Strictly Moderated: My False Rape Accusation

[Trigger warning: discussion of rape and false rape accusations.]

[Troll warning: this is going to attract the kind of people who really, really like talking about false rape accusations. Comments will be STRICTLY MODERATED.]

I picked my first college based on gender ratio. I figured with two girls for every one guy, even a denim-clad mid-90s mullet-having freckle-faced dork like me stood a chance of losing my virginity. In retrospect, this was pretty stupid, but, well… I was young and horny.

I wasn’t especially well-liked at this college; I kept to myself a lot and my adolescent habits were kind of alienating and unlikable. Also, this was a former women’s college that had only gone co-ed recently, so the campus was thick with radical feminists still in the stage Bitch magazine once called “freshly-hatched gynocratic rage”. For a long time, I didn’t know there was such a thing as sex-positive feminism, as the feminism I encountered at college was emphatically sex-negative.

I did make a friend, though, a girl we’ll call Maureen. She was a crabby punk/goth girl who was supposed to be taking a lot of psychiatric meds, but didn’t. She had wild mood swings and a penchant for drama, but she was willing to hang out with me and she also liked Highlander: The Series. (Again, mid-90s. Don’t judge me.)

Sure enough, after a while I got a girlfriend. Met her on Usenet (mid-90s!) and flew down to visit her over winter break. Lost the living HELL out of my virginity, naturally. On my return to college, I happily told my friend Maureen my personal good news.

More or less instantly, Maureen stopped hanging out with me. It wasn’t an announcement or anything, she just wasn’t ever available and didn’t eat at my table any more. True to teenaged-geekboy form, I didn’t fully pick up on this or attach too much significance to it. Non-explicit social cues: not my forte in 1996.

I did gradually notice, however, that everyone else seemed to hate me now. The trash piled in front of my dorm room door was a clue. The fact that nobody on campus would talk to me, outside of the outcast Red Dwarf fans I usually ate with, that eventually became noticeable. People made obscure comments in class discussion that seemed pointed at me, but that didn’t make any sense. Eventually, when I applied to room in a certain dorm and the entire dorm had a meeting where they informed me that I was not welcome there, but wouldn’t say why, I got it. The clue, of course, was that Maureen was at that meeting, shuddering theatrically and not looking at me, with other students gripping her shoulders supportively.

I asked around a bit and finally heard the truth: Maureen had spread the word around campus that I’d raped her.

This wasn’t a case of a gray area or he-said/she-said, this wasn’t implied consent or drunken mistake. I’d never had any kind of sex with her or even kissed her. This was something she just plain made up to hurt me. Eventually, I figured out that she’d been hoping to seduce me, and was upset that someone else had beaten her to the punch.

The worst part was that there was nothing I could do, no defense I could mount. Had she lodged this accusation through official channels, there might have been some question of evidence or credibility. The fact that we’d never had sex might have mattered, or the fact that she was severely unstable and histrionic. There were, however, no official channels, no evidence. Just a whisper campaign that would have made Karl Rove proud.

I dropped out of college not long after that. Nothing ever happens just for one reason, but Maureen’s accusation was a major factor in my decision. The place had become unlivable for me.

Now, here’s where it gets tricky in terms of my thinking. That was fifteen years and a lot of learning ago. Problem is, there’s a pretty well-established cognitive bias in human brains: we privilege our personal experience above all other forms of evidence, despite our personal experience having, by definition, questionable methodology and a sample size of one.

So, in my personal experience, 100% of rape accusations are false.*

Every time I hear about some questionable rape case, there’s part of my brain going “Oh, it’s probably bullshit. In my experience, that’s usually how it goes.” Which is, of course, wildly and provably wrong. I have to actively weight evidence differently just to overcome my own bias, the way a driver in a car that pulls to the right will hold the wheel ten degrees left just to stay in their lane.

And right now, some of you reading this are falling prey to an even more powerful cognitive flaw: confirmation bias. Some of you, at this moment, are massively overvaluing my experience because it confirms what you want to believe, that false rape accusations are the norm. Quick test: if you read about how I had to drop out of college because of lies, ostracism, and hatred, and that gave you a warm, positive feeling of being right? You’re that guy. Don’t be that guy.

Others of you are doing the same thing in reverse, scrambling to dismiss my experience because it doesn’t fit your worldview, though I suspect there aren’t as many in that camp. Even the most radical feminists I’ve known wouldn’t put the false-accusation count much below 3%, which I think is low, but still allows room for millions of stories like mine.

What’s interesting, of course, is that my story would never show up in those statistics, because there was no reported rape. The cops never heard about it, campus authorities never heard about it, nobody who would have to come to an informed judgment on the subject was ever informed. It was all off the record, on the QT, and strictly hush-hush. That’s the only way it could have worked as well as it did.

When I realized that, of course, it changed my mental math again. The people who file police reports and official complaints and court charges about rape, they’re doing something fundamentally different than what Maureen did. They’re going on the record, they’re opening themselves up to questions of evidence, to the accusations and smears that too often are aimed at those who openly talk about being raped. Maureen never did that; she risked nothing. Had she had to offer any kind of evidence for her lie, she’d never have tried it.

In the end, I’m not sure my story has any larger lesson to teach. It was awful, it was a long time ago, and it’s statistically meaningless. It’s not a definitive example of anything, just a sad little anecdote about some unhappy, petty people. I share it partly because I think how people react to it is revealing, but much more because it’s part of how I got where I am. Having to deal with it, personally and emotionally and intellectually, was a serious part of the mental journey that led to me posting in a place like this.

I suppose we all have to attach our own significance to things, and people can usually do that for themselves. All I can say for sure is that once, long ago and far away, a badly unstable girl tried to punish me for not sleeping with her by saying that I’d raped her. So, yeah. That happened.

*Someday, some asshole may want to discredit or smear me for some reason. The sentence “In my personal experience, 100% of rape accusations are false” is my personal gift to that asshole. I figure the poor assholes need the occasional pity quote; it’s not like they can get by on their own competence.