Lying Whore Charged with Murder

The BBQ Pit
61

I believe this, as some posters have stated personal experience with it, but I’ve seen plenty of cases where people were actually convicted of rape or child molestation and were able to move on with their lives quite nicely. I have an extended family member who was convicted of rape, served a short prison sentence and is now happily married with a kid and completely accepted by his entire social circle as having just made a bad decision. My Mom’s second husband was convicted of molesting me, served his prison time, and by all accounts of those who have seen him around, is doing just fine. This wasn’t a grey area where his friends and family could claim he was set up – he confessed, he pled guilty, and he served a short jail sentence and has apparently suffered no real consequences for his actions.

So I guess my point is, there is another reality here, one that doesn’t get taken very seriously at all on the Straight Dope, and that is the fact that society is generally biased against the victim of these kinds of crimes. I know this because I have personally lived it.

When I was seventeen and a legally emancipated minor, I told a therapist, with the understanding of complete confidentiality, that Mom’s fourth husband had abused me (yeah she knows how to pick 'em). I did not want anyone to know, I just wanted to deal with it in the privacy of a therapy session. But the therapist was new and didn’t know what she was talking about, so she ended up legally obligated to report it, and my entire family reacted against ME – what an attention seeking, vengeful little whore I was, how much it was my fault, how I should have known better, how I was obviously insane. And no, I didn’t have a reputation as a trouble maker or a criminal. I was a straight-A student, obsessed with Jesus, and honest to a fault. It was both fascinating and devastating how quickly I lost my credibility in the eyes of society because of something I told a therapist in confidence.

About one week after I was forced to tell my family this awful thing and succeeded in pissing them all off simultaneously, a cop showed up at my door. I hadn’t called the police, but I guess that’s part of the standard procedure, I dunno. Anyway, I was seventeen years old, in my pajamas by myself at home, and this young cop shows up and begins asking me all these questions about what my stepfather did to me. This guy had to be five years older than me max, and I’m not going to lie he was kinda cute. I was raised to submit to authority, I believed I was required to answer any question asked of me by a police officer. I started to tell him, but the questions became more and more detailed, and I was embarrassed and so was he, and finally I just looked at him pleadingly and said, ‘‘Do I really have to talk about this?’’ And he said, ‘‘No, you don’t have to file charges.’’ So I didn’t. He was just as relieved as I was.

So every time I hear a story about a victim retracting her statement about a rape or sexual assault, I think about that moment, standing alone with this cop who was my age and completely unprepared to deal with the concept of sexual trauma, and about me, being forced into disclosure before I’d barely started to deal with it myself, and I think about the fact that nothing that happened to me would have ever held up in court, I think about how the only proof I have about what I endured is the fact that I still don’t sleep at night, ten years later, and I think about how my grandmother still invites this guy over to her house for dinner. I remember all the harassing phone calls I received from my mother about how self-centered I was to destroy our family, I remember her sobbing about how she just wanted her family to stay together… and I don’t, forgive me, I don’t… immediately come to the conclusion that because it didn’t hold up in court, the victim must be lying.

And every time I hear these rants about how biased the system is against men, I’m not gonna lie, it cuts like a knife. It hurts all over again. Because that’s not the reality in which I live. I live in a world where people will do anything necessary to a victim in order to maintain a sense of order and reinforce their belief that the world is just. Even people who claim to love you will sell you out in a heartbeat if it protects their worldview, their sense of justice. I guess it’s something you have to live to understand.

62

Speaking as the victim of a false accusation–and no argument whatsoever that what you went through is FAR worse–the bolded statement cuts the other way too.

I lost a lot of friends who simply found it easier to believe that I (with my as-yet-still-in-treatment anger management problem and political views that didn’t quite fit in) was more likely to be lying about not having done it (even with my roommate’s testimony, since he was in the room during the alleged incident and saw her initiate contact then after a few minutes abruptly flee from the room without a word in between–and he lost friends too, since HE was assumed to be lying to protect me) than it was to believe Ms. Sweetness-and-Light would do anything so vengeful.

