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A L S O+T O D A Y [ MOTHERS WHO THINK ]
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WHO SAYS WOMEN NEVER LIE ABOUT RAPE? | PAGE 1, 2, 3
There are objective ways of gauging credibility: whether the story is consistent, whether verifiable details check out. But too often, it has to do with subjective impressions. Feminists say that a rapist may go free because the woman is not a "good victim": too calm, too angry, too flashy. But juries may also convict because they like the victim or dislike the defendant. Of course, character and demeanor matter in almost any trial. But they may assume a disproportionate importance when believing one party or the other becomes the central issue. Ironically, this creates a strong incentive for the defense to attack the woman's credibility -- that is, to use the "nuts and sluts" tactics that feminists have decried. The problem is that the accuser's character and her past can sometimes have a direct bearing on the guilt or innocence of the accused. Take the 1991 case of Maryland realtor Gary Hart (not the politician), who was accused and acquitted of raping a woman he had been dating. Evidence produced at the trial, which became a cause célèbre in the local media, showed that the woman had a history of emotional instability and fantastic claims of sexual assault made to psychiatrists and police. Surely these were facts the jury deserved to know. Yet many victims' advocates reacted as if this were a gratuitous character assault and deplored the "abuse" of the woman. Of course, if Hart was innocent, he was abused far worse; the negative publicity forced him to sell his business. Many courts, in fact, have barred such "abusive" inquiries under an expanded interpretation of rape shield statutes -- applied not just to stop defense lawyers from painting the victim as a slut who deserved it, but to suppress relevant evidence related to the woman's sexual history. The misuse of shield laws was recently spotlighted by the notorious "cybersex" case in New York, in which Columbia doctoral student Oliver Jovanovic was convicted and given a lengthy prison term for the sexual abuse of a Barnard student he had met on the Internet. Jovanovic's claim that the encounter involved consensual bondage was crippled by the exclusion of portions of the correspondence in which the young woman discussed sadomasochism and her S&M relationship with another man. The law may have ended up shielding perjury: On the stand, the woman testified that she never gave Jovanovic any indication of her interest in S&M. No one knows how often men are convicted of rape on the basis of false allegations. We only know about the lucky ones who are later cleared -- like James Liggett in Washington state, who was convicted in 1991 of raping a woman he had met through a dating service and spent a year in prison before her story fell apart (not only because she reported an eerily similar rape by another man from the same dating service but because a private detective hired by Liggett found out that she had a history of unstable behavior, including dubious claims of rape). What happens more often is that, due to activist pressure not to dismiss rape charges, men who are most likely innocent are subjected to a lengthy and costly ordeal. Traditional attitudes at their worst may result in a Teflon system to which few rape complaints stick; but prosecutorial zeal on behalf of women may result in a Velcro system that clings to the most dubious charges. When former New York police officer Desmond Robinson was accused of sexually assaulting a policewoman during a night of bar-hopping, the case dragged on for five months after the alleged victim was caught in a major lie: She first denied and then had to admit that they had consensual sex in the bathroom of one of the bars, though she still insisted that he forced her to perform oral sex later that night. (When she changed her story yet again and reverted to insisting that there had been no consensual sex at all, the sexual assault charges were finally dropped.) The judicial system is not monolithic; stories of excessive zeal in pursuing alleged culprits can always be countered with stories of callous indifference to real victims. Still, there is no doubt that in many cases, the "women don't lie" dogma has led to serious infringements on the rights of accused men. The trouble with the feminist position is that it seems to leave no room for the presumption of innocence when a woman accuses a man of violating her. After the notorious sexual assault trial of sportscaster Marv Albert, defending the judge's decision to admit compromising information about Albert's past but not about the woman's, attorney Gloria Allred decried "the notion that there's some sort of moral equivalency between the defendant and the victim" -- as if the defendant did not have the same moral standing as his accuser until he has been proven guilty. To recognize that some women wrongly accuse men of rape is no more anti-female than it is anti-male to recognize that some men rape women. Is it so unreasonable to think that a uniquely damaging and stigmatizing charge will be used by some people as a weapon, just as others will use their muscle as a weapon? Do we really believe that when women have power -- and surely there is power in an accusation of rape -- they are less likely to abuse it than men? As Columbia University law professor George Fletcher has written, "It is important to defend the interests of women as victims, but not to go so far as to accord women complaining of rape a presumption of honesty and objectivity." Feminists have often been accused of betraying women out of allegiance to Clinton. The charge of hypocrisy is hard to refute, since many of these same feminists have made solidarity with women a basic principle. But feminism shouldn't be about supporting Clinton, or blindly supporting women. It should be about fairness, including fairness to men who find themselves under the cloud of a charge that can never be proved or disproved.
Cathy Young is the author of "Ceasefire! Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality."
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