On the 18th of September, the BBC published an article by feminist “journalist” Katty Kay titled “The truth about false assault accusations by women“. The article was staggeringly poor even if judged by typical feminist BBC standards and once again Kay proved herself to be one of the most laughably biased members of staff the broadcaster.

Kay messes things up before she has even started, for example figures only exist for false allegations overall, including those made by male accusers, and it isn’t possible to break things down by gender and thus her title can never be accurate given its gendered nature.

Kay cherry picks from studies to claim that “only 2-10% of rape accusations are fake”. She does at least acknowledge the Duke Lacrosse case in 2006 and the “alleged University of Virginia gang rape” saying “they were terrible miscarriages of justice – but they were not representative.”

Given the US-focus of the article then one obvious elephant in the room here is Obama’s notorious “Dear Colleague” letter which Kay conveniently neglects to mention completely. One of the biggest scandals of Obama’s “scandal free presidency”, the letter completely abolished due process for the accused at US colleges not to mention the concept of innocent until proven guilty and allowed hundreds and possibly thousands of students to have their lives ruined by false allegations.

The brilliant Professor KC Johnson is the foremost expert on the Dear Colleague scandal (and the Duke Lacrosse case too), and his Twitter feed is littered with details of Dear Colleague-related legal cases every single day of the week going back years. His feed is seemingly a never ending-stream of important rulings by judges related to falsely accused students, and helpful lyhe keeps a tally of the number of schools who have suffered due-process related losses. The figure stands at an incredible 115 at the time of writing, and it’s worth noting that’s just the number of schools, not the number of cases, thus making far more than 115 cases/victims. It’s not just Kay that ignores these 115 schools either, a hopeless BBC report into DeVos rightly rescinding Obama’s life-destroying letter totally omits any mention of the catalogue of wrongly expelled students, legal defeats and ruined lives. Furthermore, the article even turns the story on its head by including an interview with an alleged campus rape victim rather than any one of Obama’s actual victims harmed by the policy in question.

Kay goes on to write that “false rape accusations very rarely lead to convictions or wrongful jail time” and again this is only half the story . While a lot of juries may see through the lies of false accusers, innocent men usually still find themselves arrested and put in a cell until they can be bailed. The victims of false accusations have their lives put on hold while they wait months or years to finally go to court and this entire traumatic process is a horrific type of abuse by the false accuser and a significant form of punishment in itself.

Kay conveniently ignores the massive CPS disclosure scandal which showed so many men being put on trial due to false allegations, she doesn’t even hint at all the suicides caused by false allegations. Then of course there’s the small matter of Alison Saunders losing her job over the way she and the CPS treated men falsely accused of rape, with the CPS regularly hiding evidence that proved their innocence in an attempt to increase convictions.

Perhaps the best part of Kay’s article is where she gives some of the reasons why women lie about rape. It’s rather selective and focuses on the more trivial rather than vicious reasons, completely ignoring how false accusations are regularly used by mothers in divorce and custody battles. However, we do commend Kay on at least touching on this area, even if she’s again being somewhat dishonest.

You see, by far the top feminist criticism of Mike Buchanan and Justice for Men and Boys and even Philip Davies MP, is the fact that J4MB dared to link to an article titled “13 reasons why women lie about rape”. The Guardian website has no less than five different articles highlighitng that J4MB links to this article from its website (1,2,3,4,5). Note that Buchanan didn’t actually write said article and thus Kay’s article goes a step further than him. Furthermore, Kay goes at least two steps further than Davies as he was merely “guilty” of thought crime by way of attending an event organised by someone who linked to the article about why women lie about rape. Seeing as this “scandal” led for feminist MPs and even the leader of the opposition Jeremy Corbyn to call for Davies to resign, one has to wonder what those same people make of Kay? Why aren’t the likes of Laura Bates called for her head? Is it because she only listed four of the 13 reasons? How many are we allowed to mention?

If that’s the best part of Kay’s article, then perhaps the worst part is her version of events when it comes to the Duke Lacrosse scandal. Kay describes the scandal as a “miscarriage of justice”, which again is inaccurate. The court system partially did it’s job eventually and went as far as declaring the falsely accused men innocent. The scandal wasn’t merely about corrupt prosecutors or false rape accusers, but organised lynch mobs at Duke University itself, including the notorious “Group of 88” staff who sided against the victims in a notorious open letter implying their guilt. The innocent men were assaulted on campus, had their grades unfairly lowered by feminist staff and even had mobs of people banging pots and pans at their houses and shouting support for violence against the innocent men including calls for their castration! Only a couple of staff faces consequences for their misconduct and a grand total of zero have apologised to their victims.

