Last year, two of my friends were falsely accused of rape.
One of them was lucky enough to have evidence - texts from the girl expressing enthusiasm about the experience and agreeing that she had initiated and expressed implicit consent (like getting a condom, putting it on him, and asking him to fuck her harder) - but that didn’t stop rumors spreading. It turns out she had a boyfriend, and probably fed him a different story in order to prevent him being mad at her.
My friend got uninvited from parties and had people warning his friends about his sexual offense. Eventually the story morphed into the rumor that he had assaulted two people, but when he asked the supposed second person, she had no idea what he was talking about.
My other friend wasn’t lucky enough to have direct evidence. He never found out who was accusing him - an image began circulating virally with his face, name, where he lived, and a long description of his supposed ‘violent assault.’ People he didn’t know started contacting all his facebook friends and warning them that he was a violent rapist. He received threats and hate mail.
He didn’t have any absolute proof that he was innocent, but his reputation was solid. I saw messages from previous casual sexual partners (who’d been contacted by friends of the accuser) saying the accusations were strange because he’d only ever been respectful and they couldn’t imagine him doing something like that. He lived in a house with roommates, and his roommates had met all his sexual partners, and they said all of them had seemed happy to be there and fine when they left. Everyone who knew him was confused by the accusations. He was a close, old friend of mine. I’d had seen him interact with many casual sexual partners during our friendship, and he had always been consent-oriented and not pushy. He refused to have sex with people who were intoxicated.
I suspect it might have been a similar circumstance to my first friend - he had sex with someone who had a boyfriend, and then she’d lied about it in order to avoid telling her boyfriend that she’d cheated.
It’s also possible that it wasn’t even anyone who had sex with him, but just anyone who disliked him and wanted to hurt him.
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Neither of the accusers went to the police, probably because their claims were false. They stayed out of the legal system and proceeded to destroy my friends’ reputations on a social scale. I suspect false rape accusations are more common than we think, mainly because false accusers have a special incentive not to report to the police.
And even if they are rare, the power to destroy lives is incredibly serious. One of my friends became suicidal and went on medication to keep himself from self harming. The mental distress he underwent from the false accusation seemed comparable to that of a rape victim.
The problem is that people have the power to do this to each other, and we don’t have any social system in place for preventing this. I don’t think we should believe all victims absolutely - we should ascribe probability to their stories, and be far more cautious before we take actions to socially punish the accused.
I want to help rape victims, but I can’t justify it when it’s at the expense of other victims.
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Also, there are shitty people in the world, shitty enough to hurt other people for any reason - feelings of power, personal gain, revenge - and if a woman can ruin a man’s life by falsely accusing him of rape, without having to go to the police - shitty women will absolutely take this route. They have nothing to lose if they’re in a culture of ‘never question a rape victim.’
There are people out there that have the capacity to do it and the motivation, much as is the same with actual rapists. I don’t really understand the argument that false accusations are implausible or extremely rare. “Someone shitty has something to gain by hurting another person” is not exactly a rare scenario.
