We have a challenger! First it was “No smoke without fire”. Then “We will never know what really happened that night” became the passive-aggressive hint of choice for the modern feminist forced to contemplate a man somehow left unconvicted of rape despite being accused of it.
Now there is a fresh new contender. Diane Roberts!
Does the Heisman Trophy still stand for integrity after Jameis Winston’s win?
Although allegations of the football player committing rape resulted in no charges, we should reconsider who we call a hero.
It is probable that Diane Roberts did not write that standfirst. She definitely wrote this:
Much as we want to think we know Jameis Winston, we don’t. Maybe what happened that night was consensual, just like his lawyer says. Maybe it wasn’t. We don’t know. Nobody knows, except Jameis Winston and that young woman. There will always be a bruise on this glorious season of big scores and big awards, always an asterisk. And in Florida somewhere, there is a woman who’s not famous and who still maintains she was raped.
It’s not as if the authorities just brushed the incident off. They investigated for a year, and couldn’t make a case. Too many men have been freed by DNA, recantation and inopportune video, to still believe in this “women never lie” feminist garbage. That is nothing more than the obverse of the Muslim belief about the worth of women.
I’m not quite sure what Natalie’s beef is. “Innocent till proven guilt” is a legal principle, ie the courts can’t send you to jail until and unless you’ve been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s a good thing that the state has quite a high hurdle to get over before you get sent to jail. But innocence in the sense of “did he do it or not?” is not a legal concept, it’s a real world one. And if Ms A accuses Mr B of rape, we, the general public, can believe either of them, or be unsure, quite regardless of the progress of the case through the courts.
You might say that it is in bad taste to speculate when the facts are murky, but I don’t think it really is. It may be very hard for a young man, who hasn’t committed rape, to be thought to have done so by the general public, or at least some of it. But it’s also pretty hard for a young woman who has been raped, if the perpetrator gets away with it. And even worse if society frowns on her allegations being publicised.
In this case it looks like a woman went to the trouble of making a rape complaint, and the police didn’t get enough evidence to mount a prosecution. That doesn’t mean she was lying. She might have been but we don’t know.
It may be – and I suspect that it probably is – that Ms Roberts would explode with righteous progressive fury if anyone speculated about Mr Winston’s guilt or innocence (real world rather than legal sense) if he had been unsuccessfully accused of armed robbery by a corner store, rather than unsuccessfully accused of rape by a young woman. But even if she turned out to be a hypocrite on such matters it doesn’t mean that speculation about matters the courts can’t decide upon is in bad taste.
But that is not the title of the article, is it.
“Legally innocent” is not the same as “factually innocent”. The power of the judicial system to find guilt is constrained by the burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt; the freedom of private citizens to find guilt is not so constrained, nor should it be.
If it is, then citizens concede a large part of their freedom of choice and thought to the state. Yes, popular sentiment can be wrong and unfair. But private action should be at the discretion of private actors. There can and should be debate about both particular cases and general rules for private actors to follow.
But it is absurd to require private actors to follow the same rules as the judicial system, or to be completely bound by its findings.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was not convicted of rape either. Was it therefore unjust that he was stripped of his eminent position? (In this case the World Bank was de facto a private actor.)
As to the Jameis Winston case: it is notorious that American college athletic programs frequently protect star players from criminal charges by political influence.
The onlooker is caught between the Scylla of believing the unproven charges against Winston and the Charybdis of accepting the possibly fraudulent official exoneration.
It may be that Roberts as a doctrinaire feminist is promoting sexual lynch-law. It may also be that the award of the Heisman Trophy to Winston is institutional complicity in the cover-up of a vicious crime.
Although it is the case that legally innocent is not the same as factually innocent, he is innocent under the law.
Which leads me to this simple question: why is there an asymmetry in the revelation of the names of the people involved? Why is she anonymous and he is not? There is certainly merit in the argument for anonymity, just as there is merit in the argument for publicly declaring the name. However, whichever side of that argument you come down on you must surely agree that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
it seems lately that a false accusation is a woman’s default opening to dealing with a man she doesn’t want contact with anymore.
personally I can’t imagine a greater injustice than allowing a single, massive, demographic to railroad the other half of the population in this way.
