When Alleged Workplace Rape Becomes a “Close Call”

Doe v. New York State Office of Mental Health Exposes the Continuing Gap Between Sexual-Offense Doctrine and What the Law Already Knows About Supervisory Power, Coercion, Grooming, Trauma, and Victim Behavior

There is a sentence in Doe v. New York State Office of Mental Health, No. 1:25-cv-00912 (ECC/DJS) (N.D.N.Y. Sept. 1, 2026), that deserves considerably more scrutiny than an ordinary Rule 12(b)(6) ruling would ordinarily receive.

“Although it is a close call.”

The court used that formulation twice. First, it described as a “close call” whether the complaint sufficiently alleged forcible compulsion in support of a civil rape claim under CPLR § 213-c. It then used essentially the same characterization in determining whether the allegations sufficiently pleaded physical helplessness. The court ultimately denied defendant Matthew Canuteson’s motion to dismiss on both theories, correctly recognizing that the allegations had to be accepted as true and reasonable inferences drawn in the plaintiff’s favor.

The disposition was favorable to the plaintiff. The reasoning, however, exposes a much larger problem.

This was not a complaint alleging an unexplained sexual encounter between social equals followed by a later assertion of nonconsent. According to the pleading, Canuteson was the plaintiff’s direct supervisor and the Chief Diversity Officer of the New York State Office of Mental Health. He allegedly supervised her daily work, directed her professional activities, exercised discretion over her work life, began pursuing her sexually approximately one month after she joined the agency, sent sexually explicit communications and photographs, and communicated with her hundreds of times. The plaintiff expressly alleges that she responded to some of those communications because she feared that rejecting her supervisor could jeopardize her employment and believed she had to remain in his good graces.

The complaint then alleges two separate workplace encounters behind a locked office door. During the first, on March 17, 2023, the plaintiff alleges that Canuteson entered her office, closed and locked the door without her consent, and sexually touched her. She alleges that she believed he could physically overpower her, became frozen with fear, anger, and confusion, was virtually unable to speak or move, feared retaliation including the loss of her employment, and remained passive throughout the encounter.

What allegedly happened next should be central to any serious legal analysis. That same evening, the plaintiff says she told Canuteson that the encounter made her uncomfortable, that she would not submit to his sexual advances, that physical contact could not happen again, and that she wanted a normal professional relationship without a sexual component. According to the complaint, Canuteson said he understood and would respect those boundaries. Nevertheless, the pleading alleges that he continued pursuing sexual contact.

Then came May 3.

According to the complaint, Canuteson again entered the plaintiff’s office, closed and locked the door, kissed and touched her, lifted her dress, directly touched her buttocks and vagina, pushed her onto the desk, and vaginally penetrated her with his penis. The complaint alleges that she did not consent or actively participate, that she again became paralyzed by fear and confusion, remained silent, barely moved, and attempted simply to endure what was happening “as if she was a non-participant observer.”

At the pleading stage, those allegations were not subject to credibility weighing. They were to be assumed true.

And still: “a close call.”

That is the part worth examining.

Sexual-Offense Doctrine Is Not the Only Law Relevant to Understanding the Alleged Coercion

One reason the decision is so revealing is that sexual-offense doctrine and employment-discrimination doctrine conceptualize power differently.

The court was required to determine whether the allegations fit the Penal Law concepts incorporated through CPLR § 213-c. Penal Law § 130.35, as applied in the decision, required the court to consider forcible compulsion or incapacity to consent by reason of physical helplessness. The statutory definition of forcible compulsion focuses on physical force or specified threats producing fear of immediate death, physical injury, or kidnapping. The court correctly recognized that forcible compulsion is not synonymous with extreme violence and may be inferred from surrounding circumstances, including superior size and strength.

Employment law, however, has long understood coercive workplace power in broader terms.

Current EEOC regulations expressly recognize sexual harassment where submission to sexual conduct is made explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of employment, or where submission to or rejection of sexual conduct is used as the basis for employment decisions. The regulation further requires consideration of the record as a whole and the totality of the circumstances, including the nature of the advances and the context in which they occurred. 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11(a)-(b).

That is not accidental. Employment law recognizes that the official power of the workplace can itself provide leverage.

