My family was destroyed by a series of false rape accusations made against me, over a period of several years.
Those words are just a summary, a cursory sketch of the pain, betrayal, hatred, and continuing grief for everyone involved. The true magnitude and scope of the damage is beyond my ability to describe in any way with both brevity and precision. The truth is that I am writing this more than 20 years after the facts, and it is difficult, not because events have faded in memory, but because they are fresh and sharp, and the wounds still raw.
The story I am recounting is for context, so I will keep it as succinct as I am able.
When I was 11 my parents divorced. There was lots of drama, and after the divorce each waged war on the other, using my brother and I as weapons, with apparently no recognition of what impact this would have on us. When I was in my late teens, my Father married his immigrant girlfriend, bringing her and her then 13 year old daughter into our family. My pointing out that she was an immigrant is deliberate, not because I harbour resentment of people seeking new opportunities, but because she escaped from the former nation of Czechoslovakia when the Russians invaded, smuggling her then-3 year old child across the militarized border under cover of night.
I don’t know what she went through to accomplish this, but I recognize that it demonstrates a will to survive, and pragmatic mentality. Her daughter was, in her eyes, the vessel in which she placed every ideal, dream and hope.
The practical impact of this was that the daughter never experienced a consequence for her own actions in her life. She could do no wrong, and her formidable, and superficially beautiful mother defended her against all personal accountability.
The child at 13 was a pampered, entitled sociopath, with an attractive face and an athletic figure. Being in my late teens, I simply found her irritating, and frankly I was too busy with life outside the house to take much notice. I did observe her skillful manipulation of her mother, and indirectly, my father, and I consequently avoided contact with her.
At age 18, I moved out on my own, although my bedroom was maintained as my own for some time afterwards. When I was 19, the first of the rape accusations reached me through my father. My brother, several friends, and my father and I had been camping, and it was on the 5 hour drive home, trapped in a vehicle, that he said, “Your stepsister says you’ve been sexually molesting her.”
I was stunned into silence, and when I finally spoke, I asked if he believed her. He did not answer this question, and that hurt me most. The accusations emerged in a muddle over the next several days and weeks, but the key was that my stepsister had been discovered by her mother, nude except for a pair of my underpants, in my old bedroom in the house I no longer lived in. The child’s story was that I had forced her into this, forced her to get undressed, forced her to take a pair of my underpants from the chest of drawers, and wear them.
How I actually managed to force a willful 13 year old from the distant location of my apartment in another city wasn’t examined. Her mother swallowed the story whole, and the child was rewarded with increased attention, conciliatory gifts, and the unimpeachable political power of her new status as victim. It’s likely that she was simply a 13 year old exploring her sexual impulses, and using my old bedroom and the absent figure of a sexually potent older male for her exploration. I could take exception to the pilfering of underwear, but from an intellectual point of view, I get it. I even get the covering story she fabricated when her mother caught her. He forced me. When the individual accused isn’t present, and doesn’t even live there, it makes sense, it’s a safe lie fabricated by a child’s mind in a moment of embarrassment.
The reward of attention, status and gifts precipitated additional accusations. The stories overlapped, conflicted with each other and observable reality. The accusations grew more bizarre and outlandish. With the mother, there was no question, her daughter was the perfect child, the centre of her universe. With the mother and daughter a united front, my father didn’t dare to openly oppose them.
The accusations, flamboyant and multiplying as they did never went as far as the channels of law enforcement. I wanted charges, and a trial, but being still a teenager in my father’s psychological shadow, I acceded when he forbade me from taking these matters to the police. It was the family’s great shame, and had to be kept hidden.
This was the wrong approach, because unchallenged by the apparatus of the courts, the terrorism by mother and child escalated. They attacked my father by attacking me. This went on for years in various forms and consumed the members of the family in an ever expanding smog of lies, manipulation, accusation, and hatred. It consumed the considerable wealth of my father, destroyed his career, and scattered us all to the winds. During the divorce of this woman from my father, the child and the mother taunted him by telling him they had invented the accusations of rape against me, and against him which came out during the divorce.
This admission was not recorded, and was not allowed to be heard by the court. It was hear-say.
It has been 10 years since I received death threats. In case you missed it, there never was any molestation, but the damage splashed outwards onto the extended family, and onto friends and colleagues of every member.
It continues to reverberate 20 years later.
That simple, puerile accusation devastated myself and my family, and the lives of everybody it touched.
My accuser never tasted a hint of consequence, and attended a prestigious university paid for by my father’s appropriated savings.
A casual reading of the news shows an increasing number of false rape accusations, sometimes by idiotic teenage girls, sometimes by successful female meteorologists on major news channels. The consequences to these false accusers are trivial.
Louise Creighton falsely accused a man she had consensual sex with of raping her. She was sentenced to community service (1). An American Weather Girl reported an imaginary rape committed against her in 2010. If she is convicted, she could face up to a year in jail, or a 1000 dollar fine (2). If anybody thinks these are serious consequences, let me point out that a man convicted of actual rape will go to prison for 10 to 15 years, and will be raped in prison, and possibly killed.
In Canada a New Brunswick woman was recently acquitted of murdering her sleeping husband even after her defence attorney admitted during the trial that she had options besides stabbing him to death (3).
A Freedom Of Information Request (4), made to the Bedfordshire UK Police department on the topic of false rape accusations revealed that in 2008, 12 false accusations were made, while 21 accusations resulted in prosecutions.
This equates to 36% of rape accusations being false in a city of 252,900 individuals in 2008 (5). The same information request included a question about prosecutions for false rape accusation, but provided no answer other than the implicit zero since false rape accusation is not defined as a crime.
Increasingly, the system of law in western societies suspends the concept of accountability for women, while vilifying men, and holding men accountable for an expanding set of issues over which they have no control.
As an aside, what kind of job of protecting and empowering women are we doing by treating them like children without volition or accountability. The false rape accusation is arguably the ultimate expression of women’s privilege and the systematized, automated destruction of men. As a free pass to celebrity victimhood, and compensation, there is almost no faster track to social lionization for a woman.
The courts typically protect an accuser with legally mandated anonymity, while a man accused is demolished through the court of public opinion, prior to any inquiry of evidence. In the event that a case is successfully pursued, he faces prison where he will likely be raped by other inmates, or killed. This is what a woman making a false rape accusation threatens a man she accuses.
Some advocates of feminist jurisprudence argue for presumed guilt in rape accusations, a reversal of the normal onus of evidence on an accuser in western criminal law. Guilty by accusation. From a purely pragmatic view, a prison sentence for the crime of murder is a better outcome for a man, than incarceration for the crime of rape. To date, most men falsely accused of rape have not acted from this pragmatic understanding.
The western system of criminal law, in which individuals can settle disputes without resort to retributive violence is transforming under the influence of radical feminist ideology into a system protecting the rights and privileges of only half the population, based on sex.
How far will this trend progress, before reliance on the law is abandoned by the group no longer protected by it. As an individual socialized to avoid violence, I find the prospect of justice through personal vendetta, including violence and murder abhorrent. But I also recognize that the transformation of the law into a tool of apartheid can lead nowhere except to a much more brutal and violent society.
This is what proponents of radical feminism are ultimately pushing for; a much more brutal, and violent society.
I understand that brutality all too well.
(1) http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/Article.aspx/2096760?UserKey=
(3) http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/case+fuels+debate+over+domestic+violence/4051267/story.
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(5) http://www.centralbedfordshire.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/statistics/population.aspx
