Once upon a time, my wife was a campus police officer at a large state university. She was officially a member of the state police force — a real cop. She was also a student and her part-time job was part of a plan to become an FBI agent. Her law enforcement career was derailed by health issues, sadly.
Investigating sexual assault was, as you might imagine, a prominent part of her job. She was assigned cases because she was female, a peer of the victims, and also a rape survivor herself. The hardest cases were male victims and female perpetrators. There were a lot of people invested in the idea that this simply “didn’t happen.” Men should be able to defend themselves, and women, you see, just “didn’t do that.” Sometimes they couldn’t and sometimes they did, respectively.
Were there ever false allegations? Yes, about once a year, they had to investigate a false report. They took all reports seriously, but the false reports tended to unravel pretty quickly under scrutiny. It was never what’s in the “rape culture apologist” toolkit. It wasn’t that the accuser had no proof (although she didn’t). It wasn’t that the accuser was deemed “to have asked for it” or “a jilted ex” although the latter did emerge as a motive in one case. It was really just police interrogation 101.
You ask the person open-ended questions, then you press for details. “Is there anyone who saw you leave the party together?” you might ask. Assault victims don’t remember details like that — especially if they were intoxicated at the time. “I don’t know… maybe” said with frustration and sometimes tears was a typical answer. False accusers had a detailed explanation of why no one saw them and the accused leave that party together. When pressed for details, they would have them. “You left through the back door, but that where people gather to smoke. No one was smoking?” They have a reason why there were no smokers loitering at the back door at that exact time.
Or maybe they don’t, at first. But another trick is to have the first interviewer “have to leave” and another interviewer (who has been following along) come in and take over. The new interviewer revisits the detail later, and a now the false accuser has a newer, better story, sometimes contradicting the first explanation. It’s not unusual for a victim’s story to change, but usually as bits and pieces return during the interview and not switching from one clear recollection to another.
My wife had an inkling early on because false accusers are operating under the same misconceptions most people have about sexual assault. One of the counter-intuitive things about assault victims is that a lot of them are not burning for revenge. They aren’t really reporting the assault so that the perpetrator will be busted, but because they need people to believe them and to validate that they were a victim of a crime. The most important thing for them is to have people agree that it was not their fault. That is, of course, one of the main reasons so many victims don’t come forward; the immediate backlash of “what were you wearing” and “what did you do to put yourself in this situation” or “why didn’t you fight back”?
My wife’s hot take on the allegation against Kavanaugh is that they are completely credible and authentic. Her take on the story is actually quite chilling:
He locked the door. He turned up the music to cover the sound of a struggle. He put his hand over her mouth to silence her. He was too drunk to be thinking methodically. He’d done this before. He did it again.