A supervisor may possess the ability to assign work, evaluate performance, recommend discipline, affect promotion, alter responsibilities, control opportunities, or terminate employment. The old EEOC supervisory-liability guidance—although superseded in 2024 and therefore not current operative guidance—captured the structural point particularly well when it described a tangible employment action as the mechanism by which a supervisor brings “the official power of the enterprise to bear on subordinates.”

That concept matters here even without relying upon the superseded guidance as present EEOC policy.

The complaint itself alleges that professional power affected the plaintiff’s behavior before either physical encounter occurred. She does not merely allege sexual communications and then ask the court to infer coercion after the fact. She alleges that she felt obligated to participate in sexualized exchanges because Canuteson controlled aspects of her employment and she feared what rejection could mean for her job.

That alleged dynamic is legally recognizable under employment law.

The difficulty arises when the same power relationship enters the sexual-offense analysis and suddenly becomes something that fits poorly within doctrinal categories constructed primarily around physical force and physical incapacity.

That is the disconnect.

The Law Cannot Artificially Separate Supervisory Power From the Sexual Conduct

People v. Moreno, 100 A.D.3d 435, 953 N.Y.S.2d 54 (1st Dep’t 2012), lv denied, 20 N.Y.3d 987 (2012), supplies an important conceptual bridge.

In Moreno, NYPD officers initially encountered an intoxicated woman because they were performing police duties in response to a 911 call. Through that official encounter, they learned where she lived, observed her vulnerable condition, obtained her keys, and acquired access to her residence. They later returned repeatedly while on duty and in uniform. Although the jury acquitted the officers of the charged sexual offenses, it convicted them of official misconduct.

The First Department rejected the proposition that the officers’ personal sexual objective severed the connection to official authority. Their access, knowledge, opportunity, and apparent legitimacy derived from police functions. What made their later conduct legally significant was precisely that public authority had furnished the mechanism through which the personal objective could be pursued.

That reasoning deserves broader application as a way of thinking about institutional power.

A supervisor does not cease being a supervisor when the interaction becomes sexual. The authority that brought the subordinate into the relationship, created access, structured dependency, and supplied the potential for professional reward or punishment does not evaporate at the moment sexual conduct begins.

This does not mean that every sexual relationship between a supervisor and subordinate is nonconsensual. That proposition would be far too broad.

It means that consent cannot intelligently be assessed by pretending the hierarchy does not exist.

The emerging social-science literature concerning hierarchical workplace relationships makes the same point from another direction. Hart and McLaughlin’s 2024 study identifies workplace hierarchy as creating opportunities for coercion and observes that a subordinate who becomes the object of a superior’s sexual attention may face adverse professional consequences whether she accepts or rejects that attention. Their broader point is that hierarchical sexual attention itself can place the subordinate in an impossible professional position because the relationship is never occurring on a completely level organizational field.

That proposition fits squarely with the structure of the Doe allegations.

The plaintiff alleges that sexual pursuit was intertwined with supervision from the beginning. She alleges that appeasement protected her employment. She alleges that resistance eventually produced hostility. And she alleges that the professional consequences intensified when she attempted to terminate the sexualized dimension of the relationship.

Those allegations should be analyzed as a course of conduct, not as disconnected snapshots.

The Complaint Also Raises a Grooming Question That Courts Should Be Capable of Recognizing Without Converting Psychology Into a Legal Conclusion

The complaint does not plead a cause of action for “grooming,” and the court made no finding that Canuteson groomed the plaintiff. Nor should an academic model be treated as proof that a particular person engaged in predatory conduct.

But The Psychology of Adult Sexual Grooming: Sinnamon’s Seven-Stage Model of Adult Sexual Grooming provides a useful framework for understanding why reciprocal communications, incremental boundary crossing, continued contact, and delayed resistance are not necessarily inconsistent with exploitation. Sinnamon describes adult sexual grooming as a gradual process in which trust, access, credibility, and progressively sexualized conduct can be used to blur boundaries before overt sexual exploitation occurs.

That concept is relevant here because the complaint itself alleges progression rather than a single isolated encounter. According to the pleading, Canuteson was the plaintiff’s direct supervisor, communicated with her extensively, introduced increasingly explicit sexual content, and allegedly created a dynamic in which she felt compelled to respond in kind because she feared jeopardizing her employment.

