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Ah okay, fair enough. Well, just to contribute:
I just know too many women who have come up against the wall of people saying "she's probably lying." It's just not something I feel comfortable saying myself, even if something does seem shady or whatever. I've done it myself and I regret it to this day, because it turned out they were telling the truth.
As I said earlier, it costs nothing to give someone the benefit of the doubt, and it doesn't immediately mean you throw the accused into jail and throw away the key. That's why investigations into these things happen. I just don't see any benefit to assuming someone is lying about sexual assault. No one assumes that about any other crime. If someone says "my stereo got stolen," people say "fuck, that sucks" and wonder how they got warped back in time to the 1990's. It's just gross to me that there's this macho bubble of resistance to the likelihood of these things, and this hyper-critical analysis of a fucked up person's behavior in the wake of it and leading up to it.
But I wonder if this might be, at least in part, why these things aren't falsely reported very often. Because people (and not just men, there are a lot of women who do this too) make it extraordinarily hard for people who come forward and say this happened to them. If it were as simple as saying it and waving a magic wand, maybe more fucked up people would say it to take out their enemies?
You obviously need a very high standard for definitive guilt, but I just don't feel comfortable, at all really, setting my standard for dignity very high. This woman obviously needs help -- one way or another.
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