Hacker News Reader

Comment by hop | Hacker News Reader

A friend in college was accused of something worse, luckily witnesses (her friends) and a video camera proved otherwise and she finally admitted the truth to the police two months later. No jail time for her lying, but this guys whole life was on the verge of destruction - jail time, registered sex offender for life, everyone in your social circle would think you are a monster, all friends in your hometown, your parents, their friends, any future employers that could Google, etc.

I'm certainly not saying that in this case, but this type of thing is completely your word versus theirs and an ounce of caution should be taken in the rush to judgement until all the facts come out.

View on HN

Thats right. It happens and sometimes it even gets national publicity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case.

Look, no one knows anything right now apart from what appears to be a credible accusation on a blog. People rightly want to believe that the truth is simple and want to see the accused held accountable; however, in cases like these one must take a measured approach to fully understand the situation.

It's easy to jump in with the lynch mob, but making an informed decision based on gathered data and collected facts is the right thing to do.

Everyone has a friend of a friend who was falsely accused of sexual assault.

Everyone has actual real friends who are women who've been victims of actual real sexual assault. Usually at least 10% of them. (That'll be 10% who've actually dared speak up about it, and another, probably larger percentage who don't, because they've seen what's happened to their friends who've spoken up. "What, no witnesses? How do we know you're telling the truth? Oh, you were drinking that night, were you? I guess you must have been leading him on...")

Let's get nerdy about this, shall we? It's classic outlier bias, like people who're afraid of the risks of flying, and prefer to drive everywhere.

In the time it takes you to read the article about the Duke lacrosse case, another woman will have been sexually assaulted. (One every two minutes in the USA. 1 in 6 women, 1 in 33 men.) But the Duke case is the one you'll remember, because it's far rarer than real sexual assault.

Maybe she's making it up, and the guy really is innocent. I wouldn't bet on it, though.

The lesson from the Duke case is not that false accusations are more or less rare than what we feel in our guts. It's simply that these sorts of cases elicit enormous emotional responses; however, we owe it to ourselves and our civility to recognize that fact and force ourselves to make judgments based on facts and reasoning and not those emotions.

I'm sure that you're correct in this matter and it is common knowledge that it is more likely that a woman is telling the truth in such cases vs a man being set up.

That being said (and take this with a grain of salt because I'm not stating it's a fact), in my experience I've seen more cases of male friends being set up. Not only with assault allegations, but pregnancy, rape, and other convoluted evil plans. I've even been accused of such things twice in my life, once when I was a virgin, and a second time when I had a stable long term relationship (my partner and my neighbor where with me at the time so I had both as alibi).

Yep - there just isn't enough information to jump to any conclusion.

I personally know girls who have been assaulted at parties, and girls who have grossly exaggerated or comletely made up accusations. No way of knowing which this is yet ... Sadly, both are more common than I would have expected a few years ago.

Time will tell, but it seems fairly likely to be true. Posting this account publicly like she did could make her liable for slander even in the US. We will see if Florian Leibert decides to take the matter up in court.

[Edit: actually, I think the correct term may be libel not slander]

I think this is an excellent point. Rape is a very difficult crime in this respect. Many victims don't want to report it and deal with the emotions associated with having it be public knowledge.

That doesn't mean it's ok to assume anyone accused of it is guilty.

That goes without saying, of course.

But if the veracity of the accusation holds up, the perpetrator fully deserves what is coming to him.

"No" does not mean "yes, please continue".

This is true and it's a good point.

But... if I had to guess, I'd say there are probably a hundred times more sexual assaults that go unreported versus false reports.

Sexual assault is, unfortunately, very common. False reports of sexual assault are relatively quite rare. These two things do not have parity.

I'm curious -- do you run around posting in every thread that concerns potentially criminal behavior that people shouldn't rush to judgement? And if not, what in particular makes this case prompt you to jump in with that story? And people wonder why more women don't come forward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com