@MichelleDean: Why bother interviewing? Obviously she is a liar who can't be trusted. (Obviously there will be no negative consequences to her for her calumny, though, for we live in a Matriarchy where men bear the burden of rape accusations)

@MichelleDean No(t guilty) means no(t guilty)

@MichelleDean
1. Correct. And I am a lawyer.

2. In a court of law, "the truth" is not in a victim's head in the case of rape. Both sides get to testify if they so wish because we have a jury that decides who is telling "the truth." So the accused's thoughts are not "irrelevant." As far as your last sentence goes, I'm not sure I follow your argument about strict liability.

3. I don't know who these "people" are that you're referring to but have you been over to Jezebel lately? Because they're people too.

4. Yes a "false" rape accusation ruins multiple lives, the accused, his significant other and family all suffer. Not to mention, the extraordinary debt one incurs for legal fees when you mount a defense for two whole separate trials.

5. This article wasn't about the rape. It was about the aftereffects of the accusations and trials in a small town on a normal, everyday Joe. If you were the accuser, would you really want to talk to a reporter about that?

@saythatscool: You should read the piece. It doesn't talk about anything legally – in fact there's a lot of nonsense in which the author harps on how awful it is that he was put in handcuffs or questioned by the police. The whole thing is written as "one man's quest to reveal the truth: that she was a slut." A highlight: "He thinks often about the woman who accused him of rape—there is anger when he hears about how carefree she seems driving a Mercedes around town."

Indeed.

@saythatscool 1. Oh boy, a lawyer, really? I'm impressed. Lawyers are always right.

2. I specifically said I wasn't talking about what the legal process might consider "the truth." Might want to work on your ability to distinguish, there, counsel. "The truth" of the NYPD rape case, for example, according to your definition here, is that the lady wasn't raped. I think the truth might be something else again. The legal process doesn't really do a very good job of ferreting out "the truth."

3. It's sweet, if entirely weird, how people over here have some kind of complex about Jezebel commenters and their quest for lady-and/or-world-domination.

4. I think his significant other is said in the article to have left him for the cheating, not the rape allegation. I'm sure he suffered, I just don't think the victim was without suffering either. As for astronomical legal fees, well, sure, that sucks. It sucks especially for the indigent and the people who can't afford to pay for a competent defense! But none of those are "false allegation" problems. They're "regulate your legal profession and court system properly" problem.

5. The article is predicated on the idea that what happened to this man is unfair because he was not guilty. Having read it, I don't see where the journalist is getting that 100% certainty underwriting her piece. I suspect it's from not talking to anyone other than the one guy and his mom. She doesn't even say she tried to contact the accuser and that the accuser refused the interview. She didn't attend the trial herself, I'd bet, judging from the way she reports his impressions of it, and the victim's alleged manner, as fact. It's just bad reporting!

xo.

@MichelleDean
1. Sorry, I wasn't bragging. I thought you wanted some support from a lawyer when you ended with "where is my lawyer already."

2. I didn't say anything about the NYPD rape case or its "truths." In a criminal case, a jury isn't required to articulate their fact finding upon which a verdict is predicated. I agree with you that criminal law doesn't do a very good job of ferreting out "truth." It does an excellent job of sending more people to prison than any other country in the world. The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners. The United States leads the world in producing prisoners. We now entirely have an distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations. Rape cases are no exception here in the US.

3. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings of pride about Jezebel's worldly views. I won't pick on them any more today. But to return to my original question, what "people" are you talking about? The Details magazine people? They don't represent any significant portion of the world either.

4. Actually I wasn't referring to the woman who left him. I was talking about his new fiance who was interviewed for the article. But I think we agree that legal fees suck, so hooray for consensus?

5. I agree that she didn't try to contact the accuser and that probably would have been good to try to do so. So that is bad reporting. I agree. I also understand why the accuser would not want to talk about this matter.

@MichelleDean

Did you not read the part in the article about the evidence significantly failing to indicate an assault of any type, or the part where there were inconsistencies and outright lies in the testimony of the "victim", or that this wasn't the first time the "victim" made a sketchy rape accusation, or the part where she depicted herself as a sexually-active person online (indicating totally logical "reasonable doubt", in the absence of hard evidence, that her engagement of sexual intercourse in this instance might have been part of a pattern of sexually aggressive behavior)?

And did you fail to Google the prosecutor's name and find a long list of instances of corruption? And on top of that, abusive workplace behavior, to the extent that the county had to offer a six-figure settlement to her former-coworkers? And the fact that she was ousted from her job after her original boss was angrily voted out of office after decades of holding the position?

Did you see that the accused filed a complaint against the prosecutor with the state bar association, and that nothing cited in that complaint could be justified by any obligation of the legal process to evaluate the original charges?

This case fails the sniff test legally on all accounts. Given that it dragged on for years at a cost of hundreds of thousands, the whole thing was a shitshow and the article tries to reflect that. Don't worry, the local media in Redmond already gave the victim and the prosecutor their "airtime", and a lot of it. The accused was acquitted but is still well-known as "that guy accused of rape". Including, apparently, to you.

