Have you ever been wrongfully accused of something?
I had a nightmare that my previous landlord was accusing me of stealing things from their house. I went over to talk to them and they were convinced I was guilty, no question about it. They told me I could pay them back over time if I didn’t have the money to cover their losses at this time. Man, I woke up in a cold sweat.
No, no, no. This is a “I had a weird dream last night” thread, not a “Have you ever been wrongfully accused?” thread.
Are you accusing me of starting the wrong thread? 
Ok, this really happened to me. I was leaving work at around 03:00 in the morning, stopped at a gas station across the street to fill up. A squad pulled in, and was just sitting there. I thought nothing of it. As I pulled away, a half-mile down the road, he catches up to me, and pulls me over. He asked me why I pulled him over. I told him I had no idea (I wasn’t speeding or doing anything wrong). He just took my info, and headed back to his car. 10 minutes later, 5 more squads pull up. At this point, I’m like WTF? They tell me to get out, and they request to search my vehicle. I had nothing in the car, I mean nothing, so I had nothing to hide. So I let them do the search. They search it and find nothing. They then tell me that I match the description of a thief who had just robbed a gas station a couple miles away and had tied the clerk to the toilet in the washroom. I tell them that there was no way that it was me because I had just left work.
They then tell me that they’re going to bring the victim in a squad to ID me. I’m like ok, I have nothing to worry about. They then cuff me, because “they have to”. Whatever. 10 more minutes go by, the victim comes up to me and he is looking really scared. One of the officers ask him if it was me. The victim looks at me for like 5 seconds, and POSTIVIELY ID’S ME AS THE GUY WHO ROBBED, BEAT HIM, AND TIED HIM UP! He told the officer that it was me, 100%. I was completely shocked. How are you going to say that you saw my car, a 1988 olds, with the paint practically gone, and me, a 6’2" redhead with glasses, did this shit to you? I’m sorry, the odds of another guy looking like me, with that car is practically nil at 03:00 in the morning.
At this point, I had the most horrible feeling in the world, I imagine it was the same feeling that Kobe got when he was accused of rape, how do you defend something like that? About a million thoughts went through my head at once. Am I going to jail, do I have to go to court? The thoughts were going so fast, that I actually thought I’d be going to jail for a while. I kept telling the police, I had just left work and to have them ask the night guard about me having just left. After five minutes of that, they finally drove to my place of work and talked to the guard. The guard did indeed tell them, that I was there all night and had just left. Thank whomever, that I told the guard goodnight that night.
After that, the police apologized to me for the mess up (which was cool). They gotta do what they gotta do. I mean, I guess I did match the description, so I’d do the same if I was an officer. They even told me that the victim had alcohol on his breath, and they didn’t even believe him. No blame there. But the nerve of this guy to positively ID me AND my car, 100%? (He looked at me dead in the eye, and said it was me, he even said 100%) You fucking asshole. He probably did get robbed and beat up, but don’t go blaming the first guy you see, just to have somebody arrested you fucking slime ball. That shit scared the fuck outta me.
From that day on, I always greet the guards at work, coming and going.
I was riding my bike through a bad part of town once (no need to mention the town, just a bad part of town). This young lady was walking by and asked if I had a cigarette, so I say sure and turn around on my bike, stop along side her and hand her a cigarette. No big deal, just handing out a ciggy to some bum I suppose. So I get on my bike and ride about a half block and here comes Mr. Bad Cop. He has me stop my bike and he jumps out like he’s going to start clubbing me, you know you have that feeling of aggression coming at you. I kind of smile and say, “What’s the problem officer?”. He gives me kind of a smart ass look and starts giving me the third-degree about what I am up to.
So I tell him I am just taking a different way home, because I was going to look at an apartment in that area. Totally the truth, I didn’t know the area was bad until just now. He tells not to lie to him or I will get in even more trouble. Then Bad Cop II shows up, and he’s another sarcastic punk. So they search me, search my pockets, search my mouth, search my bike seat, look all over on the ground by my bike. They run a check on my drivers license, hoping I am wanted for something, somewhere. Then he gives me back my license, says I look like a reasonably intelligent fellow but I must be a dumb ass because I am in that neighborhood, Then they let me go, with a couple more wise ass comments as I was on my way.
