FALSE ASSAULT ACCUSATIONS BY WOMEN
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
SEPTEMBER 19, 2018


YET ANOTHER MAN ACCUSED OF SEXUAL ASSAULT IS CLAIMING THAT THE VICTIM HAS CONCOCTED A STORY AGAINST HIM. HE DOESN’T EVEN REMEMBER BEING AT THE PARTY. OF COURSE, HE WAS SO DRUNK THAT HIS HAVING A BLACKOUT WOULDN’T BE SURPRISING. SANDRA NEWMAN IS SOMETHING OF AN EXPERT ON THE SUBJECT OF FALSE RAPE ACCOUNTS, AND THE WOMEN WHO MAKE THEM.

BOTH OF THESE STORIES FROM VOX AND BBC ARE SET ASIDE HERE BECAUSE OF THE NUMBER OF TIMES IN MY LIFE WHEN I HAVE SEEN OR HEARD NEWS REPORTS OF THESE ALLEGEDLY FALSE RAPE STORIES. THOUGH I AM A WOMAN AND A FEMINIST, I HAVE BEEN ALIVE LONG ENOUGH TO HAVE NOTICED THAT THE URGE TO COMPLETE A SEX ACT IS BUILT IN, BOTH IN WOMEN AS WELL AS MEN. STILL, IN A SAFE AND JUST SOCIETY, NEITHER THE MAN NOR THE WOMAN SHOULD BE ASSUMED TO BE GUILTY; AND BOTH OF THEM MAY MAKE UP A STORY TO GET THEMSELVES, THEY HOPE, OUT OF TROUBLE.

THESE ARTICLES ARE ABOUT WOMEN’S LIES AND THE INCIDENCES THAT HAVE BEEN DOCUMENTED THROUGH ONE AUTHORITATIVE SOURCE. THE WRITER SANDRA NEWMAN HAS WRITTEN A SIZABLE NUMBER OF BOOKS AND ARTICLES ON SOME INTERESTING SUBJECTS THAT I HAVE RARELY IF EVER SEEN BEFORE. THE MOST GRIPPING IS ONE ON INFANTICIDE – A SUBJECT SO STARKLY SHOCKING THAT WE RARELY MENTION IT OR ALLOW OURSELVES TO THINK ABOUT IT.

TO VIEW MORE OF HER WORK, AND I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO, GO TO https://aeon.co/users/sandra-newman. RAPE OR SEXUAL ABUSE, UNFORTUNATELY, IS A SIN/CRIME THAT IS COMMITTED MUCH MORE OFTEN THAN IS EVER REPORTED, INCLUDING WITHIN MARRIAGES AND FAMILIES IN GENERAL. MOST WOMEN I HAVE EVER ASKED CAN REMEMBER AT LEAST ONE FRIGHTENING INTERACTION OF A SEXUAL NATURE, AND IT HAPPENS EVEN WHEN THE WOMAN’S DRESS IS NOT “TOO SHORT.” WE MUST BE HONEST ABOUT ONE THING. FORCED OR VIOLENT SEX IS NOT LOVE-MAKING, INSIDE OR OUTSIDE WEDLOCK, NOR IS IT “NORMAL,” EVEN IF THE ENCOUNTER IS (VERY UNCOMMONLY) GENUINELY “CONSENSUAL.”

IT IS PROFOUNDLY UNHEALTHY IN ALL CASES. BOTH MEN AND WOMEN WHO DO DESIRE VIOLENT SEX SHOULD SEEK PSYCHOTHERAPY AND SHOULD NOT REAR CHILDREN IN SUCH A HOUSEHOLD. A BOY WHO WITNESSES HIS MOTHER OR SISTER BEING BEATEN OR RAPED IS MUCH MORE LIKELY TO DO IT HIMSELF WHEN HE MATURES. IT’S A SCOURGE, AND SHOULD BE VIEWED AS SUCH. DID I SAY ENOUGH HERE ON THAT SUBJECT? I HOPE SO.


https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45565684
The truth about false assault accusations by women
Katty Kay
Presenter, BBC World News
@KattyKayBBC on Twitter
18 September 2018

PHOTOGRAPH -- Brett Kavanaugh has denied the allegations against him GETTY IMAGES

Either Brett Kavanaugh or Christine Blasey Ford is lying. We don't know which one.

Here's what we do know.

According to various academic studies over the past 20 years, only 2-10% of rape accusations are fake (Prof Ford's lawyer says she believes this was attempted rape).

