False Rape Accusations Are Common

From WTNH TV, the story of a woman who made a false rape accusation:

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A young woman accused of making up rape allegations against two college football players to gain the sympathy of another student she wanted to date is going on trial this week, and claims that she was pressured into confessing are expected to play a key role.

Jury selection in the case of Nikki Yovino, 19, of South Setauket, New York, is to begin Tuesday in Bridgeport Superior Court in Connecticut, and testimony is expected to start June 18. Prosecutors and defense lawyers will be in court Monday to argue over whether some evidence and testimony should be excluded from the trial.

Yovino was a student at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield when police say she reported being raped by two Sacred Heart football players at an off-campus party in Bridgeport in October 2016.

Authorities say she later admitted that she had consensual sex with the players and told them her motive. She was charged with evidence tampering, a felony, and falsely reporting an incident, a misdemeanor. The evidence tampering charge carries as many as five years in prison.

So her fake story fell apart, and she was charged. Justice was done, right? Not really. The story continues:

Yovino withdrew from Sacred Heart. The football players were never criminally charged, but both withdrew from the school as they faced possible disciplinary action based. One player lost a football scholarship, his lawyer said.

The football players’ names have not been released by police but are expected to be disclosed when they testify at the trial, their lawyer said.

“Her actions have seriously affected them,” attorney Frank Riccio II said. “They’re no longer in school. The loss of their education and the college experience has certainly affected them greatly. And this is all because of a very serious lie.”

One case, of course, doesn’t prove much of anything, but it does underline the problem with the feminist notion that women would never (well, they have to admit, hardly ever) lie about rape.

How Common are False Rape Accusations?

Quoting from Stuart Taylor, Jr. and KC Johnson, Until Proven Innocent, 2007, pp. 374-375.

The standard assertion by feminists that only 2 percent of rape claims are false, which traces to Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book Against Our Will, is without empirical foundation and belied by a wealth of empirical data. These data suggest that at least 9 percent and probably closer to half of all rape claims are false:

1. FBI statistics say conservatively that about 9 percent of rape reports are “unfounded” in the sense of being dismissed without charges filed, usually because the accuser recants or because her account is contradicted by other evidence.
2. Forty-one percent of 109 rape complainants eventually admitted to police that no rape had occurred, according to a careful, highly regarded 1994 study of all rape reports in a midwestern town of about 70,000 between 1978 and 1987, by Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin, Ph. D. The recantations made irrelevant the claims of many feminists that police often discount valid rape claims. And because there is no reason to suppose that all false accusers recanted, the total number of false reports probably exceeded 41 percent. The police in the study made serious efforts to polygraph both the accused and the accuser; it is now much more rare for police to polygraph rape accusers, due to pressure from feminist and victims’ rights groups more interested in convictions than in truth.
   
   Kanin also concluded that “these false charges were able to serve three major functions for the complainants: providing an alibi, a means of gaining revenge, and a platform for seeking attention/sympathy. This tripartite model resulted from the complainants’ own verbalizations during recantation and does not constitute conjecture.” Other experts note other motives for false rape claims; they include remorse after an impulsive sexual fling and escaping accountability when caught in an embarrassing consensual encounter.
3. Fifty percent (32) of accusers recanted their rape charges in a study by Kanin of campus police reports on sixty four rape claims at two large, unnamed Midwestern universities. In both universities, the taking of the complaint and the follow-up investigation were done by a ranking female officer. “Quite unexpectedly then” Kanin wrote, “we find that these university women, when filing a rape complaint, were as likely to file a false as a valid charge. Other reports from university police agencies support these findings.”
4. False rape accusations occur with scary frequency and “any honest veteran sex assault investigator will tell you that rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes,” Craig Silverman, a former Colorado prosecutor known for his zealous pursuit of alleged rapists, said in 2004 as a commentator on the Kobe Bryant case for Denver’s ABC affiliate. Silverman added that a Denver sex-assault unit commander had estimated that nearly 50 percent of reported rape claims are false.
5. Fraudulent rape complaints were perceived as a problem by 73 percent of the women and 72 percent of the men in a survey of students at the Air Force Academy, West Point, and the Naval Academy, according to a March 2005 Defense Department report.
6. One in four rape reports was unfounded in a 1990-1991 Washington Post investigation in seven Virginia and Maryland counties. When contacted by the Post, many of the alleged victims admitted that they had lied.

The presumption, driven by the political power of feminists on college campuses, that any accusation of rape must be true is a classic case of ideologically driven “justice.”

The campus leftists would loudly support the presumption of innocence, and full due process rights, for a black defendant accused of robbery, or a Muslim accused of conspiring with terrorists. But since the stereotypical campus rapist is a white male, these principles go out the window.