The awfulness of YOUR take on the matter is the reason why the accused in these cases need "rape shield" laws, too. Your side of the matter is probably correct more often than it is incorrect, but still… it's as bad as anyone who suggests "she was asking for it". Our society is incapable of processing either side of the case logically. The accused become victims and the victims become the accused. That's offensive to anyone's sense of "justice".

@saythatscool God, I feel irritated that I have to explain this but: I have no sense of "pride" in Jezebel or any other website, 'cept maybe this one! And even here, I agree with no person 100% of the time. (Except the eds, love you guys.) My point is merely that "Jezebel commenters" – much like "women" or "black people" – ain't a hive mind. They're only presented as one by people who seem to feel threatened by them and want to feel powerful by being deliberately obtuse about their non-monolith status. Which I find amusing, for the record, not offensive! Go right ahead and make those remarks, I enjoy laughing at the people who make them!

As who the "people" are, sure, let's go with Detail readers, and the Detail editor who commissioned this story, and the journalist herself. Let's go with the journalists who keep covering rape in this way, like the ones who wrote that story at the NYTimes about the 11-year-old in Texas, implying that she was probably old-looking for her age and slutty to boot. Let's go with all the jurors who have wrongly acquitted actual rapists over time – we know there are more than a few. Let's go with the cop in Toronto who told a roomful of women to stop dressing so slutty or else they'd get raped. Let's go with the NYPD SVU who say if you ask for a female cop you are lying "nine times out of ten". It cannot seriously be your position that most people automatically believe the victim here.

As for the "truth," you seemed to me to imply that because in a court of law the "truth" is not solely in the victim's head that meant that it could not reside there outside of it. That's why I said: under your reasoning, the NYPD victim couldn't have been raped because the jury said she wasn't. Perhaps I misunderstood. In any event I did not mean to imply, as I would agree I did, that the "truth" of a rape resides wholly in the mind of the victim. It's entirely plausible to me, though maybe not in this case specifically, that in a rape case the accused genuinely, seriously thinks he has consent, but the accuser genuinely did not consent and experiences a rape. To me, the latter fact is alone enough to make this a rape. I.e., the status of the act does lie wholly in the victim's mind. Does that mean that in every case where someone says they've been raped the legal system should incarcerate someone? No, probably not. But it'd be great if it happened more often, and yeah sure rape cases are part of the American prison industrial complex, but any sex crimes prosecutor will tell you: these are not the easiest of criminal cases to probe.

@brianvan Brian Van always takes the men's rights bait.

@MichelleDean While we're here, let this tale be yet another severe reminder that people ought to be REALLY CAREFUL about being alone with strangers, any attempt to become intoxicated, and sexual activities with complete strangers.

She could have murdered him! Or vice versa! How did either of them know what the other was going to do? Taking chances doesn't make you a bad person or deserving of harsh circumstances, but yikes, these are BIG chances that people take.

Plus, he's a serious doofus for cheating. No such thing as a "she was laying next to me naked" free pass.

@MichelleDean You know I was going to write a point-by-point response but your last argument re: "the status of the act does lie wholly in the victim's mind." I find that to be the most unjust, poorly-reasoned and inhumane argument you have made yet. You want to declare everyone guilty if they were ever accused of rape? That's insane. That's just horrible. I understand that you don't want to lock them up but you want them to be found guilty of rape in general by society? That position is so extreme and wrongheaded that I am now disengaging. There's really nothing else for me to debate with you on this, Michelle. You're just wrong. Please tell me that I misunderstood your argument.

@all I'm playing a game of The Awl All Inclusive Cruise cabin assignments in my head.

@saythatscool Yeah, you're minsunderstanding me, a little. Partially because you seem pretty invested in misunderstanding me. Partially because I'm not being super clear, though. To be as clear as I can be in an Internet comment: what I would like to see happen is a vocabulary develop around rape such that we can acknowledge a victim's genuine feelings of violation as described above. I would like it to be the case that you could talk about those feelings without flipping out as you did here. I linked someone below to an article that comes pretty close to explaining why people DO flip out when I raise the hard case – of the two competing but genuine accounts of one incident – I did above. I'm not saying that my math comes out to the accused in that situation being an irredeemable Rapist in the capital-r sense. What I am saying is that I want the person who genuinely feels violated to have the ability to speak about it and to give the name to their experience they feel best fits it, even if the law can't or won't agree.. Again, probably not being clear here, but there's reams of thinking about this in the literature.

@MichelleDean Jezebel gets paradoxically billed as both a hive mind AND a super-catty fray in almost every non-lady-specific (and some lady-specific) blog I read. Why it's become a synonym for castrating feminism/feminism in general/just plain crazy ladies is something for the sociologists to figure out. Honestly, I used to comment there a lot and only stopped after several instances of dudes starting fights with me in the comments section.

@MichelleDean All of this, so very strongly cosigned.

@MichelleDean I.e., the status of the act does lie wholly in the victim's mind.

I know what all those words mean, but that sentence doesn't make any sense. There is no "victim" if the "crime" exists in a purely subjective state [disclaimer: I don't mean in the world of philosophy. I mean in the law]. Yes, rapists are horrible recidivists, but there are many, many instances of false or incorrect accusations and while those are certainly not the majority of the cases, there is no need to assume that everyone accused of rape is guilty.