The literature therefore matters for a limited but important reason: it cautions against treating earlier flirtation, sexual messaging, or apparent accommodation as dispositive evidence that later sexual conduct was voluntary. Sinnamon’s model specifically recognizes that authority and trust can facilitate access and influence, including in professional relationships involving superiors and subordinates.

The legal point is not that the complaint proves grooming. It is that courts should not assume that outward cooperation resolves the question of coercion. In a hierarchical workplace relationship, the history of the interaction, the progressive crossing of boundaries, the employee’s stated fear of professional consequences, and the later assertion of nonconsent all remain part of the totality of circumstances.

“She Responded in Kind” Is Not the End of the Inquiry

The plaintiff’s own complaint alleges that she “regularly responded in kind” to Canuteson’s sexual communications. The court recited that allegation.

A superficial analysis could treat that as evidence of reciprocity.

The complaint itself alleges something very different: she says she responded because she feared the employment consequences of alienating her direct supervisor.

That distinction is fundamental.

Sexual-harassment law has never treated outward submission as synonymous with actual welcome. The regulation asks whether submission was made a term or condition of employment or whether submission or rejection affected employment decisions. 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11(a).

The entire doctrine of quid pro quo sexual harassment would make little sense otherwise.

If the law already recognizes that an employee can submit to sexual conduct because of workplace power without thereby converting the conduct into lawful employment behavior, courts should be extremely cautious before importing a simplistic submission-equals-consent assumption into adjacent sexual-offense analysis.

The concepts are not identical. Civil employment liability and criminal sexual consent involve different statutory elements and burdens.

But the underlying human behavior does not change because the lawyer changes doctrinal boxes.

A subordinate can outwardly cooperate because resistance carries perceived professional danger.

That proposition should not be controversial.

The Alleged Retaliation Sequence Makes the Power Relationship More, Not Less, Relevant

The complaint becomes particularly important after the May encounter.

According to the plaintiff, she increasingly attempted to restrict communications with Canuteson to professional matters. The complaint alleges that once she stopped engaging in sexualized texting and flirtatious conduct, Canuteson became confrontational and, for the first time, began criticizing her work.

The chronology then tightens dramatically.

On June 21, the plaintiff alleges that she confronted Canuteson about his hostile treatment. According to the complaint, he expressed remorse over the effect his pursuit of a personal relationship had had upon their professional relationship and acknowledged that it had made the workplace “toxic” for her. He allegedly promised greater professional support.

The following day, according to the pleading, he chastised her after she refused further sexual interaction, removed her supervisory responsibilities, and provoked her to announce that she intended to contact Human Resources concerning his alleged harassment and retaliation. Approximately one hour after she communicated that intention, she allegedly learned that Canuteson had represented to Human Resources that she had voluntarily resigned. When she denied resigning, Human Resources allegedly informed her that OMH was terminating her.

The complaint further alleges that OMH subsequently relied upon complaints about her “interpersonal communication” and an older email that Canuteson had previously said was not problematic, notwithstanding the absence of formal performance warnings or progressive discipline.

Those allegations have obvious significance to the pleaded retaliation claims.

They also retrospectively illuminate the alleged power dynamic surrounding the sexual conduct.

If ultimately proven, they would tend to support the plaintiff’s allegation that the fear of professional consequences was not imaginary. The person she says she feared rejecting allegedly exercised employment authority when the sexual relationship deteriorated.

Again, that is an evidentiary proposition to be tested, not a factual conclusion.

But it is precisely why context matters.

The Law Already Requires the Workplace to Be Examined as a Whole

Federal employment regulation specifically instructs decisionmakers to consider the entire record and the totality of circumstances when determining whether sexual conduct constitutes harassment.

New York law imposes parallel institutional duties designed to prevent precisely this type of workplace problem.

Labor Law § 201-g requires employers to maintain sexual-harassment prevention policies addressing prohibited conduct, complaint procedures, timely and confidential investigations, available remedies, sanctions against individuals who engage in harassment and managers who knowingly permit it, and the unlawfulness of retaliation. It also requires annual interactive training, including specific attention to conduct by supervisors and supervisors’ additional responsibilities.

Those mandates reflect a legislative judgment that supervisory sexual conduct is not simply a private interpersonal matter occurring inside a public or private workplace. It is an institutional risk requiring prevention, training, reporting mechanisms, investigation, and protection against retaliation.