Two to 10% is too many, but it is not a big proportion of the total. Fake rape accusations get a lot of attention.

Both the Duke Lacrosse team case in 2006 and the alleged University of Virginia gang rape in 2014 were widely covered by the media. They were terrible miscarriages of justice - but they were not representative.

False rape accusations very rarely lead to convictions or wrongful jail time.

A useful article in Quartz by Sandra Newman points to research from the British Home Office showing that in the early 2000s, of the 216 cases that were classified as false allegations, only six led to an arrest.

Of those, only two had charges brought against them and those two were found to be false.

Brett Kavanaugh denies sexual misconduct
Five takeaways from the Kavanaugh hearings
Why is the US Supreme Court so important?

The idea that lots of men are going to prison because they've been falsely accused of rape isn't supported by the facts.

Moreover, official figures suggest the number of rapes and sexual assaults which are never reported or prosecuted far outweighs the number of men convicted of rape because of fake accusations.

Indeed it far outweighs the number of fake accusations, period.

Figures from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics suggest only 35% of all sexual assaults are even reported to the police.

Image copyrightREUTERS
Image caption
Prof Ford says Brett Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and tried to take off her clothes

It's also useful to look at what we know about the kind of people who make fake accusations to see if Prof Ford fits a pattern.

According to Sandra Newman, every academic study on the issue finds that the most common type of fake accuser is actually a teenage girl trying to get out of trouble.

Often it's her parents who report the "rape" attempt. The studies suggest the false accusation can often stem from something as absurd as finding an excuse for missing curfew.

According to a 2017 report by the US National Institutes of Health, fake accusers "were primarily motivated by emotional gain. Most false allegations were used to cover up other behaviour such as adultery or skipping school".

In many cases the fake accuser has a history of lying to authorities or committing fraud. She may well have a criminal record.

In the Duke lacrosse team case, the woman in question, Crystal Mangum, had reported a previous assault in which no one was charged, she had a felony conviction and ultimately went to prison herself.

Christine Blasey Ford clearly does not fit this profile.

She is not a teenager, she has no history of fabrications, she doesn't have a criminal record and, as far as we know she isn't trying to cover up some other behaviour.

None of this proves that Prof Ford is telling the truth but it does suggest we should be sceptical of the notion that it is common for women to say they've been sexually abused when they haven't.

It's not.


SANDRA NEWMAN SPEAKS FOR HERSELF HERE ON THE FORD VERSUS KAVANAUGH STANDOFF. THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SUBGROUP OF THESE CRIMES WHICH WE CALL “DATE RAPE.” MOST RAPES ARE NOT EVENTS BETWEEN TOTAL STRANGERS THAT HAPPEN ON A DARK CITY STREET, BUT RATHER THAT WHICH IN THE SOUTH IS CALLED “HOMEMADE SIN.” IT'S WITH US EVERY DAY. WE EITHER ACT ON IT OR WE DON'T. WITH SOME MEN, IF A WOMAN AS MUCH AS MEETS THEIR EYE IN AN ENCOUNTER, HE MAY FANCY THAT SHE IS INVITING HIS EXTREME ADVANCES. SHE IS NOT. SHE IS MERELY BEING SOCIAL AND NORMALLY CONFIDENT. HE SHOULD ENGAGE IN A LITTLE POLITE CONVERSATION AND LEAVE IT AT THAT – AND GET HER PHONE NUMBER, PERHAPS. EVEN IF SHE IS “FLIRTING,” THAT IS AS NORMAL AND HEALTHY FOR A WOMAN AS IT IS FOR A MAN, AND IS NOT “CONSENT” TO PUSH THE MATTER ANY FURTHER. UNDERSTAND THAT, GUYS?

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/9/18/17874504/kavanaugh-assault-allegation-christine-blasey-ford
I’ve studied false rape claims. The accusation against Kavanaugh doesn’t fit the profile.
What I learned reading hundreds of false rape accusations.
By Sandra Newman Sep 18, 2018, 2:50pm EDT

PHOTOGRAPH -- Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, DC, on September 6. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“This is a completely false allegation.”

That’s what Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh said in a statement on Monday after an allegation surfaced that he had attempted to rape a woman named Christine Blasey Ford decades ago when they were both in high school.

“I have never done anything like what the accuser describes — to her or to anyone,” he said. “Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself.”

This accusation has not been fully investigated, so we don’t yet know what happened for sure. But Ford’s allegation does not, based on what I’ve researched, have the characteristics of a false rape accusation. I would know. I’ve studied hundreds of them.

