Tag Archives: Sexual Assault

News

Ford’s last witness says that she doesn’t remember a party with Kavanaugh

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The obstruction of Kavanaugh is all about Roe v. Wade, and its going poorly
The blocking of Brett Kavanaugh is all about Roe v. Wade, and its going poorly

I am not happy with the Weekly Standard being so anti-Trump, but this article about the accusations by registered Democrat Christine Ford is interesting. She named four witnesses in her accusation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and all four have now refused to support her claims. Let’s take a look at an article from the Weekly Standard.

Excerpt:

Christine Blasey Ford has claimed that four other people attended a small gathering at which she was allegedly assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh. Three of those people, PJ Smyth, Mark Judge, and Kavanaugh, have already denied any recollection of attending such a party.

On Saturday night, Leland Ingham Keyser, a classmate of Ford’s at the all-girls school Holton-Arms and her final named witness, denied any recollection of attending a party with Brett Kavanaugh.

“Simply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford,” lawyer Howard J. Walsh said in a statement sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

CNN reports that ” Keyser is a lifelong friend of Ford’s.”

Keyser previously coached golf at Georgetown University and is now executive producer of Bob Beckel’s podcast. Keyser is the ex-wife of Beckel, a former Democratic operative and commentator. A search on OpenSecrets.org reveals Keyser’s only political donation has been to former Democratic senator Byron Dorgan.

[…]All of Ford’s named witnesses of the party, both male and female, have now denied any recollection of attending such a party.

This story troubles me because I keep thinking about what it will be like for Christian conservatives going forward. Will they always be blocked from positions of influence with unsupported accusations of sexual misconduct?

With that in mind, I recommend that Christian mothers and fathers take steps to teach their children how to avoid false accusations made by secular leftists.

Here’s a good article by Megan Fox from PJ Media about that.

It says (in part):

Mothers of sons everywhere should be terrified by the constant destruction of men by duplicitous, lying women and an overzealous and political Senate confirmation process. All a scheming broad has to do these days is claim that your son touched her inappropriately more than two decades ago and she can derail his career. Worse, if your son ever happens to end up in front of the Senate, U.S. senators may drive his wife to suicide. The Senate confirmation hearing for Miguel Estrada, a Bush choice, was so stressful that Estrada’s wife had a miscarriage, developed a drinking problem, and overdosed on pills and died, according to The New Yorker.

She has a list of advice for parents who don’t want that to happen to their children.

One of them is this:

1. Take him to church and make sure the lessons stick

Make sure your son knows how to treat others, what his moral obligations to himself and his family are, and to follow God’s laws in regards to dating and marriage. Try to impart the importance of saving sex for marriage. What can happen to him if he fails to do that (poverty, child support, disease, death, false rape charge) isn’t worth it.

People sometimes ask me how it’s possible for me to treat conservative Christian women so well, and then write such harsh judgments of non-Christian women on my blog. Well, I think that Christian men should treat serious Christian women well, but not everyone who claims to be a Christian really is one. Regarding non-Christian leftist women, my advice is don’t talk to them, don’t do anything for them. There are plenty of women who take Christianity seriously who we can pay attention to and help instead. Youth and beauty are not a good measures of a woman’s character. Good women are chaste and sober and self-controlled. I don’t it’s possible to do a relationship with a woman who is drinking a lot, pursuing fun and thrills, etc.

More good advice:

3. Teach your son to assume he will one day have a position of high importance and encourage him to live accordingly

This is the Mike Pence school of behavior that will serve him well. Do not be alone with a woman who is not your wife if you are married. If you are not married, then try to have witnesses when dealing with women. Double-dating may soon be the only smart thing for a man to do when looking for a mate to protect himself from dangerous women who would like to hurt him. Teach him that anything he might say or do today could affect him and cost him a job 30 years from now. Show him what’s happening to Brett Kavanaugh. Teach him to choose his friends wisely, to stay sober, and to stay away from shenanigans that could come back and haunt him.

