“Better ten innocent men go to jail than one potential female victim hesitate to come forward.”
At least, that seemed to be the consensus in 2017, when I first made this video. I’m not sure it’s still entirely true, though I do often hear the ‘Ultimately, this will hurt women …’ argument when the subject is male disadvantage or blatant anti-male injustice.
This video was originally part of the No Joke Janice video series, designed by my friend and producer Steve Brule as short audio commentary on current events. (Over time, many of the videos became indistinguishable from the main Fiamengo File videos, longer and more detailed—before they were all taken down by YouTube’s censors in one fell swoop. Steve is now re-posting many of them at Studio B.)
In the video, I used a couple of then-recent news items to analyze how media consistently put the spotlight on women as the primary victims of women’s false accusations against men. Even when a man had spent years in prison on a made-up charge, judges and pundits usually expressed concern about the negative effect on other potential female accusers (though evidence of this negative effect was never produced).
Re-watching the video yesterday, I wondered if it was still quite as true now as I believed it to be then. Is this an area in which men’s issues advocates have actually made a difference in putting the focus on harms to men? Or has feminist hysteria simply backfired on itself? Recently, Bettina Arndt hosted a conference on “Restoring the Presumption of Innocence” that brought many concerned Australian citizens together around the issue.
Since the video was made, Jemma Beale became widely known for the serial rape-claim lies that sent one innocent man to prison for seven years and caused many others to endure criminal investigations (though the judge in that case, sentencing Beale to a lengthy term, said predictably “These false allegations of rape […] are likely to have the perverse impact of increasing the likelihood of guilty men going free” and posed “a real risk that a woman who has been raped or sexually assaulted may not complain to the police for fear of not being believed.”)
Johnny Depp was finally vindicated after airing recordings in which ex-wife Amber Heard taunted him that no one would believe he was a victim of domestic violence.
High-profile trials such as those of Jian Ghomeshi in Canada (in which complainants were shown to have lied to police and on the witness stand, as well as colluded with one another to punish Ghomeshi) and Harvey Weinstein (in which complainants had had love affairs with their alleged rapist, and a feminist forensic psychiatrist was brought into court to claim that that’s just what victims often do) highlighted female accusers’ murky motives and oft-proven dishonesty. Ghomeshi was acquitted in his trial, and Weinstein’s New York conviction was, of course, ultimately overturned as a result of the many prejudicial tactics used to convict him.
The whole #MeToo fiasco had many men deciding that enough is enough; associating with women is dangerous (as this Forbes article reveals, while pooh-poohing the risk and blaming men for caring about their lives and reputations).
Are more men and women becoming aware of the scourge of false allegations? I’m not too sanguine yet. For now, I thought this 2017 time-capsule deserved a second look.
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