Some studies estimate that up to 10% up rape allegations are false, and because these are just reported false allegations, there is no telling how many are victims of false accusation have lost their job, friends and families that did not go through the criminal justice system. As an advocate, activist and survivor of rape, I can say with certainty that any sexual violence is a crime that needs to end, but just because there is one evil in the world, does not mean we should ignore another. For every false rape accusation, a real rape victim is discredited, an innocent person goes to prison, and guilty ones are never charged. Part 1 of this 3 part article features 4 men accused and/or convicted of rape; Clarence Brandley, Kevin Parisi, Brian Banks and Frank Lee Smith:
CLARENCE BRANDLEY
On August 23, 1980, two custodians – Clarence Brandley and Henry (Icky) Peace – found the body of 16-year-old Cheryl Dee Ferguson in a loft above the auditorium of Conroe High School in Conroe, Texas. She had been raped and strangled. Fergeson was part of a school volleyball team at Bellville playing a match against another high school in Conroe.
Suspicion immediately fell on two of the custodians who had found the body. Texas Ranger Wesley Styles led the police investigation. Soon after the body had been found, he conducted a joint investigation of Brandley and Peace, during which he said, “One of you is going to have to hang for this” and, turning to Brandley, added, “Since you’re the nigger, you’re elected.”
In a case of egregious police and prosecutorial misconduct and unvarnished racism, one of these custodians, Clarence Brandley, was framed for the crime. Brandley was one of five school custodians, and the only African-American. Three custodians claimed to have seen the victim enter a girls' restroom near the school gymnasium, and then to have seen Brandley walking toward the restroom with an armload of toilet paper. They claimed that they told Brandley there was a girl in the restroom, and that he replied that he was taking the toilet paper to the boys' restroom.
They did not see him again until about 45 minutes later, after a search had begun for the missing student. The fourth white custodian, Peace, subsequently added that Brandley was insistent on immediately searching the loft and, when they found the body, calmly checked for a pulse and then notified the authorities. And all four said that only Brandley had keys to the auditorium where the body was found. In interviews with police, the other four all made statements implicating Brandley in the murder. There was also no physical evidence linking Brandley to the crime.
Before an all-white Montgomery County grand jury on August 28, 1980, five days after the crime, Brandley professed innocence. Although he contradicted his white co-workers in several respects, he acknowledged that he had disappeared for perhaps 30 minutes about the time the murder was believed to have occurred. He said he was in the custodian's office smoking and listening to music alone. He also testified that a number of other persons had master keys that would open the auditorium and, in any event, that doors near the stage usually were propped open with a two-by-four.
Brandley went on trial in December 1980 before an all-white jury. There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. Spermatozoa recovered from the victim's body had been destroyed — without having been tested to determine whether Brandley could have been its source. Moreover, a fresh blood spot had been found on the victim's blouse that had not come from her and could not have come from Brandley. The spot was Type A, but Brandley had Type O blood. One juror found the evidence insufficient to establish guilt, forcing Judge Sam Robertson, Jr. to declare a mistrial. The name of the holdout juror — William Shreck — became public knowledge, leading to anonymous harassing telephone calls. One man, whose anonymous communication was monitored by police, threatened Shreck, "We're going to get you, nigger lover."
Brandley’s second trial was held in February 1981 before another all-white jury but a different judge, while one of the original witnesses — John Sessum — was not called. Later it was discovered that the prosecution had decided not to use Sessum because he no longer was willing to support the other custodians' versions of events, even though he had been threatened with being charged with perjury if he refused to go along. However, the prosecution came up with a witness who had not testified previously. He was Danny Taylor, a junior at the school, who had worked briefly as a custodian but was fired before the crime. Taylor claimed that Brandley once had commented — after a group of white female students walked past them — "If I got one of them alone, ain't no tellin' what I might do."
Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk, medical examiner for Harris County, testified that the victim had died of strangulation and that a belt belonging to Brandley was consistent with the ligature used in the crime. In closing argument, District attorney James Keeshan mentioned that Brandley had a second job at a funeral home and suggested that he was a necrophiliac and had raped Fergeson after she was dead — an argument that could not have been made in good faith because Keeshan had a report stating that Brandley only did odd jobs at the funeral home and had never been involved in the preparation of bodies for burial. The defense objected to Keeshan's remark as inflammatory, but Judge John Martin overruled the objection. Brandley was convicted and sentenced to death.
Eleven months after Brandley was convicted and sentenced to death, his appellate lawyers discovered that exculpatory evidence had disappeared while in the custody of the prosecution — including a Caucasian pubic hair and other hairs that matched neither the victim nor Brandley, and photographs taken on the day of the crime showing that Brandley was not wearing the belt that the prosecution claimed had been the murder weapon. The missing evidence was all the more troubling in light of the pretrial destruction of the spermatozoa. Much was made of the willful destruction and disappearance of the potentially exculpatory evidence in Brandley's appellate briefs, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and death sentence without mentioning the issue.
"No reasonable hypothesis is presented by the evidence to even suggest that someone other than [Brandley] committed the crime", said the court. Brandley V. Texas, 691 S.W.2d 699 (1985). Then a woman named Brenda Medina, who lived in the nearby town of Cut and Shoot, Texas, saw a television broadcast about the Brandley case. Saying she had been unaware of the case until then, she told a neighbor that her former live-in boyfriend — James Dexter Robinson — had told her in 1980 that he had committed such a crime. Robinson had previously worked as a janitor at Conroe High School. Medina said she had not believed Robinson at the time, but now it made sense.
At the neighbor's suggestion, she went to see an attorney, who took her to see District Attorney Peter Speers III, who had succeeded Keeshan in the job when Keeshan ascended to the Texas District Court bench. Speers quickly concluded, or so he said, that Medina was unreliable — and, therefore, that he had no obligation to inform Brandley's lawyers. However, a private attorney Medina also consulted put her in contact with Brandley's lawyers and petitioned the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for a writ of habeas corpus (A writ of habeas corpus is used to bring a prisoner or other detainee (e.g. institutionalized mental patient) before the court to determine if the person's imprisonment or detention is lawful). The court ordered an evidentiary hearing, which was conducted by District Court Judge Ernest A. Coker.
Before calling Medina to testify at the evidentiary hearing, Brandley's defense team called Edward Payne, father-in-law of Gary Acreman, one of the school custodians who had testified at both Brandley trials and who was now suspected by the defense of having been a co-perpetrator of the crime with Robinson. Payne testified that Acreman had told him where Fergeson's clothes had been hidden two days before the authorities found them. After Medina related details of Robinson's purported confession, Brandley's lawyers called John Sessum, the custodian who had testified at the first trial but not the second. Sessum's testimony was in sharp contrast to what he had said at the first trial.
He now said he had seen Acreman follow Cheryl Fergeson up a staircase leading to the auditorium and then heard her scream, "No" and "Don't." Later that day, Acreman warned Sessum not to tell anyone what he had seen. But Sessum said he did tell someone — Wesley Styles, the Texas Ranger who was leading the investigation. That was a mistake. Styles, according to Sessum, responded by threatening him with arrest if he did not tell a story consistent with Acreman's.
Despite the accumulation of new evidence, Judge Coker recommended that Brandley be denied a new trial — a recommendation perfunctorily accepted by the Court of Criminal Appeals on December 22, 1986. But by now civil rights activists, including Reverend Jew Don Boney, had coalesced and raised $80,000 to help finance further efforts on Brandley's behalf. The Rev. Boney was the Chairman of the Houston, Texas-based "Coalition to Free Clarence Lee Brandley" and spearheaded community efforts to have Brandley receive a fair trial. Boney was interviewed on numerous national news outlets and brought significant media and community attention to the case. National Advocate James McCloskey, of Centurion Ministries in Princeton, New Jersey, also took on the case.
