In 2015, Stubblefield was convicted and sentenced to 12 years in prison for the aggravated sexual assault of Derrick Johnson, a 33-year-old severely mentally disabled black man with cerebral palsy who is unable to speak.
In 2009, Stubblefield convinced Derrick's parents to let her use FC to potentially unlock Derrick's ability to communicate. This method involves a "facilitator" holding the hand or arm of a non-speaking person to help them type out their thoughts on a keyboard.Using FC, Stubblefield believed that Derrick was not only capable of communication but also quite brilliant. With her assistance, Derrick was supposedly composing poetry and writing essays for university courses. Furthermore, she convinced herself that Derrick loved her and was seducing her. And she loved him too.This culminated in Stubblefield raping Derrick, deluded into believing that he had consented through facilitated communication.
Peer-reviewed studies using simple blinding techniques have unequivocally demonstrated that FC is pseudoscience. For instance, when both the non-speaking person and the facilitator were shown the same picture of a common object, such as a shoe, the facilitator would correctly type out "s-h-o-e." However, when shown different images, the typed word invariably matched what the facilitator, not the non-speaking person, had seen.
