al2simon: I know you think invoking rape culture is counter productive. I don’t know whether you believe in it or not. It is very real to me.
Let’s just assume for the sake of argument Emma was raped and the rapist not punished. This does happen to women. The mattress project publicizes that fact. To me, it is an extremely powerful message about refusing to be silenced.
Friends who worked in gay rights have repeatedly told me the way to create change is to “put a face on it” and it seems to me this strategy has worked really well. Some had to be brave enough to be that public face. And they have changed cultural norms.
Emma is “putting a face on it” for those who don’t like to think about rape on campus. It is possible she is creating a narrative that empowers others to come forward.
However, any good the mattress project accomplishes will be meaningless in my mind if Paul is innocent. It is not worth hurting an innocent. Someone here is very much in the wrong. imho
Emma and Paul have both chosen the spotlight now. It is inevitable the story will play out in some way.
Oh, OK, al2simon, I forgot the Stanford Alaska woman. As you say, she went to the police. And for sure the Vanderbilt woman is brave and gutsy.
Irrelevant. We don’t have to look into the motivations of false accusers; we just have to consider the probability that two false accusers independently pick the same guy. Evil scheming publicity-hungry Emma picks someone to falsely accuse; she picks Paul. Now there’s going to be another evil person making another false accusation: it’s “Adam,” and oh what a coincidence, he picks Paul too. Very unlikely.
The article reports Adam saying he was sexually assaulted a year before Emma and reporting it to a student group at that time. This report would have nothing to do with Emma. Unless Emma was aware of the report, hers has nothing to do with his.
Assuming Adam is real and made the report.
Now this has been reported in Jezebel, it is inconceivable to me that Adam isn’t being pursued by reporters to expand on the story. If Adam exists.
adding: this is very difficult to discuss unless everyone has read the same article.
once again, Adam claims he was sexually assaulted, though he doesn’t provide details.
@momofthreeboys Paul was not “already in the spotlight” when he reported him to ADP. Adam was assaulted in 2011 and reported it to the student organization a “few months later.” Looks like he was the first to report. When Emma’s case got all the notoriety he then went and notified Columbia of the assault and filed a Title IX complaint in the Fall of 2014.
I don’t get this focus on probability making it “very unlikely” that someone else would pick someone to accuse if the allegation was false. I get the Cosby allegations, so many women, so much detail and such similar accusations. The Columbia stuff seems very different -different types of allegations, level of relationship, gender involved, etc. Maybe I need to read more about Adam’s complaint but I thought it had more to do with groping, possible unwanted advances?
When you first started talking numbers and formulas and probabilities, and FBI statistics, and police statistics, I thought you were going to expand your focus to create a formula essentially proving the existence of rape culture.
alh - Even though I disagree somewhat strongly about the morality of the mattress stunt, I do see how a reasonable person who has good values could see things differently. Given the evidence, I also think it’s very possible that people will later be able to do a victory dance over the carcass of my dead posts on this subject And if Emma turns out to be vindicated then even though I wouldn’t be happy about sacrificing the principles involved, I too would admire her bravery (if not her tactics).
As to the rape culture thing, I do think it’s divisive language on an issue that shouldn’t be that hard to build consensus for. Even though I never would claim to be a saint please know that most men would never do such things, nor would they tolerate such things in their presence, nor can they even understand such things. But I’ve also been confronted with provable incidents and statistics that I can’t ignore. It’s like being told my memory of my childhood is false and I actually was born a Martian. I don’t know how to reconcile this in my head. But I do think people like me are the majority, and the rape culture language doesn’t build support with them.
CF - I think you understand the issue perfectly. The key question is whether the additional accusation is independent or whether a set of false accusations is staged / attract each other. This is what I was using as one of my prior hypotheses. Common sense tells people that; sometimes people who use math get so enamored with their calculations they forget their common sense - as they say, “The map is not the territory”.
Perhaps you’ve read facts about Adam’s accusation that make it impossible for his accusation to be coordinated with Emma’s? I agree that if it were truly independent then that would be very damning in my mind (though in a court of law they don’t allow any evidence like this, for very good reason).