A few years ago, I wrote an article on false rape accusations after becoming obsessed with the issue and how frequently it’s used as a cudgel when allegations of sexual misconduct come out. I ended up spending months reading hundreds of accounts of false accusations in newspapers and magazines, in scientific and government studies, and in the database of the US National Registry of Exonerations, which has documented every exoneration in the United States since 1989.

I worked to find the nuggets of useful information in flawed research, like sociology professor Eugene Kanin’s 1994 study, which was based on uncorroborated judgments of police officers as to whether a report was true or false, as well as government studies intended for other purposes, which sometimes dealt with cases of false rape accusation in a sidebar. Through this painstaking process, I became very familiar with what a false report of rape tends to look like. I’m confident that Ford’s allegations do not fit this profile.

False rape accusations tend to be dramatic, lurid stories

To briefly recap Ford’s allegations: She says that one evening when she was about 15, she was at a small party in suburban Maryland. She left the group to go upstairs to the bathroom. She says that Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, who were 17, caught her on the way and Kavanaugh pushed her into a bedroom.

There, in her words: “Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with [Judge], who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state. With Kavanaugh’s hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me.” She says that Kavanaugh also groped her over her clothes and ground his body against hers. At last, she says, Judge jumped onto Kavanaugh so hard that he toppled him and Ford escaped.

Again, Kavanaugh denies that any of this happened. When asked about the allegations, Judge, who was implicated in the alleged assault, told the Weekly Standard, “It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way.”

Studies have found that false accusations are quite rare, but when they do happen, they tend to share several important characteristics. To anyone familiar with false rape accusations, the striking thing about this story is that it’s so undramatic. False stories typically have a lurid quality, often involving bizarre forms of cruelty that don’t always strictly make sense.

A good example is the University of Virginia student who accused several fraternity brothers of gang rape in a 2015 Rolling Stone article that was later proved to be fabricated. In the article, the accuser said that her attacker jumped her and crashed them both through a glass table to the floor, where he and six other men proceeded to rape her on the broken glass for three hours while calling her “it” and behaving with inhuman brutality.

In another famous case, a stripper hired to dance at a party at Duke falsely accused members of the lacrosse team of rape. In her story, the accuser described being suspended from a ceiling in the bathroom while three men attacked her at once. In another version of her story, she said she had been raped by 20 white men.

The reason for this dramatizing tendency is clear. There’s no point in making up a rape story that may cause people to minimize the seriousness of the allegation or make them think, “So what?” It’s crucial to a false accuser to tell a story so horrific that no normal person could fail to be moved.

In Ford’s allegations against Kavanaugh, we have none of this. The event described feels common. Ford emphasizes that both Kavanaugh and Judge seemed to have no inkling of the seriousness of what they were doing, and the story ends with the slapstick note of Judge knocking them all into an ungainly heap.

She alleges that she feared Kavanaugh might kill her through drunken clumsiness, not through savagery. This is not a story crafted to earn sympathy or destroy someone’s character. This is a story someone tells because it’s most likely true.

Ford doesn’t fit the profile of somebody who makes a false accusation

Additionally, Ford herself — a married professor who teaches part time at Stanford — doesn’t fit the profile of a false accuser. Adults who make false accusations generally either have a criminal history or have a specific type of mental illness known as a factitious disorder: a personality disorder related to Munchausen syndrome that compels them to say they’ve been assaulted in dramatic ways.

Note that no study points to mental illnesses such as anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder being associated with false reports of rape. This distinction is crucially important, since having mental illness is strongly correlated with being a victim of rape.

It is comparatively common for teenagers to make false accusations, typically as an alibi to get out of trouble. These cases can end tragically, as in the story of the 14-year-old girl with cognitive deficits caught in a compromising position with a boy by her mother, who assumed she’d been raped. The panicked girl agreed to the false accusation and only confessed her lie after the boy was already in prison.

Ford’s situation, on the other hand, couldn’t be more different. It is not common for adults to falsely report that they were raped many years after the accusation. In my research, I didn’t come across a single verified example of this. So — counterintuitively for many people — if Ford had reported the assault when it happened, there would be far more reason to suspect it was a lie.

Finally, while Ford’s alleged story of drunken wrestling sounds nothing like a false rape accusation, it does sound exactly like millions of real attempted rapes. It’s such a common story that it’s likely happening to many people as you read this sentence.

