Samantha Bee accused states of auditioning for Hoarders: Rape Kit Edition on Monday, with a scorching Full Frontal segment on the 400,000 rape kits that are sitting untested in police evidence rooms across the country.
Most rapists are serial offenders, Bee pointed out, not "college boys who were confused about consent that one time" — and testing rape kits can connect the dots between cold cases and bring those offenders to justice.
Yet not only are thousands of kits sitting around collecting dust, but some departments are actually destroying untested kits, even for unresolved cases before the statute of limitations runs up.
Destroying rape kits like this is legal in every state, Bee pointed out. Thankfully, a growing number of states are passing bipartisan legislation to clear the rape kit backlog — but some local officials are standing in the way, like Georgia State Sen. Renee Unterman.
The Georgia House unanimously passed the Pursuing Justice for Rape Victims Act, which would require timely processing of rape kits and seek to end the backlog by requiring the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to issue an annual report on how many kits are still waiting to be tested.
But Unterman was on the state Senate committee that blocked the bill. "If there was a problem ... I would have written the legislation," Unterman said in a news interview clip.
"Woman, have you lost your fucking mind?" Bee yelled. "Are you just pissed that someone else wrote the law instead of you? Or are you in the pocket of Big Rape? I don't know!"
Unterman added in another news clip that the state has already received a $2 million grant, which means the issue is being resolved, and that there's no reason to write a law "just because it makes you feel good."
Bee pointed out that the grant money will run out "long before Georgia runs out of rapists."
But at least Unterman "believes rape exists," Bee said, unlike Idaho Sheriff Craig Rowland. Rowland told local news that after interviewing alleged rape victims, police often find it wasn't actually rape — rather, "things went too far, and someone got scared."
"Things went too far, and someone got scared? That's what rape is!" Bee said.
After Rowland said the "majority" of alleged rapes were consensual sex, Bee let him have it.
"Listen, you giant pink hamster-fetus of a man ... you can believe women are lying whores all you want off the clock, but when you're the sheriff, you have to listen to rape victims," she said. "Otherwise, when the women in your county rise up and strangle you with your own stupid monogrammed shirt, it's going to be assisted suicide, because you're definitely asking for it."
Vox's Dara Lind explains that, unfortunately, a lot of police officers hold the same views as Rowland. There's a vicious cycle in law enforcement of believing that most rape victims lie, which makes police more suspicious of victims' stories, which leads them to take fewer stories seriously and spend less time investigating them. But a new independent body of research finds that only about 2 to 8 percent of rape reports are false, and police are slowly getting more educated about the real signs of a false report.
Bee concluded by pointing out that both Unterman and Rowland are running unopposed in the upcoming November elections.
