The Facts of the Jake Bakes Case

Jake Baker was a student at the University of Michigan.  He wrote a posting to alt.sex.stories in which he described abducting, raping, and torturing a woman.  The piece was fantasy, but he named the woman, a fellow UM student. 

A 14 year old girl in Moscow read the posting, and  told her father, a diplomat who was a UM graduate. Her father called the UM president, and the FBI and police raided Jake Baker’s apartment.  They found an email on his computer in which he’d written someone in Canada saying he’d really like to do to this girl what he’d written about. 

Jake Baker was arrested and taken to trial.  The charge was threat, a form of speech which isn’t protected.  For threat to be proven, it must be perceived as such by the victim. 

At trial it came out that the girl in question hadn’t known about the posting and therefore couldn’t have felt threatened, so the state lost the case. 

Later, they brought Jake Baker back in on a new charge of international conspiracy to abduct, rape, etc.  The backbone of that charge was the email Baker had sent to Canada.  Because the threshold for conspiracy is much lower, they did convict him on that charge.