SAINT CHARLES, Missouri — Michael Johnson was finally getting his day in court.
Best known by his screen name, Tiger Mandingo, the black, gay, HIV-positive college wrestler with a chiseled body had been accused of infecting two men with the virus and of “recklessly” exposing four others to it.
Under Missouri law, HIV-positive people must tell all their sexual partners that they are infected, even if they practice safe sex. Johnson was accused not merely of keeping his HIV status to himself, but of willfully lying to his partners, telling them he was HIV-negative before engaging in what the prosecutor would call the most “dangerous” form of sex: ejaculating without a condom into the rectums and mouths of his sex partners.
As his lawyer tried to negotiate a plea deal, the 23-year-old Johnson rejected the idea, even after a friend visited him in jail and begged him to reconsider, and even though Johnson said he had spent months in solitary confinement, not even allowed to go to church. He was innocent, he said, and had confidence in the American criminal justice system. So on May 11, he was in St. Charles County court, where the judge and the lawyers began to choose the 12 jurors who would decide if he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
No one had shown up to support him. His own mother wasn’t there; she would arrive late and leave before his trial ended. His only ally that morning was his public defender, Heather Donovan, a petite white woman in a gray suit, and she stood up in front of the pool of potential jurors and told them that her client was...guilty until proven innocent.
Amid groans in the courtroom, the judge, Jon Cunningham, reminded Donovan that she’d meant to say the opposite: that her client was innocent until proven otherwise.
Things never got better for Johnson, who has become one of the most highly publicized targets of America’s controversial HIV laws, which make it a crime for HIV-positive people to have sex without first disclosing that they have the virus. When actor Charlie Sheen announced that he is HIV-positive last month, he said that at least two of his sexual partners had been “warned” about his health status. But another of his sex partners came forth to say the actor never told her that he has HIV, potentially opening him up to prosecution under California’s law.
Many prosecutors defend HIV laws as offering just punishment for behavior that can help transmit the virus. But critics say the laws unjustly place all responsibility on the person with the virus: While Johnson faced up to life in prison, his partners bore no legal liability, even though they all willingly engaged in unprotected sex acts during casual hookups with “Tiger.”
The soft-spoken former university student had shown up to court in a blue shirt and a bright red tie, but standing trial was his black, ejaculating, HIV-positive penis.
More fundamentally, AIDS advocates say, the laws are outdated and harsh. If decades-long sentences ever were appropriate, they say, they aren’t anymore, given the tremendous medical advances in HIV care. Indeed, many epidemiologists and AIDS advocates say the laws — which single out HIV — can actually fuel the epidemic by making people afraid to get tested and treated, and by fostering the dangerous belief that only the HIV-positive person is responsible for preventing transmission of the virus.
But what propelled Johnson’s case into headlines as far away as Australia was the volatile combination of race and sex epitomized by his own screen name, Tiger Mandingo. Many of Johnson’s sex partners — including four of the men he was charged with exposing to HIV — were white. And almost every news account featured photos that Johnson had posted on social media of his dark-skinned, muscular, and often shirtless torso.
That lurid fascination with Johnson’s black body carried over into his trial. Arrested and charged in an overwhelmingly white community where anti-gay beliefs are widespread, the gay, black “Tiger” never stood a chance. Over five days, as a procession of sex partners and medical experts, as well as Johnson himself, testified, what unfolded was a courtroom drama that on the surface pitted an aggressive prosecutor against a hapless public defender, but that in a deeper sense pitted Johnson against America’s deeply entrenched attitudes about race and sexuality.
A photo of Michael Johnson posted to his Instagram account.
Characterized by his sexual partners as being “very large,” “too tight” for condoms, and too big to fit in a mouth “due to his large size,” Johnson/Tiger’s penis was described in unusually graphic and at times almost absurd detail in police reports and later on the stand. It would even be shown to jurors in still images from a sex tape that he and one of his partners made. The soft-spoken former university student had shown up to court in a blue shirt and a bright red tie, but standing trial was his black, ejaculating, HIV-positive penis.
The Jury
Of the 51 potential jurors, only one appeared to be nonwhite — a female, African-American retired nurse — and all identified as straight. Most looked to be in their fifties or older. During questioning, about half of the would-be jurors said being gay was a “choice.” Only a third agreed that being gay was “not a sin.” No potential juror acknowledged having HIV. All said they believed HIV-positive people who do not tell their sexual partners that they have the virus should be prosecuted. When asked, not a single person said they had any distrust of the police. (The quotations from this trial are from the reporter’s notes. Following directions from the court, BuzzFeed News did not record the proceedings, and the court has declined to make transcripts available.)
When the prosecutor, Philip Groenweghe, made arguments from notes, he confidently lifted his eyes from his papers to make eye contact with whomever he was addressing. But much of the time, his arguments were so polished, and he seemed so confident in them, that he spoke eloquently and persuasively without notes. His hands went in and out of his pockets as he emphasized points, and he grabbed his lapels or took his glasses off with dramatic effect. He stalked the courtroom, never asking the judge for permission to approach the bench. He would drop his voice to sound reasonable while addressing jurors, but he sometimes yelled and jabbed his finger at witnesses.
Donovan, who appeared many years Groenweghe’s junior, clutched her notes, the papers sometimes shaking. Donovan routinely asked Judge Cunningham for his permission to approach the bench (as did the female prosecutor), and she rarely made eye contact with anyone. When she spoke, she often stammered and stumbled over her words. (Donovan did not respond to requests for comment.)
