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Kevin Spacey cleared over all sexual assault charges
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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WOW the number of people in this thread immediately jumping to the accusers being "false" and deserving jail. Because no actual sexual predator ever got away with it in court...
(Sex crimes are extraordinarily difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt because the actions are taken in private without a lot of physical evidence. Which sexual predators rely on to get away with their crimes, by the way.)
Perhaps we should review the sheer volume of young men from all over the US & UK reporting that Spacey was at best inappropriate with them. One of the youngest being 14 years old:
https://people.com/tv/kevin-spacey-controversy-timeline/
And just in case some of us need a refresher course, the rate of false rape accusations is low:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21164210/
And the rate of sexual assault is high:
https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/sexualviolence/fastfact.html
Indeed. In a thread a couple of days back on a different (though related) subject I was accused of being a rape apologist because I was insistent on the presumption of innocence and the beyond-reasonable-doubt standards that need to be overcome when accusations like this are slung. But it works the same in the other direction too - we can't assume that an accuser is guilty of fraud or libel or filing false reports or whatever just because they failed to prove their case.
It would not be good for justice if these situations ended up being "now that the accusation has been made someone is going to go to jail, either the accused or the accuser." The Thunderdome is not a good model to emulate.
Good thing to insist on, but be prudent. Keep in mind that, at least on reddit, there's a tendency for every thread about rape to become a thread about false accusations. I wasn't there, but in general, sometimes people object not to the presumption of innocence but to people bringing it up.