Why does this start to sound familiar?
Remember Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz, who said she’d been raped, the university administration had dealt with it wrongly by exonerating the accused, and that therefore she was going to carry a mattress around on her back as an art project to publicize the outrage until the accused either was dismissed from Columbia or left voluntarily?
Cathy Young has written an extensive and explosive article on the case that has appeared in The Daily Beast. Read it.
The facts are quite different from the UVA rape Rolling Stone story. For example, in the Sulkowicz incident, there is no doubt that the accused exists. His name is Paul Nungesser, and he tells his story in Young’s article. There is also no doubt that sexual contact between Sulkowicz and Nungesser occurred on several occasions, and that some of it was consensual.
But some of the takeaway from the case is similar:
Journalism has become propaganda; the coverage of the Sulkowicz case has hardly been fair and balanced.
Colleges should not be adjudicating rape charges. Rape charges need to go through the police.
In these areas of consent given and then withdrawn, the truth is fiendishly difficult to determine, and it will almost always be a he-said she-said situation.
Women do sometimes lie. Men sometimes lie. What else is new?
Is being mentally unstable a prerequisite for being a feminist nowadays?
That’s all I could see when reading about a woman insisting on carting a mattress around campus to protest (commemorate?) her rape. Before all of the “rape culture” activism hit I might have felt sorry for, just as I initially did with “Jackie” from the RS article. Thought maybe something did happen in that gray area between and consent and rape when both partners are intoxicated. But no, this was just the manipulation of friends and rape counselors for attention by a mentally unstable woman.
What I’d like to know is why Sulkowicz was allowed by the school to pull that mattress stunt for so long, harassing & shaming a fellow student who was not found to have raped her. What other behaviors by activist and/or unstable student tolerated on college campuses today?
I wonder why he doesn’t sue her for defamation per se. Rape is still a felony, no? And if what she claims he did was ‘merely’ non-consensual sexual assault, assault and battery (unpermitted touching) are also crimes. And it certainly appears that he’s been exonerated. If so, he should have a good claim and if per se defamation is recognized in NY (or in her home state if she lives out of state) he wouldn’t even have to prove damages (they’re presumed in per se cases like being falsely accused of a crime).
Of course she could try to prove the truth of what she’s claiming; that would be a complete defense, but she would have the burden of proof by a preponderance of the evidence.
He may not be pursuing his claims because the lawyer(s) he’s conferred with have explained the modern phenomenon of jury nullification. Plus the whole ‘show trial’ thing…
NY Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is ready to claim her rightful title as the Senate’s most fatuous member as soon as Boxer departs.
She appears to be severely bi-polar — and to have been dumped.
She has a severe entitlement complex…
And is an attention whore in the extreme.
&&&&&
And what kind of gal parades her ‘distressed’ status to the world at large?
She’s now an ‘untouchable.’
Wiki says that the mattress stunt was a part of her senior thesis/project. Is that not a final work that should crown one stage of her academic career? And such a project passed the scrutiny of her mentors?!
For the moment I am not discussing the whole “he said, she said, was she raped, was she not raped” mess. I am thinking out loud only about the academic quality and acceptability of such a stunt as a graduation project. Is it within the norm? Can one actually graduate on an activist project that is not supporting an academic contribution (or a work of aesthetic value, in her field)?
I hope I am misunderstanding something.
“Women do sometimes lie. Men sometimes lie. What else is new?”
What is new is that a male accused is now, guilty(!) until 110% proven innocent.
I also suspect there may be a racial component. Percentage wise, how many minority males are being accused?
Suggested supplementary reading . . .
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/02/04/accused-columbia-rapist-fights-back/
Women lie. Men lie. That sure sounds like moral equivalence. The reality is the only one falsely accusing others of rape is women.
Steve:
Obviously there can be false denials of rape. These will be almost entirely by men, whereas the false accusations of rape will be almost entirely by women (men can accuse women of rape, and I assume it’s possible some of those accusations are false, but for the purposes of discussion let’s just stipulate most rape accusations are by women and most rape denials are by men).
A lie is a lie. I said women lie and men lie. I wouldn’t have thought that would be in dispute.
