Royal Marine Corporals on Trial for X-Rated Punishment

A commando in the United Kingdom’s toughest and most elite fighting force, the British Royal Marines, told a military court this week that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder from doing something that many people do voluntarily on a regular basis, and even pay money for the opportunity: masturbating to gay porn. But enjoying porn of any genre as entertainment and being coerced into participating in sexual acts are two entirely different things, and the Royal Marine, whose identity is being kept secret by the British press, told the court that he was forced to commit the act by a pair of Royal Marine corporals, Philip Beer, 34, and Danny Foster, 30, who are standing trial in court martial proceedings, accused of coercing other Marines to take part in the gay porn masturbation ritual as discipline for coming up short on basic daily chores. A prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel Graham Coombes, described the punishment ritual, called “family time” by the Marines, as "an unofficial way of dealing with any professional failings that may have happened, ranging from not wiping up a coffee stain to not looking after troop equipment properly” One of the Marines, who says that the corporals forced him to masturbate while viewing gay porn on a laptop computer as the 42 other Marine commandos in his troop looked on, told the court that the ordeal caused him to feel “disgusted and degraded having to do it. It was massively degrading. I had no power against it. I could not say no." When one Marine refused to take part in the forced masturbation “punishment,” Foster told him “‘You fucking are!'," Coombes told the court. In addition to the forced masturbation allegedly inflicted by the two corporals, other forms of discipline—meted out in a nightly exercise meant to mimic the internationally popular game show Deal Or No Deal—were more brutal. One punishment known as “Newborn Baby” involved forcing a Marine to shave off all of the hair on his body, while in another, known as “Django” (after the film Django Unchained), Marines were beaten with a whip while hung upside down. The punishments were “imposed after a game of Deal or No Deal, which involved a marine standing at the front of the room picking box numbers like they do on the show,” Coombes told the military court. Deal or No Deal, a television game show that originated in the Netherlands, now airs in local versions broadcast in dozens of countries worldwide.