What motives drive false accusers?
The answer might seem obvious, but I think it’s more complicated than most people might think.
Let’s leave out accusers who are telling the truth. I’m interested in the ones who are not. They can have multiple motives, too. This list is not all-inclusive, but here are the major ones:
(1) Revenge. The person actually has hurt you in some way—estranged spouses are notorious for this motivation—but you’re making up a story with an accusation that can hurt them even more than the truth would, and you justify it by telling yourself they deserve it.
(2) You’re a sociopath who enjoys lying and gets off on seeing people squirm. Makes you feel superior to all those stupid normals.
(3) Someone has paid you money to lie.
(4) You want your 15 minutes of fame.
(5) An actual psychological contagion effect, a kind of mass hysteria in which people start thinking they remember something that is really just a reflection of what they’re hearing from others. Obviously, for this motive to be operating there must be other accusers and a lot of attention given to them, which is often true for a public figure. I believe that this was at least part of the motive for the girls doing the accusing in the Salem witch trials, for example. Do not underestimate the power of the strangeness of the human mind.
(6) (This one is related to #5, but somewhat different.) Some time ago, something happened to you that was bad, but your memory is foggy on some details. When you really think about it [added for clarification: or are coaxed to do so, perhaps by a therapist], you become convinced that it happened a certain way at a certain person’s hands. And yet this is actually a manufactured memory detail superimposed on a much hazier basic memory that is real. People who are undergoing numbers 5 or 6 can make very convincing witnesses indeed, because they have convinced themselves of the absolute truth of their memories and can therefore speak with the power of tremendous conviction.
(7) You believe this is a noble lie you are telling because the cause is noble. This is the mentality of some spies, or people working for the real Resistance during a war, in which that person can easily justify lying, making false documents, perhaps even assassination, for the sake of the greater good. Right now, for example, if a person believes, truly truly believes, that the right is waging a War on Women, let’s say, and that women’s very liberty is at stake if the evil Kavanaugh gets on the Court, that person could easily justify lying in order to take him down. I think that mentality is quite rampant these days.
(8) You once had something similar happen to you at the hands of someone else, and that person shares a lot of traits with the person being accused. Let’s say, for example, that the person who hurt you went to a Catholic prep school and wore his hair like Kavanaugh did in his high school yearbook, maybe even talked a bit like him, and became a lawyer or a judge. That person did something very upsetting to you, and never apologized or looked back, and then went on to great glory and fame and achievement in life. You want justice and never got it. For some people in that circumstance it is easy to tell themselves that all Catholic prep grads who look something like that or talk something like that are the same sort of scumbag. So what’s wrong with telling a little white lie to expose what a scumbag that person must be? You may be lying, but you’re telling A Greater Truth.
My own theory is that Ford has a “recovered memory” that came from therapy. Usually in older women, this is alcoholism treatment. I had a friend, who I had once dated long ago and who I ran into and spent some time with 20 years later. She had had a problem with alcohol. Her therapist convinced her that her father had molested her as a child. Her final act was to pee on his grave.
When I first knew her, we had had a romantic relationship but she never mentioned anything negative about her father. Her home town had been devastated by Hurricane Camille. Nothing about her father.
When we reconnected for a few months, she told me this recovered memory and I steered clear. Then we met again about five years later and this time no mention of the father thing.
When this happens with young women it is usually eating disorders, like bulemia.
It would be interesting to see all the therapist’s notes and why she was in “couples therapy.” The second accuser is probably getting paid.
You missed self defense. There are multiple cases of a woman being caught by someone and it being obvious that (consensual) sex occurred, and the woman turns around and claims that the sex was non-consensual.
Facts and evidence must matter. CBF and anyone else must be under oath. They must be credible. Otherwise there are no rules and no rules means chaos.
Ford is probably going through intense Hypnosis session now to have herself brainwashed into truly believing every lie she made. they might be able to fresh out the lies, implanting details into the stories to make them completely believable. I have a feeling she is going to do well in the testimony.
maybe the reason why the dems are so convicted in their collective belief that Trump is Putin’s manchurian candidate is that they themselves have the technologies to create their own Manchurian candidates namely everyone working for CNN.
See Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed, then read Ken Burns (disgusting) remarks on the Duke rape case (in which he refers to a year long campaign of threats and defamation and six figure sums in legal fees as an ‘inconvenience’ to Messrs. Evans, Seligman, and Finnerty), then read Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s idiot story about Jackie Coakley in Rolling Stone.
