It’s been a big week in rape-related news, inasmuch as that counts as a category of news. Donald Trump and his lawyer. Bill Cosby. Now, three men are suing Rolling Stone magazine, claiming that the later-retracted article “A Rape on Campus: A Brutal Assault and Struggle for Justice at UVA” defamed them.

The plaintiffs are members of Phi Kappa Psi, a fraternity the identified in the article. According to the article’s pseudonymous “Jackie,” seven young men gang-raped her at a Phi Kappa Psi party. The article follows Jackie’s alleged attempt to get alleged justice for the alleged crime from UVA administrators.

It turned out that all of those ‘alleged’s are pretty important. Shortly after Rolling Stone published the piece, skeptics nosing around in the facts discovered that Jackie’s story wasn’t adding up. (If you need to further get up to speed on the background events, Margaret Hartmann’s thorough timeline of the UVA rape case should do the trick.) Soon Rolling Stone retracted the piece.

The three men now suing claim that the magazine and the author were negligent in their efforts to verify Jackie’s story and that the men suffered as a result of being associated with the gang-rape allegations.

The harm to the men’s reputations is probably not surprising. If there’s anything worse than going on the post-graduation job market labeled as a rapist, then it’s going on the market labeled as a gang-rapist. You don’t even get points for being an independent thinker.

What is surprising is, even after the Rolling Stone debacle, how many dubious beliefs persist about women who allege that they have been sexually assaulted, the men those women accuse, and how the media reports on it.

Here are three lies that linger.

Lie #1: Journalists Shouldn’t Ask Too Many Questions Of Someone Who Says She Was Raped

Recall that Rolling Stone’s journalistic lapses came to light when investigators found inaccuracies and inconsistencies in Jackie’s tale.

Rolling Stone editor Will Dana’s statement apologizing for shoddy journalistic practices remains remarkably deferential to Jackie:

“Given all of these reports, however, we have come to the conclusion that we were mistaken in honoring Jackie’s request to not contact the alleged assaulters to get their account. In trying to be sensitive to the unfair shame and humiliation many women feel after a sexual assault, we made a judgment – the kind of judgment reporters and editors make every day. We should have not made this agreement with Jackie and we should have worked harder to convince her that the truth would have been better served by getting the other side of the story. These mistakes are on Rolling Stone, not on Jackie.”

The folks at Rolling Stone were apparently so afraid of throwing shade on a woman who claims to have been raped that they were tripping over themselves to seem as sensitive as possible, even once her story began to crumble.

Even after Rolling Stone’s retraction, if one believes the statement, the magazine only erred by not doing their darnedest to convince Jackie to maybe she should think about letting them prove how right she obviously was about the rape that obviously happened to her.

Lie #2: Telling Falsehoods Is Not Lying If Something Bad Happened

Sure, friends of women who say they have been raped should not lie for their friends. But a lot of people still seem pretty comfortable with re-defining for their friends.

Emily Clark, a former suitemate of Jackie’s, wrote an op-ed piece for the UVA newspaper shortly after the story broke. Clark actually corrected a few pieces of Jackie’s version of events. Nevertheless, she also stood up for her old roommate. She wrote:

“While I cannot say what happened that night, and I cannot prove the validity of every tiny aspect of her story to you, I can tell you that this story is not a hoax, a lie or a scheme. Something terrible happened to Jackie at the hands of several men who have yet to receive any repercussions.”

Clark tries to salvage Jackie’s story, not through the presentation of proof, but by loosening the limits of what counts as Jackie’s story. Now, Jackie’s story is approximately “something terrible” happening, possibly even just Jackie being genuinely upset. Clark has restricted the definition of “a hoax, a lie, or a scheme” to refer only to an account that doesn’t resemble in any way whatsoever what really happened. Unless Jackie is lying about “something terrible” happening to her, then her supporters credit her with telling the truth.

Lie #3: Nice Guys Shouldn’t Pick on Female Rape Victims, Even When There’s No Rape and The Women Aren’t the Victims

After the story broke, three of Jackie’s friends whom she identified by pseudonyms in her account came forward using their real names. They rejected Jackie’s depictions of them.

The students, including Ryan Duffin, spoke with the Associated Press. Here is a video from the interview, where Duffin says:

“People at U.Va. want answers just as much as I do. But if anything, the takeaway from all this is that I still don’t really care if what’s presented in this article is true or not because I think it’s far more important that people focus on the issue of sexual assault as a whole.”

Who cares about members of the fraternity that Jackie cited? Who cares about evidence? Who cares about niggling little details like whether a crime was actually committed? What matters is campus rape is a thing, you guys.

Women refusing to focus on the wrongdoing of women who lie about sexual assault is sad. A man doing it is sadder. It’s a perverse twist on women blaming women for being victims of rape.

In the bad old days, both men and women searched for ways to make a sexual assault the fault of the female victim. Even if a woman was herself the victim, she might blame herself for dressing a certain way, trusting a certain person, visiting a certain location. They internalized their own oppression.

When men say that it doesn’t matter whether a woman is telling the truth about a sexual assault because what really matters is the “big issue,” those men have internalized their own oppression too. They’ve adopted the attitude that any harms done by a woman lying about a rape are not important. They’ve bought into the lie that “good guys” continue to focus on the suffering of women, even when facts suggest that a woman has inflicted suffering on men she has falsely accused.

A man blaming “campus rape culture” or “the patriarchy” or whatever instead of blaming an alleged rape victim whose story unravels is no more noble than a woman telling another woman that she must have been “asking for it” if she was raped.

How many false gang-rape allegations need to happen before everybody cultivates some healthy skepticism?

I wish I knew. Given the number of myths and misconceptions that persist, even after the UVA rape story was discredited, I fear that whatever the number is, we haven’t hit it yet.

Tamara Tabo is a summa cum laude graduate of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the school’s law review. After graduation, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. She currently heads the Center for Legal Pedagogy at Texas Southern University, an institute applying cognitive science to improvements in legal education. You can reach her at tabo.atl@gmail.com.