"Eject."

Complex and complicated, but meriting attention.  False rape accusations: Why must we pretend they never happen?: "In the emotionally charged conversation about rape, few topics are more fraught than that of false allegations.  Consider some responses to the news that singer-songwriter Conor Oberst had been falsely accused of sexual assault. Last December a woman writing in the comments section of the website xoJane, going by the name Joanie Faircloth, claimed Oberst raped her when she was a teenager. The charge spread across the Internet; Oberst denied it and brought a libel suit against Faircloth when she refused to retract the story. In July she completely recanted, admitting that she had made it all up to get attention. Yet instead of showing sympathy for the ordeal of the musician—one known for being supportive of feminist issues—some chided him for taking legal action to defend himself against a false, career-damaging charge. In the Daily Dot, pop culture critic Chris Ostendorf decried the lawsuit, arguing that it could intimidate real victims of rape and that it promoted the idea of men as victims of false accusations—even though that’s exactly what Oberst was. After Oberst dropped the suit, Bustle’s Caroline Pate praised his decision and referred to the saga as “a roller-coaster for both parties”—treating the false accuser and the wrongly accused as morally equivalent—and called the revelation of Oberst’s innocence “crushingly disappointing.”

False rape accusations are a lightning rod for a variety of reasons. Rape is a repugnant crime—and one for which the evidence often relies on one person’s word against another’s. Moreover, in the not-so-distant past, the belief that women routinely make up rape charges often led to appalling treatment of victims. However, in challenging what author and law professor Susan Estrich has called “the myth of the lying woman,” feminists have been creating their own counter-myth: that of the woman who never lies."

...How frequent are false accusations? A commonly cited estimate, which may have originated with feminist author Susan Brownmiller in the 1970s, is that they account for only about 2 percent of rape reports. After the Oberst fiasco, feminist blogger Rebecca Watson posted a video asserting that, statistically, you will be wrong two out of 100 times if you presume a rape accusation to be true and 98 out of 100 times if you presume it to be false. In fact, as Emily Bazelon and Rachael Larimore wrote in Slate five years ago, official data on what law enforcement terms “unfounded” rape reports (that is, ones in which the police determine that no crime occurred) yield conflicting numbers, depending on local policies and procedures—averaging 8 percent to 10 percent of all reported rapes. 

...in other known cases, such allegations stem from conflicting definitions of what constitutes rape and consent—particularly in sexual encounters that involve alcohol. The scandal at Ohio University last fall is an example of this.* A female student who was caught on camera in a drunken public sex act—which bystanders of both sexes had perceived as consensual—then filed a rape complaint after photos and video that showed her receiving oral sex from a male student became an Internet hit. The woman, who claimed she had no memory of the event, received strong support from feminist activists on campus and was vilified as a liar on men’s rights websites. Ultimately, the grand jury cleared the man, concluding that while both parties were drunk, the woman was not incapacitated—she walked away unassisted and bought a burrito moments after the encounter—and was a willing participant...

Did the young woman lie to salvage her reputation? Of course we don’t know; it may be that she thought that any level of intoxication renders consent invalid, as many campus programs are teaching today. But, as sociologist Kathleen Bogle and law professor Anne Coughlin recently noted in Slate, this is far from the legal standard for incapacitation required in a criminal finding of sexual assault. Even assuming the female student genuinely believed that what happened was rape, it was still, as the investigation concluded, a wrongful accusation—but one that won’t be recorded as an “unfounded rape report” by the FBI...

So why is it necessary for us to have a clearer picture of the scope of false allegations, if most allegations are not intentionally false? We are not, as some anti-feminist blogs assert, in the midst of a massive “epidemic” of rape hoaxes. But wrongful accusations—either deliberately made up or based on gray-area cases that may hinge on mixed signals, alcohol-addled memories, or misunderstandings of what constitutes sexual assault—are not the almost nonexistent anomaly advocates for victims often claim. They can be cries for attention and sympathy, or attempts to cover up embarrassing sexual encounters (such as the 2009 Hofstra University case in which a female student’s claim of gang rape in a men’s room fell apart after a cellphone video taken by one of the accused men showed consensual group sex), or vendettas against former partners. At whatever rate such cases occur, they should not be dismissed as statistical blips: These lies can have tragic results. Two years ago former California high school football star Brian Banks, who had spent five years in prison for raping his classmate Wanetta Gibson, was exonerated after Gibson contacted him to apologize and admitted making up the attack. In 2009, New Yorker William McCaffrey was released after serving four years of a 20-year prison sentence for a rape his friend Biurny Peguero had made up to explain her injuries from a fight with several women. In 2012 a Michigan man, James Grissom, was freed after nearly 10 years in prison when the woman who accused him, Sara Ylen, was caught making another false allegation (and faking cancer to bilk money from insurance companies and sympathetic donors)...

Coulson.  Soon.