Our chattering classes and their auxiliaries commonly maintain a menu of social groups they treat (and regard themselves as treating legitimately) as depersonalized objects of contempt. Any injury done one element of that Borg creature is legitimate because they’ve all done something or benefited from ill-gotten gains. Our chatterati also commonly adhere to a set of sociological fictions which make bizarre tales like Jackie Coakley’s perfectly plausible. Such social fictions are re-inforced by such things as television crime drama, in which the perpetrator among the characters introduced will be the bourgeois white male except when it is the bourgeois white female. (NB, if they introduce a homosexual character, he will not be the perpetrator unless he studiosly refuses to make a public point of his homosexuality).
For Debra Katz and Christine Blasey, Brett Kavanaugh is a cultural untouchable and his interests and welfare are of no account. His wife and children have attached themselves to this untouchable, so they’re of no account either. Among their social fictions are that haut bourgeois white males are violent threats to the decent people of the world, especially when they refuse to subscribe to the narratives of the Democratic Party. Of course this is nonsense. The Democratic Party and it’s social nexus is a stew of socially-sanctioned aggression.
I suppose I could do #7, the (real) Resistance, but I don’t know how effective I’d be. It seems very possible that women who are accusing Kavanaugh fit into #3, #4, #5, #6, and #8.
And if you’ve ever had to deal with #2, the sociopath, it’s devastating. Once you realize that’s what the person is, you are best off cutting off all contact where possible.
Christine Blasey Ford has been married for 16 years, has two children, and has been a participant in scores of research projects over the last 20 years (though hardly ever the senior study director). If she’s a drunk, she is one productive dynamo of a drunk.
My wager on the table is that she badgered her husband into counseling in an effort to get him to accede to her in matters of dispute in their marriage by bringing in a 3d person to press her case. (If it had been an effort to provide an excuse for her to serve papers, they would have divorced subsequently). Her manipulative exercises in these sessions included a bogus claim of having been sexually assaulted as an adolescent. She lied to the counselor, she lied to her husband, and now she’s repurposed her lies in the service of a social cause she favors and contrary to a man she despises as a certain generic representation.
It would be interesting to see all the therapist’s notes and why she was in “couples therapy.”
She’s a clinical psychologist married to a pharma executive. She grew up in a handsome suburb, the daughter of a BigLaw attorney. She’s lived in agreeable circumstances her whole life, though it’s possible she was living on short rations during her years as a graduate student. It’s conceivable that she cannot bring herself to let it slide when she suffers mundane domestic problems. Other people let it slide, but she’s the princess with the pea under her 10 mattresses. I’m wagering she’s an irritant to other faculty members as well, but she can’t very well drag them into counseling. Hubby it is. Hubby is a busy man who is fond of his sons, and doesn’t want the expense and inconvenience of a divorce. He knows how to let things slide. Just a hypothesis, to be sure.
If she’s a drunk, she is one productive dynamo of a drunk.
Not unknown. My friend was an operating room nurse and quite successful in a stressful occupation. Not all alcoholics are failures. I was once called to see a patient, an upper middle class business owner, who had had a major GI bleed. His liver function was bad and we had a talk. He told me he did not think he could stop drinking. He died a couple of years later of liver failure leaving a nice family and a good business.
Mike K: A recovered memory at the hands of a therapist would be an example of #6. Maybe I’ll make that explicit in the post.
Not all alcoholics are failures.
No, but it generally catches up with them.
She had a dissertation to complete. She had to pass a tenure screen. She had to pass licensing exams. She had to do collaborative work with people who were not her employees. She had give 7 or 8 hours worth of lectures seven months of the year. She’s around clinical psychology faculty and clinical psychology students all the time. Some of them specialize in straightening out alcoholics.
BTW, I’ve known a pair clinical psychologists who’ve been subjects in couples therapy and also once made part of their living in couples counseling. One of them grew up in a congenial family. The other was the unscathed survivor of a somewhat less-than-congenial household. The reasons? Nothing that the parents of either would have bothered about. The mother of one of them chuckled and shook her head: “they have the stupidest arguments…”. They are, however, still married.
So which reason was driving Che?
“I don’t need proof to [defame] execute a man, I only need proof it’s necessary to [defame] execute him.