Once at a job with a commercial insurance company, a very small office, I was fired on the last day of my 6-week probation period. Why? Because the owner was convinced that I, a secretary with absolutely NO contact with cash and NO IDEA of where they even kept the money (locked up), was stealing from him.
I realized right away that no matter what I said I wouldn’t be believed, the guy had his mind made up that I was the thief. I did deny it and pointed out that I had no access ever to any of his cash, but then quietly picked up and left. Humiliating, even though I knew I wasn’t guilty.
My son was born with a birth defect, external hydrocephalis, which can show some of the same symptoms as Shaken Baby Syndrome.
We were unaware of the defect until he was four months old and it became apparent. The examining physician diagnosed it as SBS despite the fact that the symptoms didn’t match up. Not gonna cite, feel free to look it up.
Washington State CPS was called in and, as our children’s primary doc warned us, they went after me.
Well, after two fucking years of jumping through all the ridiculous hoops and complying with all the stupid demands, I was cleared. My son is OK. My wife and I are trying to recover from being forced to fork over around $20,000 to defend ourselves. We are also trying to patch up our marriage.
Bitter? Oh yeah.
Warning: Looooooooooonggg story
Two years ago, at the start of my second year of teaching, a student accused me of looking at porn on my school computer.
I had stayed pretty late after school and was actually getting some work done. Student A (a kid I had in Writing and English the previous year) and Student B were hanging out on the other side of the building. The school, itself, is quite small, and all the classrooms open up to the outside. There is no fence around the school; the campus is totally open, so anyone can walk onto school grounds. It’s a very small town, and there’s never really been a problem.
Students A and B spotted an elementary kid and talked/bribed him into coming up to the corner of my classroom - right where I was sitting at my desk - and pounding on the wall. It was impossible to catch elementary kid, because the door to my classroom was at the other end of the room. Elementary kid came up and pounded on the wall two or three times, each time scaring the beans out of me. So, I finally did a walk around the campus and saw Students A and B. I asked them if they’d seen anyone running like a madman from my class, and they shrugged, so I asked them to keep an eye out, and if they saw the kid to ask him to cut it out.
Then, as I was working at my podium, up at the front of the class - grading papers , working on lesson plans, etcetera - Student B puts his head in the class and asks me if I’m looking at porn on my computer. I was so startled, I didn’t get angry, just told him I was busy, and no, looking at porn on the school computer would be about as stupid as stupid gets. Ten minutes later - after I’d had enough time to get angry about the question - Student B puts his head back in and asks me if I have a dildo. I told him to get the hell out of my classroom and not to come back.
Next morning, I tell me principal about what happened. He knew exactly who Student B and the madly pounding elementary student were - a benefit of being a principal in a school district with only five hundred students. He and the elementary principal pulled the elementary student out of class and put the fear of God in him. Then, he pulled Student A out, chewed him out, and got him to completely roll over on Student B. Then he and the superintendent have a little chat with Student B about his behavior. His defense was “Well, the reason I asked her if she was looking at porn was because I saw it on her computer.”
Now, both my superintendent and principal are savvy people. My superintendent is quite the political animal. She makes Hillary look like a piker (and I say this with awed respect. I never want to get on my superintendent’s bad side. She takes care of her people, but woe betide the idiot who messes with her). They both knew Student B was lying through his teeth. However, with an accusation of that magnitude made, they had to follow through with an investigation as well as the standard Student Attendance Review Board (SARB) meeting with a county judge on Student B (not for this one infraction. Student B had a loooooong history of misbehavior and was in fact, attending the alternative high school, which is why I didn’t recognize him).
The superintendent came to my class and pulled me out to talk with me - this NEVER happens. She explained that Student B had made the accusation against me, and as I instantly began hyperventilating and babbling that no, I had not been looking at porn, assured me that she knew it wasn’t so. It was just that Student B’s mother would take his word over anyone’s and was probably going to spread the story in the community. This was no idle threat, since the community was 3000 year round residents, and I had no tenure. If things had gotten rolling, I could easily have been told there was no contract for me the next school year - never mind, the possibility of a witch hunt, a firing, and a revocation of my teaching credential.
