It's scary, knowing that your life can be permanently damaged or at best dragged through the mud for years because someone intentionally misrepresents an incident that only the two of you can attest to, or even worse-- because someone else intentionally misrepresents an incident they weren't even involved in, that said other party can't or won't vouch for you for (or even if they do, they'll have their testimony shafted by an angry mob). We talk about the obvious tell of them not getting the cops involved, but even if they do, we can't tell for certain with how unwell some people are. Even if they get told to beat it by the cops who realize that the filer is untrustworthy, they will have still succeeded in making you suffer for however long. At best, you waste time. At worst, you consider suicide, even when you're exonerated. Vic got lucky that all his opponents were unbelievable idiots that they left permanent records of their defamation-- what about the littler guy who doesn't get that much and can't even resort to a solid lawsuit to clear his name in the court?
The only way you can fight against it is if you were ready to fight against it when you started that relationship, and had we not supplanted our own world with Clown World, we'd be reasonably be called paranoid for not deleting correspondences ever and literally videotaping our sexy times. But between my own experiences, recent events, and following Weeb Wars, I'm seeing a reality of a society where trust between the sexes is eroding because the inherent trust we put into people who cry rape because of the difficulty of proving such a thing is being taken advantage of by people that unironically should have been committed and the people who don't see that. Everyone made fun of Mike Pence and those conservative Christians requiring their wives in the room when they'd otherwise be alone with a woman, but look at what's happening now: every month we have a new woman alleging that Donald Trump raped them with no evidence, only to get shuffled out the media coil and memory holed to make way for the new accuser. And adjacent to that was the heartbreaking incident where politicians used clearly disreputable allegations of rape just to prevent a guy from being a Supreme Court justice for the crime of not being likely to do liberal judicial activism, and victimized not only him, but his wife and children in the process, even when all the other accusers recanted and Ford was clearly shown as a liar.
Is there anything that can be done to assure that, should this happen to any of us, we'll be able to pick up the pieces afterwards? Is there any guarantee that even after exoneration in criminal and/or civil court (should it come to that), or after dumping every correspondence preserved for as many people to see even immediately after the allegation is made, or anything else that we could do, that we won't be permanently stigmatized for things we never did?
Even if/when Vic wins this court case, will it serve as a big enough lesson for everyone that rape accusations aren't your out from explaining to your parents that you had premarital sex, or your out from explaining to your boyfriend that you cheated on him?
That I don't know the answer to that question bums me out.
