It’s time to put down the mattress.

Columbia student Emma Sulko­wicz, who claims her close friend and former sexual partner Paul Nungesser raped her, has been carrying a mattress around campus for months to symbolize her status as a victim and remind everyone her alleged attacker remains on campus. (The mattress was also earning her course credit for performance art, but never mind that.)

Sulkowicz, who has been pictured in newspapers across the country, was even a guest of Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand at the State of the Union address last month. The New York Times referred to Sulkowicz as “a woman with a mattress, refusing to keep her violation private, carrying with her a stark reminder of where it took place.”

Way to reserve judgment, folks.

Turns out there’s another side of the story. Writing in The Daily Beast, the intrepid Cathy Young notes that Nungesser has been cleared by a campus court. And since Sulkowicz declined to press criminal charges, that’s about as close as he’s going to get to an official vindication.

But what he should really get is an apology from the media and the ­cabal of feminists, including Gillibrand, who have supported his ­accuser unquestioningly.

Paul Nungesser and Emma Sulkowicz met during freshman orientation in the fall of 2011, and by the end of their first year of college, they were what you might call friends with benefits. They had sex twice, as well as frequent “sleepovers,” always hugged each other and were close confidants.

The second time they had sex, the two agree, it began consensually. But then their stories diverge. As Young writes, “According to Sulkowicz, he suddenly and brutally assaulted her, then picked up his clothes and left without a word, leaving her stunned and shattered on the bed. According to Nungesser, they briefly engaged in anal intercourse by mutual agreement, then went on to engage in other sexual activity and fell asleep. He says that he woke up early in the morning and went back to his own room while Sulkowicz was still sleeping.”

But two days after this alleged attack, he invited her to come to a party, and she responded affirmatively, adding that the two should have a “paul-emma chill sesh.” A couple weeks later on Facebook, Sulkowicz wrote to Nungesser, “I want to see yoyououoyou.”

There are six pages’ worth of back-and-forth Facebook messages between the two, which Sulkowicz has confirmed are real and not redacted in any way.

Whatever else you can say about social media these days, it has made it awfully hard for women to change their minds about the nature of a sexual encounter from months earlier.

Which is what also caught up the accuser at the University of Virginia last year. Once someone actually decided to do the reporting Rolling Stone never bothered with, what was unearthed was a complex trail of weird e-mails, fake boyfriends and made-up accusations. Indeed, since it is rare for anyone on a college campus these days to have a private sexual encounter, it really doesn’t take much digging to see many of these incidents are made up entirely or simply “reinterpretations” of actual events.

Young recently found a similar situation at Brown University, where a student, Daniel Kopin, was accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend, Lena Sclove. After he had decided to end their sexual relationship of three weeks, they had one last encounter. He claims it was consensual; she says it was not. When his housemates, two men and a woman, found them in flagrante delicto, one reported, “She said she didn’t want us to think of her as ‘that girl.’ ” Another said Sclove asked them not to tell their other friends that she and Kopin had been together “because she wanted to tell them herself.”

The third recalled her smiling. Sounds like the aftermath of a brutal assault, huh?

But that didn’t stop Gillibrand, who told MSNBC that Kopin “should be in jail, not with a one-year suspension.”

Feminists complain that by putting assault victims through this barrage of questions we are shaming them.

Why does it take weeks or months or years for anyone to question these young women? For one thing, the kangaroo courts on campus aren’t set up to gather real evidence.

But, really, the problem is this: It’s considered offensive to even ask a single question of a woman who says she has been sexually assaulted. Because rape is not a crime like armed robbery or murder anymore. Rape is a political statement by the patriarchy trying to silence women. It doesn’t matter what actually happened. What matters is what you think happened after you’ve taken enough women’s-studies courses.

That’s why Lena Dunham got away with publishing a book accusing an easily identifiable student on campus of rape without any fact checkers or lawyers flagging the passage. It’s why no one at Rolling Stone demanded the reporter verify the accuser’s story. And it’s why the word of a girl with a mattress strapped to her back is treated like the Holy Bible.

Feminists complain that by putting assault victims through this barrage of questions we are shaming them. As Sulkowicz told the news site Mic: “It’s an awful feeling where this reporter is digging through my personal life. At this point, I didn’t realize that she’s extremely anti-feminist and would do this in order to shame me.”

But shame is exactly what these accusers are hoping to bring on their alleged attackers. By refusing to report these matters to the police instead of the campus Keystone Kops and The New York Times, they are supposedly saving themselves from the pain of a trial, but really what they are doing is saving themselves from having to answer any questions and destroying men’s lives with lies and innuendo.