I saw a thread on Reddit that deals with a husband recounting a married woman's tale of ambiguous circumstances surrounding her infidelity.

Redditors in that thread argue a rape occurred, or not, depending on which side of that particular axe they want to grind.

That particular instance no longer interests me. What interests me in this post is the issue of how many rape stories are just flat-out lies. Data is hard to come by regarding that question. Social scientists avoid it.

What I am about to relate is anecdote, not data. Take it as such. The conversation has stuck with me over the years, and I think about it when I read debates over the statistical level of false rape claims.

A prosecutor I knew socially worked in the sex crimes division of a large American metropolitan area. He was a solid guy who came from a blue collar background, went to a good law school, and was an earnest guy with a decent sense of the world. He is the kind of guy who, if he became your brother-in-law, you would be glad your sister (or brother, given the current trends these days) found and married.

In passing, as we discussed his job, he estimated to me that around 30% of the claims he got from females are totally false. Not, "these two people had sex, and one was drunk, who can say what happened?" false. But rather "the ex-girlfriend is trying to get back at her ex by making things up" false.

He told me he routinely heard elaborate, sometimes harrowing tales from women of ex-boyfriends coming over and breaking into the house, holding a knife to her throat, raping her repeatedly, etc.

Then when his office investigators questioned the boyfriend, the accused guy would be dumfounded. The accused ex-boyfriend would sometimes then offer to show his receipts and plane tickets, proving he was in Las Vegas that day, or he would provide 5 witnesses swearing the guy was working a factory shift 50 miles away during the time he allegedly was raping the accuser. In short, the gal's report was 100% falsifiable, and the guy could show it with relative ease.

I asked the prosecutor what happened when women made those false reports? He told me no charges are filed on such women for their false reports. The prosecutors just put the file away, and thereafter ignore it.

I asked the prosecutor why this is tolerated, why are those women not charged with filing false police reports? His response was, essentially, as I recall, "We have a lot of true believers working here, who think every rape report is real, even if the details are not entirely accurate. In the true believer's view, the trauma rape victims experience is causing the facts to warp in the victim's head. Those true believer prosecutors do not accept that the woman is lying. Every story is true, it is just that we cannot prosecute, because the details she provides are wrong, due to the trauma. Others will argue that even when you show a record of prior false allegations by the same woman, to prosecute them for false charges would cause other real victims to not come forward. So better to let things slide and focus on prosecuting rapes that we can prove happened." (Not word for word, but that is the essence of it.)

At this point, on another forum, I would make the obligatory nod to civil discourse of, "Rape is a terrible crime and must be punished" but this is TheRedPill, so no such credential-establishing is necessary. We all know that neither that prosecutor nor his words are evil.

Far from evil, he was the TV-show hero sort. This guy was actually prosecuting rapes, and sending people to prison for years. That was his job, and he did it. His docket included crimes where kids were victims. He was not the sort of person who looked the other way when people were victims: he had an edge to him when it came to punishing criminals.

But he was also able to speak plainly about what he saw in life. That day, talking to that prosecutor, I got something of how he saw the machinery work inside a prosecutors' offices.

Now, to relate this back to statistics, I doubt a single one of those false reports that guy encountered ever showed up in any statistical data set as false reports.