Speier Calls on Marines to Shut Down Facebook Page Denigrating Women

Rep. Jackie Speier has fired off a letter to the Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, bringing his attention to what she called a "disturbing Facebook page" that includes many negative comments and photos denigrating women in the U.S. Marine Corps.

One photo on the page shows a woman's breasts and her fingers flipping someone off in an image that is labeled "F'N Wook." Another shows a female Marine putting a colleague in a choke hold with the words, "This is my rape face," as shown below.

Speier, a Democrat from San Mateo in the San Francisco Bay Area, said she did not know who the Facebook page belonged to. She said she was tipped off to it by a whistleblower.

Speier's letter (PDF) and the accompanying Facebook screen grabs were dated May 8, and sent to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Commandant of the Marine Corps General James Amos and Principal Deputy Inspector General Lynne Hal Brooks.

Her letter comes amid a national uproar over sexual assaults in the military following a Pentagon report this week saying that 26,000 military members were sexually assaulted last year.

"Many of the pictures imply women only advance professionally by performing sexual favors," Speier wrote. "And otherwise promote the idea that women are inferior and only useful as sexual objects and sandwich makers."

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In a statement on behalf of the Marines received by e-mail on Wednesday, Capt. Eric Flanagan said that in general, "We have identified active Marines doing inappropriate posting on social media and they have been punished." 

In some cases, Flanagan said that Marines have faced "office hours" as "non judicial punishments" for unsavory comments posted online.

He said the men have been both active duty and reserve Marines and have been referred to commands for "appropriate action," though he was not specific about what that action was. Flanagan's comments were not necessarily made regarding the "F'N Wook" page, specifically highlighted by Speier.

Flanagan also issued some general information about the Marines and their social media policies. Marines are responsible for all content they publish online, for example, and there is "no tolerance for discriminatory comments," he said.

Violations of federal law and Department of Defense regulations or policies may result in disciplinary actions, which includes posting "any defamatory, libelous, abusive, threatening or ethnically hateful or otherwise offensive or illegal content," Flanagan said.

When the Marines do receive a complaint regarding derogatory comments made online, Flanagan said that his military branch has notified companies such as Facebook about it.

However, Flanagan said in an e-mail that "there are difficulties" in discovering which Marine posted a specific comment because people use fake accounts and pseudonyms. Social media sites, he said, are not obligated to divulge personal information to the Marines.

His statement added that the Marine Corps has been dealing with social media complaints "over the past ten years."

According to Speier, Amos has been aware of this specific Facebook page and monitoring it for three years. And despite the monitoring, the "cyber retaliation against those who complain about the website's content continues unabated," Speier wrote.

On her website, Speier called for "Hagel and Marine Leadership to Respond," and said that this type of vulgar "humor" seems to "encourage sexual assault and abuse."

Speier has worked to end what she calls an "epidemic of rape and sexual assault in the military," and has authored three pieces of legislation to change the military's justice system's treatment of cases of rape and sexual assault.

NBC Bay Area's Joe Inderhees and Cheryl Hurd contributed to this report.

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