Not only that, but rape is not the only issue. There are all sorts of sexual offenses short of rape, such as sexual harassment in the workplace, which can have a male or female perpetrator (and sometimes is even a woman-on-woman or man-on-man crime—as I suppose happens on occasion with rape, too).
I repeat: women lie. Men lie. Lots of each. About a lot of things, some of them very major, for both sexes.
This sentence close to the end of the article really struck home:
” …And if Nungesser is not a sexual predator, he could be seen as a true victim: a man who has been treated as guilty even after he has proved his innocence.”
Perhaps this sentence explains why universities are examining allegations of sexual wrongdoing themselves. In court the standard is innocent until proven guilty. By examining the cases themselves the defendant doesn’t not have those protections. Hence Cathy Young interprets the fact that he was not charged as an indication that he has “proven his innocence – to the extent that anyone can ever really clear their name in a case like that.
I will just repeat, again, what is my little pet peeve: not being found guilty (for _insufficient_ evidence in either direction) is different from being found positively innocent (from _sufficient_ evidence).
In most cases we do not know that the accuser of the exonerated is lying (I am talking in abstract, not about this particular case as I have only skimmed over the particulars). The exonerated may often well be guilty, but the evidence may be insufficient, and it is desirable to have high standards of proof. A lack of evidence for guilt does not equal automatic innocence.
To slap the label “false allegations” indiscriminately to _all_ situations in which the accused was exonerated is blatantly misleading, as we do not know that the allegations are _factually false_ on the sole account that no guilt could be ascertained. Few are the cases in which positive innocence is ascertained (ie. _eliminated_ the possibility that the accused is guilty). So in practice, most of it seems to amount to “he said, she said”.
There is a sickening amount of intellectual dishonesty on _both_ sides of this issue – from those who redefine consensual activities as “rape” in retrospect to those who would automatically proclaim the accusers liars if the accused gets exonerated for a simple lack of evidence _either way_ (a rape, due to its nature and the nature of proofs, is a very difficult crime to prove).
A disturbing number of people and articles are conflating these two things. Being found innocent is not the same as not being found guilty, although the _practical consequence_ must be the same (charges dropped). But the two are very different and in most cases the exonerated are actually not found innocent – _nor_ guilty. Which means that the allegations were not _necessarily_ false to begin with. Somebody really ought to start insisting on this minimum of conceptual clarity when false allegations are discussed, it is too important an issue to let essential distinctions be blurred.
Anna:
Well, I certainly was very careful not to say it’s clear he’s innocent and that the charges are false. In fact, I said:
I also realize you didn’t say I did say the charges were false in this case; I just wanted to clarify, though.
However–
If the facts in Young’s article are correct—and Sulkowicz apparently agreed that the text messages were correct—then there is very grave doubt cast on Sulkowicz’s allegations. Also, the fact that she decided not to explain further to Young, although given the opportunity, is suspicious, although hardly definitive. After all, prior to those text messages of hers coming out into the open, Sulkowicz seems to have had no trouble talking to the press about the entire episode and giving her point of view. Odd that she clams up now, isn’t it?
But what is especially troubling about what Sulkowicz did is that after the charges were not substantiated she tried to get Nungesser expelled from school (or to harrass him into quitting) anyway, by stirring up publicity and public opinion through her “art” project. That the school approved and supervised this vendetta is probably most scandalous of all, especially after they had dismissed the charges. Yes, Sulkowicz has the right to free speech, but when does it cross the line into defamation? She might say Nungesser’s identity was not universally known, but it became universally known (it had been published in the Columbia newspaper many months before she started carrying her mattress around, so it was public knowledge).
To me this case goes far beyond the usual he-said/she-said situation. Sulkowicz failed to get what she wanted from the normal process at Columbia. She realized her case would never hold up in court (all the evidence, what there is of it, exonerates the accused). So she went the psychological vigilante route, and the Columbia paper and the MSM aided and abetted her.