@IBentMyWookie I don't really understand your response either? I think what you mean is that there is no "perpetrator" if the crime exists subjectively in the mind of the victim. And if that's what you mean, I would agree that there's something weird about applying the term "guilty of rape" to the… eh, let's call that person the non-victim in this transaction. OTOH, like I said: I still think there is reason here to let the victim call the act what she wants to call it.

Also, I agree there are knowingly false accusations, sometimes, though I'm skeptical that's what happened here. But I think the knowingly false accusation is another side of the confusion coin: no one knows how to talk about really thorny issues of consent, and what we get as a result of that is this utterly unsatisfactory sex crimes legislative/judicial regime. No one is happy with it, certainly not rape victims – even the ones we could all in this thread agree could properly be said to have been raped – and it also generates occasional terrible results that are theoretically "victim-friendly" like what went on in the Jim Crow South.

@MichelleDean Let me see if i can simplify what i'm saying (and i don't mean that to sound condescending): You cannot be a "victim" unless there is a wrong/crime and there is no "crime" which exists subjectively, that is "in a person's head," not in a legal sense. So your use of "victim" in that sentence is erroneous, because if something does not exist independent of your perception of it, it cannot be prosecuted, not criminally.

@IBentMyWookie I sort of see your point, but this is what makes rape the hard case crime, yeah? Because so much of the damage of it is emotional, rather than physical. While of course there are easy cases where the physical evidence leads one inevitably to the conclusion that a rape occurred, it's hardly universal, any sex crimes prosecutor will tell you that. So often the only signals that this crime "objectively" occurred are, in fact, subjective feelings. In which case: it becomes he-said-she-said, a battle between what went on in each person's head.

Also, I've been trying all along to say that yes of course I understand that there are limits to what the legal system can deal with, here, and that I'm talking not about manageability choices the system has to make here but rather about how I want to let the victim call this rape even if I agree it isn't possible for the legal system to agree with him/her.

@MichelleDean I'm finally starting to understand your point better and the fact that you're talking about about how the legal system deals with it vs how society/media deals with it. But you have to understand, I don't agree that you should "let the victim call this rape even if I agree it isn't possible for the legal system to agree with him/her." And civil law agrees with me for the most part. In almost every state you can still sue somebody for defamation if you falsely impute that they committed the criminal act of rape. If somebody came along and said I raped them and I didn't legally do it, that person's statement is defamatory and in some states I am entitled to automatic damages under the law. But that's also why we have a civil system to deal with this too. I am not sure if you are aware of this law or have ever considered it but I would be interested to hear if you would want to exclude rape from defamation cases or how you would deal with it otherwise.

@saythatscool In general I think I would exempt, yes, though I haven't thought about it too much. I thought the First Amendment quashed defamation, though, unless you could show that the person made a knowingly false statement, which I think you would find nearly impossible to do in the case of someone who genuinely perceived herself to have been a rape victim and was thus using the term.

I think where it gets tricky is if I as a third party called it rape and whether he could sue me then. There I do agree it's trickier, but I think you just get around that by using "alleged" though, yes?

@MichelleDean I think the issue here is that Michelle is assuming that the, uh, recipient genuinely perceives the act as rape, and saythatscool is assuming the recipient is knowingly making a false statement.

@zidaane Yeah, I thought the whole story was weird like that. His friends stopped hanging out with him after that night (the reader should assume, I suppose, that the only reason for this was the trial and had nothing to do with his actual observed behavior). In the next sentence, he points out how many of his gal-friends tended to him during the trial, as if to say "ladies like me! So, I can't be guilty!". He also, right off the bat, describes the alleged victim as the girl "with the big smile". Subtle. I dunno, honestly a lot of this story kind of stank to me and I didn't leave feeling a lot of pity for the guy. At the very least, he cheated on his fiancee and didn't seem to have a lot of remorse about it…

@zidaane There is quite a bit of research to show that ostracism happens as much for reasons of relation as for causation. That is, you don't have to be the source of misfortune to be socially abandoned, you frequently just have to be in physical proximity to it. As many innocent victims would know.

I think the real interest of the article is a fascinating subject and one that seems to have eluded the author's talents: the social death that invariably follows trauma. Years ago, for example, a coworker of mine was strolling about on her lunch break and had the bad luck to have the body of a man land right in front of her on the sidewalk after he had fallen some nine stories from his balcony. Well, it was good luck at least that he didn't hit her, but nonetheless he of course died, got no small amount of blood on her, and of course it shocked everybody. She recovered her professional composure in short order but nearly all of her 120 coworkers pretty much entirely ceased all informal interactions with her. I can speculate about why, but however it worked having a man blow up in front of her changed her social status as distinctly as if she had suddenly gotten married. And in a short time the incredible stress of uncorrectable social isolation got to her and she quit. Which is a long way of saying that if you're ever arrested for rape you can be sure that all of your people will scatter like roaches and only your dear, heartbroken mother will want to hear your side of it. Innocent and guilty's got nothing to do with it.

@PierceHarlan Of course you did.