Opinion
We live in a time of near-universal deceit, but one of the biggest lies sold to us is that “women never lie about rape”. Does anyone with half a working brain cell really believe that?
Now, before the autistic screeching starts, I’m not saying that women always lie about rape. Or even that women lie about rape more often than not. But, if “women always lie about rape” strikes you as a ridiculously absolutist argument, then so must its diametric opposite.
The simple fact is that women, as slightly more than one half of the human race, are as prone to human failings as the male less-than-half. That includes lying — and it definitely includes lying about even something as big as rape.
We know for a fact that some women lie about rape. How many is much-disputed — some say as few as 1%, others as much as 25% — although, ipso facto, every failed rape prosecution is presumably a false accusation. (Another curious sophistry is “X% of rapes aren’t reported”: if they’re not reported, how does the claimant even know they supposedly happened?)
Still, we know for a fact that some women do indeed lie about it. Some of them have been prosecuted, even jailed, for it. Which is only fair: after all, an accusation of rape is devastating for the accused. Many men say they’d rather be accused of murder than rape.
But the delusion that “women never lie about rape” is a ruling conceit in legal activist circles. As the Bruce Lehrmann/Brittany Higgins case revealed, the Canberra DPP was determined from the get-go to prosecute the case, even over the severe misgivings of investigating police. As it turns out, though, Shane Drumgold was very far from alone in his almost manic determination to pursue even the dodgiest rape accusations.
A NSW judge has called for the “lazy and perhaps politically expedient” referrals of baseless rape accusations to the court to stop after the case of a man who spent eight months on remand in jail and faced a jury trial despite never committing a crime.
The “deep level of concern” over the abrogation of the prosecutor’s duty to interrogate complainants’ allegations – raising the risk of false convictions – has been exposed in a NSW District Court case in which a man faced trial despite clear evidence the sex he had with the alleged victim was consensual.
What follows is a story that Australians have become all-too familiar with in recent years.
The woman had alleged the man sexually assaulted her, because she was so drunk she had a blackout and could not remember the events, despite it being clear she had “enthusiastically participated” in sex and consent was obtained every step of the way.
The man spent eight months in prison before eventually being granted bail and then acquitted by a jury on December 4.
He can thank his lucky stars. Because the jury was never allowed to know the following, one would think pertinent, information:
In an application for a costs certificate following the trial, it was revealed the complainant had made five virtually identical allegations against other men.
Why wasn’t the jury told this vital information? Because decades of “progressive” legal activism have eroded, in cases of rape, the sort of basic legal protections defendants have long been afforded.
But a much-criticised piece of NSW legislation that fails to provide exceptions to admit tendency evidence relating to prior sexual history largely prevented the jury from knowing about the pattern of accusation […]
During the trial, the complainant’s history of accusing men of rape in similar circumstances was largely not allowed into evidence due to section 294CB of the Evidence Act in NSW, which forbids tendency evidence that goes to a complainant’s sexual history from being placed before a jury.
Unlike in other states, the NSW legislation has no exception provision.
Like so many injustices, this blatantly unfair law was enacted supposedly in the name of “justice for women”.
Had the jury known, the accused would have been “acquitted within minutes”, according to District Court judge Robert Newlinds […]
“This must stop. Justice has not been served and will not be served by repeated cases being prosecuted based on obviously flawed evidence.”
The Australian
Except, as it turns out, the DPP has no intention of grinding her activist axe.
The Office of the DPP in NSW is prosecuting another man in a sexual assault case brought by the woman at the centre of a judicial scandal that has pitted a District Court judge against the state’s Director of Public Prosecutions.
The new case is the sixth sexual-assault prosecution brought by the NSW Office of the DPP involving the same complainant, which has sparked concern within the judiciary at prosecutors’ alleged failure to rationally interrogate victims’ claims and the inability of juries to know when alleged victims have made multiple allegations against a string of men.
The Australian
Sounds like the DPP isn’t the only person who refuses to learn from her mistakes.