Aspiringmatriarch · Today 12:43
Of course it is, in a court system (or in any context) credibility is a factor. But you're not necessarily going to always get that because often the more vulnerable a person is the more difficult, unsympathetic or unreliable their behaviour can be. But those same individuals are statistically more likely to be victims.
Then they are always going to have a hard time being believed when there is scant evidence and the credibility and truthfulness of witnesses is paramount. Do you suggest we lower our standards of credibility for such cases?
The thing is that this was never a criminal case. The majority of rapes never get to that stage, probably a majority are never reported (not sure of the stats). The issue of rape convictions is quite separate from this case, which was for defamation.
True but Adam made the ludicrous claim that no men are hurt by false allegations so it needed to be corrected.
We know the case was brought against Heard because of three statements in an op-ed, the one pertaining to sexual violence being the headline, which she didn't write - the only reference to SV in the article was about her younger years before meeting Depp. The headline doesn't really match the content of the article actually and probably should have said gender based (or sex based) violence.
She didn't object to the title and posted it proudly on Twitter. She also (according to the ACLU who actually wrote the damn thing) wanted to name Johnny explicitly. She also made in plain in court she meant Johnny so let's not pretend she didn't know what she was doing or it was just an essay on abuse in general.
So the question is whether any victim or survivor has the right to refer even obliquely to their own experiences if they don't have proof that would meet the standards of at least a civil case. And we know many many women - and men - wouldn't have that. So essentially it's a gag order.
To some degree yes. However, you really can't expect not to run into problems if you publish accusations you cannot substantiate in the national media rather than going to the police, especially if those accusations leads to someone losing their career and reputation.
Because the alternative, that a man's reputation might be damaged (and I see that can be a horrible situation too), is worse than the alternative which is all victims being forced down the route of an invasive and horrible criminal process with an uncertain result or having to stay completely silent for the rest of their lives.
No, they are both terrible but I don't see an alternative, do you? People have killed themselves in despair over false accusations and I know women who preferred not to deal with the authorities and I can't fault them for their decision. We can't make sweeping statements about these things.