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1. Assault with a sexual motive =/= "Sexual Assault" in most jurisdictions

2. This isn't tantamount to rape. It's definitely in the ball-park and it's done by the same kind of people so it should be treated very seriously, especially as a "gateway offense" to prevent rape down the line, but let's not minimize rape by exaggerating non-rape things.

Under Texas law, it's indecent assault, a misdemeanor for a first offense in most cases. It's similar in Pennsylvania. Those are two of the states where incidents in the article took place.

I'm generally against the recent trend to increase the severity of existing crimes, but I will make an exception here: this should be a felony.

tantamount to rape

I miss when words had meanings and victims were respected.

Rape has a legal definition that this does not meet.

This is not "rape". Let's stay sane please.

But Dollar Tree never produced any footage, never apologized for what happened to her and, when challenged in a lawsuit alleging negligence and failure to provide a secure environment, argued that MR was not entitled to damages under Texas law because she had suffered no physical harm. Without video footage, police and private security officers at the River Oaks shopping center were unable to pursue an investigation.

MR’s lawyers counter that the relevant legal standard is not, in fact, physical harm but “offensive contact”. And, in a testy exchange with a lawyer for Dollar Tree during a sworn deposition, MR vigorously challenged the notion that she had suffered no damage. She described how the incident had rocked her confidence, affected her relationships and made her afraid to go out after dark. “My life is not the same since that incident,” she said. “I totally was caught off guard. I didn’t have a chance to defend myself.”

When the Dollar Tree lawyer asked her what she wanted out of the lawsuit, she replied: “You [have] to take accountability of what is happening in your stores. You’re causing pain to people. I don’t know if it’s because of the bottom line, or what, but it’s happening and you guys need to stop it.”

In its statement to the Guardian, Dollar Tree said it was committed to effective safety and security. “Our efforts include ongoing safety education, regular policy reviews, risk assessment and mitigation activities, investments in physical security measures, and collaboration with local law enforcement,” the spokesperson said.

With MR’s lawsuit, though, the company has attempted to limit the introduction of evidence from assaults in other states and other Dollar Tree outlets as a matter of legal strategy. In an August 2025 email to MR’s lawyers, company attorney Wesley Welmaker described the assault on MR as a “one-off event at Dollar Tree in the River Oaks shopping center”.

In response, Greenberg told the court that MR’s assault was “anything but a ‘one-off event’” and pointed to 10 cases of sexual assault at Dollar Trees she had documented over the previous year and a half, six of them involving ejaculation.

A year later, with the lawsuit still mired in preliminary motions and no trial date in sight, Greenberg’s research team has dug up 63 officially documented sex crimes in all – fewer than five a year before 2020 and as many as 18 a year since the December 2023 attack on MR. Sixteen involved masturbation or ejaculation. The company’s attempts to disavow this, Greenberg said in an interview, amounted to “a plethora of stupid arguments” and only underlined what she saw as a pattern of poor corporate governance.

Dollar Tree, its former sister company Family Dollar (which it sold last summer), and its rival Dollar General have all been under a microscope after multiple reports in recent years of safety violations, improper storage of drugs, rat infestations, poor security, shoplifting and other crimes including sexual assault that have occurred in its stores. Predominantly, the stores serve low-income neighborhoods where there are few alternatives, and critics often accuse them of preferring to endure some degree of criminal behavior occurring in stores and weather fines from the federal government’s workplace watchdog, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), than pay for fully functioning security systems and boost staffing.

You could've read the article to know that it's an uphill battle to get these men punished for these crimes.