If I had known the story of my false rape allegation would be held up by so many dudebros as the reason why you can’t take rape allegations seriously, I almost certainly would have thought again about posting the story I told primarily for catharsis’ sake back in 2009, before the shit started hitting the fan in the secular community when people dared suggest maybe we should try not to chase out women so much.

Another comment today has hit my first-post moderation wall, as so many others have since the allegations had been made against Shermer, on that old post. My linking it in the Web of Trust post probably didn’t help matters, but neither did having a shitload of people who hate FtB latching onto it and deciding this meant that we at FtB, monolith that we are, are lying hypocrites and/or rapists and/or something something evil something something blog hits something take over the world.

This comment seems more reasonable than most of them, at first glance. It’s decidedly not, though.

Trigger warnings due to frank discussion of rape and rape-apologetics.



Author : Rohn I have no doubt based on your story you were a victim of a false rape accusation. But a dilemma is raised. Is it fair for us to believe that your ex-girlfriend who accused you years ago of rape, is a bat-shit crazy liar without hearing her side of the story? Isn’t this “the bitch be lyin’?” Have I missed something? You seem trustworthy but many would say Dr. Shermer does too. Only a minority of rape allegations are false, as you yourself say. Hypothetically – If your ex-girlfriend approached Dr. Myers today with her allegation of being raped by you, what do you think ethically he should do: Ignore the allegation, liase with you about it, publish it on his blog, or go the the police? I suspect raising this question will get me insta-banned, if not I’d be interested in your answer.

I absolutely love the preemptive defense of Freeze Peach at the end, but I have to say that seeing this nonsense used as a club to attack PZ Myers and the unnamed source of the allegations against Michael Shermer is emotionally draining — in no small part because it’s being used to ultimately undercut victims of sexual assault.

Let’s go through this Fisking-style.

I have no doubt based on your story you were a victim of a false rape accusation. But a dilemma is raised.

I provided no evidence for my story other than my word — I could have made up every single fact about it, up to and including the existence of a girlfriend when I was 16, and yet you believed me without reservation. Why is that?

And a “dilemma” is a problem with exactly two solutions, neither of them being acceptable. You do not raise a dilemma in this comment; you raise, at most generous, a conundrum.

Is it fair for us to believe that your ex-girlfriend who accused you years ago of rape, is a bat-shit crazy liar without hearing her side of the story? Isn’t this “the bitch be lyin’?” Have I missed something?

Quite a few things, actually. Aside from the fact that lying about things causes an erosion of trust overall, and aside from the fact that trust is necessary for believing a case without corroborating evidence, I’m going to say this as absolutely plainly as I can: Even people who lie frequently should be able to report rape and it should be taken as seriously. There should not be a “you cried dickwolf” defense. This is morally reprehensible, and intellectually lazy, and it allows real rapists who target known liars to get away with their crimes.

Another thing that you missed is that I don’t mean “throw men in jail because a woman claims rape”. Nobody means that, to my knowledge. What “taken seriously” means is, trust but verify.

In my story, a group of her schoolmates who believed her came to my house ostensibly to beat the shit out of me. They trusted, but didn’t verify. They were trying to enact vigilante justice. In Shermer’s case, I don’t know of a single person advocating either that he get put in jail without evidence, nor that a mob of vigilantes take him aside and beat him to a pulp.

So, yes. She was a compulsive liar, which I should have recognized sooner with all my attempts at covering for her and providing apologetics for her that what she said wasn’t REALLY a lie. I was in love, and I didn’t want to think ill of her, so I mentally justified all the lies as mere misinterpretations and misspeakings. But people saw her do this and recognized that this was the case, prior to her rape claims, and despite the small circle of her friends who took her at her word, many people saw this as just another lie. This, I recognize, is ALSO a problem.

I never saw a court of law over this. Most claims of rape never do. I did see some repercussions though, psychologically — since then I have had a great deal of difficulty with being overly cautious even with enthusiastic partners, to their consternation when I move too slowly in bed for their tastes. As a result of the deeply in-grained fear that perhaps the rape allegation against me was predicated on my misreading signals, I have historically chosen to be as cautious as humanly possible in such matters. I know, intellectually, that I didn’t rape her, and I know, intellectually, why she made the accusations that she did, but the psychological damage is still there, and I’m still overly cautious decades later. This is something I need to work out between myself and my partners, though — and I’ve managed to some reasonable degree, given that my dance card is presently full. But she was not taken as seriously as she should have been, except for the small group that took her way too seriously without verifying.

I resent the hell out of the fact that my ex-girlfriend’s lying is being used as an example of why you shouldn’t trust-but-verify when people claim they’ve been raped. It’s an example of exactly why you should be measured and careful in treating such a situation without doing undue damage to the alleged victim, at the same time as not doing undue damage to the accused in case they turn out to be one of the rare cases of false accusation. NOBODY treated this situation correctly, in my estimation — not the people who dismissed it as a lie out of hand, and not the people who took her at face value. And if anyone took her seriously and fact-checked before taking action, I didn’t see it (probably because they were being as cautious as they should have).

You seem trustworthy but many would say Dr. Shermer does too. Only a minority of rape allegations are false, as you yourself say.