I have a friend who has repeated a story for two decades. Originally the story happened to me and he was there but fairly quickly that was updated and now he very much believes it happened to him. Memory is very strange.
I’m sure Ford will solidify her tale now that she is repeating it again and again. The inconsistencies will be gone soon and by the time she writes her book she’ll actually believe her own lies.
Never underestimate the ability of the GOP to screw up a sure thing ! These weak,scared,whiny pukes could screw up a cannonball.
I tend to agree with #6. I was at Dartmouth about the time the Recovered Memories thing got going. “The Courage to Heal,” the Bible of that movement, was in the Dartmouth Bookstore. I heard an account of a man whose daughter was at Dartmouth at the time and sought help for bulemia. He lost his whole family, His wife divorced hm and his other two daughters agreed with their sister.
Gary Ramona stopped the hysteria by winning a lawsuit against a UC, Irvine therapist and a medical center that worked with her.
The malpractice insurers stopped covering recovered memories and the hysteria ended. Like flipping a switch.
Doug:
I believe the answer for Che is number 2 plus number 7. Or, it could be simply number 2. Or, it could be simply number 7. Either alone would suffice.
Mike K:
The most chilling book on the subject is Remembering Satan: A Tragic Case of Recovered Memory. It will shock you.
@neo:You once had something similar happen to you at the hands of someone else, and that person shares a lot of traits with the person being accused.
This is called “racism” if the trait involves ancestry… the logic is the same. In Kavanaugh’s case the terms in the statement do not correspond to protected classes under Title IX, or the terms used by the grievance industry to denote what they call “privilege”.
It’s all “who, whom”, so the people propagating this view don’t see it. They have literally redefined “racism” so that whites cannot be victims of it, and “privilege” so that white men cannot be without it.
It solves a problem. Like a pregnancy, std, etc.
The following was from One Cosmos blog : “Schuon’s solid gold maxim:
“In reality, man has the right to be legitimately traumatized only by monstrosities; he who is traumatized by less is himself a monster.””
A number of the Salem Witch Trials witnesses were traumatized war refugees from the war with the French and Indians, known in the colonies as ‘King William’s War’. They had escaped the sack of their home towns along the New Hampshire frontier the year before the witch-panic. Several of them may have witnessed captives being burned alive and other atrocities.
“Displacement” is a very likely cause for the hysteria they exhibited.
See In the Devil’s Snare
This is either a subset of #4, or a blend of 4 & 5, and the people who tell these lies are more to be pitied than censured, I think: every murder or publicized act of violence results in calls to the police of people making false confessions. (Not to be conflated with coerced confessions, either through physical intimidation or psychological manipulation.)
* * *
I think we are seeing the Dems searching for any kind of confession, true or false.
Are we also witnessing an attempt to elicit a false confession from Kavanaugh through intimidation and coercion?
He seems to me to be resistant to that, and of course he can’t be locked in a windowless room with the rubber-hoses, but I wonder if some other #MeToo confessions (exclusive of solid evidence) aren’t coerced (or internalized) in some way.
* * *
“Remember to always show your research”:
Wikipedia (some paragraphing added): [the excerpt kept getting longer, but I think a lot of it is pertinent to the Kavanaugh case]
Research demonstrates that false confessions occur on a regular basis in case law, which is one reason why jurisprudence has established a series of rules—called “confession rules”—to detect, and subsequently reject, false confessions.
…
False confessions can be categorized into three general types, as outlined by Saul M. Kassin in an article for Current Directions in Psychological Science:[3]
Voluntary false confessions are those that are given freely, without police prompting. Sometimes they may be sacrificial, to divert attention from the actual person who committed the crime. For instance, a parent might confess to save their child from jail. In some cases, people have falsely confessed to having committed notorious crimes simply for the attention that they receive from such a confession. In that vein, approximately 60 people are reported to have confessed to the 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short, known as the “Black Dahlia”.[4]
Compliant false confessions are given to escape a stressful situation, avoid punishment, or gain a promised or implied reward. An example is the setting of a police interrogation; these are often conducted in stark rooms with no windows or objects other than a table and two chairs. For suspects, the room becomes reality, and this creates serious mental exhaustion for the individual being questioned. After enough time suspects may confess to crimes they did not commit to escape what feels like a helpless situation.
