that kind of sounds like you are calling me a liar
I don’t even know your mother or stepfather and I find them more credible, which may contain a lesson about being accused, falsely or otherwise. Antagonizing the people you’re trying to convince is likely to work against you.
being accused of doing something i didn’t do tends to antagonize me.
OP, next time leave your family drama out of the thread. Trust me, from experience, you are going to get a conga line of people here arguing with you over the details and splitting hairs while you endlessly attempt to clarify and backpedal.
I’d rather discuss the title of the OP, false rape allegations.
What can the person do? Keep their mouth shut, get a lawyer, explain the situation truthfully to the lawyer. The lawyer maintains confidentiality with his client and is invested in defending him, so you want to give the lawyer all the details, even things that might sound incriminating.
When people are falsely accused, its easy for them to get defensive. But for people convinced they are guilty, any excuse, explanation or argument is just going to reinforce their beliefs, not change them. People that trust you and know you well will be much more objective, but its better to err on the side of caution with what you disclose to people.
Given how hard it is to get people who actually comitted rape convicted, a false accusation is not the death sentence some people think it is.
it seems that you are correct…
agree
agree
agree
Understandable, but why transfer the antagonism to this message board? It’s not going to help.
Anyway, false accusations of rape are wrong. This comment is made possible by a grant by the Duh Corporation.
OK, so, if I am in an argument about something with a coworker, and they make up the story that I stole their work (data) but I didn’t, and people (here) start asking me, where you hanging around their desk, did you stay after work, do you have any secret hiding compartments in your desk, it would SEEM LIKE they doubted my story that I was FALSELY accused. That would not be a case of “transferring my aggression” that would be responding to being called a thief all over again.
At some point it may be that everyone in the world is doubting you for terrible reasons and you’re super-trustworthy. You may, however, wish to consider why it is that so many folks are all :dubious: at your story here.
Maybe the part when you call the coworker a grumpy tyrant drama queen will tend to turn sympathies against you, compounded by you getting all sarcastic and not even in a clever Frasier kinda way.
Just saying.
Is that false allegations or false arrests, and is that as a percentage of all rapes, or only those reported to the police?
The estimate is that only about 25% of rapes are reported to the police, albeit, the number is rising. Now, there are rapes that are reported, and rapes that are not reported, but while there are false reports, there are not false non-reports, if that makes sense; probably the 20-40% is only for those that are reported to authorities, not all rapes.
This is hugely important. While stranger rapes (or other types of rape, like rape-murder, where the victim cannot make an identification, and the ID is done through forensics) are not a large percentage of rapes, they are probably a large percentage of those investigated by the FBI.
To follow up the earlier comment, sometimes a physical examination of the victim determines whether there will be a prosecution in a he said/she said case. And there are cases where the victim is legitimately a rape victim, but makes an ID of the wrong person-- usually after viewing a police line-up of “usual suspects,” or something. Thanks to DNA, these kind of mistakes don’t result in conviction like they used to. The stereotype of a woman who concocts a story out of whole cloth against a man she just wants to get in trouble is vanishingly rare (and rarely works), but it’s the thing everyone fears-- just like everyone fears the guy with the van, even though children are usually molested by family members.
False accusations are two types: the Central Park Jogger type, where the police targeted someone who was innocent, and he said/she said incidents, where the man will usually admit to having intercourse, he just claims he had consent. I’m personally inclined to think that in almost all of those cases, the woman is telling the truth, because of course he is going to claim that. What other recourse does he have? but why would a woman make that claim in the first place? if it’s regret, you’d think she’d be more likely to just shut up about the incident altogether.
What any of this has to do with hitting an old man, I can’t fathom, though.
or maybe the fact that this is the internet, information is compressed, and that is actually the way the two of them are, is simply the true description of events
indeed i do wonder why people are all at :dubious: my description since my description is what actually happened. people’s tendency to embellish or question events is kind of the point of the danger of having people make false accusations against you.