I had several things in my favor, though. First, the school network was setup with a firewall server that blocked all known inappropriate sites. Second, the network had a sniffer that logged any viewed unblocked inappropriate sites. Both were used to police the students’ computer usage, but I was subject to the same review. Third, the district’s connection was piped through the county’s department of education, which also kept server logs. Fourth, the setup of my room completely precluded anyone standing in the doorway from seeing my computer. Both were on the same wall, separated by twenty feet of counterspace topped with a big screen TV, then a full size filing cabinet, and then my monitor. There was no way Student B could have seen my computer screen. And fifth, Student B had was very well known by the administrators, the school board, the local sheriff’s deputy, and the county SARB judge as being a Not Nice Person. The previous year, he’d gotten an eighth grade girl pregnant.
It boiled down to a SARB meeting. Student B had broken his SARB contract by being on school grounds after school, so he was up for review. Turns out this particular SARB meeting was the one I’d signed up for at the beginning of the school year, since each meeting needs two teachers from the school staff present. We dealt with a seventh grader who’d been stealing, doing drugs, and getting into vandalizing, and when we were done with that, I explained the judge that I had to excuse myself. I couldn’t be present as a SARB board member, as Student B had leveled an accusation at me.
I sat outside at the secretary’s desk, reading a book, while the meeting went on. Student B’s mother, apparently, was ready to push the accusation as far as she could. She was convinced the system was trying to railroad her darling child, and I, of course, was the Evil Seductress trying to get her son in trouble (yes, all 255 pounds of me at the time). I later got the story from the superintendent, the principal, and the school secretary.
First, the judge read over the accusation Student B made towards me and asked Student B if it were true. He said it was, so did his mother. Then, the school secretary explained the IT network setup - that I couldn’t have gone to a porn site, even if I had, the sniffer would have logged it, which it didn’t, even if I’d been able to go there, the county’s servers would have logged the visit, which it hadn’t. Both Student B and his mother still swore that I’d done it. After that, the superintendent pulled out a sheet of paper and pencil, handed it to Student B, and asked him to draw a map of my classroom - where he’d been, where my desk was, how my computer was setup, etcetera. Student B couldn’t do it.
The judge asked him again if the accusation were true, or if he were making something up to get himself out of trouble. Student B finally caved and said he’d only been making a joke, and didn’t understand why everyone was so upset. His mother, however, still said that I’d been looking at porn. At which point, the superintendent leaned forward and said:
“Ms. Phouka is a valued member of our faculty. If you repeat your son’s false accusation in any manner, I will encourage her to sue you for slander and defamation of character, and I will offer the support and resources of my district to her to do so. Do you understand?”
And Student B’s mother folded.
All in all, it took about six weeks for everything to shake out. I was a shivering wreck through much of it, as I’d read and heard second/third hand accounts of teachers who’d been ruined by similar accusations. Had it been another student - one with good standing and credibility - it would have been much worse, even with the evidence on my side. Had my principal and superintendent not backed me to the hilt, it would have been catastrophic for my career.
The next year, Student B had to come to me and personally apologize for his behavior, and I got the chance to explain to him why it was so much worse than a “joke” and him trying to weasel out of a bad situation. He’d had to come to me because he’d transferred back to the regular high school, and in order to graduate, he had to take Art - of which, I was the only teacher. I had him sign a behavior contract, which he held to for the first quarter or so. Then he just kind of stopped doing any work, or coming to class, or really, anything else, so he ended up flunking three of four quarters.
At any rate, that’s my story.
I got home from work one night about 17 years ago, and there was a message on my answering machine from an unknown woman who did not identify herself, but who called me by name and obscenely berated me for having an affair with her husband. Since I had watched a movie at the apartment of the only guy I was (casually) seeing at the time (his male roommate was there at the time - there was no question that he didn’t live there), I knew it wasn’t that some slimeball married guy had deceived me into dating him. To this day, I have no idea with whom I was supposed to be having an affair!
Kinda wish I did - it doesn’t seem fair to get the blame without any of the fun - at least of knowing who!
I’ve told this story before, but my ex Eric’s boss when he worked at a movie theatre was a giant homophobe. He managed to get Eric fired by accusing him of stealing. They had a video that they showed Eric, proving he hadn’t stolen bubkes, but they fired him anyway. Eric had a panic attack and I had to come and get him. :mad:
I wasn’t officially accused of this, but I was held for questioning, arrested and put through a lie detector test, so I guess I was a suspect.