The fact that more or less the same thing happened two more times with this woman (accusation of sexual misconduct, quickly dropped, against a current or recently-ex boyfriend), in almost exactly the same way, when she was done with dating them and wanting to move on while retaining her image, registered on a few of those people, but a surprisingly large percentage didn’t see any pattern whatsoever.

From a fair bit of anecdotal evidence, it seems like “the system” is often biased in favor of the (alleged) victim in cases of stranger/acquaintance rape, and often biased in favor of the (alleged) perpetrator when it’s a matter internal to family. Since so many rapes/molestations are committed by family members of the victim, the latter impression is an especially tragic conclusion to reach but it’s a common pattern in my experience.

63

This sounds about right. And I have heard plenty of stories from guy friends about girls they know who do make these accusations. None of the cases have ever made it off the ground as far as I know, but for some women there’s no doubt that it seems like a knee-jerk revenge reaction or their way of retconning bad decisions they made. The thing that gets me so frustrated is when it gets generalized from ‘‘some women’’ to ‘‘many’’ or ‘‘most.’’

I guess what I’d like to emphasize is that there is a big difference between ‘‘can’t prove something happened’’ and ‘‘didn’t actually happen.’’ Retracting a claim doesn’t mean that the victim was lying, it could mean any number of things. I think the system needs to be a little more explicit when dealing with accusers about the potential consequences --psychological and procedural–of going through with the prosecution of a sexual assault or sexual abuse. I had no knowledge whatsoever of the system and to me it seems like I was that close to filing a police report without even having any idea what that meant. I was in a complete state of shock at the time and had no idea what I was doing or how the legal system worked. How much easier it would have been to discredit me if I had filed charges and then dropped them. It would have changed public perception of me even more, but it wouldn’t have changed the truth.

What also complicates the situation is that being falsely accused of a sexual crime can ruin a reputation, absolutely, and I’m glad I don’t have to live with that fear. But it should also be understood that calling a trauma victim a liar, when she is not, has been shown to dramatically increase the risk of PTSD. There are actual existing studies that show that the support or lack thereof that a trauma victim receives following a trauma has a substantial impact on the victim’s internalization and understanding of that trauma. Lack of social support is in fact the greatest predictor overall of whether a victim will develop PTSD, greater in fact than the nature, duration, or severity of the trauma itself.

I completely believe that the law MUST continue to make a distinction between whether something happened and whether it can be proven. It SHOULD be hard to prosecute rape and sexual abuse. But the system seems set up to either destroy the accused or the accuser. Rape IS a special case, it is a different kind of crime, it is arguably the most psychologically damaging of all traumas (I’ve already cited peer-reviewed psychological studies including a meta-analysis of 73 separate trauma studies on predicting factors for PTSD. The study found the incidence of PTSD among rape and sexual abuse victims is significantly higher than PTSD among victims of physical assault, war veterans, natural disaster survivors, etc. I’ll drag up the cites if someone really wants me to, but Jesus I’m getting sick of repeating the same thing over and over again.)

It would be nice if people would start thinking about how sexual crimes ARE special, instead of treating them like any other crime, both for the sake of the accused and the accuser. As it stands, the system seems likely to screw over the innocent party in both cases. One change I would REALLY like to see is the having the identity of the accused and accuser legally shielded. I don’t believe the public should have known the names of those Duke kids involved or the woman making the claim The public spectacle is harmful to both parties.

64

To the extent that there is systemic bias in favor of a putative rape victim, in your estimation, how is this different from the way it might be biased in favor of a putative robbery victim, for instance? I’m not asking socratically, I’m just not sure how you mean this exactly.

I know that the point about hiding the identity of the accuser has been brought up but that doesn’t appear to have much to do with what you’re talking about.