Neo:
I am sorry if I gave you the impression my post was in a direct reply to you, I probably should have emphasized better that my remarks were general (and frankly more prompted by the comments to one of the articles elsewhere than any dicussion we had here; there seems to be quite a lot of popular inciting that the accusers be automatically considered as liars if no guilt is ascertained, which I find ridiculous). I would _never_ have allowed myself to contest what is after all a qualified opinion of a specific case with general remarks of the sort I proposed. I hope I did not come across as doing just that.
It is just that I still cannot believe, ever since I was interested to learn more about the problem of false allegations, how loosely (at least in the public discussion) the lines are often drawn. I remain of the opinion that felony charges are properly of the competence of police, not university.
Years ago, I read of a study that found that women jurors were a little more likely to acquit in rape cases than men.
At the time I thought that wasn’t surprising, that women know that women sometimes lie, and that men know that men are sometimes pigs.
(One sad possibility in this case: Sulkowicz may now believe her own story, just from telling it a number of times.)
Anna:
No, I didn’t misunderstand what you were saying. I just wanted to clarify my point of view..
You make a good point—which is that dismissal of charges does not necessarily mean a person is actually innocent.
I agree that the comments on some of those articles are extreme on both sides. I have been impressed by how little people seem to understand about the way the law works. It seems that the mob is ever-ready to jump.
By the way, as to stirring up publicity and the school approving and backing up her project, I am in complete agreement with you. Even more, I am quite scandalized that the schools endorse “activism” of that sort in general. I really think that if one approached any of my professors with a “project” like that – especially for something as major as a graduation thesis – one would be laughed out of the cabinet. I may be wrong, but it is my impression that the provocations of that sort, especially where borderline defamatory, do not normally get a pass. I was quite unpleasantly shocked, both on academic grounds and as to general propriety, that she actually had somebody’s – institutional – _support_ for this.
Anna:
Unfortunately, way too many universities in this country have descended to that level. I don’t know if it’s true in other countries, but it is much too prevalent here.
See this, if you’re not already familiar with it.
Neo said:
“It seems that the mob is ever-ready to jump.”
You’re not referring to your readers are you?
Actually under the law with the innocent until guilty approach an acquittal does not prove innocence. However, in real life including some of the most celebrated cases of false rape reports the accused do indeed prove their innocence.
One which comes to mind is the Duke Lacrosse case in which the state and the woman both lied about the case. Crystal Mangum went on to commit murder later on.
Another case that comes to mind is the Tawana Brawley rape allegations against Steven Pagones.
Dennis:
I only point out that we ought to consistently distinguish between _factual_ innocence and _legal_ innocence/acquittal. The mob that I was originally referring to were the commenters on sundry websites who essentially incite that, unless the accused be found guilty (in a proper process with sufficient evidence, as we all agree should be the case), the accuser should be almost automatically considered as having lied – that is, the case should be lumped into the “false allegations” category, and if the accuser continues to claim that _factually_ she was raped (in absence of grounds for _legal_ guilt), those claims should be automatically considered as defaming. To make the entire enterprise even more polluted, most of these pseudo-legal processes we read about not being dealt with by proper courts, neither her accusation NOR his acquittal have any actual legal weight to them, although we continue to express ourselves, colloquially, as if they did.
The examples you bring up are structurally different (from what I know), the factual innocence was proven – that does change everything. But suppose nothing gets proven either way, as is very often the case, and never even gets to a proper court – it should _not_ be considered as a false allegation (mentally classified alongside allegations the actual factual falsity of which has been proven to the legal standard) and it is problematic at what point can we begin to properly talk of defamation (I am not sure how blurred are the lines in _that_ camp – I find it hard to believe that the free speech can fully justify a stunt of this kind which ultimately vilifies a specific person?).
I may be stating what is obvious to everyone else here, but it was quite a novelty for me when I recently studied it a bit and then understood just how messed up and blurred many of these distinctions seem to be: what properly constitutes defamation, is there an actual legally binding defintion of “false allegation” or are we to take the label (and consequently the statistics that employ it) with great reservation, what would prove a positive falsity of an allegation, many people truly fail to understand that an acquittal does not imply factual innocence etc. So that results in a mob behavior of the sort “take ’em to a court and unless he is found guilty, automatically charge HER”.
