I suppose there's two aspects to it:
- whether what happened was morally wrong and if so, who was culpable
- whether Evans 'deserves what he gets' because he's an idiot
In the first aspect it looks like both McDonald and Evans are culpable in as much as they seem to be scumbags who conspired to deprive a woman of proper informed consent to sex. In my view they're most probably both rapists. However, the facts seem a bit murky as to how conscious and able to give consent she was at the time - for one thing, she herself doesn't remember the events.
I don't think drinking to the point of 'missing time' should lead to too much passing of judgement. Missing time affects different people for different neurological reasons. A friend of my sister's who fell three storeys and fractured his skull aged 14 can lose six hours of an evening by drinking a pint, but it doesn't stop him doing it from time to time.
In the second aspect, I don't really believe in punishing idiocy, but even supposing that Evans was somehow innocent of depriving the victim of consent - that he arrived on the scene ignorant of her degree of intoxication, that she seemed 'in control', that it was just your average harmless May 2011 multi-footballer gang-bang - he should've known that the situation he was in could potentially destroy his career.
All in all it's the sorry tale of an interaction between a group of dimwits in a dimly lit world with unacceptable standards of respect for women. Evans deserves his sentence no doubt, but I'd invite those enthusiastically supporting his punishment to realise that there are probably scores of pro footballers, playing now, who've been involved in similar incidents and gone quite unpunished. If Evans is a rapist then so are they.