Kay informs us that the false accuser in the Duke case, “Crystal Mangum” “had a felony conviction and ultimately went to prison herself.” From this text readers will almost certainly assume that Mangum was rightly punished for her malicious actions against the false accused, and went to prison for this reason, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Mangum faced absolutely no consequences for her false accusations and instead cashed in on her crimes by publishing her memoirs. So, why did she go to prison you may ask?, well there’s the small matter of her going on to murder her boyfriend, though of course he was male so to misandrist Kay that minor detail doesn’t matter.

Kay’s article attempts to convince readers that the Duke case is nothing like the Christine Ford accusations against Brett Kavanagh, arguing that Ford doest’ fit the “profile” of a false accuser. Had Kay addressed the Duke case more honestly, then one can see that the cases may well be rather more similar than Kay and the BBC would have you believe. For example, at Duke, the scandal was possible thanks to corrupt Democratic District Attorney Mike Nifong who looked to exploit the racial and gendered aspects of case for political reasons as he as up for re-election. The parallels with allegations against Kavanagh don’t end there. For example:

Nifong was strongly criticized for pressing ahead with what appeared to many to be a weak case without any physical evidence or credible allegations

Mangum gave a least five different versions of the “incident” to police and possibly as many as twelve.

Far from being rare as Kay suggests, false accusations are common in society. For example, one can even earn a degree out of making false rape accusations and call it “art”. What’s actually rare is for false accusers to face any consequences for their actions, a fact Kay tries to cover up with her dishonest account of the Duke Lacrosse case. Of course if Kay had reported on the Duke case honestly, people who realise that failing to punish false accusers and protect society from them allows such criminals to go on and commit ever more serious crimes against men, including murder itself. False rape accusations can be fatal in other ways ignored by Kay too, not just in terms of assaults by enraged mobs, but tragic suicides too such as Jay Cheshire and also his mother.

Thankfully it appears that the BBC has received at least one complaint concerning Kay’s attempted journalism and embarrassingly she’s been forced into a staggering number of u-turns. A corrections note at the bottom of the article admits to only two changes, though in reality the “truth” is that there are a massive eight significant corrections to the piece by comparing it to an archive of the original.

The “studies” concerning a 2-10% rate of false rapes are now merely “argued” rather than stated as fact. The following clarification is added: “That figure does not include any unsubstantiated accusations where an investigation was unable to prove a sexual assault occurred, so an accurate figure for the total remains unknown.” Kay admits she’s using British figures in one instance, even though every single other word of the article concerns the situation in the US. A FBI figure of 8% false allegations is added – a figure toward the high-end f the previously claimed range and four times higher than Kay’s 2%. Kay’s dishonest claim that “The idea that lots of men are going to prison because they’ve been falsely accused of rape isn’t supported by the facts.” is corrected to ” isn’t supported by that study“. Kay now no longer implies that Mangum was punished for her false rape allegations. Mangum’s 2010 attempted murder charges are now included. Mangum’s murder of her boyfriend is finally added.

Ultimately what has happened here is that Kay has ripped up the BBC’s impartiality guidelines and set out to write an ideologically motived article in support of her friends in the Democrat Party and in order to attack Kavanagh. She’s thrown reality and objectivity out of the window in order to achieve her goal and to write such a dishonest article and claims its the “truth” in the headline is beyond absurd. Her article has almost zero compassion for the victims of false rape accusations and she completely ignores the pervasiveness of false allegation in society, pretending the problem is just limited to court rooms. What Kay should be addressing is not merely men in prison who are falsely accused, but all those undergoing the ordeal of a trial not to mention those denied a relationship with their own children and kicked out of their own homes. That in itself is not just like a mere prison sentence, but in fact a life sentence for many. And as we’ve highlighted here, in some cases it’s a death sentence too.

Given her focus of the Kavanagh case parhaps above all else she should be mentioning all the men who lose their jobs and livelihoods as a result of false allegations, but then that would ruin all her “arguments” wouldn’t it?

If you enjoy reading HEqual and the work we do please consider making a donation so we can continue promoting equality and tackling discrimination.