Interrogation techniques such as the Reid technique try to suggest to the suspect that they will experience a feeling of moral appeasement if they choose to confess.
…
Internalized false confessions are those in which the person genuinely believes that they have committed the crime, as a result of highly suggestive interrogation techniques.
…
False confessions greatly undermine the due process rights of the individual who has confessed. As Justice Brennan noted in his dissent in Colorado v. Connelly,[9] “Our distrust for reliance on confessions is due, in part, to their decisive impact upon the adversarial process. Triers of fact accord confessions such heavy weight in their determinations that ‘the introduction of a confession makes the other aspects of a trial in court superfluous, and the real trial, for all practical purposes, occurs when the confession is obtained.’ No other class of evidence is so profoundly prejudicial. ‘Thus the decision to confess before trial amounts in effect to a waiver of the right to require the state at trial to meet its heavy burden of proof.’ ”
…
“Jailhouse informants who recount their fellow prisoners’ ‘confessions’ are often used by the state as witnesses in criminal prosecutions. It has recently become public knowledge that such confessions are easily fabricated.”
…
[interesting because of the use of filmed hearings, which switch between questioners and subjects.]
Psychological research suggests that evaluations of videotaped confessions are altered by changes in the camera perspective used at initial recording. …
The manner in which videotaping is implemented holds the potential for bias. This bias can be avoided by using an equal-focus perspective. This finding has been replicated numerous times, reflecting the growing uses of videotaped confessions in trial proceedings.
Camera perspective bias is a result of fundamental attribution error and, more specifically, illusory causation. People commit attribution error when they ascribe causality to people or environmental entities to which they are attending. Illusory causation occurs when people ascribe unwanted [unwarranted??] causality to a stimulus simply because it is more noticeable or salient than other available stimuli.[56]
Illusory causation is perceptual-based, meaning it occurs because salient information is registered and perceptually organized differently from nonsalient information. In regards to camera perspective bias, the perspective of the camera determines which interactant (detective or suspect) is salient and which one is nonsalient.
…The results revealed that greater causality was attributed to whichever person observers happened to be facing.[59] This was determined by their seating position, a factor that is entirely incidental and should therefore have had no bearing on causal judgments. Observers who sat where they could see both interactants very well viewed both subjects equally in terms of causality.
…
Research shows that a judge’s requirement-of-proof instruction to a mock jury (the defendant is presumed innocent, the burden of proof is on the prosecution, and guilt must be established beyond a reasonable doubt) has more impact on jurors’ verdicts when made prior to the presentation of evidence than when made after the presentation of evidence.
…
[this is why even the innocent should lawyer up before interviews by the police; of course, we know that the lawyers can also persuade people to alter their recollections]
Police use persuasive manipulation techniques when conducting interrogations in hopes of obtaining a confession. These can include lying about evidence, making suspects believe they are there to help them, or pretending to be the suspect’s friends. After enough time and persuasion suspects are likely to conform to the investigators’ demands for a confession, even if it was to a crime they did not commit.
One of the most important findings in guilt manipulation research is that once guilt is induced in the subject, it can be directed into greater compliance with requests that are completely unrelated to the original source of guilt. This has important implications for police interrogation, because guilt induction is recommended in manuals on police interrogation.[68] …
While many officers may develop their own interview techniques, the lack of formal training could lead to interviewing with the purpose of simply completing the investigation, regardless of the truth.
The easiest way to complete an investigation would be a confession. Fisher and Geiselman concur, saying, “It seems to be more on interrogating suspects (to elicit confessions) rather than on interviewing cooperative witnesses and victims”. This study suggests that more training could prevent false confessions, and give police a new mindset while in the interview room.
You left off an important one, perhaps the most important one; playing a victim is empowering. Doing so “makes” you morally superior, entitled to sympathy and unaccountable.
This is very common with those with Borderline Personality Disorder. (One “tell” is that the victim story can’t be pinned down, which makes it irrefutable, at least to the person playing the victim
Mike K on September 25, 2018 at 2:59 pm at 2:59 pm said:
The malpractice insurers stopped covering recovered memories and the hysteria ended. Like flipping a switch.
* * *
Always follow the money.
(See the John Putnam Thatcher mysteries by Emma Lathen.)
