I think I see the issue: SlackerInc probably thinks that the problems of rape victims being by default disbelieved, mocked, and pressured to shut up about their assault are generally in the past.
Actually, I know I’m right; my mom went to Stanford.
Funny, LHOD: you seem to be contravening your vow to deprive me of conversational oxygen. I guess you can’t help yourself! 
All right then, let’s look at the evidence for and against my friend Tom’s guilt, above and beyond my testimony as a character witness that he would never do such a thing.
For:
Someone called an anonymous police tip line to accuse Tom of raping her on a particular Saturday night—March 25, 1995.
Against:
Tom rode with me to Kansas City (hundreds of miles away) on Friday, March 24, where we met up with my high school friends and attended the NCAA Regional Semifinals on Friday night and the Regional Final on Sunday. (There was a complication that is one of my favorite anecdotes, if anyone is curious to hear it; it does not however affect the basic facts of the case.) We stayed in a Kansas City hotel, and did not return to the college town where the rape was alleged until Sunday night. Saturday night, we were all together all night, and didn’t go to sleep until after the bars closed, maybe 3 a.m.
So unless he stole one of our cars the moment we were all asleep, drove four hours to commit rape at 7 a.m. (which the victim then inexplicably described as Saturday night), and raced back to sneak into the hotel room just before anyone woke up, then pretended to have gotten a full night’s sleep…I’m gonna go ahead and say the allegation was false. (What does Ockham’s Razor tell you now?)
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So an anonymous tip in which he had a very easily provable alibi ruined his life?
Yes. As Jonathan Swift wrote, “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”
Tom was a good student, with high grades and test scores, which allowed him to get admission to the selective university we went to. But he was in a precarious and vulnerable position, as nearly any social scientist or counselor would tell you, based on his background.
He came from a large, poor family in the struggling Rust Belt city of Decatur Illinois, and was the first person in his family to attend college, so far as I know. His peer group in Decatur was what would be colloquially termed a “bad crowd”. Tom had told me tales of various misdeeds they had gotten up to in his teen and even preteen years: nothing violent, but stuff like shoplifting and burglary. He very much felt like he had “gotten out” by going to college.
The cops went around questioning people in his dorm before they got to me (I lived off campus). So far as I know, once they called my high school friends to confirm the alibi, they stopped pursuing the case but did not go back to the dorm to tell anyone they had previously questioned that the allegation was false.
Tom immediately felt like a pariah, and it was not just his being self-conscious (although that would have been bad enough). I not only saw the looks people gave him at parties, I heard directly from them when he was not with me: “Dude, you realize your friend’s a rapist?!?” When I would explain the alibi (which unfortunately did not involve anyone else THEY knew, since it was my high school friends from Minnesota), they looked at me very skeptically like I just made up some bullshit to protect my friend. I was increasingly getting the sense that the “taint” of rape, or rape enablement at least, was getting put on me as well.
This was too much for Tom to take. He rode out the semester, but did not return to school in the fall. I went to visit him periodically in Decatur, and he promised me he was going to go back to school, maybe somewhere local—he just needed to sort out the admissions paperwork, request transcripts, apply for financial aid, and so on. (In retrospect, of course, I regret not going and getting the paperwork and sitting him down to do it myself; but during our relatively scarce time together, we just wanted to hang out and have fun.)
The last time I saw him, he was psyched to show me he had moved out of his parents’ house and in with his friends, whom he introduced me to. They sort of seemed like dirtbags, but I didn’t remotely realize until later how bad they were.
The next time I came through Decatur, I tried calling him but got no answer. I also tried his family home, but his brother hadn’t seen him. From later reconstruction of the timeline based on newspaper accounts and my own best recollection of what day that was, I think I was there either the same day he died, or within the next day or two afterward, before his family knew he was missing (they didn’t know he was dead until weeks afterward).
The next time I came through looking for him, a few months later, one of Tom’s relatives gave me the bad news, prefaced by “you mean you didn’t hear about…?” Even without registering, this page from the local paper will give you an idea of what happened (just scroll through the OCR text).
Recall that I said the false allegation “ruined his life and indirectly led to his death”. I think that’s a fair summation of what happened.