I’m not sure it’s a goose / gander thing, it’s not about things that are equivalent except for sex. It’s an alleged perp v alleged victim thing, which is a bit different. I attempted to construct a “truth table” of consequences, ie {both public}, {both private}, {accused public / accuser private}, mapped against {found guilty}, {found not guilty but actually guilty}, and {found not guilty and actually innocent.} It got rather complicated rather quickly, but I think I arrived at a conclusion justifying the {accused public / accuser private} set up.
I start with two axioms, which you are free to accept or reject, of course. The first is that any system that has the accused’s name kept private, will still make his name public if he is convicted. (There is no mirror assumption for the accuser if the accused is found not guilty, because a not guilty verdict for the accused is not proof that the accuser was lying.) And second – unlike for many other crimes – if the accuser has indeed been raped, the publication of her (or his) name is a very serious, public, supplementary humiliation, heaped on top of the humiliation of the rape itself. Aside from the injustice of inflicting further punishment on the victim, there are the utilitarian considerations about whether rape victims will be deterred from reporting rapes if they face further public humiliation.
According to my truth table, public naming hurts the accuser (seriously) whenever her/his accusations are truthful (regardless of whether the perp is found guilty or not.) Keeping her/his name private only unjustly benefits her when she is lying. But this is, in my opinion, a much smaller unfair benefit than the corresponding unfair damage of public humiliation when she isn’t lying. Moreover, if she is lying, she faces the risk of prosecution for attempting to pervert the course of justice, perjury etc. Maybe it doesn’t happen very often, or not often enough, but it has happened.
Meanwhile as far as the accused is concerned, if he is found guilty (whether factually guilty or not) – he gets no advantage from a system keeping his name private. For it will be publicised anyway on his conviction. If he is acquitted wrongly (ie he is actually guilty) then compared to a system in which the his name is kept secret, he is worse off, but hardly unfairly worse off. A lingering suspicion may attach to his name, but in fact it is fully justified. If he is acquitted and is actually innocent, he suffers a disadvantage – there is still a lingering suspicion which he does not deserve. But set against that, though a system that keeps his name secret unless convicted may avoid the unfair lingering suspicion if he is really innocent, it also allows him to get off completely scot free, without even a lingering suspicion, if he is acquitted but is actually guilty. And the true injustice he faces – lingering suspicion if he is acquitted and truly innocent – is in my opinion far less serious than the public humiliation the rape victim faces from identification.
This all assumes that the difference between public identification and not, makes no difference to the chances of correctly convicting the guilty and acquitting the innocent. But here I think the odds are stacked in favour of identifying the accused. Other victims may come forward. It’s possible that other false accusers may come forward, but it’s not obvious, if a group of women wanted to falsely accuse a man of rape, why they shouldn’t cook it all up beforehand rather than wait till the guy’s name is already in the papers. And I see no advantage in publicity to deter false accusations by the fake victims. The police – unlike the public – ought to have access to previous accusations on their computer.
There’s no answer to all this of course, but I don’t see the accused and the accuser as being in equivalent positions deserving the same analysis of the merits of public disclosure of identity. And a cursory glance indicates to me that public identification of the alleged perp and keeping the accuser’s identity private (unless and until she (or he) is tried for perverting the course of justice) is fairer than the other options.
“It may also be that the award of the Heisman Trophy to Winston is institutional complicity in the cover-up of a vicious crime.”
Nonsense. It is merely recognizing the best player in college football. It would more than merely wrong to impugn his integrity and deny him the clearly deserved award solely on the basis of an allegation which was so weak that it didn’t even result in a charge, despite nearly a year of investigation.
I think Lee Moore has it right. And I have no problem at all with the quote definitively attributed to Diane Roberts (the second of the two quotes in the post). It sounds pretty factual to me.
Lee,
You arrived at a conclusion which didn’t require any complicated truth table, as the outcome you reached really only depended on the totally subjective weightings you attached to different outcomes. The only things that mattered in determining your outcome were the discounting all harm which the man incurs, the harm that accrues to society by permitting the woman to misuse the legal system without serious threat of repercussions.
Your exercise strikes me as a way to try and justify personal prejudices, feigning the appearance of logical rigor where none exists.
