It's not a high chance of being futile, it's remarkably easy to prosecute someone if an actual rape occurs. They have rape kits for this reason. Our entire society is structured on treating rapists as bad as murderers, or worse. I struggle to think of a crime that is more demonized than rape.
The problem is: most women making these claims were not raped. Rape is incredibly rare. A statistically insignificant amount of women are raped every year. This is why they have expanded the definition of rape to include sex women regret, grey areas of vocalized consent, and "feeling pressured."
So the question of "why do these women wait so long to come forward?" is answered with "because they were not raped, and did not think it was bad at the time, but now they know it can benefit them." That's really it. People sometimes wonder aloud why a woman would lie about this, but recall that during the Kavanaugh hearings he was accused by 3 women and 2 of them ended up provably false. And it's widely acknowledged they just made it up, and it was dropped from the narrative. So I guess ask them why they made it up. There are stories every day about a woman who made up a rape. Why would they lie? Well shit, why does anybody ever lie about anything? Personal benefit. Revenge. Sadism. Because it solves some other problem they have like an affair. There's loads of reasons why they would do it.
The real story here, especially for Twitter industry types, is there actually is a professional interest in putting your name out there as a survivor especially once someone else has shown it is safe to do so. It doesn't matter if the story is "he was a dick to me when we were dating." For many women, that is tantamount to sexual abuse because so many women are emotionally-driven and insane. Of the whole #metoo movement, there have been only 2 claims that seemed valid: Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey. Every single other claim has been "I fucked this guy to get what I want and I don't think I should have to do that." This has more to do with the female mind's pathological desire to have zero responsibility in any situation.
That might be the case how it works with regular people, we're talking about someone from Hollywood with connections and money being the culprit, that changes the situation significantly. That's all that I am saying and I don't disagree with you about the possibility of attention-whores using accusations to do petty bullshit.
It's not a high chance of being futile, it's remarkably easy to prosecute someone if an actual rape occurs.
This is not correct for 2 reasons:
1) The rape would need to be recent that the police can file evidence. There are viable reasons why reporting such a crime can take too long to make this possible, such as feeling ashamed or being afraid of legal repercussions. Also remember that grooming is a thing and that Max seems to be very manipulative. Also, public opinion will support the "victim", however that is irrelevant in a court, which brings me to the other reason:
2) A lawyer might misconstrue a rape as "She's into rough sex, that explains the scratch marks, now she wants to squeeze money out of my client".
We are talking about lawyers here that earn more in a week than most people earn in a year, they are very experienced, have absolutely no problem with doing whatever's necessary to smear the victim and paint the culprit as an angel and they know a shitton more tricks than anyone could ever imagine. He'll shoot holes into the victim's testimony, he'll make her look untrustworthy, he'll do whatever he must to defend his client... and countering that is expensive, since you need an equally good lawyer. Don't tell me you never heard stories of guilty people being not punished and innocent people going to jail before.
It certainly doesn't help that the victims might not know about Max' history with women (otherwise, we could assume they wouldn't hang out with him in the first place), that might also lead to them not going to the police. Upon learning that he does have such a history and getting to know other victims later on might change that. Or at least encourage them to collect their stories and go to the press (which is the worst decision, to be sure, but y'know...)
Does that mean we should take any rape accusation any woman says at face value? Fuck no, I have repeatedly argued against that very thing over the past few pages. Especially, when the accusations are vague, anonymous and without any kind of evidence or at least supporting witness accounts.
Without having any kind of context of what supposedly happened, we have no ground to say whether it
was or
wasn't rape.
The same way how one person can't easily take this rape accisation as facts is the same reason why you can't simply dismiss it.
And as I said: It's not even relevant how high the chances of success in court actually are. When the victim thinks "Okay, I might accuse this guy of rape, but he'll walk away unscathed and then he'll tear me apart in a defamation process and there is no chance it'll happen any other way", that is sufficient. Up till #metoo, a shitton of people were getting away with being sleazy scumbags exactly due to that situation.
Hell, even during #metoo, scumbags still got away without an issue (or do you think the ones that got into trouble are the only ones?)
But here's a little food for thought:
What if you actually manage to succeed in court and Landis goes to jail for -say- 3 or 4 years? Does that mean everything is going to be fine in the future? If you work with film production in Hollywood, you might still end up without a job, since Max' mom will pull a few levers and make use of her connections. Some people might fear that scenario enough that they figure "Ok, even if I win, I lose my job" and decide it's not worth it. Humans are kind of stupid that way, that they just overlook being a victim, telling themselves "it happened in the past, it's over now" and don't do anything. Even if you don't work in film production, when you live and work in Hollywood, a pissed of influential person can still most likely ruin your life in a more permanent manner than what Max gets as a punishment.
The point is, of course, that the situation is far too complex to simply say "They didn't go immediately to the cops, therefore there was no rape". This isn't even true for regular rape cases, we are dealing with immensely powerful and influential people here, that changes the situation even more.
