So you met a girl at a party. Both of you had been drinking, but not so much that either of you was stumbling around, slurring your speech, or anything. The attraction between the two of you was palpable; sparks flew through the air like electric currents, and one thing very quickly led to another.

After a night of passionate fun, she left with a smile on her face, bidding you farewell. You proceeded on with your life, a little happier for the encounter.

Then, a few weeks later, a pair of uniformed police officers showed up at your door. They were investigating the rape of an acquaintance of yours – the girl you’d slept with a few weeks back. You, they said, were the alleged perpetrator.

She said you’d raped her, they told you. They needed to ask you some questions and wondered if you might come downtown with them for a chat.

Immediately, your world was turned upside down. You had no choice but to hire an attorney at $200 an hour for a lot of hours if you didn’t want a one-way ticket to the soul-destroying prison-rape gulag of the penitentiary system. Friends distanced themselves from you; you feared work finding out, and firing you on the spot because “it’s not good for the company image to have someone accused of what you’ve been accused of on the books.” And forget about finding a girlfriend; now every girl you see looks like a potential accuser to you of a crime you did not commit.

The terrifying reality is that false rape accusations are as common or nearly as common as genuine rape reports to the police, according to the most reliable of the research studies out there – but nobody talks about it.

What causes it, why it happens, what to look for, how to avoid it, and how to deal with it. It’s taboo; it doesn’t fit the “agenda”, and you’re not allowed to mention it. Talking about the plight of the legions of men preyed upon by vicious women risks distracting from the discussion of the plight of the legions of women preyed upon by vicious men, and this festering boil is left undiscussed, and young men uninformed and unprepared.

Being slapped with a false rape accusation can be one of the most terrifying, isolating, and emasculating events that can befall a man, because another individual decides to leverage the power of “the system” to try to destroy his life, often for reasons he does not know or cannot comprehend. When it happens, there’s frequently no one you can talk to, because everyone just presumes you did it... after all, why would some girl go to the trouble of filing a police report accusing you of such a crime otherwise?

So let’s talk about it, because it needs to be talked about. Let’s discuss why this happens... how to steer far clear of the women who do it... and what to do if you get stuck in some Jezebel’s fly trap.