When I was 16, I worked at a locally owned video rental store. It was a Sunday and New Year’s Day and I had worked both Saturday night and then all day Sunday. We were extremely busy because of the holiday and had a huge deposit (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) in the back lockbox.
I had finished counting out first at the end of the night and went to the back to reconcile and lock up my drawer. I finished up, opened the drawer where the box was kept. No box. Sometimes we took the box up front to count out because the office was oddly scented, but no, my coworker didn’t have it either. The back door was unlatched (anyone under five feet tall couldn’t latch the top latch). Our manager was just at five feet. Hmm.
We called the manager. She didn’t want to leave her party so she told us to just put the money in a locked cabinet in the back and she’d sort it out later. Not wanting to be implicated in the theft of several thousand dollars, we called the owners, who called the cops. We were questioned for an hour or so (with a break as the cop chased down a getaway car from a robbery directly across the street… we all heard the description of the car on his radio as it sped by the store). We went home that night, rather… upset.
The only odd thing we remember happening that day was an old employee (who’d been fired for selling drugs at work) coming in to “wish us a happy new year” but never entering the store (not going past the alarm panels).
I was taken to the police station the next day, fingerprinted and hooked up to a lie detector. I passed, obviously, and they eventually pinned it on the diminuitive manager.
The whole thing was a lot like an episode of Murder, She Wrote.
When I was in tenth grade, I was accused of stealing one of the school year books.
My friends and I were in the school library during one study hall, looking up people in the old yearbooks, especially our parents so we could make fun of them. Well, a few days later, it was learned that one of the most recent yearbooks had been stolen, and we had been one of the last group of students in there. The other two were girls who we KNEW had reps for being troublemakers, and were most definitely the thiefs. We were questioned by the vice principal, who said things like, “Look, we’re not interested in punishing you, we just want the yearbook back, because these things aren’t replaceable.” Things like that.
Rather mild, I suppose compared to most of the stories here, but it really pissed me off at the time. Funny thing is, a few weeks later, the yearbook was returned in the book drop.
I worked at the Horseshoe as a craps dealer back when it was still owned by members of the Binion family. One fine night, the muscles in my lower back decided to go into spasm, and I was in hell for the last three hours of my shift. Mentally, I was very much on top of my game. I had seven players on my side, three of whom were stroking me (continually changing their bets in order to try to confuse a dealer into making a mistake and overpaying them), pretty heavy action, but I was all over it, keeping track of everything on my layout. The only problem I was having was when I had to pay the line. I had to continually readjust my body postion to be able to reach the more distant bets with minimal pain. When I would do this, one of my cow orkers would tell, me in the snottiest of all possible tones of voice, how to pay very simple bets, even though seconds before I had successfully paid bets far trickier. I would give him my very best glare, and go on about my business. He kept this up the last two hours of the shift. At the end of the shift, he came up to me and said, “If you’re going to drink, do it on your own time, you can’t be fucking up on the game like that.” Never mind the fact that I had made one single mistake in the course of two hours (the average dealer makes seven mistakes a day, and is actually on the game for six hours in a shift, so you do the math) and it had been caught before the bet was paid. I shrieked at him, “I’m not drunk, I am in pain, and I wasn’t fucking up.” Also, there was a distinct lack of alcohol on my breath. Problem solved, or so I thought until the next night, when my shift boss confronted me about “what happened the last two hours last night, you were so fucked up you didn’t know what you were doing, and if it happens again, I’m going to send you for a toxicology test”. I told him what had really happened, that I was in pain, that I was very much on top of my game, but just having physical problems because of the extreme pain I was in. It was obvious he didn’t believe me, though. Dealers at the 'Shoe were allowed to leave the casino during their breaks and have a drink (or, in some cases, several) and it was the rule rather the exception that most of the craps dealers would have a buzz on, but nobody really cared as long as they didn’t get so inebriated they couldn’t deal.