So, just as we know that the discussion of “rape” is very problematic (with all of the “redefinitions” of the crime and messy statistics) and that the actual numbers are much lower than typically claimed, it seems to me that we have an analogous thing going on with “false allegations” and that only a small percentage of what gets lumped that way _should_ be considered as such – and yet I see comparatively little discussion of that anywhere.
Ann:
Your point is well taken.
Unfortunately, because of the feminist meme about rape culture there is a great deal of hostility building on the male side of the ledger which could harm actual victims of rape. Real men are being victimized here and real men are having their lives ruined by slimy liars who do not seem to pay any price whatsoever when they ruin someone else’s life.
This thread needs a musical theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79wrXi_5WSw
that is all ….
Severe bipolar psychosis patients can entertain completely false perceptions of the events, bordering with outright delusion. And insist on this fabricated narrative obsessively, which seems to explain all this acting out with matrass thing.
Sergey Says: at 11:26 am
“Severe bipolar psychosis patients can entertain completely false perceptions of the events…”
Bingo. Give the man/woman a gold star. This girl needs a psychological evaluation. If she is bipolar, the real evil in this case is not the delusional individual but those around her who exploit her misery for their own causes.
Colleges should not be adjudicating rape charges. Rape charges need to go through the police.
in a soviet system, power is delegated…
in our system, power cant technically be delegated because only the owner of said power can define what to do with it, and the owner of the power is the people.
the point of this was to stop what king george and others did to control their mini leaders and force them to do things that they otherwise may not do (or might do as they were selected for their brutality or willingness)
the king could delegate power by assigning a title and within that title and position, as long as the person made the king happy, they kept title, and lands, etc.
a pay off system based on title and position which then garnered money without actually costing the king money and creating monetary benefit…
however, in our constitutional system, the power technically is vested in the people who then give the state permission to act, or restrict it from acting.
under a Nazi or Soviet system, this power is delegated as a reward and bribe to act. so what you see in progressives, as i have tried to put forth before, is the desire to give out powers (or usurp them).
this leads to the creation of councils (soviets), in which power NOT granted by the people is assumed and used. like the city council of ny, which makes laws… but is not elected… are they?
or the FCC claiming the internet is a utililty and so claiming power over it, despite the FCC was illegally created by FDR
here what your seeing is the power of the police being transferred to school administrative councils (soviets), in which law is inconvenient and limiting… and so its put aside, and its processes ignored – which is the point of the granting of false power… to pay off someone to be the seat of that power and largess, and in return, to adjudicate the outcome (or else lose their position)
the most visible form of this constitutional change a la feminists, is the powers vested in child protection services who can come into your home without a warrant in many cases, take your child, move them to another location, not tell you where they are, and then start a heart wrending process in which your guilty till you prove to the state that your not.
while the courts have some hand in this, they flout the constition and parental rights now that parens patria has been expanded till the state owns every person.
this is why the state complains as to how much productivity is lost based on our actions and claims a false power of taxation as a carrot and stick to mold behavior… a form of monetary blackmail that is normalized but unconstitutional as the constitution does NOT allow taxation to be used to mold behavior
only the owner of a human resource (means of production) can complain that they are losing something that belogns to them that comes from the slave/worker in that situation.
if the slave/worker was not owned by the state, the state neither loses or gains anything based on the entity.
if i dont own the cow, i dont lose anything if the cow does not give milk…
so that may give you a bit of insight they fail to inform
Dennis:
The saddest thing is that the feminists would have much grounds for honest agitation about worthy causes if only they were less provincial.
For example, most selective abortions around the world seem to be of girls – there is currently a deficit of women in China (-40 million) that can hardly be attributed to chance. In the same country there are forced abortions (other than “choice”!).
Then you have some dynamics resembling an actual targeted “rape culture” in some parts of Northern Europe (Rotterham, Sweden etc.) – the problem is continually downplayed because men of immigrant origin are overrepresented among the perpetrators, and that is a taboo topic. So we all know which demographics are actually mistreating women, and we all know there are ways to address it (and to cut on much other violence, too), but there is no political will to do so.
