someone else for any reason is
never OK, whether it be [for] a job, a
relationship, criminal history, parental
history, marital history . . .. When did we
become a society that thinks it's
completely acceptable to lie to other
people on a daily basis and think that's
morally OK?"

Should it pass, such a bill would open up a whole
realm of possibilities for tricked lovers.
"On the one hand, we want law enforcement to
have the law on their side in order to go after
sexual predators who try to lure victims into
sexual situations through deceit," pointed out
Kathleen Bogle, assistant professor of sociology
and criminal justice at La Salle University.

"On the
other hand, many people lie to get sex and we
may not want to cast too broad of a net in
pursuing these situations through criminal law.

"Most people would agree that lying to obtain sex
is immoral, but only a fraction of those scenarios
should be punishable by criminal law," she
added.

She's right about not clogging up the legal
system.
But there's such a thing as principle. As Yale law
professor Jed Rubenfield wrote in a 2013 edition
of the Yale Law Review , "Rape-by-deception is
almost universally rejected in American criminal
law. But if rape is sex without the victim's
consent - as many courts, state statutes and
scholars say it is - then sex-by-deception ought
to be rape, because as courts have held for a
hundred years in virtually every area of the law
outside of rape, a consent procured through
deception is no consent at all."

Meanwhile, Lewis, whose dating horror story was
chronicled in the Daily News last year and later on
NBC's "Dateline," is recuperating from the shock
of discovering that the man she met on an online
dating site back in 2013 was a con artist.

Not only had the man she knew as Liam Allen lied
to her about his legal name, but instead of being
some sort of secret agent of the British
government, as he claimed, he had served time in
the U.K. for bigamy. He also had failed to register
as a sex offender and had been convicted of
indecent assault of a minor.

But back when she was falling madly in love,
Lewis, a labor and delivery nurse, knew nothing
about Jordan's nefarious ways. When she was
handing over $5,000 for a phony security
clearance, she had no clue that she was just
Jordan's latest victim.

In November, he pleaded guilty to third-degree
theft by deception and was ordered to pay
restitution. He's currently serving a three-year
prison sentence in New Jersey.