That was very useful. Thank you! I will try to do better.
The classic example is the Duke lacrosse case.
Granted, to speak to your point it happened well before the MeToo movement. And this was a situation caused by prosecutorial misconduct.
Nifong, who was labeled a “rogue prosecutor” by Cooper, withdrew from the case in January 2007 after the North Carolina State Bar filed ethics charges against him. In June 2007, Nifong was disbarred for “dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation”, making him the first prosecutor in North Carolina disbarred for trial conduct. Nifong served one day in jail for lying about sharing DNA tests (criminal contempt); the lab director said it was a misunderstanding and Nifong claimed it was due to weak memory.
Just one accuser, but the prosecutor used the notoriety of this case to win an election to District Attorney by a very narrow margin. As to why it took off the way it did…
“It was too delicious a story,” says Daniel Okrent, a former New York Times public editor, who is critical of the Times’ coverage and that of many other news organizations. “It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That’s a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us.”
My personal philosophy is that accusations should be given the respect to look into them and conduct investigations. But that doesn’t mean assuming guilt automatically.
I’ve certainly seen ‘you can just believe women, and any man that objects is an abuser’ argued before, I don’t think it’s a straw man to object to that.
Why wouldn’t Depp himself be a counterexample? Has anyone else come forward with similar stories?
I’m sure that with some appropriate nutpicking, such a statement could be found somewhere out there. And in those cases when someone states that, it certainly would be appropriate to object.
However, if someone were to bring up such a statement in a conversation where no one has said it, that would be a perfect example of strawmanning.
Because of what we’re seeing right now. His reputation was initially tarnished, but no similar accusations emerged from other women (in fact I think there were supportive statements), the facts have come under scrutiny, and most people are now treating anything Heard says with great skepticism.
I don’t see how else this could work for abuse that usually occurs under “he said / she said” circumstances for any single incident. You cannot proceed on the basis that a victim has to meet the “reasonable doubt” standard or shut up. Of course this creates the potential for harm in rare cases of false accusation, but how else do you propose to address the much greater problem of abuse? Blackstone’s ratio sounds very noble until you also consider the 100 victims of the 10 guilty men who go free. The ratio may be appropriate for criminal convictions, but I don’t think it’s an appropriate standard for (say) a potential employer to form an opinion about someone’s character that affects their career prospects.
That did not happen until he sued her and brought his vast financial resources to bear in marshalling evidence in the case. That’s well beyond the capabilities of 99.999% of people accused in this manner.
You brought it up as an alleged counterexample. “This would be a counterexample if the circumstances were different and a counterfactual outcome occurred” is not very convincing.
It’s an actual counterexample. Prior to his lawsuit, he had his movie career severely damaged by the accusation of one alleged victim. This is an example of how society will penalized accused #MeToo abusers based on the word of one person, and contrary to your claim.
Your statement was that you “don’t recall anyone being condemned on the unsupported accusation of a single person. It’s always multiple victims coming forward with similar stories”. Depp was condemned on the unsupported accusation of a single person without multiple victims coming forward with similar stories.
(What you’re doing seems logically analogous to waving away the issue of false convictions, since virtually all the people known to have been falsely convicted had their sentences overturned.)
No he wasn’t. his reputation was initially tarnished, and he lost some film roles, and now he’s being pretty decisively exonerated.
I’m not waving away the issue. It’s a quantitative question - how big is the problem of false accusations relative to the problem of abusers getting away with it?
Obviously we strive toward an ideal that all of the guilty are punished, and anyone innocent is immediately exonerated. But that’s an impossible ideal, and we have to work to some compromise in how we deal with accusations. The number of people who get away with abuse is at least (very conservatively) an order of magnitude larger than those falsely accused, and number of victims of abuse must be at least two orders of magnitude larger than the number of victims of malicious false accusation.
With numbers like this, would you propose that treating people who claim they are victims of abuse with greater initial skepticism is appropriate? How many real victims of abuse are you prepared to discourage from coming forward without concrete proof and throw under the bus to avoid the risk of one false accusation being heard?
The British trial involved other witnesses than Heard.
But not other alleged victims.
Here’s a recap of the whole celebrity cyclone.
Fair to say, but making an implicit argument explicit for the purpose of challenging it would not.
Who are you challenging with your “implicit” argument?
Anyone in this thread, or someone, somewhere else, on some other board?
If the first, then directly respond to that poster, and challenge that argument, rather than just passive aggressively dropping it without any relevance. If the latter, then what is your purpose for bringing it into this discussion?
These are usually complicated theories, all the better to be discussed for months or years on end, but they’re tied together by something simple: anger at a woman in the public eye. Rebecca told me that the Depp fans had seemed to lose interest, at a certain point, in defending Johnny Depp. They were “just using him as a platform,” she said. Now they’ve become obsessed with someone else, and they’re not about to let her go.
I’m not making an implicit argument.
I’m saying that spelling out something that’s implied in a position, or is a consequence of that position and building a straw man that you can knock over are different.
It’s true that few people said, out loud, that a de facto presumption of guilt and a cancel first and ask questions later approach was what they were advocating, those were foreseeable consequences that could be challenged without straw manning.
I also think this thread should probably stick with intimate partner abuse questions and that the larger issues of harassment and assault are a bit of a highjack, so I probably won’t continue with this part of the discussion.
Almost a month later, ITA.
Am I the only one who’s having a problem with Heard going tooth and nail with the abuse allegations and how very terrible the abuse she suffered was while also freely admitting under oath that she herself engaged in multiple acts of abuse including hitting, throwing things and threatening to accuse Depp because “nobody would believe him” if he denied it?
I mean, one time my horrible ex was hitting me and during the chase with me trying to get away from him I picked up a flower pot, whipped around and clocked him right upside the head, knocking him the fuck out. When the cops got there I got arrested for clocking him, while he was given the choice of having his head treated in jail as well or he could take an ambulance ride instead. I spent the night in jail for defending myself, but at no point did I maintain that I DIDN’T clock him with the flower pot or that it was okay because “he hit me first.” I just took my lumps and carried on with life–although it turned out I got the better deal since the asshole got stuck with a $3000 ambulance bill he never did get tired of blaming me for.
Anyway, seems to me Heard is rather undermining her case with her own actions and words and trying to act like her abusive actions aren’t REALLY abuse while anything Depp did is automatically THE WORST THING EVAR ONOZ. Doesn’t incline me toward sympathy for either one of them, really.
Yeah. My opinion stays the same, he was defamed but his reputation isn’t worth as much as he thinks. She is undermining her own case, whatever it is.