Marjorie Anna Stubblefield (/ˈɑːnə/; born December 3, 1969) is a former professor of philosophy at Rutgers University–Newark, practitioner of facilitated communication, and convicted sexual assaulter.
[2] Stubblefield received her PhD in 2000, and became "a prominent scholar in the field of Africana philosophy", and chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association's Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers,[2] and the author of a book published by Cornell University Press titled Ethics Along the Color Line.
"[3] In 2015, Stubblefield was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault against a man with severe cerebral palsy, which makes assessing his mental capacity with accuracy impossible.
At the time the investigation began in 2011, Stubblefield was the chair of Rutgers-Newark's philosophy department, whose professional work centered on ethics, race, and disability rights,[4] but she was subsequently put on administrative leave without pay and removed as chair of the philosophy department.
[5][6] The victim was identified as D.J., a 33-year-old African-American man with severe mental disabilities who cannot speak, has cerebral palsy, and is unable to stand independently or accurately direct movements of his body.
by family members failed to establish the ability to communicate, and Stubblefield was thanked but denied further access to D.J.
[4] After a three-week trial, the jury found Stubblefield guilty of two counts of first-degree aggravated sexual assault, the equivalent of rape in New Jersey.
"[11] In July 2017, an appeals court overturned her conviction and ordered a retrial on the basis that it was a violation of her rights to not allow her to use facilitated communication as a defense.
In 2018, Engber wrote:"From my position in the gallery, reporting on the trial, it always seemed to me that Anna was entrapped by the grandiosity of her good intentions.
As an academic, she devoted much of her career to social-justice activism and the philosophy of race and disability, warning in her published work that men like D.J.
how to type, using a widely disavowed method known as 'facilitated communication,' she believed she was restoring his right of self-determination: empowering him to take college classes, present papers at conferences and eventually express his longing for the older, married, white woman who had been his savior.
In 2018, he said:"For decades, the Syracuse administration has not only tolerated dangerous facilitated communication pseudoscience, it has even openly championed FC over clear and established science...