Regardless, I don’t think anybody can estimate these parameters. Certainly 1/2 is just a completely arbitrary number between 0 and 1 in this context. If Adam’s accusation were independent then the true number might be 0.1%-100%, depending very much on whether you believe the serial rapist thing. Anyway, I hope you & @dstark agree it’s not productive to debate probability anymore.
Well. this story will never be anything more than a he said, she said and some people will think Emma is hero for some reason and others will disagree strongly. I don’t see it as progress at all. Why not have a less controversial poster girl? There is no vindicating when something happened years ago and only two people were in the room. And. she is not very sympathetic and additionally we have a girl who decided a few months later that she didn’t like the sex and a girl who claims to have been groped in a bar which is pretty common and a queer guy who was pushed and exactly what else I don’t know but apparently something sexual. Nope. This is not a pattern yet, imho.
Alsimon2. No. I don’t agree.
But I will stop for now.
I was an option market maker. I understand probabilities. I understand Black Swans. I understand outliers. I had to use probalities to make a living. If I was wrong, I got … I lost real money.
The four main questions are…is the Adam story true? What is the relationship between Emma and Adam? Did Emma know Adam’s story when she presented her story? Even then, where are we?
If the Adam story is true or false…maybe that is all we need.
I realized everything happens but definitions these days have become a problem. And, here we have nothing. Posters on this thread are saying he was raped so I’m guessing it was somewhere between butt slapping and full on rape but I have no idea, therefore no opinion. Why the bar girl is even in this bunch I really don’t know, either.
Also, I do not think Emma is lying. I’m reasonably convinced that she believes she was raped and the whole point is that she is supposed to be believed. Done deal. She gets aggressively offended by questions and gets pretty nasty about it, too. Some of these young women have been taught to believe they were or will be victims and she is not the only one to make a career of it. I find it quite sad, really.
@al2simon " but I’ve heard lawyers discuss employing strategies like this and it’s really not something a 19 year old would think of on her own. It was a calculated way to leak his name while avoiding a lawsuit."
I don’t perceive the mattress carrying as something a lawyer would come up with. Just don’t think this is the way they think. Both her parents are manhattan psychiatrists. Thats my guess. The mattress carrying is a way to work out all the emotions she feels for the injustice of Columbia’s ruling against her.
That doesn’t make sense to me. If it’s wrong for Columbia to allow the mattress project because Nunberger was not found responsible, it will still have been wrong if he is later determined to be guilty.
I’m sure that is true of you. But unfortunately, I am unable to be as sanguine as you are about “most men.” Consider this: when Vandenburg and his evil gang brought their victim back to his dorm room to gang rape her, his roommate was there. Nobody seems to have considered that the roommate would even possibly do the normal thing and call the police, and he didn’t. While she was being raped, he turned his back to go to sleep. Two of Vandenburg’s friends were sent the video of the gang rape afterwards; they did nothing. Numerous men saw the victim lying half-naked and unconscious in the hallway; nobody did anything. Several football friends learned of the crime afterwards. They acted-- acted to cover up the crime. A lot of men had a chance to do the right thing, but none of them did. Where were the “most men” who wouldn’t tolerate gang rape? Nowhere in evidence. That looks like rape culture to me.
Consider the Steubenville case. Again, there were numerous young men there during the attack. Nobody did anything. Afterwards some adult men learned of the case. They covered it up. That looks like rape culture to me.
How about the case that happened near me, where yet another girl, Audrie Potts, was unconscious and was sexually assaulted by male bystanders, who yet again took pictures and shared them with their friends? And yet again, nobody called the police. The police finally got involved in that case-- after Audrie found out about the pictures and hanged herself. Rape culture.
When was the last time a man watching a gang rape called the police? I’ve never heard of a man who watched a gang rape calling the police. And no man there thinks anyone will call the police. Rape culture.
And if Emma turns out to be vindicated then even though I wouldn’t be happy about sacrificing the principles involved, I too would admire her bravery (if not her tactics).