This piece is bereft of any kind of scenario analysis or attempt to understand humans. It sounds like are describing a revenge fantasy for men whose prosecutions scandalize you.
Contrary to what you suggest, evidence of ex-post social contact is in fact routinely introduced in criminal defense. But in fact, this is never solid evidence of innocence because people have professional, personal, or familial reasons for staying in contact with abusers, and accommodation is a normal human response pattern. Using the same logic and omissions, you could write an essay saying that battered women who do not leave their abusive spouses should be stigmatized instead of helped.
Where else is this standard that victim must not have any further contact with perpetrator enforced? In an elder abuse case, would we dismiss a claim that an elderly person was abused if they maintained contact with the abuser after the initial event? This standard seems especially odd in cases of rape involving abuse within a family or human trafficking cases. If a step daughter stays in a house after her step father rapes her, this counts against her claim? Why? When that doctor for the womens olympic gymnastic team was repeatedly abusing the girls, why should it count against their credibility that they didn't immediately focus on bringing charges against him instead of continuing to train at the olympics?
I'm not really seeing what would be more believable about contact stopping after the initial sexual occurrence either. People have consenting one night stands. People have ongoing abusive relationships. What makes a rape allegation more credible when a woman or girl stops associating with a rapist after sex given that women can just as well suddenly stop associating with a man they chose to have sex with?
I agree with your conclusion in the legal sense. Even if Hanania persuaded victims to behave like this, bad actors would just abuse the pattern. Rapists could try to coerce their victims into prolonged contact, and false accusers could cut contact to boost their credibility. It’s like a Goodheart’s Law for rape.
However, in an informal sense, all of your examples do make gut sense to me. If there are two elder abuse cases, one of which is false, where one elder remained in contact and one managed to escape the situation, I would a priori assign marginally higher probability to the truth of the second elder case.
All of this situations involve a reason to stay in contact bc there was a pre-existing relationship or the person lived in the same residence of in the case of most elder abuse victims, their mind doesn't work well enough to even know what's going on. In this case they did not even live in the same area and had no relationship or other reason for ongoing contact unless she went out of her way to keep it going. In any event, all of these things would be presented as evidence in any case, and a jury or judge is going to weigh the evidence (or lack of evidence, or exculpatory evidence) before them. I agree with Richard there should be norms/standards that are clearly communicated to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault and distinguish. With the current norms it is almost impossible and you do need actual evidence to prove a felony ... Just he said she said is almost never going to be good enough to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt.
Why is the ongoing or lack of ongoing relationship a relevant criteria in terms of definitive evidence for or against a sexual assault charge? E Jean Carroll never saw or spoke to trump again after she alleges he assaulted her. How is this evidence in her favor? What if he had stated his intent on coming to the store later and did so? Would we not simply say that her motive for being at the store was keeping her job?
Good points but there seems to me a clear difference between abuse between people with long term and close relationships and a literal stranger that you don't have any history or complicated relationship with. If you, like mattress girl, are texting love notes to your rapist, that has to count as evidence against the rape. We can't set up a situation where the accused can't adduce any evidence at all on their behalf. Clavicular is a douchebag and for all I know totally did this, but we can't have a system where the accused is just defacto guilty because of an accusation and nothing else.
The Epstein case is replete with adult women later claiming to have been "abused" or "raped" by Epstein coincidentally when hundreds of millions of dollars were up for grabs for anyone claiming to have been "sexually abused" by Epstein.
The most recent example is Julia Molchanova who had a puff piece written by the WSJ. She was 22 years old when she met Epstein and worked for her "abuser" for 8 full years. As lead plaintiff, she recently sued Bank of America who settled for over $70 million. Bank of America's great crime?Failing to report suspicious transactions and cash withdrawals that theoretically could have been used by Epstein to "traffick" adults by paying them for a massage.
Another example is Juliette Bryant who filed a lawsuit against Epstein in 2019 claiming that her abuse caused her to cry herself to sleep every night. The Epstein files released in January show that Bryant was emailing Epstein in 2015, a full decade after the beginning of her alleged abuse:
"I'm in New York until Sunday, would be great see you if you're here?
Let me know if you're around, I could pop in anytime to say hi quickly - it's been so long since I saw you!
Lots of love"
Those who deny women agency will tell you with a straight face that the "victims" must have had Stockholm Syndrome, which is not even a real thing.
Your weird obsession with the validity of various sex crimes is gradually corrosive of your intellectual credibility. And has been for long enough now that it's material as the lawyers say.
