There have been various marches and meetings on area campuses this year protesting rape and lesser varieties of sexual offense. What has gotten almost no attention, however, is male-on-male rape. The arrest of K-State grad and former University of Missouri at St. Louis (UMSL) grad student Devonta Bagley in St. Louis last week may change that.
In September 2017, Bagley was charged with one count of aggravated sodomy and one count of aggravated burglary for his assault on a “unconscious or physically powerless” 20-year-old man at the Sigma Chi fraternity house on the Kansas State campus. Bagley was arrested in Manhattan on Sept. 23 and promptly posted $100,000 bail.
At the time, Bagley’s arrest got close to zero attention in the local or state media. Later that school year, K-State would witness protest marches against hate crimes that never occurred, but Bagley’s attack sparked no visible outrage.
Among the minimal conditions of his bail was that Bagley avoid the Sigma Chi house. His preliminary hearing was scheduled for March 15. Subsequent events in St. Louis prevented Bagley from making that hearing, specifically his arrest on March 13 for the rape at gunpoint of an 18-year-old male in a UMSL campus apartment two days prior.
To date, the UMSL campus newspaper, The Current, makes no apparent mention of this incident, not even in the relevant weekly crime report. By contrast, male-on-female sexual offenses at the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri-Kansas City had massive coverage in the student publications, even though no one offense was as egregious and as clear cut as the attack in St. Louis at gunpoint.
Bagley, a 2017 Kansas State graduate, is being held on $500,000 bail. He had been a grad student at UMSL in the fall of 2017 before being dismissed following an unspecified student conduct hearing. Bailey describes himself on Linkedin as “a recent college grad, having over nine years of experience and a successful background in customer service and sales.” He will have to do one hell of a sales job to get himself out of his current jam, and that isn’t likely.
The gun charge will negate the preferential media and judicial treatment shown to Bagley after his K-State offense. Whether the gun charge is enough to move the feminist ideologues on university campuses to action remains to be seen.