That is particularly significant here because OMH is alleged to be the employer and Canuteson was allegedly its Chief Diversity Officer.

The irony is difficult to miss.

According to the complaint, the very official occupying a senior position associated with diversity and inclusion was the direct supervisor alleged to have engaged in the conduct.

The allegations remain allegations. But the institutional setting cannot reasonably be treated as background scenery.

Trauma Research Shows Why “Normal Victim Behavior” Is a Dangerous Legal Baseline

The second major analytical problem exposed by Doe concerns victim behavior.

The plaintiff alleges that during the first encounter she was frozen with fear, anger, and confusion and virtually unable to speak or move. During the later alleged penetration, she says she again became paralyzed, remained silent, barely moved, and experienced herself as a nonparticipant observing what was happening.

The court found those allegations sufficient to survive dismissal on physical helplessness, but characterized that conclusion as another “close call.”

The problem is that legal decision-making has historically been contaminated by assumptions about how a “real” victim behaves.

The National District Attorneys Association’s publication Victim Responses to Sexual Assault: Counterintuitive or Simply Adaptive? addressed this problem directly. The publication warns that conduct such as failing to fight back, continuing contact with an assailant, or delaying disclosure may appear “counterintuitive” only because observers begin with an assumed model of how victims are supposed to behave. It specifically cautions that describing such behavior as counterintuitive can itself reinforce the false premise that there is a normal or appropriate post-assault response.

That observation is critical.

The problem often is not the victim’s behavior.

The problem is the observer’s expectation.

The same publication explains that victims whose conduct departs from cultural expectations are frequently subjected to skepticism, with delayed reporting or continued interaction transformed into reasons to doubt the allegation rather than examined as possible coping behavior.

Research discussed in the publication goes even further. Some victims maintain relationships with alleged assailants, and some continue sexual relations afterward. The publication explains that such behavior may occur because victims do not immediately conceptualize or label the experience as rape.

None of this proves an allegation true.

That is not its function.

Its function is to prevent false negative inferences.

Failure to resist does not establish consent. Continued communication does not establish consent. Delayed reporting does not establish fabrication. Emotional flatness does not establish fabrication. Apparent normalization after an assault does not establish consent.

These facts may be examined, tested, challenged, and weighed. But they cannot responsibly be interpreted through stereotypes masquerading as common sense.

Rape Myths Do Not Disappear When the Decisionmaker Is a Lawyer

This is where the legal system must exercise particular self-discipline.

Rape myths are not confined to unsophisticated jurors. The NDAA publication specifically warns that stereotyped assumptions can be held by professionals throughout the prosecution process. It notes that sexual assaults departing from the stereotypical model—a sudden nighttime attack by a deranged stranger involving a weapon and obvious violence—are more likely to encounter skepticism.

That matters because workplace sexual assault often looks nothing like the stereotype.

The alleged perpetrator may be known.

He may be professionally respected.

He may have had an apparently friendly relationship with the complainant.

There may be flirtation.

There may be sexual communications.

There may be no weapon.

There may be no screaming.

The complainant may freeze.

She may continue reporting to work.

She may continue communicating.

She may attempt to preserve the professional relationship because she needs the job.

Those facts do not answer the ultimate question of consent.

Yet those are precisely the facts that can make legal actors uncomfortable because they do not conform to the culturally familiar rape script.

The NDAA publication makes the central point correctly: “counterintuitive” describes the observer’s perception, not an objective defect in the victim’s behavior.

That should be part of judicial literacy in sexual-offense cases.

Institutional Betrayal Explains Why Formal Policies May Not Translate Into Actual Safety

There is still another dimension.

Organizations often defend sexual-harassment systems by pointing to policies, training, reporting channels, and formal complaint procedures. Those safeguards matter. They are legally required in many circumstances.

But the existence of a policy is not synonymous with institutional safety.

The organizational literature describes “institutional betrayal” as occurring when the institution upon which a person depends fails to prevent misconduct, protects the wrongdoer, silences the complainant, or compounds the original harm through its response. In Sexually Harassed, Assaulted, Silenced, and Now Heard: Institutional Betrayal and Its Affects, Sarah Duffy, Michelle O’Shea, and Liyaning Maggie Tang describe workplace sexual harassment as embedded not merely in the dyadic relationship between victim and perpetrator, but in organizational structures, policies, practices, and power relations that can themselves perpetuate harm and silence victim-survivors.

