Hysterical women ranting that women “must be believed” suspend logic and reason, residing in an alternative universe where a vagina acts not as a reproductive organ, but as a determiner of truth.

Back here in the real world, women lie all the time. They lie about love. They lie about sex. They lie about money. They lie about violence inflicted upon them and the violence they inflict upon others. They even lie about who the father of their children may or may not be. Women are not only adept at lying, but also at manipulation and deceit. To say women must be believed simply because they are women is, in fact, a big lie and a brilliant deceit—a manipulation to obtain unassailable power.

Having practiced family and criminal law for 20 years, I had a firsthand view of lying and manipulative women. A memorable case occurred when a young, white Mormon girl hooked up with some young Mexican guys for a night of partying. The next day when her mother and boyfriend came looking for her and learned that she had spent the night having sex with her Hispanic hosts, her only gambit to avoid the consequences of her promiscuous behavior was to accuse my client, a 20-year-old Latino farm worker, the rare Mexican in an all-white town—of rape.

And she did. Only through withering cross-examination did we learn that she was the sexual aggressor and made no effort to call the police (or anyone else) because the phone next to the bed was “too far away.” This woman had a vagina, yet she lied. Fortunately for my client, her friend collaborated my client’s story and my client was spared 25 years in prison.

Any trip to a criminal court in America will reveal lying women. Women use threats of domestic violence charges to control and manipulate men: “If you don’t do x, I will call the cops and tell them you hit me.” If the woman has relented and decided to reunite with her “abuser,” suddenly her memory gets foggy on the stand, or “That’s not what happened the police told me write that he beat me.” Ask any prosecutor or any defense attorney in any county in the country and they will assure you that not only do women lie all the time, they’re great at it.

When women get caught is a lie, they often resort to Plan B: crying. Often the crying stems from the fact she got caught lying. In a memorable case, a woman emptied a substantial sum of money from a joint bank account. In order to bolster her abuse allegations (and to qualify for immigration status as a battered woman) she checked herself into a battered women’s shelter. When confronted with her string of lies she started crying. “Were you crying when you filled out the withdrawal slip for $50,000 and ran off to a woman’s shelter and told them you had no money?” Probably not.

As much as woman lie in criminal court, it’s only the warm up round for family court. They lie about violence to gain an advantage in custody battles. They lie about sexual assault to limit and control a father access to their children. They lie about child support and money they’ve received. They file fake restraining orders to gain a tactical advantage to secure possession of the home. Anyone who says we must believe her because she’s a woman needs to have a talk with any family law judge in America.

But before I get hate mail calling me a misogynist, or stoke the flames of rage burning in the dark corners of the incel havens of the Internet, let me note that everything said above about women lying can be said with as much force about men. Men lie for the same reasons women lie. To gain a strategic advantage, to save face, to exact revenge, to secure an economic advantage. Men and women lie for the myriad of reasons that people have lied since the dawn of time. (For those of you who remember the 10 Commandments, it’s in there, so God must have known that people are prone to lying.)

Because men and women lie, we have developed a legal process to discern lies from exaggerations, omissions, misinterpretation of events, and fantasy from the truth. It’s called due process and, coupled with longstanding rules of evidence, it’s pretty good and winnowing out most of the truth from most of the fiction most of the time. Abandoning these standards for a platitude that someone must be believed because they have a vagina, is the slippery slope into madness. Men lie too, but no sane person would ever say: “He has a penis, he must be believed.”

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