Lee Moore,
That one person insinuates in a publication with a worldwide readership that another person is a rapist without even pretending to offer any evidence. I accept that people speculating about what really happened in a high profile case is inevitable and cannot be held to the same standard of proof as a trial, but she does not even offer any supporting evidence to that low standard. Every word she says to imply Winston’s guilt could apply to any “he said/ she said” rape case whatsoever. She pushes the line that accusation equals guilt and uses a lot of emotionally manipulative language to do it. She writes,
True of anyone. I substituted your name for Winston’s to make that point in dramatic form.
Try reading “just like his lawyer says” without sounding sarcastic – I couldn’t do it. Everyone is meant to instantly note that a lawyer’s claim that a client is innocent is worthless. The woman in the case also has a lawyer and could equally well have “just like her lawyer says” added to each of her statements.
Many people would say that the fact that the stench of an allegation can hang around forever irrespective of its truth is exactly the evil that our legal presumption of innocence AND its cultural penumbra, the declining but still surviving idea that decent people don’t leap to believe every accusation, evolved to combat.
Her lack of fame isn’t relevant to anything but stirring up resentment against Jameis Winston. The fact that she still maintains she was raped is true. The impression of consistency in her testimony about the accusation is not fully supported by other accounts of the case. for instance this one says that ‘In the warrant, the accuser says she and friends had shots at a local bar and her “memory is very broken from that point forward.”‘
Please note, I am not claiming poor recall makes her claim untrue. I do not know whether it is true. Unlike Diane Roberts I truly do not have any line to push about this case which concerns people thousands of miles away of whom I know nothing but what I read last night, acting in a cultural milieu (American football) of which I know very little. But I am qualified to state (because the only qualification required is a basic ability to read critically) that her article is nothing but innuendo, which the Guardian would denounce in any other context but rape. Many of the comments put it well, for instance “unretrofied” says, “He wasn’t even charged with a crime, but now you are going to always consider him a probable rapist? Tell me, how do you feel about the Salem witch trials?
I also like Lee’s take on this.
Living in close proximity to where the incident occurred and being aware of the behavior of Tallahassee Police Department and this particular State Attorney not only in the case but other high profile events, I have a lot of doubt about whether justice was actually served. It was evident from day one neither the police nor SA Meggs once he was alerted to the case wanted anything too truly investigate this case and only did so because TMZ broke the story. Florida State football is very big in Tallahassee and there was a lot of public pressure just to make this go away.
There continues to be conflicting aims in our culture. We hear endlessly that women are equal, yet we continue to invent situations and rules that must favour them. If the commentators on this site are truly libertarian then it is essential to accept that each and everyone of us must be judged equally before one system of laws that offers no advantage by virtue of accident of birth. This does not imply that we are intellectually or physically equal, that clearly is not the case, instead it means we must all be held personally responsible for what we do and how we behave, as secrecy is not compatible with any such system both parties must be named and held to account.
Indeed, Barry. Everything that has been said here, including Lee’s comment (in fact, I think he’d stipulated that much) should be read without regard to the sex of the individuals involved in any specific case.
The part with which I respectfully disagree (see Lee’s comment again).
Hi jim west
Obviously my conclusions depend on my weightings, but I think it is a mistake to conclude that it’s all just “a way to try and justify personal prejudices, feigning the appearance of logical rigor” – cos when I started, I didn’t know which of the three options – {both public}, {both private}, {accused public / accuser private} – I favoured. I had to do the sums to find out.
It’s true that I attach much the highest weight to the victim being identified when she/he is making a true accusation. But interestingly, that doesn’t make much difference to the conclusion that {both public} is a bad answer. Taking
w = expected value of a rape victim being publicly identified when she’s making a true accusation (ie multiplying the estimate of harm if the event occurs by the probability of the event occurring)
r = expected value of harm to man’s reputation if he is identified when he is both unconvicted and actually innocent
y = expected value (ie harm to justice system) of a woman getting away with a false accusation
m = expected value (ie harm to justice system) of a man not being identified when he is actually guilty
you have to believe that m > w + r , to go prefer {both public} to {both private} – ie the damage to the justice system from an [actually guilty, but unconvicted, man suffering no damage to his reputation by not being identified] is worse than the sum of [a truthful rape victim having her name publicised] PLUS [an actually innocent, and unconvicted, man unjustly having damage to his reputation from having his name publicised.] I think most people would regard holders of that opinion as quite eccentric.
