Seemona Sumasar Scapegoat
Seemona Sumasar’s story may seem incredible to most people, but I propose that it happens more often than we realize. It is a classic tale of an involvement with a psychopath. I’m particularly interested in this story because the psychopath I encountered also had a propensity for using the police to do his dirty work. I believe it is a common trait of psychopaths and one which needs to be considered seriously, due to the ramifications it presents.
Seemona met Jerry Ramrattan in the restaurant she owned. He introduced himself as a police detective, his first lie and one she believed.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/investigators&id=8510099
After they started dating, he moved into her home. She noticed that he lied a lot but didn’t think it was doing any harm. Still, when the relationship got rocky, she asked him to move out. He refused. Instead, on March 8, 2009, he bound her with duct tape and raped her. After she pressed charges, he was arrested and released on bail to await trial. He tried sending friends to her place of business to convince her to drop the charges. When she refused, he planned his revenge.
Ramrattan was not actually a police detective, he was a police informer.
Informants are commonly found in the world of organized crime. By its very nature, organized crime involves many people who are aware of each other’s guilt, in a variety of illegal activities. Quite frequently, confidential informants (or criminal informants) will provide information in order to obtain lenient treatment for themselves and provide information, over an extended period of time, in return for money or for police to overlook their own criminal activities. Quite often, someone will become an informant following their arrest. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informant)
This meant that he had frequent contact with the police, he knew the officers and they knew him. There was ample opportunity to network, establish relationships and, for a psychopath, to size up the weaknesses of the police officers or compromise their integrity.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/investigators&id=8508621
Ramrattan was obsessed with everything to do with police. He was an fan of “C.S.I.,” “Law & Order” and other television police dramas. Though he was not a police officer with the responsibilities which go with the job, he enjoyed wearing the mantle of authority and wielding the power of the police.
Ramrattan convinced two men and a woman to pose as victims who, in three separate incidents, were allegedly robbed at gunpoint by Seemona. The woman was so convincing in her accusations that she even cried and could barely speak about the incident. All three “victims” described being robbed by a woman who was impersonating a police officer. The descriptions, license plates and other evidence all pointed to Seemona as the perpetrator. Seemona was pulled over in May 2011 and arrested. She claims that the police who arrested her would not explain why she was being arrested. They would only say ‘You know you did it’ and ‘Just admit it’.
Seemona spent the next seven months in jail despite evidence that she was elsewhere at the time of the alleged robberies. The exculpatory hard evidence was ignored in favor of the psychopathic lies. Suddenly, a few weeks before the scheduled trial, one of the alleged victims came forward to admit it was a frame job. Phone records corroborated that Ramrattan had been in contact with all three of the “victims”. Seemona was released but not before her business failed and her home went into foreclosure.
On Wednesday, January 4, 2012, Ramrattan was sentenced to 32 years for raping and framing Seemona.
This story will next be examined in two ways. First I will point to evidence which indicates the involvement of a psychopath, including some things which might not seem obvious to the casual observer. Second, I will examine this story from the perspective of Girardian Theory.
ENTER THE PSYCHOPATH
From the beginning, psychopaths will associate themselves with power and authority. The psychopath I knew, would regale me with stories of his victories in the court room, over the police and others who had tried to accuse him. This is to inspire fear and respect. In Seemona’s case, Jerry Ramrattan lied explicitly when he portrayed himself as a police officer. He had the badge, the gun and the bracelets. To him these symbols were sufficient props to “prove” that he was an officer. He took her to meet “his boss” and had her listen while they discussed a case.
Psychopaths are always parasitical. In this case he moved in to her home and refused to move out when asked.
Ramrattan bound Seemona with duct tape and raped her. Rape is a classic tactic for dominating and shaming. In my opinion, he wanted her to be afraid of him and concurrently reduce her self-esteem so that she would be less likely to stand up to him. The shame of rape was supposed to make her compliant.
Sending people to her work place to try to convince her to drop the charges added pressure because it showed her how he could manipulate others to do his bidding. In a sense, it was a psychopathic tell about what he was capable of doing: convincing others to lie for him.
Criminal versatility is on Dr. Hare’s list of psychopathic traits. Ramrattan’s role as an informant showed that he could move in various circles both within the law and outside the law. This was the key to his power: His ability to take on different roles and show no anxiety when doing so. Psychopaths always lead double, triple or multiple lives. They compartmentalize, only allowing a peak into his other roles, as needed to maintain the mask. He could wield more power by manipulating those in authority, but without the responsibility that comes with authority. Psychopaths never take responsibility.
His ability to manipulate others to break the law and compromise their own integrity, is typical of the psychopath. He convinced others to join him in the accusation and planted evidence to create an entirely new “reality”. It is unclear how he convinced all the others to frame Seemona, except that he did promise the illegal immigrant, a special “victim’s visa” and he promised money to others.
The accusation Ramrattan chose to slander Seemona with are a classic example of a psychopath not only slandering his victim but also specifically accusing her of doing what he, himself, had done: Impersonate a police officer. This is the 180 Rule. Psychopaths are the epitome of hypocrisy, they project their own crimes on to their victims when they slander them.
