I can understand why some feminist bloggers are digging in their heels in the aftermath of the dismissal of charges against the Duke lacrosse players. Obviously, falsely accusing people of rape is a tremendously destructive act, both for its effect on the accused and because it tends to make people more skeptical of genuine victims, who often have plenty of difficulty proving their cases. But the bile flung at the accuser, whose identity is now being very publicly aired, is unsettling. Not because she wouldn’t be blameworthy if she did fabricate the whole story, but because it seems to send the message: If you make an accusation of rape and (as will often be the case even when one really did occur) the charges can’t be proven, your name will be made public, and if the case is high profile enough, dragged through the mud at length. False accusations of rape are awful, but they’re probably a lot less common than real rapes going unreported by women who fear they’ll be disbelieved, or even attacked.

All that said, this post at Feministing is truly wrongheaded:

I just want to say first and foremost, I still stand by what I say and have said. It does look bad for people to support accused rapists, at that point we didn’t know the facts either way. Furthermore, women of color are in fact OFTEN sexually assaulted and usually the criminal justice system and/or the media either overlook it or mishandle it. Women of color often have a higher burden of proof that they are not lying about rape. Case in point (as Amanda and others stated ): when the lack of DNA evidence was announced — before we even knew whether the players were innocent or not — people were quite quick to accuse the accuser of being guilty of lying. [….] The charges were dropped. Does this mean that they are innocent? None of us actually know what happened that night. Sorry, unless you were there, you don’t know what happened.

This is pretty clearly a huge cop out, no? Sure, none of us were there. But we still have to attempt to determine whether a crime occurred in cases like these, and who’s responsible. If the evidence for the players’ guilt had turned out to be as compelling as the evidence we now have suggesting the story was fabricated, I very much doubt we’d have seen a parallel post pointing out that, as we weren’t there, we should recall that they might well be innocent after all.

More importantly, I’m wondering why it necessarily “does look bad for people to support accused rapists” in this context. Certainly, it would look bad if people utterly unconnected to the players or the situation presumed that, say, a black stripper accusing white college students had to be lying. But the “people” in question here are the women’s lacrosse team at Duke, most of whom presumably knew the accused. If they thought their friends were falsely accused, why on earth wouldn’t they support them? Certainly if I were ever accused of rape, I would hope everyone who knows me at all well would be quick to say: “That can’t be true; he’s just not capable of such a thing,” rather than throwing up their hands and saying “Well, we weren’t there, so we’ve got to wait on the forensic evidence.”

Finally, if the big fear here is that people will overgeneralize from this case—presuming that a minority sexworker accusing affluent white students is lying—it seems as though it’s exactly the wrong response to say “well, never mind the details of this case, women of color really are raped and disbelieved all the time.” Because that sure makes it sound as though you care about particular high-profile instances like this mainly as symbols of broader race, class, or gender inequity, and so will always reflexively rally to the side of a similarly situated accuser, whatever the facts. And if that’s the impression you give, don’t be surprised if, next time around, your support isn’t seen as counting for a whole lot.