Why would I believe you over your co-worker, when I’ve never met either of you? All I have is two conflicting stories, and if you’re inviting me to accept one to the exclusion of the other, then you inviting me to make a critical assessment of both. And that involves asking questions which do not start from the assumption that your story is true and his is false.
It seems to me the questions that were put to you about the incident you described in your OP were perfectly reasonable and indeed inoffensive ones. Does your accuser know that his accusation is a complete fabrication, or might he in fact think you did hit him? And if he did think you hit him, is this a delusion on his part, or is it an interpretation or misinterpretation of something - some degree of contact - that actually happened? And, I have to say it, but your reaction to these perfectly reasonable questions does raise a doubt about whether the breakdown in relations between you and your family is entirely due to unreasonable attitudes on their part.
I’ll be sure to take your word for it, sooner or later.
So basically, when you get beyond all of the rhetoric, I said I was falsely accused of hitting someone in a verbal argument, and, I find that type of false accusation very frustrating, and your response is “you don’t know which side to believe” when I just told you I was telling the truth. You are, essentially, saying I’m lying.
No, it’s more like saying you’re a cat in a box, and we have no way of knowing if you are dead or alive.
Saying “I don’t know whether to believe you or not,” is a completely different thing from saying “I don’t believe you.” Your assertion that you are telling the truth is meaningless, because we don’t know if you are truthful in the first place. Whether you are truthful, or a liar, you are going to say “I’m telling the truth.” Therefore, with absolutely no other information aside from your assertion, we have to remain agnostic. You are going to have to offer outside evidence that you are a truthful person, before we can take you at your word.
And, BTW, even if we said we did not believe your version of events, that would not mean we didn’t think you believed them. We might think you were delusional, or emotion was clouding your memory. When people are in highly excited states they tend to have poor memories of facts, so it may be that you and your stepfather both absolutely believe your very different versions of events.
That would be reasonable if I simply told you the story and you questioned the veracity of the details. But if I specifically told you some people made up some untrue accusations about me and you still questioned my version of the story, I am left with the only conclusion is that you don’t believe me. Which is the same as calling me a liar. Or, you think I am delusional. But you don’t really think I am delusional, do you?
It’s not really worth going on about. It wasn’t worth going on about in the first place. I doubt I will reply again.
You are essentially saying your stepfather is lying. So we have two characters, one of whom is lying. I only have character evidence about one of them on which to form my judgment.
I don’t have enough information to decide, as I’ve said before. However, I suspect that your version of the story is inaccurate. I don’t necessarily think you hit him, but the way you told the story doesn’t really add up.
Other possibilities:
-He didn’t say you hit him, he said something else, and you interpreted it incorrectly.
-You brushed past him at some point as you were leaving, not aware you’d done it, but he was very aware.
-You were so aggressive in your jabbing your finger in his face that he ended up believing he was hit, remembering incorrectly.
-You hit him on some other occasion.
-The “hitting” thing is a red herring: you were so obnoxious to both him and his wife–your mom–that neither of them particularly wants you in the house.
It’s as if your office story were something like this:
“I can’t believe I just got fired! I went into my mean boss’s office and called him an asshole, and when the security guard came in I told the security guard if he touched me I’d beat the shit out of him. And the security guard said I punched him, and I got fired! The noive!”
If you’d told that office story, people probably wouldn’t focus on the false accusation.
Get a grip, Robert. First, even if I did think what you told us was false, that would not be an accusation of lying; falsity is consistent with mistake as well as with dishonesty. Second, as I have explicitly said that I do not know whether your story is accurate or not, I clearly do not believe it to be false. So I’m not even accusing you of being mistaken, much less of lying.
And now consider this. Repeatedly, in this thread, you have complained that people are saying you are lying, despite the fact that anyone reading the thread can see that nobody has said you are lying. Do you think this is likely to inspire us with confidence in the reliability of your account of of what passed between you and your family?
Actually, my step father has never said I hit him, my mom has said that and he just sits there and lets her repeat the lie. I doubt he thinks I actually did hit him, I think, as you say, he is just using the event as an excuse to get rid of me.