Their concept of “reluctant acquiescence” is particularly useful. They distinguish active withholding of voice from passive, resigned silence produced by a perceived inability to challenge the status quo. They further explain how hierarchical authority, HR structures, supervisors, colleagues, and formal organizational practices can combine to produce silence rather than prevent harm.

That literature is not New York law.

But it illuminates an institutional question that Doe squarely presents.

What does a complaint procedure mean if the employee believes the alleged harasser controls her employment?

What does mandatory training mean if the alleged harasser himself occupies senior institutional authority?

And what does a right to complain mean if the allegation is that the employee lost her job immediately after announcing that she intended to invoke that process?

The Second Circuit has recognized in Duch v. Jakubek, 588 F.3d 757, 763-66 (2d Cir. 2009), that formal complaint mechanisms do not exhaust the employer’s obligations. An employer may still face liability where responsible officials know or should know of harassment and fail to respond appropriately. The court specifically rejected purposeful ignorance as a shield where circumstances raised the specter of sexual harassment.

Duch also contains an important recognition often lost in institutional investigations: victims retain agency concerning when and how to disclose harassment. The Second Circuit cautioned against presuming that harassed employees are incapable of making rational decisions to delay pursuing complaints for privacy or emotional reasons, while also recognizing that circumstances may become so serious that an employer cannot simply remain passive.

That is a considerably more sophisticated understanding of victim behavior than the assumption that immediate formal reporting is the benchmark of credibility.

The Allegations Should Be Read Longitudinally, Not Frame by Frame

This may be the most important lesson from Doe.

Sexual coercion occurring within hierarchical institutions often cannot be understood by taking isolated frames from a longer course of conduct.

Frame one: she responded to sexual texts.

Frame two: she did not physically fight during the first encounter.

Frame three: she continued working.

Frame four: there was another encounter.

Frame five: she remained in contact with the supervisor.

Viewed in isolation, those facts can be manipulated into a narrative of consent.

But the complaint alleges an entirely different longitudinal sequence: a newly employed subordinate; intensive sexual pursuit by her direct supervisor; sexual communications that she says she reciprocated to protect her employment; increasing physical boundary crossing; a locked office; a freeze response; an express direction that physical contact could not happen again; continuing sexual pursuit; another locked-door encounter; alleged penetration; another freeze response; withdrawal from sexualized interaction; deterioration in professional treatment; removal of responsibilities; an announced intention to complain; and termination.

At the pleading stage, that sequence had to be accepted as true.

The law should be capable of seeing the sequence.

Adult-grooming research emphasizes incremental progression. Trauma research emphasizes variability and adaptive behavior. Employment law emphasizes hierarchy and employment leverage. Organizational research emphasizes silencing and institutional dependency.

The common denominator is context.

Yet the criminal-law concepts at issue in Doe threatened to compress that entire context into narrower questions about physical force and whether the plaintiff was sufficiently “physically helpless.”

That is why the “close call” language matters.

The Problem Is Not Judge Coombe; It Is the Framework

The criticism should be precise.

Judge Coombe denied dismissal. She recognized that forcible compulsion need not amount to extreme violence. She credited the pleaded allegations concerning physical superiority, the locked office, fear, paralysis, and surrounding circumstances. She drew reasonable inferences in the plaintiff’s favor as Rule 12(b)(6) required.

The decision therefore should not be caricatured as judicial indifference to sexual assault.

The more serious concern is structural.

A federal judge applying New York sexual-offense concepts could look at this pleaded chronology and still reasonably believe that whether it alleged forcible compulsion or physical helplessness was close.

That tells us something about the legal categories.

The law is far more comfortable identifying coercion when it arrives as immediate physical violence than when physical control, institutional power, economic dependency, progressive sexual boundary crossing, fear of retaliation, and trauma responses operate simultaneously.

But coercion does not respect doctrinal silos.

Human beings experience all of those forces at the same time.

New York Has Already Recognized That Workplace Sexual Harassment Requires Institutional Prevention

There is a further inconsistency worth confronting.