I’ve talked at great length about how trust is built up. Shermer’s trust is built up through his celebrity status, mostly, with regard to the people making this sort of apologetic. For the people who claim to be victims, perhaps they trusted him as well, and got burned as a result, and they are trying to let everyone know he’s less trustworthy than he seems by virtue of his celebrity.

In my case, a single person claimed rape, and made statements of fact that were demonstrably false. This is decidedly not sufficient evidence to send anyone to jail. However, I have absolutely zero problem with people taking her story into account when determining whether or not I am trustworthy to be around. If people misjudge me based on that story, it might hurt my feelings, but not enough to overcome my empathy for the position that that person is actually in when deciding whether or not they need to defend themselves.

This is the Schrodinger’s Rapist argument all over again. And my stance has not changed. I, as a male imbued with all the privileges of not having to worry about any social encounter ending with rape because rape of men is exceedingly comparatively rare outside of prison, empathize fully with someone who feels they need to cross the street or wait for the next elevator or walk faster to get away from me even though I have no intention of mistreating them. My feelings are not hurt by this — not really. In fact, it makes me angry at a society where such rapes happen and the rapists are almost never brought to justice.

A very small minority of reported rapes are false in the sense of being invented from whole cloth. However, depending on your definition of “false”, meaning everything up to and including claims of rape that cannot be proven in a court of law (and running through the gamut of excuses including “woman was inebriated and therefore untrustworthy” through “nobody’s been specifically accused” through “police didn’t want to bother”), the numbers vary greatly. The most commonly accepted number is about 6% being reported but being totally untrue.

That means 94% of rape allegations are probably true. And this with under-reporting being a huge problem. If all instances of rape were reported, despite monumental societal pressure against reporting since the person reporting rape is often the only person whose life gets turned upside-down, then I suspect the number of false rape cases would decrease precipitously.

By comparison, most theft is reported, and the victims aren’t unduly put through any legal wringers. False theft reporting happens about 2% of the time. I suspect if you took false rape claims and compared to a combination of both unreported rapes and reported legitimate rapes, you’d get about the same percentage.

So, when someone reports that they’ve been raped, chances are, they were. Calling them a liar is actually the extraordinary claim.

Hypothetically – If your ex-girlfriend approached Dr. Myers today with her allegation of being raped by you, what do you think ethically he should do: Ignore the allegation, liase with you about it, publish it on his blog, or go the the police?

Since you’re not being confronted with a person who is personally known to you, whom you trust to not make radically contrafactual statements in a climate where their lives would be turned upside-down by making such a claim, in my case you find me trustworthy because I’m the only one telling the story. In Shermer’s case, multiple unnamed people have either claimed being assaulted themselves, or established corroboration of patterns of behaviour described in those claims. You can distrust them, and by extension the people who brought those claims forward, if you want. You can (correctly) suggest that this isn’t enough by which to put Shermer in jail.

But the goal of the alleged victim is to make the pattern of behaviour better known, so in the future, others might more correctly judge how to deal with this person. Ethically, I see no problem with a multiply-substantiated account by credible sources that this person may not be trustworthy in those sorts of social situations, that this person might be a horndog on the prowl. However, it’s up to individuals whether or not this is a turn-off. There could very well be people fully interested in taking him to bed despite these issues. Philosopher groupies, as it were. The issue is one of INFORMED ENTHUSIASTIC ONGOING CONSENT. This is primary in any discussion of sex — nobody here is against sex if there’s consent. Sex is great, when all parties involved are into it. Have as much sex with willing partners as you want. But consent must be INFORMED.

This is merely more information with which people can make an informed choice to consent.

Ethically, if the goal is to prevent people from being raped, and if a statute of limitations has passed and the evidence available is grossly unlikely to land Shermer in jail even if all these accounts were absolutely true, then the correct ethical choice is to make these accusations known to the audience that might use that information to better protect themselves. Since we are an internet-based community primarily, I see no problem with using the internet to get this information to the people that might be most in need of it.

If my ex-girlfriend were to — almost twenty years after the fact — approach someone in a position of power to make the allegations widely known in our community, and the person in a position of power were to believe her uncritically without independently verifying the facts of the case that are verifiable, or to compare notes against other patterns of behaviour that have been observed and reported on for years within our community — then I would suggest that that might be ethically questionable. However, even then, the people receiving that information would be able to gauge how credible the accounts are and modify their behaviour around the accused, either with being around Shermer, or with being around me. As I said before, the worst that can happen if people shy away from intimate situations with me is that my feelings get hurt. I empathize enough with people trying to avoid rape that if they gauge me as a potential attacker, they should do what they need to to feel safe (short of preemptive assault), my feelings be damned.

If, ultimately, Michael Shermer learns that he needs to be a lot more careful about consent — even if he ends up with hang-ups about it, like I did — that’s not a horrible result. Especially not where we have multiple witnesses to multiple events suggesting he’s taking the issue of consent a lot less seriously than he should.

Now, does that answer your question to your satisfaction, first-time commenter who airdropped into a post from four years ago to talk about Michael Shermer?

Somehow, I doubt it.

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