Working with a private investigator, McCloskey soon obtained a video-taped statement from Acreman stating that Robinson had killed Cheryl Fergeson and that he had seen Robinson place her clothes in a dumpster where they were found; that is how Acreman knew where the clothes were before they were found. Although Acreman soon recanted that video statement, two witnesses had come forward attesting that they had heard Acreman say he knew who killed Fergeson, that it was not Brandley, but that he would never tell who did it. Based on these statements, with Brandley's execution only six days away, Coker granted a stay.
After further investigation, Brandley’s lawyers petitioned for another evidentiary hearing, which the Court of Criminal Appeals granted in June 1987. Robinson, Acreman, and Styles testified for the prosecution, and helped, rather than hurt Brandley’s case. Robinson admitted he had told Brenda Medina in 1980 that he had killed Ferguson, but claimed he had said that only to frighten her. She had been pressuring him because she was pregnant, he said, and he simply wanted her to stop pestering him. Acreman stuck by what he had said at both trials, although he made a stunning admission that Robinson had been at Conroe High School the morning of the murder. Incidentally, Robinson and Acreman, unlike Brandley, had Type A blood — consistent with the spot on Fergeson's blouse.
Ranger Styles, while denying he had done anything improper, acknowledged that even before he had interviewed any witnesses, Brandley was his only suspect, and when pressed about why he had not obtained a hair sample from Acreman to compare with the Caucasian pubic hair and other hairs found on the victim, Styles stammered, "Let's say I didn't do it and it wasn't done, and why it wasn't done, I don't know." On October 9, 1987, Judge Pickett recommended that the Court of Criminal Appeals grant Brandley a new trial, declaring: "The litany of events graphically described by the witnesses, some of it chilling and shocking, leads me to the conclusion the pervasive shadow of darkness has obscured the light of fundamental decency and human rights." The Court of Criminal Appeals, after sitting on the case for 14 months, finally accepting Picket's recommendation with a sharply split en banc decision on December 13, 1989 (Ex Parte Brandley, 781 S.W.2d 886 (1989))
The prosecution appealed, delaying disposition of the case another 10 months. But within hours of the U.S Supreme Court's denial of certiorari on October 1, 1990 (Texas v. Brandley, 498 U.S. 817 (1990)), they dropped all charges. A few months later, Brandley was ordained as a Baptist minister, and a few months after that he was married. The officials involved in the case were not disciplined, nor did they apologize. Prosecutors in the case still insist they convicted the right man. In 2011, Brandley attemped to recieve compensation under the Texas compensation statute, he was denied.
KEVIN PARISI
Parisi said in his lawsuit against Drew University that he awoke at about 10 a.m. to find a woman, an acquaintance with whom he occasionally smoked cigarettes, sitting on his dorm-room desk. She told him she had just broken up with her boyfriend. “She was completely calm," Parisi told the Examiner. He then asked if she wanted to join him in his bed. She said "yes." “There was no more talk of the boyfriend or the breakup after that." She answered "yes" when he asked her multiple times if she wanted to have sex. Parisi claimed that after he had consensual sex with the female student in a Drew dorm room on Sept. 24, 2013, she learned that her former boyfriend "would never get back together with her" if the sex with Parisi were consensual.
Fearing for her relationship with her boyfriend, she told him not to tell anyone about their encounter, Parisi's lawsuit claimed. He agreed, but she told someone else, a female friend and asked her to lie about their conversation the previous day. At some point after this conversation, the woman’s mother allegedly called the friend to scold her for not lying, he said. Parisi also said the accusing woman visited him later the same day and again told him not to tell anyone what had happened. Parisi again agreed, but sometime later that day, she told her boyfriend, according to Parisi's lawsuit. He then accompanied her to file a sexual assault complaint against Parisi with campus police.