If you’re planning to have an influence, then you need to understand that there are secular leftist women out there who will use false accusations in order to stop you from making a difference. If your goal is to get on the Supreme Court and reverse Roe v. Wade, understand that according to Gallup polls, almost all young unmarried women want to keep abortion legal. There is a significant group of young unmarried women who think that they should prioritize drinking a lot, and having recreational sex with hot bad boys. They see taxpayer-funded contraceptives and taxpayer-funded abortions as part of their plan to have a lot of sex with hot bad boys. They will do anything to stop pro-life men from putting an end to their fun.

This third one is my favorite:

4. Don’t trust women

[…]Contrary to the saccharine platitude that “women don’t lie,” women lie all the time. They lie like crazy. The younger they are, the more they lie and scheme. It’s probably the rage of hormones and insecurity that contribute to it, but most women lie and scheme. Teach your sons to search out morally upstanding girls and to avoid drama queens. The religious ones are usually better. Stay very far away from party girls and girls who use drugs or drink underage. Those girls are momentarily fun, but ultimately trouble. Teach him to stay away from those girls.

Now, when wise people tell women to avoid rape by being careful how much they drink, and what they wear, and where they go for fun and parties, women tend to get mad and say “don’t tell me what to do, just let me do what I want, and tell men not to rape”. Men, if you think that you should be able to drink what you want, wear what you want, and go wherever you want seeking pleasure, you are mistaken. The costs to you if you get slapped with a false accusation or a false paternity suit or a frivolous divorce will be disastrous. You need to take responsibility for your own decisions, and that means having an accurate view of how women really are, so that you know how to tell the sheep from the goats. All women are not the same inside, and inside is where it really matters – especially at a time like this. Men need to avoid women who are let by their feelings, and prefer women who do the right thing when they don’t feel like it.

My previous post reviewed what studies say about whether accusations of rape and sexual assault are likely to be true.

News

How often are accusations of rape or sexual assault false?

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Zerlina Maxwell "automatically believe rape claims"
Should we “automatically believe rape claims” like Jackie’s UVA rape claim?

The purpose of this post is to make the case that claims of rape and sexual assault should be made to the police, investigated by the police, and then proceed to trial. We should not punish men for charges that are made outside of the criminal justice system. Let’s take a look at some previous cases and studies to see why not.

Here’s one reported by the far-left Newsweek:

Rolling Stone‘s disastrous and discredited campus rape story now has a price tag.

The magazine has settled a defamation lawsuit filed by the University of Virginia fraternity at the center of the 2014 blockbuster feature by Sabrina Erdely, which was retracted after key details in the story were called into question. According to reports, Rolling Stone will pay a settlement amounting to $1.65 million.

The article, which was published in late fall 2014, described an alleged brutal gang rape of a student named “Jackie” at a UVA fraternity. The story drew wide attention and triggered a police investigation, but it was officially retracted in April 2015 after Jackie’s claims were called into question.

Why did she lie?

The Washington Examiner reports:

Documents have shown that Jackie likely made up the gang rape to try and win the affection of fellow student Ryan Duffin. She had tried other lies to get his sympathy, including pretending to have a terminal illness. When that didn’t work, she tried to make him jealous by inventing an attractive man who would constantly say she had a crush on someone else and he didn’t understand why.

When that didn’t work, she went on a fake date with the fake man, and then claimed she had been gang raped. That didn’t win his affection either, and the two eventually stopped talking.

She lied, because she wanted to get affection and sympathy from a boy she liked.

Here’s another featuring a student at Hofstra University, reported by the NY Post:

The Hofstra freshman who had a raunchy restroom romp and then cried rape made up the twisted tale because she didn’t want her schoolmates — particularly her new boyfriend — to think she was easy, the beau told The Post yesterday.

“I think she needs a psychologist. She probably felt like, ‘They’ll think I’m a slut,’ ” her boyfriend, who asked not to be identified, told The Post.

Danmell Ndonye, 18, who had accused five men of gang rape, admitted the truth only when prosecutors confronted her after learning of a cellphone video that captured the whole sordid episode and showed she had willingly participated, officials said.

She lied because she didn’t want her boyfriend (and others) to think that she was a slut.

Although she made a false rape accusation, she never received any jail time. In fact, she was never even charged.

