New York Governor David Patterson has commuted the sentence of John White, a 50-something black father, who was serving a two-to-four year sentence for manslaughter in the shooting death of 17-year-old Daniel Cicciaro, who was white. The tragic shooting stemmed from a false rape claim.

At his trial, Mr. White testified that late in the evening of August 9, 2006, his 19-year-old son, Aaron, woke him up to tell him that he had just come from a party where a young woman wrongly accused him of threatening to rape her on a MySpace posting. Aaron told his father that a group of angry white youths were headed to their house to beat him up because they wrongly believed the young woman. Mr. White and his son walked to the end of their driveway to confront the youths, and in the heated confrontation that followed, young Mr. Cicciaro was killed. Mr. White claimed his gun accidentally discharged.

The girl later recanted the rape claim.

Mr. Cicciaro’s mother, Joanne Cicciaro, said her son was trying to protect the girl. “The thing is, that night, Daniel believed Aaron threatened to rape a girl that was like his little sister.”

One boy is dead, and a father was imprisoned after a racially charged trial that divided a city. But the girl, apparently, escaped unscathed.

The scope of the tragedy is Shakespearean. But it raises an important issue that we frequently confront at my blog, False Rape Society. Those of us who follow the false rape phenomenon see patterns of gendered reactions to rape claims. Based on my review of the reported cases, it is fair to assert that men, as befitting their status since the beginning of time as women’s protectors, typically express greater outrage over rape claims than do women.

This is in contrast to the significant number of women who treat the notion of rape so cavalierly that either they tell rape lies in order to serve some ulterior, selfish purpose (only a small percentage of women actually tell rape lies, just as only a small percentage of men actually rape), or they minimize, excuse, or rationalize false rape claims (a far more significant percentage of women do this).

Mr. Cicciaro’s death is just one of many tragedies stemming from male outrage over false rape claims. A 15-year-old girl falsely told her boyfriend that Sumbo Owoiya, 18, raped her. The girl, the boyfriend, and another man then drove to the innocent youth’s apartment. While Mr. Owoiya was looking through a peep hole, the other man shot him to death through the door. The boyfriend was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, but the girl was given a suspended sentence. We wrote about it here: http://glennsacks.com/blog/?p=3316

Last year, two teenage girls lied to a 19-year-old man that another 19-year-old, Cory Headen, had raped one of them, so the man broke into Mr. Headen’s home and beat him to death with a baseball bat while he was sleeping. At the man’s trial, the judge described the teens who accused Mr. Headen of rape as “stupid, drunken, immature girls” who delivered a vile message. The judge sentence the man who did the beating to seven years in prison. One young man was dead, another’s life was destroyed, all because of a false rape claim, and the girls who ignited the fire apparently escaped unscathed. We wrote about it here: http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2009/08/awful-price-of-false-rape-claim-one-man.html

John Chalmers, a 47-year-old prominent businessman, suffered devastating brain injuries in a vicious attack after a woman’s brother was wrongly convinced that Mr. Chalmers had raped his sister, so the brother thrashed Mr. Chalmers. So terrible was the beating that Mr. Chalmers has had to “learn everything again.” We wrote about it here: http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/2009/03/man-viciously-attacked-suffers.html

Darrell Roberson had come home unexpectedly from a trip when he found his wife, Tracy Roberson, and her lover, Devin LaSalle, together in Mr. LaSalle’s truck. To cover up her affair, Mrs. Roberson falsely told her husband she had been raped, and Mr. Roberson shot and killed Mr. LaSalle. In a rare switch, a grand jury refused to indict Mr. Roberson, but Ms. Roberson was charged, convicted, and imprisoned for five years for involuntary manslaughter. “The wrong person went to prison,” fumed Jill Davis, Roberson’s attorney. Read about it here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2008/05/05/623920/arlington-mom-who-cried-rape-gets.html

And we could go on and on and on. Men, far more than women, typically are the ones who act out their rage when it comes to rape claims. They usually don’t go so far as to murder the accused, but they manifest their vitriol in any number of other ways.

This, of course, points up the monstrous lie repeated with zombie-like repetition by members of what can aptly be called the sexual grievance industry. They insist that rape is normalized, rationalized, and excused, principally by men, in our so-called “rape culture.” This, of course, is just another in a cavalcade of offensive, gender-divisive straw men concocted by persons financially dependent on the counterfeit perception that rape is a massive, unresolved problem that only they can solve.

The Cicciaro death, and the other tragedies stemming from false rape claims, raise a more sinister question: what role do men play in fostering our false rape culture? While rape liars must always assume principal responsibility for their falsehoods, and while the sexual grievance industry pumps out a steady diet of Chicken Little propaganda to foment good old fashioned lock-the-doors-hide-the-daughters rape hysteria, it seems that men and boys falsely accused of rape are mostly harmed by the overreactions of other men. It is mostly men who beat them to death, who fire them from their jobs, who splash their names all over the newspaper, and who are too quick to arrest and charge them on the basis of an unsubstantiated claim before an investigation has been concluded.

If the false rape crisis is to end, we must ask whether men, acting out their roles as women’s protectors, have become the unwitting tools of the politicized purveyors of misandry, who are all too happy to see men overreact at the slightest whiff of rape.