Parisi stated the woman called him after she filed the complaint and told him not to worry because she would tell investigators that the sex was consensual, adding that her boyfriend had forced her to file the complaint. According to Parisi, she never followed through. A day later, Parisi was summoned to meet with his resident adviser, who informed him that he would be barred from campus, except for his classes and the cafeteria, starting immediately. He was also informed that the university had put in place a “no-contact order” between Parisi, his accuser and her boyfriend. Parisi, who said he was too scared to tell his parents what was going on, moved in with a friend who had an off-campus apartment. Forced to sleep on a dirty kitchen floor, Parisi said his medical conditions became worse.
That action constituted sex discrimination and denied Parisi his right to due process, he claimed in the lawsuit filed by his attorneys. Kevin Parisi is 5 feet, 5 inches tall and barely weighs 120 pounds. He’s hunched over and walking with a cane after back surgery earlier in the year, and suffers from severe anxiety and digestive disorders, along with extreme allergies and panic attacks. Even though Parisi was immediately kicked off campus, he told the Examiner that it wasn’t until a week later that he spoke to two university investigators. He did not immediately seek counsel because he was scared.
A week after the sexual encounter, according to Parisi, his accuser called him from a blocked phone number to apologize for “ruining” his life. “She sounded like she was crying when she said it,” Parisi said.
Parisi informed university police that she broke the no-contact order and that her complaint was false, as it was his understanding the order worked both ways. Drew University's response to Parisi's lawsuit, however, only states that it placed the order on Parisi. Drew officials claimed they “did not impose sanctions” on the woman for violating the no-contact order. The university also didn't impose sanctions on her for allegedly filing a false claim of sexual misconduct. A few days after filing the university complaint against Parisi, the woman's boyfriend called Madison police to report that Parisi had raped her. Even though the university’s policy is to conclude investigations into sexual assault claims “within 15 working days of the date of the complaint,” because the police had been called, the university suspended its investigation.
Parisi said he found out about the matter being in police hands when his father called campus security several weeks after the initial encounter. During this time, Parisi said his anxiety and digestive disorders got worse due to the stress of the situation, and he was taken to the emergency room for exhaustion and dehydration. Parisi stated, because of the actions by Drew and the two students, his grades slipped during the months he was under investigation and Drew also forced the college junior to take a one-semester leave. He also states that because of the incident, Parisi's academic career was ruined and without a college education. According to the lawsuit, "his overall economic future is completely compromised" and his parents' financial resources have been "obliterated without any compensation or return."
It was at this point that his parents finally learned what was happening. Parisi then moved back in with his family — 45 minutes away from campus. After Parisi moved back in with his parents, he sought legal counsel, who discovered that his accuser and her boyfriend didn’t cooperate with Madison police following the initial rape accusation. Finally, in late November, Drew University reopened its investigation of the matter under pressure from Parisi’s father and after Parisi's lawyer discovered that the two were not cooperating with police. Around Nov. 30, 2013, the woman again asked her friend to lie about the sexual encounter with Parisi — this time to the university's Human Right Committee, and the friend never did.
Drew, according to Parisi’s lawsuit, never interviewed the accuser's friend during its investigation. The university, a private school of about 2,400 students, denied Parisi's assertion, saying the friend rejected repeated requests for a statement about the alleged assault. On Dec. 17, 2013 — nearly three months after the incident — Drew University informed Parisi he had been found “not responsible” for violating the university’s sexual misconduct policy. A month later, the Madison Police Department sent an email to Drew saying it found no wrongdoing on Parisi's part, according to Parisi's lawsuit, which was not disputed by the university. Being accused, however, he said was enough to cause his world to collapse.
BRIAN BANKS
A native of Long Beach, California, Banks attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School, where he was teammates with DeSean Jackson, Darnell Bing, Winston Justice, and Marcedes Lewis. He was named one of Rivals.com's "Juniors to Watch" of the class of 2003, before being expelled from school due to the false rape accusations. In the summer of 2002, Banks was considered a top college football prospect. A 6-foot-4, 225-pound middle linebacker at Long Beach Poly High, Banks said he had been courted by USC, UCLA and other football powerhouses. He was attending summer school, and asked his teacher for permission to leave class so he could make a phone call, according to court papers. Then Banks, a senior, ran into Wanetta Gibson, a sophomore.