There are false accusations. And even worse there are mutually honest but conflicting accounts. Now of course I don't think most accusations are false, but you can't just convict people of crimes on an accusation and nothing more. And definitely there is plenty of rape not reported or prosecuted at all, but legally you don't convict some individuals to "make up" for the others. I think of Carol Tavris' talk on this as required viewing on the thorniness of this issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo&t=58s
Issue with "if you go to his bedroom and get drunk, that is assuming sex is on the table" is that something being on the table doesn't mean it's certain! Theoretically you could decide to have sex or not even if you were in that room and if you wnd up in a situation where the lady can't reasonably say no, the choice she had to back out is off the table, you should probably not go ahead with the sex. Someone shoild be able to of course still say no to sex after following you to a room and even makihg out with yiu a bit and deciding otherwise
While I get Richard's point, I think that was a terrible sentence. Imagine a 17 year old boy went to an adults room drunk and got raped by a guy - I don't think we would say that "sex was on the table".
In some you correct that if cutting Contact is evidence of guild, then maintaining Contact is evidence of innocence. However, it doesn’t follow that is actually good evidence. If I confess to a crime that’s good evidence. I am guilty, but if I declare immuno, that’s not actually strong evidence that am innocent. Further, you hardly touch upon the considerable cost of such a social norm, especially in cases where professional obligations or social dynamics would make it costly to Contact, for example, if you wouldn’t consider accusation at that time to be worthwhile, but cutting Contact without explanation would be socially or professionally, costly. It also seems like just a terrible idea when you’re dealing with cases of young victims, who are children or just above the age of consent. I also just disagree about whether getting drunk should necessarily be treated as consent since firstly, people consent to many things under the influence of alcohol which they might not consent to when sober and it’s not always the case that it’s understood by both parties beforehand that drinking is consent to sex. Also, I think you’re suffering from the problem of treating a binary distinction in law as a necessarily binary thing in reality, the law has to draw a sharp line, but that doesn’t mean that in reality, you can’t have a gray zone and while to be fair a good argument can be made that the law would be better of being too narrow rather than two broad in terms of social consequences doing stuff with dubious consent of consent seems questionable on account. For example, the victim being unusually immature, even if technically, just above the age of consent seems at least deserving of a presumption of being very likely potentially bad behaviour, but a rule against cutting Contact in all such cases since definitely way to costly. Sorry for the rough comment, but I’m short of time.
I agree. "MeToo’s downwards trajectory from honourable to hysterical reflects feminism’s myopic, but romantic focus on male villainy and denial of female agency.”
This piece is bereft of any kind of scenario analysis or attempt to understand humans. It sounds like are describing a revenge fantasy for men whose prosecutions scandalize you.
Contrary to what you suggest, evidence of ex-post social contact is in fact routinely introduced in criminal defense. But in fact, this is never solid evidence of innocence because people have professional, personal, or familial reasons for staying in contact with abusers, and accommodation is a normal human response pattern. Using the same logic and omissions, you could write an essay saying that battered women who do not leave their abusive spouses should be stigmatized instead of helped.
Where else is this standard that victim must not have any further contact with perpetrator enforced? In an elder abuse case, would we dismiss a claim that an elderly person was abused if they maintained contact with the abuser after the initial event? This standard seems especially odd in cases of rape involving abuse within a family or human trafficking cases. If a step daughter stays in a house after her step father rapes her, this counts against her claim? Why? When that doctor for the womens olympic gymnastic team was repeatedly abusing the girls, why should it count against their credibility that they didn't immediately focus on bringing charges against him instead of continuing to train at the olympics?
I'm not really seeing what would be more believable about contact stopping after the initial sexual occurrence either. People have consenting one night stands. People have ongoing abusive relationships. What makes a rape allegation more credible when a woman or girl stops associating with a rapist after sex given that women can just as well suddenly stop associating with a man they chose to have sex with?
I agree with your conclusion in the legal sense. Even if Hanania persuaded victims to behave like this, bad actors would just abuse the pattern. Rapists could try to coerce their victims into prolonged contact, and false accusers could cut contact to boost their credibility. It’s like a Goodheart’s Law for rape.
However, in an informal sense, all of your examples do make gut sense to me. If there are two elder abuse cases, one of which is false, where one elder remained in contact and one managed to escape the situation, I would a priori assign marginally higher probability to the truth of the second elder case.
All of this situations involve a reason to stay in contact bc there was a pre-existing relationship or the person lived in the same residence of in the case of most elder abuse victims, their mind doesn't work well enough to even know what's going on. In this case they did not even live in the same area and had no relationship or other reason for ongoing contact unless she went out of her way to keep it going. In any event, all of these things would be presented as evidence in any case, and a jury or judge is going to weigh the evidence (or lack of evidence, or exculpatory evidence) before them. I agree with Richard there should be norms/standards that are clearly communicated to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault and distinguish. With the current norms it is almost impossible and you do need actual evidence to prove a felony ... Just he said she said is almost never going to be good enough to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think of this lecture as required viewing on this topic and how thorny it can be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo&t=58s
Why is the ongoing or lack of ongoing relationship a relevant criteria in terms of definitive evidence for or against a sexual assault charge? E Jean Carroll never saw or spoke to trump again after she alleges he assaulted her. How is this evidence in her favor? What if he had stated his intent on coming to the store later and did so? Would we not simply say that her motive for being at the store was keeping her job?