Then you have honor killings in Europe (again among certain demographics), Middle East, Africa. And rape in India.
On a lighter, but still important note, in many parts of the world there is a lack of reasonable informed choice regarding birth options (e.g. women who would properly need C-sections being denied those because of the extra cost and thus put through unnecessary – often serious – risks for their health). For many women around the world the entire birth and post-partum experience is unnecessarily traumatic because they are not given adequate medical and emotional support, and too many are not allowed a proper recovery (enough time off work, family support through that period).
Many women go through ordeals in order to have their babies in the first place – I know of horror stories nearby, women abandoned by their lovers and families as they got pregnant, pressured into abortion, and only finding shelter, financial support, and other help in order to give birth and rebuild their lives in the Church. And it is _Western Europe_ I am talking about, I do not dare to think what it must be like in the less developed parts of the world. It is sickening, discarded in a delicate moment like that by people who supposedly love you (many of them putting on a faé§ade of Catholicism in public life…) and having to go through such a hell of human depravity around you just so you can have what should be the most natural and the most beautiful thing in the world – your baby. I cannot even write about this without getting upset.
All of the pregnancy/birth questions are legitimate “women’s issues”, i.e. going through female bodies, but of great concern to society as a whole. One could much to improve the women’s lot around the world regarding that which is their female biological specificity.
Occasionally you have a lack of due concern for other physical differences between men and women: forced coed PE in some places, the fashion of “encouraging” talented young girls into competitive sports on much the same terms as talented young boys (we all know that an average female body suffers extreme physical exertion much differently than the male body, that it potentially threatens the girls’ health if they artifically delay their periods so they can freely compete etc.), and so forth. Minor things, if compared against the selective murder of female fetuses, but still something that could be legitimately discussed by somebody who chose the girls’ well-being as a field of his contribution to the world.
And of ALL these different arguments of varying degrees of gravity, in societies far and nearby, the homegrown feminists have chosen for their battles… “microaggressions”, “rape” reinterpreted to include consensual but regretted activities, the often tasteless assertion of a moral right to promiscuity (from what I understand there are things such as “slut parades” in some places) and alike. It does not surprise me in the least if one is losing one’s patience and benevolence. I just wish the reaction not take the bad turn and set men and women against each other.
Why does it surprise anyone that if you cram 17-24 year-old boys and girls together, away from home for the first time, and encourage them to get drunk and have sex, this kind of incident will be commonplace?
I would require a mandatory polygraph for both parties in these situations — not so much for determining the truth of the matter, but for making people think twice before they made these accusations.
Ann you’re preaching to the choir.
“I just wish the reaction not take the bad turn and set men and women against each other.”
Sadly, it ts already happening.
problem is that feminism is an army at the disposal of the supreme powers, not what it actually pretends to be…
The saddest thing is that the feminists would have much grounds for honest agitation about worthy causes if only they were less provincial.
They aren’t being provincial. They are focusing the vast bulk of their passion, fanaticism, and military cultural economic strength against the US because that’s where global power and wealth is focused, the US. Some old village in Europe doesn’t see this because some old village in Europe doesn’t have the economic or cultural supremacy to be important enough to take over.
The Leftist alliance in the US is the strongest all across the global, than any other organization or group, even the Chinese and Russians combined with Iran and N Korea. Merely because they have total access to American military, economic, and cultural forces, which are more or less stolen and used to fight the Left’s war on humanity. A war people in Europe like to ignore because they go sit in their cities and villas and pretend the world is advanced and civilized.
Why does it surprise anyone that if you cram 17-24 year-old boys and girls together, away from home for the first time, and encourage them to get drunk and have sex, this kind of incident will be commonplace?
Cults and death squads have often used sexual orgies to break down and brainwash the troops into loyal cannonfodder zombies. Drugs are also prevalent, given the addiction ratios.
So it’s not a surprise for them. They knew ahead of the time what they were doing, the Left’s officers and commanders. The grunts and people at the bottom? Nobody tells their tools what’s going to happen before it happens, usually.
Documentation on cult practices exist. People should look some of it up.