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4.2.12
WC: 191694

A Dedham, Massachusetts, woman accused four men of rape. Several days later the charges were dropped because the accuser recanted when approached by the district attorney with inconsistent forensic evidence along with information that she had falsely accused other men. The names of the falsely accused men were published in the press, but the false accuser’s name was withheld.

St. Paul, Minnesota, police determined that within one week, two reported rapes were false. In the first case, a woman reported being abducted and raped by a man who hid in her car as she gave a talk to a chemical dependency treatment group at a local high school. When police checked the story, they found that the treatment group had never heard of her and that she didn’t own a car. In the second case, a sixteen-year-old girl claimed to have been abducted at a downtown bus stop, imprisoned in a closet, and sexually assaulted by a man and his son over a thirty-three-hour period. In reality, the woman had been seen with her boyfriend several times over that thirty-three-hour period and had apparently been bruised by him. In both cases the women gave police detailed descriptions of their attackers and in both case the alleged assailants were black.

A seventeen-year-old girl from Washington State accused three twenty-year-old men of holding her down and raping her. Several days after the men were arrested, the woman recanted saying she had the whole thing up out of spite. In a statement to police, the woman admitted, “When I was leaving [he] called me a whore and a slut…and I became very angry and decided over the weekend that I would get back.”

In Rhode Island, a college student reported that her former boyfriend raped her at gun point. She admitted that she made up the entire story after learning that the man she accused was 1,500 miles away at the time.

In New York, a woman who claimed she was raped at gun point in Central Park was arrested after it was discovered that she had filed eleven false reports of rape.

In Nebraska, a woman was required to broadcast an apology to a man she had falsely accused of raping her in order to “get the attention of her husband.”

In Great Britain, a number of highly publicized rape accusations turned out to be false. A nineteen-year-old girl woman from Lincolnshire accused her former boyfriend of raping her after she spent the night with a different man. A jilted nurse falsely accused her former lover of beating her and also falsely accused his best friend of raping her. After analyzing several such cases, Angela Lambert, a British journalist, concluded that there are “plenty of reasons why a woman might falsely accuse a man of rape.” She went on to argue that “the belief that all women are truthful and all men are rapists does not prove us good feminists; quite the contrary. It reveals us as prejudiced, narrow-minded, and as bigoted as any racist.”80

80 In recent years numerous inmates serving time for rape based on eye witness identification have been exonerated by DNA. In these cases, the rapes occurred but the victim misidentified the rapist. Many of these cases involved black defendants misidentified by white victims.

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