The most common motivation for false accusations of rape is to avoid responsibility. A woman cheats on her boyfriend or husband without meaning to bust up that relationship but she gets caught, or a girl gets caught by her parents. In these situations the eoman can either admit to a transgression that she is likely to pay a steep price for or she can say she was raped.
This motivation wouldn’t be at play in the accusations against Kavanaugh, which are clearly politically motivated (whether they contain a grain of truth or not, and they seem not), but these stories are in the news all the time.
If I recall correctly, Tawana Brawley just wanted to escape responsibility for coming home late.
False accusers and race hoaxers should serve jail time and pay penalties at the same rate that their innocent victims had the charges been true.
Ruin them financially and disenfranchise them from the civil liberties they conspired to steal from others.
That how you deal with hoaxers.
This report on characteristics of false reporting is relatively recent and interesting.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1889186116300026
Another reason: You want to finally, FINALLY, be recognized by the masses as the special, unique, extraordinary person that you’ve known all along that you are and that your failure to succeed to the levels that you expected is all due to a dreadful experience during your formative years that has haunted and held you back ever since. You want to lead the parade of like-minded elite persons in your honor.
Do you remember that Donald Trump “stalked” Hillary Clinton during the second presidential debate? That was what Hillary claimed but I didn’t see any stalking. Interestingly, the media didn’t dispute her claim, they all went along with it and dutifully reported it as if it was a fact.
Scott Adams has some interesting observations about memory in general and false memories in particular. From his Periscope talk on 9/17/2018 about the Kavanaugh situation:
http://blog.dilbert.com/2018/09/17/episode-224-scott-adams-false-memories-kavanaugh-peacocks-lie-detectors-the-simulation/
Recovered memory syndrome led to some outrageous injustice. The McMartins and the Amiraults were the tip of the iceberg. There were (at least, that I know of) two really awful cases out here in the San Francisco Bay Area where adult women accused their father/parents of hideous sexual abuse when the women were growing up, the cases went to trial, the men were convicted and served time before the scam/false memories were discovered and they were set free. Truly, it is like a witch trial. Awful beyond words. I was not at all surprised to learn that the woman accusing Judge Kavanagh lives in the Bay Area.
You left out fame and fortune. Between Anita Hill and mattress girl, we certainly have enough examples to tempt someone.
What I want to know is if the person who administered Ford’s lie detector test passed a lie detector test himself about it.
If you want to get away with a crime, don’t try to bribe the human witnesses. Bribe the person in charge of the security cameras.
Frank:
I don’t think I left them out. Number 3 is fortune, and number 4 is fame. And sometimes the fame isn’t just 15 minutes worth, of course.
I recommend
Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria
by Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters.
@AMartel – Your point is good … except the second sentence.
The McMartin and Amirault cases were not recovered memory – they were cases where the authorities (legal and medical (i.e., psychologists)) deliberately contrived to get small children to go along with their invented scenarios and then pretended to believe the children no matter how ridiculous the stories they told were. The children were almost certainly behaving as children do: saying things they knew the adults around them wanted them say.
There has been a series of moral panics in this country the past 30 years. The daycare scandal was the first. Then came the recovered memories but there was a mixture in between. I remember a case in Wenatchee Washington where the accusations were of random adults, not a day care center.
Forty-three adults were arrested on 29,726 charges of child sex abuse, involving 60 children in 1995.[5] Parents and Sunday school teachers were charged, and many were convicted of abusing children, often including their own, or their foster children.
Trial
Prosecutors were unable to provide any physical evidence to support the charges. The main witness was Perez’ foster daughter; Perez was the investigator of the cases.[4]
Conviction review summary
Those who were convicted were freed by higher courts and had their convictions overturned or pleaded guilty on lesser charges. Five served their full sentences before their cases were overturned. Some lost parental rights. By 2000, the last person in custody, Michael Rose, was released, after a judge vacated his March 1995 convictions.[6]
More like Salem witch trials.
PTSD?