Another, reported by the Associated Press:

Nikki Yovino, 20, of South Setauket, New York, was sentenced Thursday in Bridgeport Superior Court. She agreed to serve the jail time when she pleaded guilty in June, just before jury selection was to begin, to misdemeanor charges of falsely reporting an incident and interfering with police.

Yovino was attending Sacred Heart University in Fairfield when she reported being raped by two school football players at an off-campus party in Bridgeport in October 2016. But police said she later admitted making up the allegations so she wouldn’t ruin a relationship with another student.

[…]Both players remained unidentified until Thursday, when Malik St. Hilaire came forward to speak at the sentencing and confront Yovino. The Connecticut Post reported Yovino rolled her eyes and smirked as St. Hilaire talked about how the allegations affected his life.

She lied, because she didn’t want to ruin a relationship with her boyfriend. And of course there are cases where the woman just wants to get revenge on men for sex she consented to, but that later made her feel bad, as in the Duke University lacrosse case. False accusations of rape or sexual assault are used by people to get attention and sympathy, or to get an alibi when they’ve done something wrong, etc.

Clearly, there are cases where people lie about rape and sexual assault. That’s why we need to get the police involved, and not punish anyone except in the ordinary way that laws and courts punish. Let’s take a look at some studies to see how often false charges are made.

What do the studies show?

A Fox News article from a prominent equity feminist, Wendy McElroy cites several studies, here’s one:

[…][The] study conducted by Eugene J. Kanin of Purdue University… examined 109 rape complaints registered in a Midwestern city from 1978 to 1987.

Of these, 45 were ultimately classified by the police as “false.” Also based on police records, Kanin determined that 50 percent of the rapes reported at two major universities were “false.”

[…][E]ven a skeptic like me must credit a DNA exclusion rate of 20 percent that remained constant over several years when conducted by FBI labs. This is especially true when 20 percent more were found to be questionable.

False accusations are not rare. They are common.

So, there’s only a 41 percent conviction rate. DNA testing exonerates 20% of men, and makes the guilt another 20% of men “questionable”. A total of 59 percent of cases didn’t result in a conviction.

In false rape cases, men can spend years in jail, until the women finally admits she made the whole thing up. There are campus cases where only the accused’s witnesses are consulted, only evidence confirming guilt is considered, the charges and evidence are hidden from the accused, the accused is denied legal representation, the accused is denied cross-examined of the accuser, etc.

A double standard

So, that’s how men accused of sexual assault and rape are treated, but what about women?

Consider this case where a female teacher got zero jail time for sexually assaulting an underage male student.  Or this case from the UK where a married mother of two was convicted of producing child pornography, but also received no jail time. It’s not just that men are being denied due process when they are accused of something. It’s that women ARE NOT being punished when they ARE found guilty of something. There just seems to be a widespread view that women are never responsible for their bad choices, and that men are always to blame for everything. What are women learning from this about how they should treat men in their own lives? Should we expect men to have friendships with women and pursue relationships with women in this cultural climate?

News

Is the Roman Catholic church serious about stopping child abuse?

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A conflict of worldviews
A conflict of worldviews

At the risk of alienating my Catholic readers, I feel that I have to say something about the recent news story about the Catholic Church leaders abusing children of both sexes, and then covering it up. Let’s start with a news article, then a reaction from a Catholic person I respect, then I’ll give my thoughts about it.

Here’s a news story from ABC News:

Sexual assault survivors shared their stories after a Pennsylvania grand jury report accused hundreds of Roman Catholic priests of assaulting children.

Speaking at a news conference Tuesday, several of them detailed heart-wrenching accounts of alleged sexual abuse against 301 priests across six of the state’s eight dioceses.

[…]Pennsylvania’s attorney general released the scathing report that revealed the results of a two-year investigation into hundreds of sexual abuse allegations. The probe found that at least 1,000 children had been abused at the hands of Catholic clergy members, dating back to the 1940s.

“Predators in every diocese weaponized the Catholic faith and used it as a tool of their abuse,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro said Tuesday. “Priests were raping little boys and girls and the men of God who were responsible for them not only did nothing, they hid it all. For decades.”