Banks said they fooled around, but that their sexual contact was consensual. His mother, Leomia Myers, believed him, and said she sold her condo and her car to pay for his defense. "I knew I didn't raise my son to do something so horrendous," she said.
Gibson's version shifted over the years. Initially, court papers show, she told a classmate in a note rife with misspellings: "he picked me up and put me in the elevator and he took me down stairs and he pulled my pants down and he raped me and he didn't have an condom on and I was a virgin now Im not." Gibson later told authorities a similar, more detailed story. But when she testified during Banks' preliminary hearing, Gibson faced the rigorous questioning typical in sexual assault cases, she changed some details and added others.
Faced with a possible 41 years to life sentence, Banks pleaded no contest to one count of forcible rape, spent five years in prison and, upon his release, was forced to register as a sex offender, five years of probation, and wear an electronic monitoring bracelet. "It's been a struggle, it's been a nightmare," he said. "It's more than I can describe, the things that I've been through." According to Banks, his lawyer told him that he stood no chance at trial because he would be tried by an all-white jury who would automatically assume that he was guilty because he was "a big, black teenager."
Meanwhile Gibson and her family sued the Long Beach schools. They settled the case for $1.5 million. Had Gibson not contacted Banks via Facebook, it's unlikely their paths would have crossed again. But she felt guilty that he had lost out on going to college and playing football and had "a desire to make amends," Banks' attorneys said in court documents. When Banks heard from her, he recalled, "I stopped what I was doing and got down on my knees and prayed to God to help me play my cards right." In March 2011, Gibson met with him and admitted in the presence of an attorney that she had fabricated the story. Banks secretly recorded Gibson's confession, but Gibson refused to tell prosecutors that she had lied, so that she wouldn't have to return the money she and her family had won in court, she also said she feared it would affect her relationship with her children.
Prior to the taped confession, Banks had asked for help from the California Innocence Project (CIP), a nonprofit law school clinic that investigates and litigates cases of factual innocence, but at that time there had not been sufficient evidence of Banks' innocence for them to take on the case. However, after the confession, CIP decided to make this the organization's first case involving a wrongfully convicted person who had already been released from prison. The video evidence was not admissible in court, because the video had been made without Gibson's knowledge or consent and was not accompanied by a signed confession from the young woman. However, CIP was instrumental in putting together additional evidence supporting Banks’ story, which led the district attorney to dismiss all charges against him on May 24, 2012.
He was also released from sex-offender status, allowing him to resume his aborted sports career. Banks supports CIP in its efforts on behalf of the wrongly-convicted, including participating in CIP’s 2013 Innocence March. He often wears a shirt with the lettering “XONR8” (“exonerate”). On April 12, 2013, the Long Beach Unified School District announced it was suing Wanetta Gibson for $2 million in an effort to recoup the $1.5 million she received, along with attorney's fees and punitive damages. On June 14, 2013, the school district won a $2.6 million judgment against Gibson, which includes the $750,000 settlement initially paid to her along with attorney's fees, interest, and $1 million in punitive damages.
Banks signed with the Falcons on April 3, 2013, participating in Falcons offseason workouts, OTA's, and training camp. Banks made his NFL debut in a preseason game against the Cincinnati Bengals, where he picked up two tackles. He played four games with the Falcons before being released on August 30, 2013. In 2014, Banks was asked by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to speak at the 2014 NFL draft Rookie Symposium. Banks accepted and his speech was well received. A few weeks later, he was hired to join the NFL Department of Operations.
Frank Lee Smith
On April 15, 1985, an eight year old girl named Shandra Whitehead died from injuries sustained from an attack in her home by a burglar. Repetitive blows from a blunt object, later found to be a rock, in addition to attempted strangulation, contributed to the victim’s death. An autopsy revealed that the victim had been raped and sodomized.