And when you compare the two remaining options – {both private} with {accused public / accuser private} – the weight given to the woman’s humiliation (w) is irrelevant, as it doesn’t figure in the comparison. Also irrelevant is the weight given to the the woman getting away with not being identified after a false accusation (it figures in the comparison but produces an identical item in each of the comparitors.)
Comparing {both private} with {accused public / accuser private} boils down to a straight fight between
m = expected value (ie harm to justice system) of a man not being identified when he is actually guilty, and
r = expected value of harm to man’s reputation if he is identified when he is both unconvicted and actually innocent
Since a very small proportion of rape accusations result in a conviction, the probabilities included within these expected values are effectively equivalent, in m’s case, to the probability of an accused rapist being actually guilty (whether charged, brought to trial , convicted or not) and, in r’s case, the probability of the accused rapist being actually innocent. So you need to come up with weights for
(a) how likely to be truthful is an allegation of rape made to the police
(b) if the accused is (actually) guilty, how to score the damage from him not being publicly named
(c) if the accused is both unconvicted and legally innocent, how to score the damage from him being named
If you give 10 points to (b) and 100 points to (c) then you only need 10% of rape accusations made to the police to be false, to prefer {both private} to {accused public / accuser private}.
My own view – and you are welcome to your own – is that scoring (c) at ten times (b) is overegging the pudding considerably. Unless you have a considerable reputation in the field of over-aggressive pursuit of young ladies, that flushes out new allegations (like DSK) a relatively small proportion of the public will believe that you really did it. (Even if the entire Guardian opinion staff believes it, they are still – fortunately – a very small proportion of the public.) And I also think that assuming as many as 10% of rape accusations made to the police are untruthful is overegging it too.
(Note all of this assumes complete neutrality on the question of whether publicity helps convict the guilty and acquit the innocent – on which I noted earlier that I was unconvinced.)
I don’t know if I agree with Lee Moore or not, yet, but *that* is a way to construct an argument. And also figure out a coherent position on something. We may not agree with Lee’s weightings but at least we can all see clearly what it is we are disagreeing about.
Don’t forget, when thinking about this, that two generations of US college-age women have been deeply indoctrinated with a mindset and meta-context of what constitutes ‘rape’ that bears absolutely no relation to law, justice or what any sentient person considers to be ‘rape’.
In this context, virtually-any encounter between a male and a female can be defined as ‘rape’, after the fact, and based solely upon the thoughts and considerations of the female party. Normal standards of evidence and proof simply do not apply, and doubly-not when either party is a college student and/or the encounter takes place on a college campus – as was the case here.
I find it perfectly-plausible that the female complainant honestly and sincerely believes that she was raped, and continues to assert that she was – it’s just that her definition of what constitutes ‘rape’ bears no relation to what the law and the great majority of sensible people consider to be ‘rape’.
So it’s not even reasonable for Diane Roberts to write (regarding the issue of consent)
‘Nobody knows, except Jameis Winston and that young woman . . . .’
because the definitions of ‘consent’ no longer has any objective meaning in the present context. Even if she says yes and appears to any objective standard to be consenting, the current context allows her to state after the fact that her apparent consent was not, in fact, consent at all – because she had been drinking, because she felt pressured, because he persuaded her against her better judgement, or any one of a hundred other ex-post-facto reconsiderations. And it’s more and more likely that administrators and law enforcement will enthusiastically and unquestioningly support her.
It’s not that nobody knows, except Jameis Winston and that young woman. It’s that even Jameis Winston and that young woman don’t know, and can’t know, whether what happened between them was or wasn’t rape – because any intimate encounter can now be defined as rape, after the fact. The old feminist battle-cry of “No means No!” has now been turned on its head, because under the new rules, Yes now can turn into No later – and there is no way to tell whether or not that will happen.