In general, I think it’s worth remembering that for a very long time, sexual offenses were given very special treatment in the eyes of the law; viz. at best it treated an accused rapist as pretty much on equal footing with the accuser, and put them both on trial. So the introduction of rape shield laws, unique evidentiary procedures, and so on were not so much intended to put rape victims into a special class of privileged victim so much as they were intended to keep a rape trial from turning into an exercise in haranguing a young woman about her chastity. Maybe that speaks to what you’re referring to, but maybe not.

65

Interesting. More a report on prejudices and trends, than a policy, as you seemed initially to suggest.

It’s also a study from New Zealand. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that a discussion of standard practices in enforcement of rape law would not be very well served by citations from, say, Zimbabwe or Afghanistan. Not that I’m comparing New Zealand with those cultures, but in a discussion of rape cases, the specifics of which are primarily US cases, in which you suggest that police *policy *is officially prejudiced in favor of the accuser, a cite from a study, not from legislation, and from New Zealand, does not rise to the level of “smoking gun.” Although, to be fair, your original assertion is peppered liberally enough with quote-unquote “weasel words” and passive voice to be largely without substance.

66

Why the snark?

Considering that I am a New Zealander, where would you expect me to cite?

Further, I was commenting on a news report I had remembered reading more than 10 years ago.

Considering that it was ONE article, that I did not research, did not follow up on and read in a newspaper and that it was more than 10 years ago that I saw it - of course I am going to highly qualify it. I only report actual facts as facts - not something as unreliable as a 10 year old memory of one article .

Now moving forward from there - the agency quoted is the one that will be tesitifying in court. If their official policy is that rape occured, unless there is evidence to the contrary, then it amounts to policy rather than trend/

Further - from what I remember of the article it actually goes deeper than that, and there was some sort of court policy paper, or instructions given to police or some such. But given I can only research what is publicly avaiable - without even access to something as rudimentary as Lexis Nexis to access newspaper archives, let alone judicial policy papers, police training documents et al - what sort of a cite should be expected?

67

A cite that confirms–or even suggests–that it’s a pervasive and systemic–or even prevalent–enough policy–not trend, or opinion, but policy–to justify, first of all, the attitude in this thread that would confer any benefit of the doubt, by default, to an accused rapist over a reporting rape victim. (Because otherwise misogyny seems to be the likeliest justification.) To justify, second of all, any suggestion that such policies should be addressed legislatively.

I don’t see it. It goes without saying that in any he-said/she-said situation, it’s more likely that one of the parties is lying than that there’s some kind of Rashomon thing going on. I’d be curious to see proof of how disproportionately such false statements can be attributed to the complaining victim rather than the denial of an accused person. Let alone an official policy, a kind of affirmative action in favor of complaining rape victims that you once read about somewhere.

If you do indeed find such a policy in a New Zealand jurisdiction, I’d suggest you write your democratic representative, whatever the NZ title for such an officeholder is, but I won’t count it as terribly relevant to the specific cases discussed in these boards, most of which are relatively high-profile cases in the U.S.

68

I thought it was well known that the courts ( and police, and society in general ) tend to go much easier on women than men when it comes to domestic violence; to the extent that the usual legal advice to men is to not defend themselves from an attacking woman, even if she’s stabbing them. Generally, the police will only arrest the man regardless of who is at fault, unless the law specifically requires them to arrest perpetrators; amusingly, such laws were pushed for in various states by feminists under the theory that the police were ignoring male violence, and instead they caused more women to be arrested. I recall the feminist reaction at the time as they tried to explain it away; my favorite was the claim that men were stabbing and beating themselves to make women look bad.

69

By ‘‘well known’’ do you mean there are like a whole host of facts and statistics to support this argument? In my experience, it seems like it could be true, but it also seems that society is biased in general in favor of abusers regardless of gender.

(By the way, I think woodstockbirdybird was responding to the jumping to conclusions about this specific incident, not court bias toward female domestic violence in general. There are very strong overtones of misogyny in this thread, starting with the implication that a woman being a ‘‘whore, fer real’’ should make us hate her more, or something.)

