By Sasha Gonzales
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A man accused of raping a woman on a Bronx rooftop allegedly said the victim deserved her treatment “because this is what they did to us during slavery,” according to court papers filed in the case.
Temar Bishop, 23, who police charged with assault with a weapon as a hate crime—along with rape, predatory sex assault, attempted murder, and other crimes—is accused of punching, kicking, and raping the 20-year-old victim on the roof of his apartment building on Alexander Avenue in Mott Haven on June 1, the records show.
Bishop, who is African-American, allegedly returned to the crime scene with a witness, to whom he remarked about the victim: “She was a white girl. She deserved it because us minorities have been through slavery.”
“This is what they used to do to us,” he allegedly told the witness, according to the criminal complaint. “This is what they did to us during slavery. They used to beat us and whip us.”
The victim suffered a broken nose and teeth, and vomited blood after the attack, the complaint states.
She was taken to a local hospital and is recovering from her injuries.
Bishop was arrested June 14 and ordered held without bail at his arraignment the following day, records show.
He is on probation for a previous robbery conviction, for which he served a little more than a year behind bars, records show.
Has Bishop himself released any kind of statements yet? And what’s the condition of the victim? Is she recovering? Can she give her own account? It seems odd that a month in the only word on a very shocking and controversial matter being used to stoke unrest on social media is secondhand from an unnamed witness whose story of being dragged to the scene after-the-fact and confessed to apropos of nothing is in itself hard to take at face value before getting to the claim of what specifically was said to be the motive. And how deliberately worded it is.