Ford told the Washington Post that she has suffered for many years from PTSD from this “incident,” as the Post calls it. It is solidly established in medical and mental health science that the memory of PTSD sufferers is flawed, often very seriously flawed, and that this distortion of memories of the traumatic events worsens over time. For example, an article in Psychology Today from May 23, 2016 states (“Trauma, PTSD, and Memory Distortion”):
“In fact, converging evidence demonstrates that experiences of trauma, whether a single event (e.g., a sexual assault) or a sustained stressful experience that might involve multiple trauma types (e.g., experiences at war) are also vulnerable to memory distortion. In fact, traumatic memory distortion appears to follow a particular pattern: people tend to remember experiencing even more trauma than they actually did. This usually translates into greater severity of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms over time, as the remembered trauma ‘grows.’ ”
During my prior career, I escaped being violently killed a few times. I recall finding a written account of one such event that I wrote very soon afterward, and that I later forgot about. Many years later I came across the account and was quite taken aback that it differed from my years-later memory significantly. In Ford’s case, 30 years elapsed between the incident and her first telling of it – to a therapist whom Ford now says made errors recording (in real time) what Ford told her.
This reminds me a question Anna Akhmatova once asked: Who wrote 4 millions of false reports to political police on which millions of people in USSR were persecuted, jailed or executed? All the reasons above mentioned were at play. Noble cause corruption, looking for “class enemies”, hysteria about “wreckers”, “foreign spies”, personal revenge and so on. One political campaign after another targeted potential enemies of the people, and lots of people supplied imaginary details about members of officially designated class of offenders, many of reporting these imaginary crimes honestly believing that they help promote justice. Now I see how such moral panic engulfs USA, and I am not sure that American criminal justice system is robust enough to quell it. On campuses at least lots of men were convicted on sexual assaults or rapes without due process or possibility to face their accusers or even to know who accusers were. Conrad Black already called USA criminal justice system “fascistic” with acquittal rate like in NK, with 99% of cases are not tried at all but decided by plea bargain with persecution.
David-2:
Acutally, the McMartin case was neither—at least, not exactly. Here’s how it happened (and remember as you read this that it occurred back when the questioning of children was mishandled because people were not that aware of the pitfalls of the process) [emphasis mine]:
Among other things, the letter from the police described the allegations in some detail, giving the parents specific charges and acts to ask about.
More:
It was thought at the time that children never lied about such things (!!) and also that they were reluctant to talk about them and needed to be coaxed. These were tremendous errors.
Donald Sensing:
Extremely interesting.
There is little doubt that the accuracy of memories of trauma (or just about anything else) varies from pretty accurate to extremely inaccurate. That’s one of many reasons for statutes of limitations.
Sergey:
In this country I don’t think the greatest risk involves the legal system, although that is at risk from this, too. I think it’s public opinion: the press combined with the left combined with social justice warriors combined with Twitter and other social media combined with outing people and boycotting people and harassing people and firing people and convicting them in the court of public opinion.
I am hoping that Kavanaugh is going to sue the hell out of everyone involved in this frame-up for libel, slander, defamation of character, and anything else he can come up with.
It would be expensive, but I would like to think that the Donald would bankroll such a counterattack.
I’ve seen it said, though, that if he is appointed to the Supreme Court, Kavanaugh would not be able to undertake such suits.
Well, his wife and children are probably going to be substantially damaged by this campaign as well. So, why can’t she sue say, on the behalf of herself and their children?
Snow on Pine:
Such a suit would be virtually impossible to win because he is a public figure.
The best thing he could do for himself and his family is to put it behind him.
Something this Ford woman should have had the common sense to do, if in fact she was groped by someone in high school as is claimed.
Thanks Neo
This article reminded me of another phenomena which could also help explain this type of behaviour. Let’s call it the “reverse-victim effect” based on (but going well beyond) the guilty feelings for perceived (or accused) “privilege”. Someone who belongs to a so-called “Privileged” group, but who desperately wants to belong to a victimised group.
Rachel Dolezal is an extreme example from a racial perspective. More common is claiming the “hard-luck” background (even Jennifer Lopez was “just Jenny from the block”). Julia Salazar anyone?
But even easier is to claim to have been abused at some time, which historically has been something usually kept quiet out of a sense on embarrassment or shame. But not these days – not only is it almost like a right-of-passage to the woman’s’ In-Club, it’s almost like there is something wrong with you if it never happened – hence the low level established to define “abused”.
And its soooo easy. Almost everyone (male and female) has had some sort of awkward/embarrassing/regretful situation. I believe that while it is likely a higher percentage of men have less of a conscience relating to encounters (the whole spread-the-seed thing) but that a) doesn’t mean they have committed some type of attack; and b) or most men are like that.