There were no eyewitnesses to the murder of Shandra Whitehead--just her mother's glimpse of a man's shoulders as he fled the family's Fort Lauderdale home that night in April 1985, and there was no physical evidence to tie Frank Lee Smith to the crime. What prosecutors did have were reports from two people--Chiquita Lowe and Gerald Davis, both 19--each of whom reported spotting a black male, about six feet tall, with muscular upper arms, shoulders and chest, a dark complexion, about thirty years old, and wearing an orange t-shirt and jeans, scraggly-hair, delirious black man with a droopy eye in the neighborhood at the time of the crime.
Not long after the two teens helped police develop a composite sketch of the man they saw, Lowe's family excitedly told her that the man in the sketch was standing outside their home, trying to sell them a television set. They urged her to call the police. The man outside Lowe's house was Frank Lee Smith, 38, a former convict out on parole after serving fifteen years in jail for manslaughter and a murder committed while he was a teenager. Based upon Lowe's identification, Smith was arrested and charged with Whitehead's murder. Lowe was to be the star witness at Smith's trial, but she began to have doubts. "When I went into the courtroom and seen [Smith], he was too skinny, too tall, and he did not have the droopy eye."
Despite her misgivings, Lowe confirmed her identification of Smith at the trial. "I was pressured by my family, people that's in my neighborhood, and the police officer," she says. "They kept telling me that I'm the only one that seen that man that night." The prosecution relied on the identification of Smith by the victim's mother and Smith's criminal history. She identified him as the man she saw leaving her home through the living room window on the night of the murder. At trial, the defense's insanity plea failed and the jury unanimously recommended the death penalty. Although former Governor Bob Martinez signed a death warrant in 1989 and shortly after the state scheduled Smith's execution, defense team investigator Jeff Walsh came across the name of Eddie Lee Mosley, a suspect in a number of rapes and murders of young black women that had occurred in Shandra Whitehead's neighborhood.
Smith was able to win a stay of execution in January 1990. Mosley was well-known to local law enforcement. In fact, two local police officers had begun to detect a pattern between local murders and Mosley's release from prison or mental hospitals. "When [Mosley is] incarcerated there are no unsolved rape/murders of black females in northwest Fort Lauderdale," police officer Kevin Allen told FRONTLINE. "Immediately upon his release or within thirty days, we find a black female [murdered] at the rate of one a month until he is incarcerated again. And that history...repeated itself consistently...." At the time of Shandra Whitehead's murder, Walsh learned, Mosley was back on the streets.
He was also acquainted with the victim: Shandra's mother was his cousin. But even more striking was his mug shot: Mosley bore an uncanny resemblance to the police sketch of the suspect--droopy eye and all. When Walsh showed Mosley's photo to Chiquita Lowe, she says she immediately recognized the man she saw the night of the murder. "I seen the man like I seen him yesterday," "I seen the droopy eye, I see the look on his face and it just shook me up." She was also stricken with remorse for implicating Frank Lee Smith. "This is an innocent person that been to jail,"she says. "This man did not do this, and I feel so bad, so guilty, so ashamed." Armed with Lowe's sworn affidavit attesting to her incorrect identification, Smith's defense attorneys were optimistic as they went into an evidentiary hearing before the Florida Supreme Court. But the optimism was short lived.
There were allegations that the Florida authorities attempted to discredit Lowe's new testimony by claiming to have shown her Mosley's photo at the time of the murder.
Despite having previously testified that Lowe had been shown two lineups, lead Detective Richard Scheff--who was nominated for Deputy of the Month for solving the Whitehead case--now testified that there had been a third lineup that included Mosley. Lowe did not identify Mosley at that time, Scheff testified. Based on Det. Scheff's testimony regarding the third lineup--and Lowe's somewhat halting testimony--the court denied Smith's motion for a new trial. Smith would wait seven years for another hearing.
