One thing would have been to check when Ghomeshi acquired that VW - something the defense clearly did. Another would have been to check email records.
I don’t see why it’s necessary - or smart - to inherently trust the accuracy of anyone’s statements.
Marie Henein is a hero who defends Constitution, Due Process, and Presumption of Innocence – and Linus agrees.
Madeleine Albright is not a religious authority and definitely not a prophet.
Telling another poster to fuck off is not appropriate in Great Debates.
This is a Warning to avoid such behavior outside The BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
This was LinusK’s attempt at irony. He does not actually regard her as such.
Yes it does. People forget insignificant details. They remember significant ones. They especially remember those charged with emotion.
I don’t in any way entertain the idea that these women were mistaken about whether these things happened.
Oh, and, becuase I don’t feel like wading through this thread again to quote it: it is not the job of those who notice the flaws in the system to propose the solutions. That’s just a tactic to prevent improvements. Those noticing the flaws are not going to be experts.
The only thing I can personally push for is not allowing one judge who is buys into rape myths preside. Get a jury, and stop with this bullshit where the jury aren’t experts. Have the jury be people who are experts on rape.
And, so you don’t get upset at me, I’m not planning on sticking around and discussing this. I’ve said what I have to say, and if you think it’s stupid, you can point out why. That’s how I tend to roll, as otherwise I get angry, say stupid things, and then people make fun of me.
Though not always accurately, as seen in this case.
What myths? It sounds as if the judge principally buys into the requirement for a presumption of innocence, and the idea that witnesses whose testimony is shown to be false are an unreliable source of truth.
How would that be arranged?
So sad.
Good story, thank you. Stuff like this is always entertaining, too bad you can’t divulge more details! But it just goes to show that in a civil case like this the complainant’s lawyer doesn’t normally grill their own client, even when the client has a pecuniary interest in the outcome. In the Ghomeshi case, there was even less reason to be suspicious since the multiple complainants had no obvious motivation other than justice, and the police had laid charges on the basis of the evidence they had. Unless of course one is on the “evil women looking for revenge” bandwagon like the OP.
Depends on the details. It’s often unsurprising that the defense will find flaws with the prosecution witnesses, since they are hugely motivated and extremely well paid to do precisely that.
Now becoming an epic series! 
This simply doesn’t follow, except in the sense that all memories are fallible to some degree.
A person’s failure to remember some things has little implication for whether or not they’ve successfully remembered other things. We’ll remember things we’re paying attention to, and fail to (or misremember) things we weren’t paying attention to, even if it all happened at the same time in the same incident. Moreover, over the course of many years it’s very common for memories from different times to be confabulated. So if an accuser thinks two things happened at the same time when in fact they happened at very different times, this is by no means indicative that either or both events did not occur. It’s just part of how our memories work.
In this case, though, they were memories of the very events in contention.
To give but one example - one of the complainants at one point remembered being assaulted in Ghomeshi’s car (though she changed the details of that assault twice). She described the assault, and the car, in detail (the interior details were important, because she claimed he smashed her head into a window of the car; she later said she ‘rested’ her head against that window; at another time, she claimed he pulled her hair in the car).
The outward appearance of the car was also important, because she asserted that its ‘cute and funny’ appearance induced her - unwisely as it turned out - to trust Ghomeshi and get in the car: it was a bright yellow VW (she described it as a “love bug”). So having her head smashed inside the very ‘cute’ car that induced her trust him made a very memorable, poignant account.
Turns out it could not have happened that way, because he bought the car months after the alleged attack.
Now, it is entirely possible for someone to mistake what kind of car a guy was driving years later - but this goes beyond that. She mistook the very details of the place where an alleged attack took place, and the details that lead up to that attack, and even what kind of attack it was - in a way that looks more like fabrication (deliberate or not) based on stuff she’d learned about him after they broke off.
It is hard to say that getting such basics as where and how you were attacked totally wrong or inconsistent do not create a “reasonable doubt”.