In fact, when defenders of Kavanaugh aren’t insisting Ford is a liar, they’re energetically arguing that what Kavanaugh is accused of is so normal it doesn’t matter. If we ever hope to live in a world where it isn’t normal, we cannot continue to elevate alleged sex offenders to the highest positions in our society.

Sandra Newman is the author of several books, including the novels The Country of Ice Cream Star and The Heavens, forthcoming from Grove Atlantic/Granta in February 2019. She has written for the Guardian, the Atlantic, Aeon, Quartz, and Slate, among other publications.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.


SANDRA NEWMAN AS THE AUTHOR, SCHOLAR AND THINKER: FOR HER EDUCATIONAL BONA FIDES, HER VIEWS AND HER STATED IMPRESSIONS GO TO WIKIPEDIA, THOUGH IT MYSTIFYINGLY DOES NOT TELL EXACTLY WHAT SUBJECT MATTER HER DEGREES COVERED, FROM EITHER INSTITUTION; BUT SHE DOES HAVE A MASTERS LEVEL EDUCATION AND HAS WRITTEN AT LEAST THREE BOOKS AND MANY ARTICLES. GO TO EAOL

THEN, FROM SUPERSTITIONREVIEW.ASU.EDU, THERE IS A PERSONAL LEVEL INTERVIEW. IT SHOWS AN INTERESTING AND PLAYFUL PERSON WHO DEALS DEEPLY WITH SERIOUS ISSUES SUCH AS CRYING RAPE AS A FEMININE PREROGATIVE. WHEN I LEARN ABOUT ANYBODY, I DON’T JUST COUNT COLLEGE DEGREES, BUT I TRY TO ACQUAINT MYSELF WITH THE INNER PERSON AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. SEE BOTH ARTICLES BELOW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Newman
Sandra Newman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sandra Newman (born November 6, 1965 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American writer. She has a BA from Polytechnic of Central London, and an MA from the University of East Anglia.[1]

Newman's first novel, The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done,[2] was first published in 2002 and received a nomination for the 2002 Guardian First Book Award.[3] The novel features an American adoptee from Guatemala named Chrysalis Moffat and focuses on events in her and her familys' lives using an unusual style reminiscent of notes taken while composing the novel.[2]

Newman's third novel, The Country of Ice Cream Star (2014), was among eighty titles nominated for 2015 Folio Prize,[4] and among twenty works nominated for the 2015 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.[5] The novel follows protagonist, Ice Cream Fifteen Star, through a dystopian future United States while she searches for a cure for her brother's inherited disease.[5]

She is the author of one additional novel, Cake (2008); a memoir, Changeling (2010); and a guide to Western literature, The Western Lit Survival Kit: How To Read The Classics Without Fear (2012). She is the co-author of How Not To Write A Novel (2008) and Read This Next (2010).


SANDRA NEWMAN
https://superstitionreview.asu.edu/issue17/interviews/sandranewman
Photograph -- sandra newmanAE

Sandra Newman is the author of seven books, most recently a novel, The Country of Ice Cream Star, which was long-listed for the Folio Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. Her other novels are The Only Good Thing Anyone Has Ever Done and Cake, and she is also the author of a memoir and three books of non-fiction, including How Not to Write a Novel (co-authored by Howard Mittelmark).


“A Dramatic, Overnight Apocalypse,” an Interview with Sandra Newman

This interview was conducted via email by Interview Editor Audrey Hawkes. Of the process she said, “The Country of Ice Cream Star was an epic journey, with such a rich and interesting world to get lost in. I was instantly eager to discuss the process with Sandra, because it was such an impressive work.” In this interview, Sandra discusses creating new dialects, falling in love with her story, and the challenges of writing a sequel.

Superstition Review: It seems that dystopian novels are getting more and more popular, both for young adults and adults alike. Why do you think this genre is so appealing to readers? What drew you to it when writing The Country of Ice Cream Star?

Sandra Newman: I hate to be a pedant about this, but Ice Cream Star isn’t a dystopian novel, it’s a post-apocalyptic novel, a genre which is also popular nowadays, but for different reasons, I think. In a dystopian novel, you have a world ruled by an evil government, which will eventually be overthrown in Book Three, so they generally reflect a feeling that we are ruled by an evil government (or, in the case of YA readers, an evil high school) which needs to be overthrown. Post-apocalyptic novels are generally popular because we feel that there’s a real possibility of an apocalypse, and sometimes even think we might welcome a dramatic, overnight apocalypse that would wipe the slate clean, so that an entirely new society could arise, which would not be ruled by an evil government.

