But as he had done the same with several other girls, all who happened to be just old enough to not be illegal, gives credence to the allegation of illegal behavior.
Also, one of those legal ones? He started hitting on her when she was 14.
Multiple people corroborated her story in that she had told multiple people at the time, and they remembered her telling them. Did you read the article (and the follow up articles)?
Further, when asked if at the time Moore dated girls as young as 14, he said “not generally, no”.
Are you seriously skeptical about these accusations?
Ah, thank you. I misread what you wrote originally and was looking in the blog post for actual studies, not guesses by policemen about how many uppity girls lie to them.
I’m guessing he made exceptions for the really hot ones.
I got an ugly scenario brewing over here, and I’m gonna lay it out ugly. Because it is. Say it up front, so if you want to stop right here, I wouldn’t blame you in the slightest.
What if he was using his asst DA status as a means to intimidate women who are vulnerable to his official capacity? What if he preys on “white trash” women who have some entanglement with the law, some vulnerability. Like the mom on the prime case, she was in court for a custody issue. Mr Asst DA Friendly plays Mr Nice Guy. “Go ahead, I’ll keep an eye on the youngster”.
Next thing up, he insinuates a possible liaison. Or he “respectfully asks permission”. Does the Mom know about his official position here? Does she imagine maybe he’s some guy who just hangs around the court, because he likes to?
Or is he subtly applying pressure for a woman to pimp out her own daughter? Who is going to approve of such a “date” for one’s daughter? Anybody here? Why would you? Unless you felt like you had to. Had to.
And wouldn’t a man in his position not only be assured they would keep their mouths shut, but wouldn’t be believed if they did speak up. They’ve had drug charges, check kiting, shop lifting, maybe even charges pending. Who’s gonna listen?
He can use them any way he wants. They’re trash. (Gotta wonder if they were all white? Or is he an equal opportunity predator?)
Shit, I would be happy to think this was all some sick fantasy that will vanish just as soon as someone shows me how impossible it all is. I’d be pleased to hear he’s only as bad as I already know he is.
It’s definitely a possibility. The powerful have been preying on the weak for quite awhile now.
So if they think their candidate can’t win, Republicans may be willing to cancel the election until they can get a new one who can. And doubtless this White House won’t have a problem with that. Hooray for democracy!
Um, when you’re in your 30s, you don’t date girls of an age where you need their mother’s permission. You’d think that would be a no-brainer.
That really IS disturbing. Canceling an election that you’re going to lose is way into banana-republic territory. But these are the Banana Republicans, so it wouldn’t surprise me.
Okay then, well unfortunately you’re going to be stuck with the Kanin study, which ends up with the highest estimate of false rape accusations I’ve ever seen anyone seriously cite. He actually looked at a police department which followed up every rape allegation and found that 40% of them were unfounded. In a follow up study he did at two Midwestern universities, he found an even higher rate of false accusations (50%).
"In 1994, Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University investigated the incidences of false rape allegations made to the police in one small urban community in the Midwest United States (population 70,000) between 1978 and 1987. He states that unlike in many larger jurisdictions, this police department had the resources to “seriously record and pursue to closure all rape complaints, regardless of their merits”. He further states each investigation “always involves a serious offer to polygraph the complainants and the suspects” and “the complainant must admit that no rape had occurred. She is the sole agent who can say that the rape charge is false”.
The number of false rape allegations in the studied period was 45; this was 41% of the 109 total complaints filed in this period.[25] The researchers verified, whenever possible, for all of the complainants who recanted their allegations, that their new account of the events matched the accused’s version of events.After reviewing the police files, Kanin categorized the false accusations into three broad motivations: alibis, revenge, and attention-seeking. These motivations were assigned prevalence of roughly 50%, 30%, and 20% respectively. This categorization was supported by the details of complainant recantations and other documentation of their cases.
Kanin also investigated the combined police records of two large Midwestern universities over a three-year period (1986–1988), and found that 50% of the reported forcible rapes were determined to be false accusations (32 of the total 64). No polygraphs were used, the investigations were the sole responsibility of a ranking female officer, and a rape charge was only counted as false under complainant recantation. In this sample, the motivations mentioned above were roughly evenly split between alibi and revenge, with only one case characterized as attention-seeking."
This appears to have been the most comprehensive study anyone’s done to address the question of “what’s the underlying rate of how many rape accusations are actually false”. (As pointed out the “2% to 10%” estimate is an answer to very different question. I am not criticizing that study, just making the claim that you can’t expect it to answer a question that it didn’t attempt to address). I don’t believe that 40% to 50% of rape accusations are false, because that seems intuitively too high to me and so I’ll stick with 30%, but if you insist on a rigorous study that seems to be the best one there.
That study has been criticized, for reasons I think are weak, but you can judge for yourself. I would link them but not sure how much text I’m allowed to quote, so i’ll give you the link here.
I didn’t say I was skeptical about the allegation of illegal conduct. At this point I neither believe it nor disbelieve it, I’m waiting to learn more. I’m criticizing your claim that there were four accusations of Moore doing something wrong. There’s one accusation of doing something very wrong (which as you correctly point out is corroborated by the victim’s friends), which stands on its own merits. And then there’s two accusations imvolving a 17- and and 18-year old both of whom were over the age of consent, and whom Moore dated with the consent of their parents.