[…]The investigation was based on official documents and secret archives from the church, according to the report. High-level church leaders allegedly covered up the abuse for years, fostering a “circle of secrecy,” Shapiro said.

“The cover up was sophisticated and, all the while, church leadership kept records of the abuse and the cover-up,” Shapiro said Tuesday. “They sought to do the same things that senior church leaders and the diocese we investigated have done for decades: bury the sexual abuse by priests upon children and cover it up forever. Shamefully.”

The key concern about this is the cover-up. The Roman Catholic church was more concerned with covering up for the abuse and rapes. That was their priority. They were concerned about defending the reputation of the corrupt child abusers. They were not concerned about the victims. And they were not concerned about what the Bible teaches about sexual immorality. Or what the Bible teaches about anything, really.

Matt Walsh, a conservative Catholic, had this to say in a post from June 2018, at the Daily Wire:

I’m taking some heat on Twitter today because I said that the real problem in the Catholic Church isn’t pedophilia but gay priests. As the statistics clearly show, the vast majority of predators in the clergy were homosexual and the vast majority were not pedophiles. The same study that reported those figures did try to absolve gay priests by claiming that their homosexuality had nothing to do with anything. But this is an assumption — I think a plainly absurd and unprovable assumption — that is not born out by their own statistics.

And the problem goes beyond sex abuse of minors. As Rod Dreher has been reporting, and liberal publications agree, homosexuality runs rampant in the modern priesthood. Sexual activity between priests, and between priests and seminarians, is not uncommon. I think it is rather difficult to separate these facts from the fact that teen boys were so often sexually victimized. Is it just a coincidence that gay priests exist in such large numbers, protected by gay cabals within the Church, and at the same time there happen to be a bunch of priests molesting pubescent boys? Are these two realities entirely separate from one another?

Take the case of the scummy Cardinal McCarrick. He has been accused of preying upon young boys. But most of the stories that have come out about him revolve around his sexual exploits with seminarians. Grown men, in other words. Yet we are told that the fact of his homosexuality is irrelevant. How could it be? If he were not a homosexual, he would not have molested boys. Who could dispute this? I’m not claiming that all homosexuals molest boys. I am claiming that only homosexuals molest boys. A non-homosexual, by definition, is not attracted to males.

Just to be clear, the Bible’s teaching on sexual activity is that no one is allowed to engage in sexual activity outside of natural marriage. Period.

I don’t feel comfortable listing the details of what the Catholic leaders did, but you can read about it on the Pennsylvania attorney general’s web site. The important thing here is that none of the men who did these things, or covered it up after, really expect to meet God face-to-face on the Day of Judgment. Everything they did to those children and young people was for their own pleasure and gratification. They certainly were not working for God, or advancing his interests. On the contrary, they put themselves first, and pushed young people away from God.

If I could summarize God’s agenda for his human creations, it would be that we all not do anything that would push anyone away from a two-way relationship with God. That goes for everybody including atheists, by the way. Nobody, regardless of religion, should do anything that pushes anyone away from God. So do these Roman Catholics work for God? To work for God, minimally, is to put your own desires on hold, and perform actions that advance God’s agenda. God’s agenda, minimally, is that people come to have accurate beliefs about his existence and character. It’s OK to be offensive to others by telling them the truth gently and respectfully. But it’s not OK to harm them in a way that pushes them away from God, just because you want to gratify your own selfish desires.

Here’s a thought about the search for truth and meaning. If you want to have a comprehensive worldview that answers the big questions, like cosmic origins, objective moral obligations, life after death, etc. then it’s probably not a good idea to look to people in an organization to tell you what is true or not. Especially when the organization relies on feelings, mysticism, rituals, etc. An organization is interested in protecting the organization. When the Jehovah’s Witnesses get caught lying about their failed end-of-the-world predictions, they cover it up. When the Mormons get caught lying about cosmology and archaeology, they cover it up. Organizations protect the organization. A much better plan, it seems to me, is to develop your own worldview, starting with the evidence from science and history. That’s what I did, and I’m an evangelical Protestant Christian.