It’s a minefield. I wouldn’t be the father of boys, these days. You would think that high-school and college coaches would make more effort to teach the young Adonises in their charge – many of whom aren’t exactly what you’d call the sharpest knives in the drawer – of the serious risks they run in having any contact with young women that goes beyond the limits of an ice-cream social.
llater,
llamas
LLamas,
I hope that you’re wrong about that, but I’m afraid I just don’t know. Clearly in a sane world, the difference between rape and non-rape is consent. Consent to anything is not consent if it is given under duress. That, though seemingly simple, is already complicated enough in practice; demonstrating duress, for example, could be difficult in any context – sexual or otherwise. If your claim is correct, ie. that ‘yes’ can turn into ‘no’ on second thoughts, then that is a recipe for judicial and social disaster.
Lee,
What you are not factoring in is the preference of the legal system that 10 guilty go free that one innocent not be punished. Which is to say there is a preference for protecting the accused over seeking justice for the accuser built into the very fabric of the legal system. So the accused should have preference here, since, being assumed innocent, he is assumed not to have initiated the action.
So, using a factor of ten, is the woman’s potential humiliation in all cases really ten times worse than the impact on the man’s life in all cases? For example, in the Duke rape case, exactly how much humiliation must we be saving a woman to cancel out the horrendous treatment these innocent men received? What about ten times as much as they received?
Again I am using the typical gender roles in this, though it applies either way (though there are very few cases of women raping men, and even fewer where the rape is reported.) Male on male rape is probably the most common type in the USA if you include most common type — prisoner rape.
Personally, I think that the whole thing is a strange anachronism, as if sex is some special magical thing different than any other type of violence. However, I recognize that that is my personal feelings on the matter, and others might not be so simplistic as I. Consequently MY preference would be that everything be done in public, as should always be the case in our legal system. However, if your preference is that because of the sensitive nature of sex crimes that at the least both names be hidden. Probably given the memetics and sensitivity of our time, public trials with hidden identities for sex crimes would be the way to go.
Remember Crystal Gail Mangum and the Duke lacrosse rape case? She was found guilty of second-degree murder on Nov 22, 2013. Funny how the media ignored her conviction after the Duke circus.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case
Correct, Fraser, I’m not factoring that in. Both the rape victim (if truthful) and the accused (if innocent) are innocent. The maxim is irrelevant in the match up between victim humiliation and accused reputation.
Where the maxim could be relevant is in the m v r comparison described above –
m = expected value (ie harm to justice system) of a man not being identified when he is actually guilty, and
r = expected value of harm to man’s reputation if he is identified when he is both unconvicted and actually innocent
where, as I say, even if you do weight reputational harm to the innocent at ten times the harm to the justice system of a guilty man not being named, you still need at least 10% of rape accusations to be untruthful to flip the game.
Understood, but since we are not blank slates and human feelings evolved over a long period, how we value different things may seem anachronistic.
There are excellent evolutionary explanations for female victims (and indeed male ones) to want to keep their rapes secret, so the fact that few of them want publicity is probably not something they’ve just picked up from the Guardian.
Bleacher Report looked at this particular case carefully:
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1877570-most-important-information-from-police-report-in-jameis-winston-investigation#comments
Other than that, I agree with llamas:
It’s not that nobody knows, except Jameis Winston and that young woman. It’s that even Jameis Winston and that young woman don’t know, and can’t know, whether what happened between them was or wasn’t rape – because any intimate encounter can now be defined as rape, after the fact. The old feminist battle-cry of “No means No!” has now been turned on its head, because under the new rules, Yes now can turn into No later – and there is no way to tell whether or not that will happen.
With ‘false memories’, it is entirely possible that she now remembers as rape something that had been consensual at the time. In effect, she may have been retroactively raped by her ‘friend’ who called the police.
Again Lee, I disagree. Protecting the innocent is more important that prosecuting the guilty, os there is a natural bias toward protecting the accused. Furthermore your math seems to assume that the harm to a woman from a rape revelation is the same as the hard to a man for a false allegation. That seems very unlikely to be true. It is very culturally dependent, but in the culture I live in mostly rape victims are sympathized with and those accused of rape, regardless of their guilt or innocence, are treated rather scummy.
BTW, I am not by any means including in that the actual trauma of the rape itself, which undoubtedly is horrible. Merely the additional harm that comes from a public acknowledgement of the fact that it happened. Some might argue, in fact Mariska Hargitay frequently does argue, that the public revelation is empowering and a step toward healing the trauma.