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That sucks, but your characterization sounds like an extreme exaggeration to me. False rape allegations are bad (assuming this was malicious rather than a mistaken identity). But I don’t see what this event has to do with anything broader – it doesn’t appear that the police did anything wrong by investigating it and asking questions. I’ve seen nothing to indicate that maliciously false allegations of rape are anything more than incredibly rare, and I know multiple women personally (and of course have heard stories of many, many more) who were raped or sexually assaulted and the rapists/assaulters got away with it.
Sad story, sound s more like it should be in controversial encounters thread, with this:
Based on an anonymous tip, the cops came and “questioned” random people in his dorm about a rape.
I assume they were going around to all the students asking, “Did you know that Tom raped some girl that didn’t give us her name?”
SlackerInc exaggerating? That sounds so unlike him.
Yeah, it sounds like the cops did what they would’ve done even in a perfect world: investigate a claim of a crime being committed. Other than the accuser (whose identity and motives you still don’t know, right?) not making the accusation at all, assuming it was indeed false, what exactly should have been done differently that has anything to do with the subject being discussed?
Is that how investigations usually take place though? It seems like the first person they would contact would be the accused, and ask if he has any alibis, then contact them.
The going to the dorm and “investigating” by telling all the students that Tom was a rapist sounds like some pretty shoddy police work to me. Maybe that is standard protocol, but is sounds like Slacker went to a college with the shittiest campus police in existence.
If you just jumped into the thread, you might well wonder what the actual fuck any of this has to do with the Black Panther movie. It’s certainly a tangent of a tangent (of a tangent?), but at every step along the way it did relate to something we were talking about, and I didn’t continue to talk about it except in response to questions or challenges posed by others.
Anyway, you have likewise asked a question. My answer: the cops should not be questioning people based solely on an anonymous tip, especially with an allegation that can be (again, despite what TWC says) extremely damaging to someone’s reputation. And we should not be culturally encouraging a standard of “believe women (who make uncorroborated accusations)” but rather promoting one of “presume innocence until proven otherwise”.
Yes, that means many guilty people go unpunished, whether criminally or socially. I vastly prefer that over a society where we throw a few innocent people under the bus as we sweep up the guilty.
BTW, what the hell do you mean by “assuming it was indeed false”? You really think he pulled that James Bond move I snarkily described (stealing a car and driving eight hours round trip to commit a post-dawn rape on Sunday that was described as “Saturday night”)? Come ON.
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I think the consensus here is that you have no idea what you’re talking about, SlackerInc, on any topic you care to name. You enjoy sharing your little anecdotes, you enjoy name dropping, but you really have no idea of what you are talking about on any matter you chose to opine. I do more than suspect that at this point, it is simply you spouting off to be as casually outrageous as humanly possible in Trumpian fashion. If so, enjoy yourself.
Your pig-ignorance is apparent to even casual thread viewers, so I’m fine with you sharing it for the world to see- because in doing so, you actually bring out the best in some posters here in smacking you down.
But… the purpose of an investigation is to GET corroboration. Demanding that crime victims come to the police with their case already made is ludicrous. By what percentage do you think your preference, enshrined into law, would reduce the number of sexual assaults rep, much less prosecuted? Do you have any idea how heavily discouraged it is to begin with? I suspect not, thus my theory earlier.
As for the other thing, I was trying to be fair. After all, I don’t have any, ahem, corroboration besides your word about a single thing that happened.
We could all just doubt everyone’s reports of personal experience, but that kind of stifles the conversation. I didn’t doubt the report from the person who investigates camppus rapes (although I do, as I say, think the definition of rape on campus has become overly broad).
Besides, if you’re going to be like that about it, you don’t have corroboration that he was accused of rape either! Isn’t it kind of a package deal?
And you do have corroboration of one part of the story: the circumstances of his death. Unless you are one of those people who doesn’t believe the mainstream media.
I missed this before, but I generally agree with you—except these were the city’s police (a Missouri town with less than 20K population). The same police department who a few years later (this time in concert with the county sheriff’s department) hospitalized and nearly killed a visitor from out of town, a black guy who hadn’t done anything wrong except annoy them by calling them over and over.
