Linda Fairstein - Why Some Women Lie About Rape

IT IS NEITHER EASY nor pleasant for a woman to report a rape to law enforcement or to show up at a hospital emergency room for an examination claiming to be a victim of a sexual assault. The woman must answer questions, in excruciating detail, about a forced intimate encounter. She must undergo head-to-toe probing examinations of her body for trace evidencenot something to subject oneself to for no good reason. The assumption is, then, that women going through the legal and medical aftermath of a rape have told the truth about their victimization. Why else would they endure such ordeals in a courtroom or a medical suite?

And yet the sad fact is that there are examples of false reports of rape. The occurrence of such an act was always one of the most frustrating aspects of the work my colleagues and I did in the criminal justice system, since one such incident reflects so badly on the thousands of legitimate victims who look to us for help.

In May 2012, the American Bar Association Journal reported on an unusual case that took place in Long Beach, California, more than a decade ago. At the time, the young womans name was sealed because she was protected as a rape victim. Her alleged attacker was a high school football star who was being recruited by several colleges for a sports scholarship. The two young adults knew each other and both admitted to sexual foreplay, but the accusernow identified as Wanetta Gibsoncried rape after their time together. Her accused assailant was arrested, and immediately claimed that the sexual encounter was consensual, but was threatened with life imprisonment if he fought for his innocence at trial and lost. So in 2002, this talented athlete pleaded guilty to a rape he did not commit, even though there was no forensic evidence against him, and even though Gibsons story kept changing. He spent five years in jail rather than risk facing the highly charged accusation in front of a jury.

After his release, Gibson startled her supposed attacker by friending him on Facebook, and she later admitted making up the entire story. While confessing to this enormous lie, though, she firmly explained that she didnt want to give back the $1.5 million she scored in a judgment against the school district in which the alleged crime had occurred.

It took more than ten years for a judge to expunge the record of this falsely accused man, and there is still no explanation for Gibsons despicable conduct. The story that follows gives you some idea of why women, on rare occasions, falsely claim rape, and the devastating effects that can have on those who have been wrongly accused.

IN 2002, during one of the final cases I handled as the head of the sex-crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorneys office, I found myself in the familiar situation of being on the phone with a woman who was in tears. Several days earlier, this woman, who was in her early 20s and working in Boston, had reported to the deans office of Columbia University in New York City that she had been raped months earlier by a grad student at the school. I called to invite her to my office to press charges, but she refused to make an appointment.

While her reluctance wasnt unusualmany rape victims are unsure how to proceed after such a traumatic eventthe way her case had landed on my desk was. There was no police report nor had the woman, Katie*, gone to the hospital after the event. Rather, a prominent defense attorney phoned to alert me that his client Jake had been accused by Katie of raping her in his dorm room one weekend while she was visiting town. Since the alleged crime had taken place in my jurisdiction, I called Columbia, and the lawyers at the university happily agreed that I should interview the woman.

I treated Katie gently over the phone, but I already knew that something wasnt quite right. You see, Jake and Katie had been friends, and after she visited New York (and was, by her account, raped), she sent him an e-mail thanking him for the weekend and inviting him to share an apartment with her the next summer. (Jakes lawyer had passed the e-mails on to me, which Katie did not know.) After several phone conversations with her in which her allegations contradicted her own behavior, I read to her portions of her own e-mails. Reluctantly, she admitted that no rape had been committed. Yes, theyd had sex but by mutual consent. When Jake did not pursue the romance, Katie decided to exact her revenge on the business school graduate-to-be. She figured that if she made a complaint at Columbia, Jake wouldnt receive his degree and would probably lose the job hed lined up.

Its not often that I am handed clues as revealing as those e-mails, but I have had to suss out more false rape accusations than you would think. Annual statistics compiled by the FBI reveal that there are unfounded claims in every other criminal category, usually between 1.5 and 5 percent of total submitted reports. Sadly, the number is higher for forcible rapeas high as 9 percentbased on numbers reported to the FBI as well as police and prosecutorial records. Having worked in this field for decades, Ive found this phenomenon especially painful to witness. Innocent men are arrested and even imprisoned as a result of bogus claims, and the precious resources of criminal justice agencies are wasted. But most appalling is that these falsehoods trivialize the experience of every real rape survivor. The overwhelming number of reported cases is legitimate, but just one false accusation makes skeptics think the next womans claim may also be untrue, and for that, every rape victim thereafter suffers.

So with each woman who came through my office, I always tried to encourage them to press charges, but I always remained on the lookout for any telltale problems. One step to doing this was uncovering a possible motive, and over time, I came to see that there are several reasons why a woman would lie about being raped. The most common, as it was in Katies case, is to get back at a man for something. Other times, women are trying to cover up for something that theyve done wrong. Or they might be trying to extort money or are simply mentally unbalanced. During an extensive interview, I always asked a victim to go over every minute of the encounter in excruciating detail, including everything both of them said and did. Legitimate victims will almost always include lots of vivid information the first time around, whereas fakers will give a brief initial account and then pile on features as they make them up. Fortunately for us, they cant always keep their stories straight, and it is because of seemingly trivial inconsistencies that the scam becomes apparent. In revealing here how women lie about rapeand whyI hope that the pernicious practice can become easier to spot and eventually be eradicated.

Like Katie, some women have tried to turn the tables on a man after theyve been spurned romantically. Perhaps the rudest example of this behavior was one of my earliest cases, in the 1970s, when a 28-year-old woman named Louisasecretary at a prestigious New York law firmaccused her boss, a senior partner, of rape.

Louisa was brought to me by detectives from the NYPDs elite special victims unit. She claimed that her boss, Gary, had kept her at the office late one evening, and after everyone left, he threw her onto his leather couch and raped her. Louisa was the perfect witnessforthright and calm. She described a fierce struggle in which she kicked her married boss to resist his advances. We all believed her, and leaving Louisa with me, the detectives went off to arrest Gary at his office.