He is adamant he did not do it.
How many people who commit sexual offences don't do this? Seriously. Even those who've been caught on film still try to deny it and claim the victim consented it.
Sexual offenders are spoken about in our culture as monsters. No human alive wants to think of themselves as a monster. None of us. We all want to believe there is something good in us. That others can see something good in us.
That is why so few people will admit to a sexual offence, even in the face of undeniable evidence. They do not want to be a monster in their own eyes and the eyes of everyone around them. It's basic human nature.
There is so much naivety on display here about how sexual violence works.
Abusers and rapists choose their targets carefully. They target people who they think won't be believed. They target people they think won't tell anyone.
They are careful to be charming, likeable, and incredibly helpful as their public face to the world. How many men who murdered their entire family were afterwards described as having been a pillar of their community? It means nobody will suspect them, and that if they are accused nobody would believe they were capable of such a thing. It's the exact same way domestic abusers operate.
I could go on.
People who are capable of rape and other forms of violence and abuse look and act just like the rest of us. That's what makes this so terrifying and compels so many of us to try to find any way possible to believe the victim is a liar. It's preferable to the reality.
We want to make our world safe again, and for our world to be safe we need to be able to take people at face value and be able to believe that we would see a rapist at a hundred paces. That we could always protect ourselves.
The truth is that we don't, but as humans that is an unbearable position to be in. So we deny it.
I know I too can sometimes be over confident in my ability to see through abusers. However, I then found myself reading a local newspaper and discovering the write up of a trial of a man I had thought seemed decent. He was part of the community, all my interactions with him were positive, I'd never felt unsafe around him, he seemed hardworking and honest.
He had been on trial for child sex offences. My immediate reaction was "no, this cannot possibly be true, it must be a mistake, he wouldn't do that." Because realising I hadn't spotted it and could not have predicted it was terrifying and unsettling, and my brain needed to make my world safe and predictable again.
Were it not for the fact that in this case he pled guilty to try and get a reduced sentence, I expect there would still be a part of me trying to convince myself it wasn't true and he hadn't done those terrible things. Even when I saw he'd pled guilty I was still in denial for a little while! "No, not him, maybe he was coerced into pleading guilty!"
There is far more complexity to this subject than people seem aware of, or prepared to accept. There are vanishingly few posts that reflect the reality and complexity involved.
As for the supposedly ruined life of a man under investigation for a year, eighteen months, two years... Where is our concern for the victim who has also had the investigation hanging over and disrupting her life for a year, eighteen months, two years? Where is our compassion and rage at her ruined life? Why are we not angry that it's been dragged out for her?
Anybody who thinks the victim's entire life doesn't disintegrate during a rape investigation is woefully misinformed, at best.
Even if you're too blinkered to accept my use of the word victim, if you're raging at this post and preparing to type "innocent until proven guilty" at me, then why are you not concerned about the innocent complainant who has never been charged or convicted of lying? Why are you casting aspersions on her reputation without a fair trial? Why do you not care about her ruined life when she's never been found guilty of a crime either? Why the double standards?
It is either deep denial as self preservation, or it's misogyny.