70

Yeah, agreed. I don’t think the word whore was necessary in this or any other thread. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a person who has sex in exchange for money. But using the word whore just seems so unnecessary. Like, if it’s so incidental, why are you using it? It would be like using the phrase “Lying N Word Charged With Murder” and then being all, “He’s black! And he’s charged with murder.” Whore isn’t quite the same, but it is a loaded word, and I don’t think it was necessary to use it except for the fact that yeah, there is a lot of misogyny here…

71

What I also find problematic is that the ‘‘whore defense’’ is one of the most often-used methods of discrediting rape victims. So by pointing out that this particular woman, is, in fact, a prostitute, we reinforce the idea that sexually promiscuous women are probably lying about rape. It just perpetuates that idea that the only true victims of rape are virgins kidnapped in dark alleys, or something.

72

Yeah, that was another time the OP lost credibility.

On this board at least, this case has garnered such a disproportionate amount of attention that it actually suggests that false rape accusations like this aren’t all that common. People tend not to be this captivated by crimes that happen every day.

But let’s say that falsely accusing someone of rape is just as bad as committing a rape. Forget that shit–let’s say its worse than rape; we could even make it equalivent to murder even. Even after adjusting for that assumption, it still doesn’t explain why more SDMB bandwidth has been devoted to ranting about this hicktown Crystal person who’s probably drug addicted on top of crazy than the professor who killed three coworkers in Alabama, the Canadian air force commander who confessed to being a serial murderer and rapist, the guy in Ohio whose house was recently found to be loaded with the dead bodies of his victims, and oh yeah, the 9/11 terrorists.

I’m just saying, a crime is a crime is a crime. A lot of us need to get a grip and gain some perspective. Falsely accusing someone of rape is bad and it makes sense to talk about it. But the passion excuded by some posters when this topic is raised borders on nutjobbery.

73

My choice of “the system” was probably poor–speaking as a falsely accused rape victim, the damage in that case is to reputation and not necessarily special antagonistic treatment in the eyes of the law. That is, the mere fact of a rape accusation in a stranger or acquaintance rape case can and does do irreparable harm because it’s typical in my admittedly anecdotal experience that the accuser is typically believed by their peers and the public in this case.

It’s equally my experience that for family rape/molestation cases the reverse is true–typically, families in my experience have shown a tendency to close ranks and blame the victim preferentially (hell, this has even happened in my family with a consensual case of a cousin cheating on his spouse with a cousin-in-law–the unmarried one was labeled as a seducer despite the fact the cheater is pretty much a known lecher).

It was just an observation on when the victim tends to be believed and when they don’t, in my experience.

74

They’re rich and white, therefore they have to be guilty of something.

75

lol damn those stupid feminists, right? vapid cunts, all of them!

feminist = feminazi, right man?

76

I started to annotate the above for “weasel words,” unattributed "they"s, and various other examples of how to type a lot while actually saying nothing of substance, but almost every single word required annotation. A very, very impressive example of possibly the lowest signal-to-noise ratio of any post I’ve ever seen here.

77

About the only feminist I’d use the term “feminazi” on, would be the one I ran across who felt the genetically unfit should be killed since obviously Mother Nature disapproved of them.

Truly amusing, since in the process of accusing me of being vague and unspecific, you carefully manage to be completely unspecific yourself. Talk about content-free.

78

So . . . even if your post is clearly strung together on a series of "I thought it was well known"s and positions attributed variously and vaguely to “feminists” and “they,” my pointing this out is not valid unless I footnote every such example and explain why they are entirely content free?

Nice try, DT, but that’s about the same as going, “Yeah, well, nice hair.”

You want to give some of your feminists names, and some of your well-knowns cites, your post might be worthy of a more thoughtful response. As it is, it’s a bag made out of holes and I’m not gonna even try to put anything in it.

79

Yeah, DT, I’m gonna jump on this bandwagon. You got a cite for that?

80

I’m pretty sure you guys aren’t gonna get a coherent response from DT. That’s why I just cut to the chase and mocked him for being a misogynistic piece of shit.