However, that is probably a private choice. Nonetheless, if you want to threaten a man with severe judicial punishment it seems to me that one should have the cojones to say it in public. Nevertheless, if you, and society, don’t agree, it seems only fair to offer the same anonymity to the accused, at least until you prove him castration-worthy.
Course if you live in a place you might get stoned to death for being raped, well then the math is a little different.
If I’m asked to consider Lee’s algebraic formula logic in considering such a case, am I “allowed” to
retain intellectual propriety and completely ignore all “emotional”, and any irrelevant “history” (including imagined or “recovered”) pleas?
Hi Lee,
I might have missed something, but it seems to me you passed rather too quickly through the assessment of both public Vs. both private. Recall your y term.
y = expected value (ie harm to justice system) of a woman getting away with a false accusation
Shouldn’t m > w + r actually be y + m > w + r? i.e. the harm caused on the LHS also needs to take into account a woman being able to falsely send a man to prison while remaining anonymous. This would presumably facilitate her repeatedly using this ploy, with little hope that the next victim would be aware of her history in this regard.
If I haven’t stuffed up my logic here, and y does belong on the LHS, in my view both public clearly wins that round.
Can’t help but wonder if the value assumed for “damage to the justice system” mightn’t be undervalued in some of this logic chopping. What’s supposed to be happening here? The justice system is being required to decide between two people over a presumed wrong & allocate punishment where appropriate. Let’s substitute general assault for rather than the particular assault of rape as the wrong. And bear in mind, the supposed “injury” suffered is in many cases not discernible, to anyone other than the victim, from otherwise normal lawful behaviour. So let’s run this again with the victim of a general assault, purely on the evidence of their own accusation, being able to claim immunity from identification whilst making that accusation. What damage to the justice system would result? Try it with theft or other “wrongs”.
Hi jim west
You are quite right that there should be a y on the left hand side. But strictly there is also be an x on the right hand side, ie :
y + m > w + r +x
where
y = expected value (ie harm to justice system) of a woman getting away with a false accusation, and not being named, and
x = expected value (ie harm to justice system) of a woman getting away with a false accusation, and being named
In my weightings, I decided that x was so little different from y that the two terms would cancel. Ze point, I sink, ees zis.
The main harm to the justice system from a false accuser getting away with a false accusation, is that she has got away with it – ie without being done for perjury or attempting to pervert the course of justice. She may of course be tried for such things, but that is independent of whether she is named in the rape trial. If the authorities think her lying is sufficiently clear and egregious they can try her regardless of the secrecy rules in the rape trial. And if she is tried, she’ll be named (whether she is convicted or not.)
So in the rape case itself, if the accused is acquitted, how much punishment will the false accuser suffer from being named, as compared with not being named ? I suspect not much. In most cases the public will not conclude that she was lying, but merely that the bloke got off because the case was not proven. Or there was a tragic misunderstanding. Or it’s one of those sad cases where people get drunk and things happen that people regret. Rarely will the majority think – that bitch made it up from day one. She’ll get at least as much (mistaken) sympathy from people thinking she’s been badly treated as she’ll suffer in reputation from people thinking she’s a liar. Maybe she’ll get a couple of thou for writing an article in the Graun. And when her lying is most clear and egregious and she suffers the greatest risk of suffering in reputation – well that’s the time she’s running the greatest risk of suffering the big punishment – being done for perjury etc
So you’re right. There’s a y on the left side. You have to decide how it stacks up against the x on the right.
More evidence that this is out of control on U.S. campuses. Note that a lot of this is coming from directives from the Federal government and to which any college that receives federal money must adhere. http://reason.com/archives/2013/12/17/guilty-until-proven-innocent
“Does the Heisman Trophy still stand for integrity after Jameis Winston’s win?”
Why yes, yes it does.
Gosh, I know, let’s consider recent awards of the Nobel, Pulitzer, and President’s, Oscar, Grammy, and knighthood “appointments” instead, shall we?
Sheesh, even the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame annual “awards” (apparently for longevity, and Time Magazine’s “thing” of the year, garnish outrage.