Groenweghe was backed up at all times by another attorney, Jennifer Bartlett, and an omnipresent paralegal, along with a rotating cast of four or five police detectives, assistants, specialists, and a victim’s advocate sitting right behind them in the first bench of the galley. All were dressed in somber business suits. Groenweghe’s boss, Republican St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Timothy Lohmar, is a rising attorney from a local political dynasty (the trial took a recess for the funeral of his father, a former judge).
Meanwhile, save for an assistant who would come into the courtroom once or twice a day for a few minutes to deliver papers, and who was often dressed in casual jeans and a blouse, public defender Donovan was alone — except for her client, whom she often did not acknowledge, even neglecting to greet him most times he was led into court.
Judge Cunningham, who had a soft, lilting voice, presided over the courtroom with a light air. He didn’t interject, and he would often pause in contemplation before overruling or sustaining an objection. But he usually ruled against Donovan.
Weeding out whom he didn’t want on his jury, Groenweghe repeatedly asked the kinds of questions (and heard the kinds of answers) about homosexuals one can no longer ask about black people outright. A handful of the younger potential jurors said positive things about gay people, but many used words such as “sick,” “wrong,” and “immoral.” Groenweghe later told BuzzFeed News he was trying to weed out anyone who was anti-gay — but none of the younger potential jurors made it onto the jury.
Later, during the actual trial, Groenweghe’s balding head and thick neck would turn almost red as he described the “lifestyle” of homosexuals. When talking about HIV and gay sexual acts, he spat out the words “semen,” “blood,” and “mucus membrane.” (He later said he was being “precise” about medical terminology.) But he spoke relatively evenly for nearly two hours during jury selection, using his time to build the central argument he wanted his eventual jurors to buy — and to screen out potential jurors who might not buy it: Whenever HIV-positive people don’t tell their sexual partners that they’re positive, that’s a crime, even if their partners didn’t ask or were promiscuous.
Donovan spoke for only about 10 minutes during jury selection, and brought up prejudice and racism rarely, such as when she asked potential jurors if they would have a problem talking about interracial gay sex acts.
When the jury was finally selected, it was made up of four white men, seven white women, and the black retired nurse, all proclaiming to be HIV-negative and straight. A couple of the jurors may have been in their forties, but most appeared to be in their fifties or sixties.
Chris Whetzel for BuzzFeed News
The Accusers
Once the trial began, it quickly became clear that the State of Missouri v. Michael L. Johnson was not a case of “he said versus he said,” but of “he said versus they said.” Each of Johnson’s six sex partners called to the stand testified that they asked Johnson before they hooked up if he was “clean” or STD-free, and that he'd assured them he was.
But their testimony occasionally contradicted what they had initially told police, sometimes on crucial points. The jury never heard about several of these discrepancies, because Donovan sometimes failed to pounce on them during cross-examination, and when she did, she was often overruled.
Even when the accusers’ testimony wasn’t contradictory, it revealed the complicated, murky decision-making that happens in sexual hookups. The sex partners all said the sex was consensual — they willingly engaged in sex that could transmit HIV — yet they often used passive language to describe how it was they’d come to have unprotected sex with Johnson’s “huge” penis on the black sheets of his Lindenwood University dorm room.
Dylan King-Lemons, a lithe young blonde man, was the person who first pressed charges against Johnson, prompting the prosecution to search for other alleged victims. And his accusation was one of the most serious: Johnson had not merely exposed him to HIV — Johnson had actually infected him.
It was not a case of "he said versus he said," but of "he said versus they said."
Lemons testified that he began his sexual relationship with Johnson on Jan. 26, 2013, when they were both students at Lindenwood’s suburban campus west of St. Louis. Lemons said he was regularly tested for HIV, always asked his partners if they were HIV-positive, and wanted to use a condom with Johnson. But, he testified, Johnson told him that he was HIV-negative, that the condom was “too tight and too small,” and that “they don’t make condoms in his size.” So, Lemons said, he agreed to have unprotected sex in the “traditional female role” and said that Johnson ejaculated inside his anus.
About two weeks later, Lemons testified, he went to Mercy Hospital with severe stomach pains. He was hospitalized twice, for a total of 14 days, according to his testimony and that of his attending physician, Dr. Otha Miles. Lemons was eventually diagnosed with gonorrhea and HIV.
The timing of what was said to be Lemons’ “HIV flu,” which can sometimes occur shortly after someone is exposed to the virus, and the fact that they both had gonorrhea formed the circumstantial basis of evidence tying Lemons’ diagnoses to Johnson’s. But no scientific tests, such as genetic fingerprinting of the virus, were performed to determine if Lemons’ strain of HIV was the same as Johnson’s.
In his opening statement, Groenweghe said Lemons knew Johnson had to be the one who infected him because he was the only person he’d had sex with in the prior 11 months. On the stand, Lemons also testified that he hadn’t had sex with anyone else in nearly a year — meaning he wouldn’t have had sex with anyone but Johnson from January or February of 2012.
But when he first went to police, Lemons said that he “had been able to narrow it down between two people” — Johnson and another sexual partner, a woman — “because of the time frame” his doctor had given him for the date he was likely infected, six months before his hospitalization. His relationship with the woman, he told Detective Stepp, lasted “from May 2012 until the end of November 2012.” He told Stepp that he had had sex with a total of six people in his life and that a state public health officer told him that all of them except Johnson had tested negative for HIV.
In the police report, a woman described as Lemons’ “best friend,” who was questioned separately, told Detective Stepp she believed Lemons had been dating a third person, about “8.5-9 months prior” to Lemons getting sick. It could not be determined if this person was one of the five people the state public health officer said had tested negative. According to the police report, the friend said that both the other people Lemons had been seeing were “very promiscuous.”
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