…nope. If you want to know what I was saying then I suggest you read what I said.
It wasn’t my scenario. It was your scenario.
See now I’m confused. Do I agree or disagree with what exactly? Do I believe Chloe Dykstra? Maybe. But since I’m more familiar with Chris Hardwick I’m more inclined to believe him. I’m guessing you’re just the opposite, which means I don’t agree with you. Unless you’re referring to UltraVires assertion which was obviously tongue in cheek that anyone can claim anything—it don’t make it true. That I’m also inclined to agree with. Are we clear yet?
…post 356. The post you quoted.
I’m sorry, but I don’t take assertions that I sexually assaulted someone as “tongue in cheek.” So for the purposes of debate I treated the assertion as deadly serious.
Are you clear yet? You weighed the evidence and you dismissed UltraVires assertion as “tongue in cheek.” You evaluated two points of view and you decided that you thought UltraVires assertion was untrue.
Thats how it works. Thats how it always has worked and that is how it always will work. Unless you are in favour of censorship then what-are-you-gonna-do? You are going to hear one-side-of-the-story then you will hear the-other-side-of-the-story. And who you choose to believe is who you choose to believe.
You can’t approach every incident objectively. You’re almost always going to favour one side or the other. The #MeToo movement was not about immediately condemning the accused, it was always about taking the victim seriously. Too often women are treated as liars, like they have something to gain from claiming they were assaulted. That has to stop.
If there is an incident, believe the victim until there is reason not to.
Now, you don’t have to do that, and we can’t insist or expect you to do so, but please allow those of us that do the option. Don’t stomp all over the people who believe the victim, especially if it’s an assault against a woman, in the name of supposed objectivity or “innocent until proven guilty”. It rings hollow.
Whoever is telling the truth will be judged fairly after due process, but as long as the victim is taken seriously from the get go.
I am involved in several cases where men are serving effective life sentences for sexually assaulting their minor children. If they are guilty, I hope they stay there.
But in each case, no other corroboration was involved. It was the alleged victim saying he did it, and the defendant saying that he did not do it.
So this whole idea that nobody believes women coming forward is absurd as evidenced by all of the threads on this board relating to sexual assault, and my experience in the criminal justice system. EVERYONE believes the accuser. Maybe in years past that didn’t happen, but it sure as shit does now.
And that is my problem with the system. Person A says Person B did it. Person B denies it. That’s all the evidence we have. If you are a juror, and have no knowledge of the veracity of persons A or B, how can you convict someone based on a simple accusation? Even if she cries and you believe her, you’ve never met a good liar?
I am equally sympathetic to the proposition that since all of these things happen behind closed doors that the accuser will likely be unable to produce corroboration.
But the end result cannot be that everyone who is accused is guilty. There must be a better way.
No, not everyone in the system believes alleged victims. All too many of them have stories about interactions with detectives who were manipulative when they should have been listening. It doesn’t make sense that juries nowadays are in lockstep believing based on a victim’s testimony because public opinion is not that extreme and some people are able to keep in mind what you know about the possibility of putting on an act. You haven’t provided data. It sounds based on a handful of anecdotes at best.
This is the truth about parents and society though. In sheer numbers, the vehicle people are most likely to victimize others by is parenthood. It is often near impossible to prove or a type of abuse that the courts can’t remedy, and there’s no easy fix for this state of affairs.
Why is this so hard to understand? False accusations are less likely than real ones. So, without information otherwise, an accusation is to be given the benefit of the doubt. And a denial is not counter evidence, because a denial of an accusation is more likely to be false than true.
From there, we can look at the actual evidence we have. We have a ton of people who knew the accused corroborating the behaviors the accused described, and many of them mentioned it at the time to others. We have the fact that her story has remained consistent with semi-anonymous posts made on another platform. We have the story itself which has tons of details that fit exactly how abused people feel, while admitting her own faults, rather than making herself look good. And she went out of the way not to name the guy, showing a desire not to vilify him, but fit with how she would need to cope. Put this all together, and we have little reason to doubt her.
So we went from giving her accusation the benefit of a doubt and checking it out to finding she has a very good case. On the other side, we have a denial and people completely getting wrong how abusive situations work. We have crowdsourced defenses, which are entirely useless, since the accused themselves didn’t come up with them. That always suggests you are coming up with a defense that isn’t true, and why I always say to never come up with a defense for someone before they respond. Don’t give away free excuses.
What is disheartening is how, even with cases like this that are this lopsided, we still get people popping in demanding that we give more weight to the idea that the accusation is false. You may claim “innocent until proven guilty,” but, due to how the accusation is framed, you are actually accusing the woman of being guilty of a false accusation. You let your empathy for the accused (or possibly lack of empathy for the accuser) override the evidence.
Asking for some bright line standard is as dumb as asking for a bright line that proves a murderer in court. It’s the sum total of the evidence. It requires dealing with ambiguity, not certainty, and processing that into belief and knowledge.
What we don’t do anymore is dismiss the accuser of lying from the outset, and need her to prove that she’s not. We don’t give more weight to counterevidence. We don’t ignore the decades of psychological research into abusive relationships and pretend normal reactions are somehow gotchas.
In short, we correct the imbalance that was there before, where we immediately disbelieved. To some, this looks like we believe everyone, because they are so used to the previous default, and thought they were being neutral. But they weren’t.
The neutral position is to start from what is most likely, and then build from there. In this case, it is “believe, but verify.” It is not “disbelieve and ignore evidence.”
You’re a defense attorney, right? So you’re only seeing sexual assault cases that the DA thinks are winnable? How much of the entire legal process of reporting sexual assault - starting with contacting the police - do you have first hand experience with?