Good points but there seems to me a clear difference between abuse between people with long term and close relationships and a literal stranger that you don't have any history or complicated relationship with. If you, like mattress girl, are texting love notes to your rapist, that has to count as evidence against the rape. We can't set up a situation where the accused can't adduce any evidence at all on their behalf. Clavicular is a douchebag and for all I know totally did this, but we can't have a system where the accused is just defacto guilty because of an accusation and nothing else.
The Epstein case is replete with adult women later claiming to have been "abused" or "raped" by Epstein coincidentally when hundreds of millions of dollars were up for grabs for anyone claiming to have been "sexually abused" by Epstein.
The most recent example is Julia Molchanova who had a puff piece written by the WSJ. She was 22 years old when she met Epstein and worked for her "abuser" for 8 full years. As lead plaintiff, she recently sued Bank of America who settled for over $70 million. Bank of America's great crime?Failing to report suspicious transactions and cash withdrawals that theoretically could have been used by Epstein to "traffick" adults by paying them for a massage.
Another example is Juliette Bryant who filed a lawsuit against Epstein in 2019 claiming that her abuse caused her to cry herself to sleep every night. The Epstein files released in January show that Bryant was emailing Epstein in 2015, a full decade after the beginning of her alleged abuse:
"I'm in New York until Sunday, would be great see you if you're here?
Let me know if you're around, I could pop in anytime to say hi quickly - it's been so long since I saw you!
Lots of love"
Those who deny women agency will tell you with a straight face that the "victims" must have had Stockholm Syndrome, which is not even a real thing.
This piece is ridiculous. And so are your opinions. Unsubscribing.
This is total BS.
Your weird obsession with the validity of various sex crimes is gradually corrosive of your intellectual credibility. And has been for long enough now that it's material as the lawyers say.
There are false accusations. And even worse there are mutually honest but conflicting accounts. Now of course I don't think most accusations are false, but you can't just convict people of crimes on an accusation and nothing more. And definitely there is plenty of rape not reported or prosecuted at all, but legally you don't convict some individuals to "make up" for the others. I think of Carol Tavris' talk on this as required viewing on the thorniness of this issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo&t=58s
Issue with "if you go to his bedroom and get drunk, that is assuming sex is on the table" is that something being on the table doesn't mean it's certain! Theoretically you could decide to have sex or not even if you were in that room and if you wnd up in a situation where the lady can't reasonably say no, the choice she had to back out is off the table, you should probably not go ahead with the sex. Someone shoild be able to of course still say no to sex after following you to a room and even makihg out with yiu a bit and deciding otherwise
While I get Richard's point, I think that was a terrible sentence. Imagine a 17 year old boy went to an adults room drunk and got raped by a guy - I don't think we would say that "sex was on the table".
In some you correct that if cutting Contact is evidence of guild, then maintaining Contact is evidence of innocence. However, it doesn’t follow that is actually good evidence. If I confess to a crime that’s good evidence. I am guilty, but if I declare immuno, that’s not actually strong evidence that am innocent. Further, you hardly touch upon the considerable cost of such a social norm, especially in cases where professional obligations or social dynamics would make it costly to Contact, for example, if you wouldn’t consider accusation at that time to be worthwhile, but cutting Contact without explanation would be socially or professionally, costly. It also seems like just a terrible idea when you’re dealing with cases of young victims, who are children or just above the age of consent. I also just disagree about whether getting drunk should necessarily be treated as consent since firstly, people consent to many things under the influence of alcohol which they might not consent to when sober and it’s not always the case that it’s understood by both parties beforehand that drinking is consent to sex. Also, I think you’re suffering from the problem of treating a binary distinction in law as a necessarily binary thing in reality, the law has to draw a sharp line, but that doesn’t mean that in reality, you can’t have a gray zone and while to be fair a good argument can be made that the law would be better of being too narrow rather than two broad in terms of social consequences doing stuff with dubious consent of consent seems questionable on account. For example, the victim being unusually immature, even if technically, just above the age of consent seems at least deserving of a presumption of being very likely potentially bad behaviour, but a rule against cutting Contact in all such cases since definitely way to costly. Sorry for the rough comment, but I’m short of time.
Drinking is not consent to sex. But consent *is* consent, even if given while drunk.
People have to be held responsible for their own decisions. Even poor ones.
they already are stigmatized.
yes, thanks for courageously taking on this third rail...
I agree. https://paulawright.substack.com/p/will-the-epstein-sex-abuse-scandal-392?r=far8c&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
I agree. "MeToo’s downwards trajectory from honourable to hysterical reflects feminism’s myopic, but romantic focus on male villainy and denial of female agency.”
https://paulawright.substack.com/p/will-the-epstein-sex-abuse-scandal-392?r=far8c&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Nah bad take
Cant wait to read the comments on this one...