The role of the police in keeping Seemona in jail for seven months is curious and questionable. The evidence of her innocence was there but they chose to believe the accusers over hard evidence. The judge at Ramrattan’s trial was quite clear, “You wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to suspect something was fishy,” the judge said. Her assertion that she was not told why she was being arrested, yet she was yelled at to “admit it!” is a red, red, red flag. This was high drama of the kind that psychopaths like best. Astonishingly, psychopaths are able to convince some people in power that using their power in “a joke” can be entertaining!
The civil suit should bring more to light on that. I certainly hope so.
Seemona suffered devastating losses. Her life was shattered, as was her faith in the legal system. This sadly, is the very classic result of an encounter with a psychopath.
The Lens of GT: Order, Chaos, Dissolution of Boundaries, Dual identities, Scapegoat, Identification of the victim by signs of guilt, Expulsion, Order.
The themes of order and chaos are introduced when Ramrattan slithered into Seemona’s life under the guise of an authority figure. He had presented an identity associated with law and order. The truth was 180 degrees the opposite, he was in fact, a criminal with a record. He was chaos misrepresented as order.
Psychopaths seem to have an affinity for symbols. The badge and the gun were props which symbolize his identity as a police officer. To a psychopath, the truth and the symbol of the truth are the same thing and completely interchangeable. This is mimesis in the sense of representation, rather than the mimesis of copying directly.
From the beginning he intended to fragment her reality so he could insert his own reality. She noticed the constant lies. She didn’t notice all of them, but she knew he was a liar, yet she accepted him anyway. Her boundaries had begun to dissolve. By accepting his lies, she was becoming more like him. Chaos arose when she struggled to remove him from her life. He raped her, a further dissolution of her boundaries and a contamination of his shame onto her. He begins to polarize the community against her by sending friends to convince her to drop the rape charges, likely portraying himself as the victim.
In the next phase, we see him convincing other people to portray themselves as Seemona’s victims. Girard tells us that Satan tempts others to mimic him. In this case, he says, “Portray the victim, as I do.”
I quoted the wikipedia entry about informants because it describes the setting for an informant as being one “which involves many people who are aware of each other’s guilt.” This setting is, of course, the perfect setting to use a scapegoat. Nobody has to admit guilt if they can find one fall guy to take the rap. What better place for Satan, the psychopath, to operate? And what better exit strategy to have, than the one in which you won’t be held responsible no matter what you do, because you are “the informant”? This is a job made for a psychopath.
In an amazing twist of reality, Seemona’s guilt was confirmed in the prosecuter’s mind despite the fact that hard evidence pointed to her innocence. Reality was usurped by lies and people just believed them. The police pointed to “the evidence” by saying that she had taken her friend’s car to Florida to change the registration after her sister bought it, proving that she was trying to cover up the crime. In other words, her actions prove she is guilty because she was guilty. As Girard explains, the scapegoat is guilty because he’s a scapegoat.
Finally, she is jailed and the police believe that order reigns in the community, when in fact, the robberies were created and resolved by the same psychopath who produced the scapegoat. This duality of roles, the maleficent and the beneficent, is how mythological gods are represented.
This story clearly illustrates the lengths to which psychopaths will go to fabricate realities and slime their victims with the guilt that they own and then convince others to join him in the scapegoating.
I believe it is particularly important to read the different accounts of this story in the media because they do shed different light on what happened. For example, this story describes, at the end, how the police reported Seemona’s guilt. The “facts” presented would lead the casual reader toward that assumption and makes me wonder if I shouldn’t question such stories more often.
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/long_island&id=7824369
http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local/long_island&id=8490557
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504083_162-20025155-504083.html
This video shows Ramrattan’s lawyer trying to blame everyone except Ramrattan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65P42Xxyf24
And… his linked in page says he co-owns Seemona’s restaurant. He ends it with: trust me ok?
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jerry-ramrattan/12/b15/2b3
The judge’s full sentencing here, is an excellent summation.
http://video.ca.msn.com/watch/video/judge-sentences-jerry-ramrattan/17y69ckug
This one is the one not to miss: Ramrattan is interviewed. In typical psychopathic distortion of reality, he says, “I believe there are 4 sides to every story. The Truth, The if, The maybe, and whatever else.” Psychopaths have no connection to the truth or to reality. Notice his confident and assured manner. They can project this manner because all their lies are equally real to them.
Copyright © 2012-2018 Skylar
OxD, I just finished reading a John Grisham book titled, “The Last Juror.” Of course, this is a work of fiction, but the accused, at one point, threatens EVERYONE in the courtroom at his trial, including the jurors. “Not finished” means that there is INTENT,and that it’s been verbalized and clearly heard. It’s a THREAT, and should be treated as such.
Trying to “prove” something that has happened is far more difficult than one would imagine. The first abusive exspath would commit spousal rape and literally DARE me to file a complaint. “There’s NO SUCH THING as spousal rape!” he would rant. Then, he would solidify the shame by stating, “Nobody would ever believe you. I’m a nice guy.”
I also hope that this woman heals and recovers from her experiences. And, I hope the rapist spends his time pacing his prison cell like the caged animal that he is. “Animal” isn’t even accurate because even animal predators have a reason for predating. Human predators? Not so much………..