- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
Crazy people have always existed, though, and don't really care about clout. They may even believe their deranged accusations. And as for social gains, one of the forms of this extremely common in the first half of the 20th Century would be in cases of miscegenation, where a white woman claiming rape against a black man spared herself the even worse public shame of admitting to voluntary coal-burning.
And don't forget the Tawna Brawley case, championed by Al Sharpton, in which a black woman falsely accused multiple white men of raping her, fabricating the crime scene to look like a hate crime, and was caught in multiple lies nearly immediately.
Or the 1991 case of William Kennedy Smith, again someone accused by a clout chaser. The jury acquitted him in less than an hour and the case should clearly never have been brought.
Or the also 1991 Tailhook Scandal, in which a bunch of military personnel were accused, almost certainly falsely, of raping and sodomizing dozens of people, both women and men.
Or the also 1991 accusations against baseball player David Cone.
There were always plenty of reasons for false accusations, whether insanity, clout chasing, or pure revenge. #metoo shit has certainly incentivized a particular type of false rape accusation, but a lot of the accusations from that quarter aren't even rape accusations. A lot of them, even the kind that get people canceled, are often as trivial as someone's ex accusing them of being kind of a jerk, and this is then treated as being as serious as rape.
I'm more inclined to believe the FBI and put it at about 8%. Anything higher is probably including things like "unfounded" claims, which are not quite the same as claims actually found to be false. And take into account that just as actual rapes are disproportionately committed by a small number of perps, each of whom has multiple victims, many of these false accusations come from serial accusers.