Story two: I was attending community college to become a massage therapist (God, I wish the licensing process didn’t take so damn long). One day, the head of the program called me aside out of the classroom and said, “What happened with Jojo last Wednesday?” I looked at him and said, “Huh?”, which, by the look on Bob’s face was the wrong answer. “No, I’m serious, huh?” He told me that Jojo had gone to our anatomy instructor and told her that I had been grinding my pelvis against him in the cadaver lab. Mind you, this allegedly occurred next to a corpse that had had most of her skin removed (I think we were working with the one I had named Irene that day) that smelled of preserving fluid, and right in the middle of a group of about twenty students. Yeah, that’s the kind of setting I’m going to freak someone I can barely stand to be in a room with in. Of course, I denied vociferously.
Jojo, BTW, didn’t finish the program. He was committed a serious breach of client confidentiality, and in the ensuing fireworks, decided to drop out of the program. He should have been expelled.
I was accused by an old boss at least twice of stealing money from the till because it came up short every time I worked. Pretty damning, except there was another girl who always worked the same day I did. She opened, I closed. I don’t know if the boss ever approached her.
It was particularly frustrating to me because I knew exactly how to steal money from the till and never get caught. It wasn’t that difficult. So I was offended because she thought I was unethical enough to steal from her and stupid enough to get caught.
At my old job, I left my jacket in the manager’s office. In the office there is also the safe. At the end on a shift I called to the only employee who I could see that I was going into the office to get my jacket.
While I was in the office my assistant manager returned. (Probably from a cig break.) She came into the office and started asking me what the hell I was doing in there. (This woman is a complete bitch, btw.) Stuttering, I explained I was just getting my jacket. She starts going on about how I should have told someone I was going in there. The guy I told can hear us in the office and yells "She told me!" The assistant manager suddenly decides everything is ok, and off I go.
Ok. So she never actually accused me of stealing anything, but know what she was thinking.
I was accused whilst on holiday of stealing from a B&B.I was supposed to have made off with their SHOWER CURTAIN :rolleyes: This kinda petered out when I pointed out it was actually still in the bathroom,but apparently I’d returned it back when they noticed…and since I was the only person in the house apart from them it must have been me.So I pointed out that there had been two strange characters playing pool in the dark.They were their children.So I wasn’t the only person there.I’m still wondering what I would have done with my ill-gotten gains…
This thread reminded me of my last stint on jury duty. My group finally got called to a courtroom after 4 hours of sitting in the assembly room. The defense attorney was questioning each of the prospective jurors in turn, always asking the same two questions. My bored mind had been paying only about half attention. When it came my turn the conversation went like this:
Defense: Have you ever been falsely accused of anything?
Me: Yes, sir, I’m married. (jurors laugh, judge and prosecutor smile)
Defense: Have you ever falsely acused someone?
Me: Yes, sir, I have children.
The whole courtroom, with the exception of the defense attorny, was laughing. I didn’t get called.
Well, I got accused of stealing from the till at the comic book shop I worked in during college because I was the only person whose register regularly balanced. The owner thought I must be stealing because my drawer was never off. What. Ever. The managers defended me and I was never formally accused. Jackass.
I also got accused of plagiarism. In high school I had to take Economics in summer school so that I could spend my senior year abroad. I was a punky goth girl whom you wouldn’t guess got straight A’s if you were judgmental had a really closed mind. So there I was, taking this class in advance with a bunch of kids older than me who were taking it for the second time. The final assignment was to write an essay about some aspect of economics. I chose to write about the globalization of the US economy and its possible effects worldwide. The teacher accused me of plagiarism and gave me a C-. My mom freaked. She called him and said “Either accuse my daughter outright and give her the F she deserves, or admit that you made a mistake and give her the A she deserves.” While this was pending, I ran into my favorite teacher in the halls one day. We were standing there talking and my econ teacher walks by and says to him "You know her? And my favorite teacher starts prattling on and on about how I’m one of the smarteest students at my school and a fantastic writer, etc and I swear I was grinning ear to ear. I ended up getting an A in that class. 
A couple of years ago, I was taking a literature class to fulfill a school requirement, and the first essay I wrote apparently came up as suspicious after running it through one of those programs that can search the internet to check for plagiarism. I was completely floored. The instructor allowed me to write another essay, and I was grateful, but I later ran it through one of those programs myself (on a website with a free trial period) and all I got back were links to discussion questions without any answers and links to the text itself. So I wished I had asked to see what came up as suspicious. I ended up getting an A- in the class, but I occassionally wonder if she thought I was a cheater.