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this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
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Name one time.
Ever think that women's lives are often ruined by being raped and not being believed when they do report it?
Took me 5 seconds bro. Please do better.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwy9y8d0093o
Here's a twist, what happens in your mind when 4 women are wrongfully convicted for rape of 2 young girls?
https://innocenceproject.org/news/san-antonio-four-wrongly-accused-rape-lesbians/
Which party of women in this example should we believe if we're just supposed to believe women.
Here's one against Joe Biden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden_sexual_misconduct_allegation?wprov=sfti1
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottsboro_Boys
Somewhat famous case, thought partially to have been a source of inspiration for a book called "To Kill a Mockingbird", somewhat famous in its own right.
Highly recommend you read it
That is the result of racism, which included all kinds of accusations that white juries convicted on without any real evidence. That is the same thing as accusations and convictions of minorities falsely convicted of murder and other cdimes.
That has nothing to do with women's claims being commonly dismissed before they ever get to a trial, which is what 'believe women' is talking about.
You wanted an example of where the accusations of rape directly led to ruined lives, and I gave you one.
Sure, in the example I gave the motive behind the accusations was racism, but the accusation was still about rape. The original commenter was pointing out that any and all accusations must be met with suspicion in order for "innocent until proven guilty" to function.
What that doesn't mean is that any and all accusations of rape should be dismissed because the accuser is a woman. There's a difference here
Should the police believe someone when they claim they've been raped and should the police investigate? Yes.
Should the police, court of law, court of public opinion believe a rape accusation purely because the accuser is a woman? No.
They should believe it long enough to investigate! That is what the saying means.
At this point I'm wondering if your National Reconnaissance Office mission patch profile pic is supposed to be ironic or not. It shouldn't take an intelligence officer to discover literally the sentence before the one you quoted.
I was confirming that it needed to at least reach the step prior. Sorry for not doing a full diagram with arrows and stuff to make that clear.
Reading would have been enough.
Figured they knew what they wrote, silly me!
They did.
How bad does the damage from the false accusation need to be?
One I'm fond of pointing to as evidence that they happen is Tracy West accusing her ex Louis Gonzales. He spent three months in jail while it was being investigated, and only got out because he happened to have a very heavily corroborated alibi for the day that left only a 6 minute window during which he would have had to travel a total of 2 miles, obtain a duffel bag full of forensic countermeasures, subdue and rape the victim, dispose of said duffel bag in a manner it would never be recovered and return. And that 6 minute window was not when she originally said it happened, until they allowed her to revise her statement which became much fuzzier about when it happened. Also there was evidence that she was researching the way she was tied up in the days leading up to her being tied up exactly that way. By all appearances this case was about a custody dispute over their kid, and despite the case being dropped because it was physically impossible for him to have done it she still got to use it against him because fucking family courts. He eventually got a finding of factual innocence from CA courts and had the entire thing expunged from his record - to be clear, this essentially requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you could not have committed the crime. When he was interviewed by an LA paper about the case, he'd developed an obsession with being as publicly visible with as much paper trail as possible at all time, just in case because of how lucky he was with his alibi from this case (if he'd eaten before he left to get the kid, his alibi wouldn't exist and that alibi is the reason he only spent 3 months in jail).
How about Brian Banks? Kid with a real chance of going into professional football, Falsely accused, threatened with 41 years, plead to 5 years + 5 probation + registering as a sex offender on advice of his lawyer. The accuser sues the school and wins $1.5M. 9 years later, his accuser contacts him on Facebook and they speak. He secretly records the conversation, in which she admits to having lied but refuses to tell authorities that because she was afraid that they might make her pay back the money. The video gets released publicly and the Innocence Project gets involved. He goes on to briefly join the UFL and then NFL after not having meaningfully played for 11 years (time that would have been the prime of his career if not for the accusation).
Speaking of the Innocence Project, what's your opinion of them? It tends to vary for left leaning folks - either they like it because a lot of the people exonerated are POC or they hate it because a significant majority of people exonerated by it were imprisoned for some flavor of sexual assault. Go look at their list of cases: https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ According to the site when filtered for sex crimes 184 of the "more than 250" people were imprisoned wrongly for a sex crime. 124/184 of those exonerated by the Innocence Project that were imprisoned for a sex crime were misidentified by an eyewitness. For sex crimes, that eyewitness is very often the alleged victim.
The innocence project is awesome! The only reason that a lot of people who are exonerated are POC is because of the systemic racism in the judicial system and society as a whole.
The majority of false accusations and convictions for rape certainly trend along racial lines, just like false accusations and convictions for murder. That is a racial problem, which only exists because of the inherent racism in the judicial system that goes right along with the sexism that dismisses claims of rape when reported or when they have enough evidence to go to trial but the prosecutor declines because they know getting a jury to convict is hard when so many people blame women for being victims of rape.
Thank you for providing real examples of people whose lives were inconvenienced due to false accusations. It is important to keep in mind that false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations, but most accusations are ignored and are never investigated or acted upon by being painted as false. That is what 'believe women' is about, not dismissing out of hand and instead actually looking into it.
"Inconvenienced" to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.
The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were "inconvenienced", and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.
In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.
Do you get this worked up about false accusations of other crimes, or just when women report rape?
People only seem to come out of the woodwork to pine about how commonly false rape accusations are ruining lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/13/duke-lacrosse-rape-falsely-accused-crystal-mangum
https://bucks.crimewatchpa.com/da/29567/post/woman-pleads-guilty-lying-about-attempted-rape-and-kidnapping-middletown
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-67992342
Are we really saying any group of people are infallible and incapable of lying?
Don't get me wrong, I believe the majority of rape accusations aren't false accusations with a sinister motive. I believe Trump is a rapist.
We should never act like any group of people will never lie, and we absolutely should never compromise on due process.
The saying means that rape victims should get due process instead of being ignored by the police they report the rape to and dismissed as asking for it by society in general.
I don't think anyone is going to argue against that. You asked for people to name one time a life was ruined by false accusations. There's been a ton.