Once the “abuse” bar is lowered to cover almost any remotely uncomfortable act, almost anyone can be a victim too (and this can be retrospective, being consensual going in, but not afterwards once the insensitive “bastard” dumps you). Add to that working and/or living in an echo-chamber environment where “victimhood” perspectives abound, and it’s easy to chime in with “yeah I was abused once (insert your own number) too” – and thirty years later, genuinely forgetting that the incident where the goofy 17 year old guy who awkwardly tried to kiss you on a date (that you couldn’t believe you agreed to) was a) innocent by any reasonable standard; and b) likely much more humiliated himself (especially since you told everyone what a dork he was for thinking he could kiss you). Which person gets embarrassed tends to be based on who is the most confident, dominant or higher in the social structure, or has the best communication channels to get their side of the story out.
Or probably more relevant in this context – getting drunk, and doing stuff you shouldn’t do or otherwise wouldn’t do. That can be a genuine assault, but most of the time it is just a case of alcohol related lack of inhibitions, followed by regret. And the regret can be major, and 30 years later, you now know it absolutely wasn’t your fault – it was all on him (despite all the scenarios whereby he was no more responsible than you were – too many to attempt to example here).
And then……”so, you went to school with this Kavanaugh guy when you were assaulted – was it him?”. Most people would say “no”, but some people are flaky, and their memories are imperfect and impressionable, and they were a victim after all, and he was there, and he’s clearly one of the “bastard” club…..and other people (“friends”) are already going through the “wow, it actually could have been him” and progressing to “it must have been him” to “it was him for sure”.
You only need to find one or two weak or embittered people and herd them along, and you have your accusers.
The fact that both of Kavanaugh’s accusers seem to have somewhat cold feet makes me think it might be this type of being carried along rather than personal vindictiveness, attention seeking or avarice.
How about avoiding ostracism? So a person to whom you are attracted is otherwise socially undesirable and when the relation is revealed you make a false claim to avoid perceived reputational harm.
You could also lie due to shame. Rather than face what you did, transfer the blame to another. See the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” as an example of this behavior. Don’t exclude blind ambition either. It can lead to smearing another person in the name of ill gotten glory, power or wealth.
#4, #5, and #7, plus the idea of a sisterhood to join. We were at nearly 20 years ago when this vicious combo nearly destroyed someone I know. (It pretty well derailed the presumptive “sister” as well, at least for a short while. But that didn’t matter to the sisterhood she ached to be part of.)
Stephen J. on September 25, 2018 at 4:39 pm at 4:39 pm said:
What I want to know is if the person who administered Ford’s lie detector test passed a lie detector test himself about it.
If you want to get away with a crime, don’t try to bribe the human witnesses. Bribe the person in charge of the security cameras.
* * *
Do you write for television?? 😉
The probable false accusers are Ford and Ramirez; the definite false accusers are sitting in the Senate.
https://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/brett-kavanaugh-presumption-of-innocence/
“Beyond this lack of evidence for the accusations themselves, they are inconsistent with evidence about Kavanaugh from and since the time of these alleged incidents. Hundreds of people, including dozens of women (and even former girlfriends), who have known him for decades offer a completely consistent description of Kavanaugh as a decent, respectful, honorable person. No one says they saw him, at any time and under any circumstances, do anything like what Ford and Ramirez claim.
This brief rundown shows, I think, that the facts we know do not overcome the presumption of innocence. The only thing left for the Left is to say that Kavanaugh simply doesn’t get the presumption of innocence in the first place.
That is Hirono’s position. She is questioning the “unquestioned” presumption of innocence itself, at least in Kavanaugh’s case. But why single him out? Hirono is not clear on that, but referred to “how he approaches cases,” that “he’s very outcome-driven,” and is “against women’s reproductive choice.” This makes it sound like the presumption of innocence belongs only to those who agree with her on certain issues or who, as judges, would decide cases to her liking. Those with whom she disagrees are guilty until proven innocent (and good luck with that).
If the presumption of innocence depends on one’s personal views, then we have much deeper problems as a country and a society to deal with. What’s next, parceling out the freedom of speech based on its content or the right to keep and bear arms based on need? Oh that’s right, the Left is pushing for those as well.
In 1850, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts said: “All the presumptions of law independent of evidence are in favor of innocence; and every person is presumed to be innocent until he is proved guilty.”
Every person.”
* * *
Just as Justice Thomas said.