Smith's attorney's several motions requesting DNA testing, all of which were ultimately denied by the state. Only after Smith died of cancer January 30, 2000, was a blood sample from Smith obtained by the state prosecutor’s office, which was then tested against a semen sample taken from the victim’s vagina. The samples were sent to the FBI laboratory, which reported that Frank Lee Smith was excluded as the depositor of the semen. Eddie Lee Mosley was linked through DNA tests to two other murders for which an innocent man had been convicted. The results of the belated DNA tests--which confirmed that Shandra Whitehead had been raped and murdered by Eddie Lee Mosley--were of little comfort to Chiquita Lowe. "I didn't get a chance to even ask him is he upset with me, and that's something that's really just inside of me, just tearing me apart," "If it wasn't for me, he wouldn't have to go through all that torture and torment...I feel that it's my fault."
Defense investigator Walsh stated that the last time he visited Smith in prison, his client was essentially naked and chained to a hospital gurney. Smith was dehydrated, Walsh says, and looked as though he were starving. "It just goes back to the truth of the matter," Walsh says. "[The authorities] just didn't care about him as a human being at all." On December 15, 2000, eleven months after his death, and fourteen years after his 1986 conviction, Frank Lee Smith was exonerated based on exculpatory DNA testing results. Eddie Lee Mosley is currently living in the Tacachale State Center for mentally disabled defendants in Gainesville, Florida. DNA testing implicating Mosley was also presented in the case of Jerry Frank Townsend, who spent twenty-two years in prison after confessing to two crimes he didn't commit. Smith's heirs settled a wrongful conviction lawsuit against the Broward County Sheriff's Office in 2013 for $340,000.
Because of a long reinforced false belief of black men being sexually promiscuous and/or aggressive, there is still a residual impact of this thought in the criminal justice system when it comes to sexual assault committed by black men. There is no recent pattern since the Jim Crow laws that suggest the racist implication begins at the accuser, as opposed to during Jim Crow where such accusations could be purely racially motivated. It seems as time goes on, the racial bias raises higher and higher, with the trickle of equalism going upwards instead of down. First, it was the accusers, then the cops and detectives, now the judges and higher court officials are where the seeds of racially biased criminal justice are planted. With any luck, progress, and lots of patience, those implications from the Jim Crow (and before) era will eventually be forever snuffed out, and the men and women of America of any race will be judged fairly with the facts of a case, rather than be judged on the amount of melanin in their skin.
Though this crime of false rape allegations is proportionally committed more against black men, this does not mean any other races are immune to this, or never accused as in the case of Kevin Parisi. Often these crimes are committed against white men in college because of the sexually charged nature of the environment, along with the high amount of drugs and alcohol available to both the accusers and the victim. While misquoted and altered rape statistics are thrown around quite often, making college seem like a war zone against women. When in reality, though more women have been sexually assaulted (not necessarily raped) by the time they reach college age, men are far more likely to be raped during their time in college than a woman is. Yet it is much more rare to hear a false accusation of rape against a woman from a man, and this is because of the social stigmas men face when it comes to woman-on-man rape. They are often ridiculed, called liars or pussies, assumed to be strong enough to stop it, assumed to be gay and are subject to physical violence.
In the time of # MeToo and # TimesUp, there is a forced pressure to always believe the victim (epecially if she's a woman), no matter what the situation is. Some even believe a person can retract consent after the sex act that they consented to previously! If a man and woman get married willfully and consensually, and the next day the woman wants a divorce, was it a forced marriage? Of course not. Many 3rd-Wave feminists believe the women first and always, even when the woman is the criminal, and while I can see how they may believe this helps victims, it only hurts them. Women are not fragile, perfect, unicorn-like creatures that can do no wrong, as a woman with women friends; women can be manipulative, abusive, cruel, horrendous excuses for human beings and should never be exempt from being treated equally to men. Some women cry rape, and denying that fact only keeps innocent men in jail and real rape victims in the shadows.
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