I’m more concerned here by the claim that Moore’s behavior with the older teenagers was wrong as well, because it seems to me to be symptomatic of a kind of shifting upward in the definition of adulthood, and a distrust of age-disparate relationships, neither of which I think are good things. It’s the broader claims about sexual ethics that concern me here, not Moore himself. (Personally I wouldn’t vote for him, based purely on his policies and party ID).
Define “unfounded”. Does that just mean that there isn’t any other evidence besides the (alleged) victim’s say-so? Because that’s going to be the case for a huge proportion of accusations, regardless of whether they’re true or not.
He was’t good at math and thought the equation was “Half your age minus 7”.
Kanin’s definition of “unfounded” was the same that the police department and the two universities he looked at used: “the victim recanted”.
I’d more or less agree, but some legal adults 18 or above still live at home and might want their parent’s permission to date someone.
Can you provide actual evidence for why you object to it, or is this just a subjective opinion?
I can’t stop you from having whatever subjective opinion you want, and I wouldn’t want to, but, you know, if I was that age and dating someone that much younger, what would you want to do about it? Push your legislators to raise the age of consent, or what?
If those are really the only two reasons you can think of, I suggest you’re having a failure of imagination. (For what it’s worth, I’m 36 right now and in an ideal world my dating preferences would be in the 18-24 range as well).
I’d suggest lots of people like to date very young adults because they’re, you know, still in the process of forming their fully adult personalities, career aspirations, likes and dislikes, values, etc…, and that’s an exhilarating stage of life. It can be really exciting to guide, nurture, care for, lead, and sort of take on a quasi-parental role for someone going through that process. And for that matter there are a lot of young adults (young men and women both) who want someone to fulfill that role for them, and are happy being led, nurtured, taken care of, etc… A relationship like that obviously isn’t going to be a partnership of equals, but I strongly disagree with the idea (which seems to be widely shared in America today) that healthy relationships are necessarily characterized by equality anyway. The older model of marriage (if you look at, e.g. the old Christian marriage services) was one in which the wife pledged to ‘obey’ her husband. I wouldn’t agree with the explicit gendered nature of that, certainly, but I do think that the best relationships are those where there are a clear ‘leader’ and ‘follower’. (Not that the male always has to be in the dominant role: personality traits vary a lot among men, and among women).
As for ‘just sex with pretty young things’, I certainly don’t think that’s always or usually the case. It’s certainly not the case for me. That said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. Trading sex for status, economic security, etc., is a very old and bog-standard type of relationship and for that matter marriage, and I don’t see those sorts of marriages or relationships as worse than dating or marrying for any other reason. If I ever get married it would certainly be <I>largely</I> me looking for youth & beauty and I would assume, my spouse looking to be taken care of financially.
Incidentally, these types of relationships aren’t as uncommon as some people seem to think. In California as of 2004, about 0.5% of births among girls 18-19 were to fathers 40-62, about 1% to fathers in their late 30s and 4% were to fathers in their early 30s.
I think his behavior with the older teenagers was questionable at best, and probably morally wrong considering Moore’s character as revealed by other behavior.
I think it’s possible for those sorts of age-disparity relationships to be acceptable, but in my experience most of them are not. Most of them, in my experience, are user-used relationships, with extreme power disparities and manipulation. Considering what an asshole Moore has shown himself to be (even before the 14-year-old accuser story), I have little doubt that these would have been similar.
But these are moral/ethical judgments, not legal judgments. There needs to be a legal line somewhere, and outside of that legal line we shouldn’t prosecute consensual activity. But I’m fine with judging such behavior on moral and ethical terms.
OK, but I’m not talking legal here. I’m talking creepy.
Laws draw bright lines because they really can’t draw shades of gray very well. The law often doesn’t have good ways of saying, “this is bad, but not bad enough that it rates time in the slammer.” All it can usually say is, “this action rates time in the slammer, but that one doesn’t.”
The age of consent law is a statement that every sexual encounter between an adult and a child below age X (16, in Alabama’s case) is potentially punishable by time in the slammer. It says, under no circumstances do we want grownups fooling around with kids under that age.
That doesn’t put every interaction between an adult and a teen of age 16 or older into a “nothing to see here, morally” category. It really more means that we can envision circumstances where it shouldn’t be legally actionable. It doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t pass judgment on it in other ways.
Most of us are still going to find it rather disturbing for a 30+ year old man to make a habit of hitting on teenagers, even if they’re all over the age of consent, would question his ability to make good moral judgments, and would want to keep him out of roles that required that of him.
Yeah, most people don’t want a “quasi-parental role” with the person they’re in a romantic relationship with. YMMV.
There are people who think it’s just wonderful to guide young hearts and minds. They become parents (obviously) or teachers or Scout leaders or join Big Brothers/Sisters or somehow become mentors in a fashion that doesn’t involve trying to get into the pants of those young hearts and minds. Then there’s a creepy shits who use “want to guide young hearts and minds” as a pretext for getting into pants.