But not long after that, they got a new chief who had been high up in the Boulder police department, and I think they are a lot better now—for instance, I heard via Facebook that they are actually actively seeking money for body cameras.
But yeah: imagine if they had just talked to him, he told them where he had been, they talked to me and my friends for corroboration, and no one else would have had to hear about it.
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What we have is just corroboration of the death of some guy named Thomas in some junkie-related shenanigans. That doesn’t actually show that this is, in fact, your friend Tom or corroborate any of the rest of your story.
Having said that, the veracity of the story is irrelevant. Like, when I said “True story, bro” it wasn’t to imply that you were lying about Tom’s case. It was to say that your anecdote has less than zero bearing on whether the reality of the existence of rape culture vs false rape accusations - it was just one story amongst billions. Most everyone has a sad rape story. Yours happens to run counter to the many, many millions of rape victims who weren’t believed or worse. Big whoop.
This is the second time you’ve snidely made this little aside about rape not actually being rape. I am curious as to what you consider ‘not rape’ among the cases I have worked. 1) Feeding someone alcohol to the point they have to be carried, and having sex with them while they are passed out and/or while they are hunched over the toilet vomiting? 2) having consensual sex, and then letting your buddies ‘take a turn’? 3) taking naked pics of someone, then speculating on where those pics would end up if she didn’t do what everyone thought she was already doing? 4)physically removing someone to another space and not letting them leave, not ever verbally threatening, but using the size differential to make the threat for them? 5) deciding that since someone consented to a blowjob, that meant that everything else was allowed, whether they liked it or not? I am just curious.
The rules have changed, and for the better. People don’t have to be tricked, drugged, or otherwise coerced into sex. And if you think that’s still the game, you don’t have a place in college, and I’d rather you be occupying a cell. But I’ll settle for you not being in college.
If every guy has a ‘falsely accused’ story and every girl has a ‘I’ve been assaulted and nothing was done’ story, i know which one is my priority to reduce the number of.
And indeed if the story is remotely accurate it appears to be “shoddy police work” that caused more of the problem than the original accusation.
All I know is that Slacks has managed to turn this thread into one about the knob at the end of his staff. I liked Black Panther much, much better than that.
It’s very much in the style of the OP. If you want more on-topic discussion (where even **SlackerInc ** is behaving) the Cafe is that way ->
Stonebow, to satisfy your curiosity:
(1) Mostly sounds like rape, but the scenario after “and/or” sounds different from the rest so I’d need more info.
(2) More info: what was the woman’s reaction to this “letting” in the moment?
(3) Sounds like soe kind of crime, extortion at least.
(4) If they are “not letting them leave”, that’s also a crime. What did the victim do to try to leave or stop what was happening?
(5) “Whether they liked it or not”: if she made it known she didn’t like it, then that’s rape.
What I object to is “enthusiastic consent” not just being “best practices” but the legal minimum. Begging someone to have sex with you and getting grudging agreement (no, asswipes, I’ve never done this) is not rape. Neither is it rape if she consents when drunk and the next day thinks “ew, I’d never have done that sober”. Nor is it rape if the man is “pushing the action”, elevating it from making out to sex without asking or being given verbal assent, but also without the woman saying “no”, “stop”, or physically resisting (and I don’t mean it has to be an all-out fight: just grabbing the guy’s hand or trying to get up off the bed is sufficient).
It’s also not rape if you think he really likes you but then after sex is over he calls you a dirty whore or something and now you feel bad. (Again: no, not something I did or would do.). If you were blackout drunk and don’t remember consenting, that’s not rape: blackout does not mean passed out, and you may have been enthusiastic at the time but now don’t remember. You may have been raped, but you have no evidence; so legally there is no crime there unless someone else witnessed it (unlikely).
Which brings up maybe the hardest part to accept: even in clear-cut, non-ambiguous situations where the metaphysical truth is that it was rape, it often should not legally be rape because there are so often no witnesses. That’s just a shame for the victim but how it has to be in a just society.
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WTF? Are you serious?