I’m troubled by what seems to be a stance of treating allegations of abuse differently according to the genders involved, and according to whether the allegations of abuse concern sexual matters or not.
Let’s say a man writes and has published a statement alleging that Barack Obama behaved abusively toward him during his five-year employment by Obama. The man begins ‘Barack Obama systematically and regularly abused me for five years; here are the details…’
Some would have an immediate reaction of skepticism; others (who dislike Obama) might have an immediate reaction of glee. But my question here is, can we agree that in these (hypothetical) circumstances, there is a reasonable response to the statement? It might be some form of the following:
1***An attentive and open-minded reading of the statement.
2***An examination of the plausibility of the statement as a whole. For example: did the writer actually work for Obama for five years? Are the broad outlines of the overall claim (where the accuser says he was; where the accuser says Obama was, etc.), supported by verifiable facts?
3***An examination of the specific claims of abuse: Is there corroboration for any or all of them, in the form of testimony by others in a position to know the truth; video or audio; remarks made by Obama; or contemporaneous memorandums (in social media or elsewhere) made by the accuser?
4***An examination of what we know about both Obama and his accuser, with regard to abusive behavior and accusations of same: Are there other allegations of abuse against Obama that might tend to show that he has a tendency to behave this way? Has the accuser made similar allegations against anyone else? If so, how were those allegations received and treated? And so on.
What troubles me is that some in this thread are (essentially) agreeing that number 1 is appropriate in the case of Dykstra/Hardwick and other accusations made against men by women-----but then they go on (in effect) to label numbers 2, 3, and 4 as being abusive of women in and of themselves. The message seems to be that examining the statement in any way is exactly the same thing as silencing victims of abuse.
I disagree with that position. I think it’s patronizing toward women to take the position that it’s okay to examine accusations of abuse that don’t involve women and sex, but not okay to examine accusation of abuse made by women against men…apparently because women are too vulnerable and fragile to cope. Examining the allegations will keep all women silent and cowed and terrified.
And I have no doubt that this post will receive several responses that say exactly that. ‘Women’s accusations may not be examined because that would silence all women’ and the like. I will say in advance that I favor treating men and women the same way, as opposed to putting women in a ‘special’ class that deserve custodial care (such as children and some disabled and elderly people).
I believe that all accusations of abuse should be read/listened to with an open mind, and then examined as described above. I do not accept that this belief constitutes ‘silencing women.’
You’ve hit the nail in the head, Sherrerd. If anyone wants a claim of abuse to be taken seriously, that claim must bear some close examination. I don’t think the #metoo movement was about letting a few spurious claims through along with the legitimate ones.
This might have been covered up-thread, and if so, my apologies. But has anyone made the parallels to the Aziz Ansari case a few months ago? As in, one can fully believe the accuser, think the accused is a dipshit (based ore upon public persona than anything else), and still accept this as a completely consensual encounter/relationship and within the ‘margin of error’ given the vagaries of human interaction?
Clearly the accuser here suffered some sort of damage as a result of the demand of this relationship. That said, how many of us in perfectly sound and healthy relationships would like some of our sexual idiosyncrasies paraded in public? Especially if this impacted our livelihood?
Can you point to who has been saying that? As far as I can tell they have all been saying it ought to be investigated, but the default starting point should be to believe the victim. When new details emerge, who you chose to side with may need to be adjusted.
There are a number who have said I am attacking the victim by simply asking for more information, or even suggesting that she might be mistaken. I’m not sure where this automatic “believe the accuser” attitude comes from—it defies common sense. Listen to the victim, sure, but also show some sensitivity to the fact that there are always three sides to the story: yours, mine, and the cold hard truth.
You’ve said that she is “grandstanding,” and implied heavily that she was lying (“IF she is telling the truth…”)
That’s not “listening to the victim.”
Name another crime where the default assumption is not believing the victim first?
Thank you for your opinion on the purpose of #metoo.
Incidentally, as I see it the purpose of #metoo is to tell our stories and make our voices heard. You have dismissed this woman as grandstanding and implied she is lying. Don’t presume to tell me the point of#metoo.
You disagree? You think the purpose of the movement was to lose credibility by supporting bogus claims along with legitimate ones?
I disagree that you are in a position to tell us our purpose.
Keep reading, I said that our purpose is to make the voices of victims heard. You think this is a bogus claim. I disagree.
She told her story, explicitly to help other women recognize red flags and avoid them. You doubted her story, and implied that she was lying. Ok. I hope that some people read the article, realized they were potentially headed into bad territory and got out. If so, her story served a purpose.
That’s what I hope. I don’t know what you hope or want.
If you were simply asking for more information, or suggesting she might be mistaken, you may have a point. But that’s not what’s happening. For example, your first post in this thread you called her story “grandstanding”, concluded it didn’t sound illegal, and saying that to tell her story she needs to name the person. But illegality isn’t at issue here so that’s a distraction. And calling her story grandstanding in this context is pretty perjorative:
And just because things are framed in the form of a question, doesn’t mean it isn’t an accusation. Like here where you accuse her of trying to torpedo Hardwick’s career:
And here you imply she’s making a false accusation, saying that without evidence that is satisfactory to you, she shouldn’t make a claim at all - which btw is total bullshit. Lack of evidence doesn’t mean it’s untrue:
And here, you question her motives, while simultaneously saying that it’s not an attack on her. Except questioning someone’s motives is an attack - you are implying her motives are nefarious in some way:
Here’s what I said earlier in the thread and it continues to be accurate, if I do say so myself. It is what you and others are doing.