SR: What are some of your favorite dystopian stories? If someone enjoyed The Country of Ice Cream Star, what books would you recommend to them?

SN: I don’t think people should read books by anyone but me. If someone enjoyed The Country of Ice Cream Star, they should read my other books. If they didn’t enjoy The Country of Ice Cream Star, perhaps they would enjoy my other books. Whatever they do, they should not waste money buying books by any other authors.

SR: Even though the setting of The Country of Ice Cream Star is quite different from our modern world, its themes of war, religion, morality, and sexism mirror real life. Do you think certain conflicts are inevitable no matter what the society is? What influenced you to include these issues in the novel?

SN: I’m not sure if these conflicts are inevitable; I like to think that a profoundly superior society is actually possible. However, if one wrote a novel about such a society, it wouldn’t have much relevance or interest for contemporary readers, so we always end up writing about societies that more or less share our problems. Some of the issues in The Country of Ice Cream Star are ones that I think about constantly, like the morality of war and how power structures work. In general, the book ended up being about belief systems to a greater degree than I expected, because I had to explain the various societies that appear in the book and how they functioned. So it’s not as if I set out to write a trenchant satire of Catholicism, for instance, I just found a Catholic theocracy more fun to write about than, for instance, an Evangelical theocracy, and the rest flowed from there.

SR: Most of the characters are children, and yet they have to deal with adult issues like sex and politics. What were some of the challenges you faced when writing a cast of characters so young?

SN: I didn’t really have any challenges writing about characters that were so young. They were just more fun to work with. At first, I was worried about representing them accurately, but it didn’t turn out to be much of a problem, presumably because I have personal experience of being eight years old and fifteen years old and so on, so I had an instinctive grasp of what that was like.

SR: The Country of Ice Cream Star has several invented dialects, and they’re all very distinct from each other. What was it like creating and writing in these dialects? What were some of your influences?

SN: The main dialect of the book, which is the only one that’s fully worked out, is pretty obviously (if somewhat distantly) based on African American Vernacular English, and I found it to be a complete joy to work with, from start to finish. Generally, although there’s a difficulty level in creating a dialect with its own rules and vocabulary, it also gives you a lot more freedom. It allows you to work with language more inventively/poetically, creating your own idioms that are (as most idioms are) based on metaphors, and using words in ways that are surprising – but in the book, that’s just how people talk. They aren’t being poetic, that’s their everyday speech. I read A Clockwork Orange and Riddley Walker, two of the classic books that use invented dialects, many years ago, but I never intended to write one myself. It just ended up being the only way I could make the book I wanted to write work.

SR: The novel is quite an epic journey, well over 600 pages long. What was it like writing such a long piece? How did you know where the book should wrap up?

SN: I loved writing this book and never wanted it to end. I’m not sure how one knows where a book should end; it just seems intuitively obvious. I found all of my other, shorter books much harder to write because, although I have some affection for them, I was not literally in love with them, whereas I really was in love with The Country of Ice Cream Star. I got impatient if I had to be away from it for more than a couple of hours, for instance. It was somewhat pathological.

SR: You said in an interview with The Writes of Women that you are working on a sequel. Did you always know you’d want to write one? What has that process been like so far?

SN: I always knew I was likely to want to write a sequel, but it only became certain when I finished the first book, and saw what happened, and that the story had refused to arrive at a happy conclusion. It’s very difficult writing a sequel, because you have to write it as if the reader hasn’t read the first book (or doesn’t remember it) which means filling them in on all the important events of the last novel. But you also have to write it as if they did just finish the first book, which means not boring them with all the events of the last novel. It’s almost impossible to do elegantly, and it’s given me immense respect for people who manage it.

SR: The novel takes place in the northeast, particularly Massachusetts and Washington D.C. Could you describe the importance of those settings on the story? Was that always where you planned for the novel to take place? What made you choose those locations?

SN: It started in Massachusetts purely because that’s where I grew up, so I knew the geography very well. In fact, in the first scene of the book, they’re in the derelict shell of my childhood home. Washington was obviously symbolically important, because in many ways, it’s a book about America. I do love Washington, D.C., both the Chocolate City aspect of it (which is sadly being eroded by gentrification) and the weird and faintly inhuman geography of the National Mall. I even like the tourists. But it was clearly the only place for the final battle to take place, and I found it very comforting to imagine it being run by a military-communist group of African-American children.

SR: What does your writing space look like?

SN: I basically just write in bed. It looks like a bed that never gets made because someone is working in it all day long.

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