“I think something is dreadfully wrong with this country when any person, any person in this free country would be subjected to this.”
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/PDFFiles/Clarence%20Thomas%20-%20Judiciary%20Committee%20Statement.pdf
If I had to guess, both Ford and Ramirez were snubbed in some way by Kavanaugh in the distant past- he probably has no idea he did so, and no memory of it either. Add to that both women’s obvious political leanings, and you have the recipe for a smear campaign.
I would wager that the snubs was Kavanaugh ignoring their interest in him. I think most boys of high intelligence who are not just physically repulsive, and Kavanaugh as an athlete would not have been so, are going to attract the interest of many girls, and he won’t be interested in most of them. It is the “rules of attraction”- most of the people you are attracted to are not attracted to you. It happens to everyone, but Kavanaugh as a class valedictorian and star athlete would have been on the better side of that rule.
If I had to guess, both Ford and Ramirez were snubbed in some way by Kavanaugh in the distant past- he probably has no idea he did so, and no memory of it either. A
Again, the number of youths living in Bethesda and Chevy Chase ca. 1982 born sometime during the period running from the beginning of 1963 to the end of 1968 was (if I’m not mistaken) somewhere around 8,000. There’s no particular reason to assume Brett Kavanaugh was at all acquainted with Christine Blasey and no one has emerged as yet who can attest that the two were ever at the same social function at the same time. One might also note that one person she might know something about without ever having met him is Mark Judge, author of Wasted and God and Man at Georgetown Prep. Brett Kavanaugh makes cameo appearances in Judge’s memoir.
Your thesis works better in re Ramirez. I’m not sure Kavanaugh was on any of Yale’s athletic teams, though (except for club sports, perhaps).
Wow! So many people who’ve touched on the same things that I noticed.
https://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-nature-of-women.html
AesopFan: “Do you write for television??”
I’ve always wanted to. 😀 Though my desire to get into the television industry has declined in direct proportion to my growing knowledge of what it’s really like.
Stephen J – I felt much the same way about using my education (MA) to work in political science, once I found out what politics was really like.
This appears to be what the media is really like.
(from Neo’s thread on Farrow & Mayer today)
Mike K on September 26, 2018 at 8:07 am at 8:07 am said:
There is an interesting example of this on Quillette today
The person is not someone I would care to know but the account sounds similar.
“In early October, 2017, following the emergence of the Harvey Weinstein allegations, a writer and activist living in Brooklyn named Moira Donegan created a Google Doc entitled “Shitty Media Men.” She sent it to female friends working in media and encouraged them to add to it and forward it on. The idea was to spread the word about predatory men in the business so that women would be forewarned. Anyone with access to the link could edit and add to the list. At the top of the spreadsheet were the following instructions: “Log out of gmail in order to edit anonymously, never name an accuser, never share the document with any men.” In the first column was this disclaimer: “This document is only a collection of misconduct allegations and rumors. Take everything with a grain of salt.” Nobody did.
The list had only been live for 12 hours when word reached Donegan that Buzzfeed were preparing to publish a story about it. She immediately closed it down. By that time, there were already 74 entries.”
* * *
Might have been a more useful list before Weinstein & Co. were outed.
This is a little different twist on lying about rape. A number of years ago a young woman accused two members of a visiting college basketball team of raping her. It went to trial and the men were acquitted. I think she was telling the truth about being raped but lied about how she came to be in the hotel room in the first place. I think she went there willing to have sex with the first player and it was only when the second decided to join in that she became unwilling. But she wouldn’t admit to the first truth of how and why she was there because she didn’t want to look like that lind of girl and it undermined the truth of the rape allegation.
In my long practice of trial law, I have noted that the mind hates gaps in a narrative and memory. Also, gaps in memory are often caused by over indulgence in alcohol.
My conclusion is this. Ford does not really remember much of anything. I believe something happened but I also believe she genuinely cannot remember who, what and how. She has political and also personal revenge motives against Trump, Kavanaugh and his family. She’s a left coast, left wing academic. What are the odds she hates Trump and any nominee he might designate to the Supreme Court.
One other thing, the who, the what, the where, the when, and the how weren’t strung over a long period of time where the mind goes in and out of things, but rather happened probably within the scope of five minutes. You’d either remember everything or you’d remember nothing. In sum, I think she’s lying about Kavanaugh.