New York requires employers to affirmatively prevent workplace sexual harassment. Labor Law § 201-g mandates policies, training, complaint mechanisms, investigations, sanctions, information concerning legal remedies, and explicit protections against retaliation.

New York also now requires covered public employers to operate workplace-violence prevention programs designed to evaluate and minimize risks of workplace assault. Labor Law § 27-b defines supervisors in terms of authority to direct and control employees and requires public employers to evaluate workplace risks and maintain prevention programs.

Section 27-b’s present form became effective after the 2023 conduct alleged in Doe, so it should not be used retroactively to characterize OMH’s obligations during the events alleged in the complaint. Its significance is instead prospective and institutional: New York law increasingly recognizes workplace violence and workplace sexual misconduct as preventable organizational hazards, not merely private disputes between individual employees.

The law therefore understands institutional responsibility at the prevention stage.

It understands supervisory leverage at the employment-discrimination stage.

It understands the significance of totality of circumstances in harassment law.

It increasingly understands trauma-informed victim behavior.

The remaining problem is bringing those understandings together when courts evaluate sexual coercion itself.

“Consent” Cannot Be Reduced to the Absence of Physical Resistance

This is ultimately where the commentary should land.

The hardest sexual-assault cases often involve not the absence of facts, but the presence of facts that do not fit outdated expectations.

A victim can be conscious and freeze.

A victim can communicate generally but be unable to communicate unwillingness during a traumatic event.

A victim can appease a person who possesses power over her.

A victim can exchange sexual messages without consenting to later physical acts.

A victim can consent to one act and reject another.

A victim can engage voluntarily at one point and revoke consent later.

A victim can expressly reject future physical contact and nevertheless later become passive when the conduct is repeated.

And a victim can continue working for, communicating with, or interacting with the alleged perpetrator because the economic and institutional consequences of immediate separation are themselves substantial.

None of those propositions determines whether the plaintiff in Doe will prove rape.

They do establish why stereotypical behavioral assumptions are an inadequate substitute for adjudication.

Due process requires proof.

It requires testing allegations.

It requires cross-examination.

It requires courts to distinguish credible evidence from unsupported accusation.

But due process does not require ignorance about human behavior.

It does not require judges to treat institutional power as legally invisible.

It does not require a victim to display theatrical resistance.

It does not require courts to disregard the difference between outward submission and freely given consent.

And it does not require the law to remain conceptually frozen while psychology, employment law, organizational research, and decades of sexual-assault scholarship have moved forward.

The Real “Close Call”

Perhaps the most important question raised by Doe is not whether Judge Coombe ultimately reached the correct result. She allowed the claim to proceed.

The question is why the legal system made the threshold question this difficult.

More than a decade ago, Moreno recognized that authority, access, vulnerability, and sexual purpose cannot always be separated. Employment law recognizes that a supervisor can use the official power of the workplace to obtain sexual submission. New York requires employers to train against precisely that exploitation and to protect employees who reject or report it. Trauma literature explains why freezing, appeasement, delayed disclosure, continued contact, and other apparently inconsistent behaviors cannot reliably be treated as evidence of consent. Grooming research explains how boundary crossing may be incremental rather than abrupt. Institutional-betrayal research explains how organizational power can silence a victim even where formal complaint mechanisms exist.

Those are not fringe concepts.

They describe different parts of the same phenomenon.

Yet when an alleged victim says her direct supervisor sexually pursued her, that she responded in part because she feared losing her job, that he locked her office door, that she believed he could overpower her, that she froze during sexual contact, that she expressly told him afterward it could not happen again, that he later locked the door again and penetrated her while she says she was paralyzed and barely moved, and that her employment deteriorated after she attempted to end the sexualized relationship, the law still struggles with whether those allegations fit its categories of forcible compulsion and physical helplessness.

That should not be dismissed as merely an interesting pleading question.

It is evidence of a deeper institutional problem.

The legal system has become increasingly sophisticated about defining sexual harassment. It has become more sophisticated about employer liability. It has become more sophisticated about retaliation. It has become more sophisticated about trauma.

It remains considerably less sophisticated when all of those concepts converge in a single alleged sexual act.

That is the real “close call” exposed by Doe: whether the law will continue forcing modern understandings of sexual coercion into categories developed around an older and narrower conception of what rape is supposed to look like.

The answer matters far beyond this case.

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