Many people are getting caught up in "false accusations", and truth/falsehood is the focus. This isn't productive, as the standard for "true" and "false" depend on perspective. Even the courts don't use "true" and "false", because these are personal terms.

We should shift focus towards genuine vs disingenuous.

A person can genuinely believe that they have been assaulted/raped but be misguided about the events, such that a court would disagree. This is not a "false" claim, it is simply a misinformed, misguided, mistake. However, when an accusation is made, the legal system should be responsible for looking into it in an unbiased manner. Furthermore, the accuser should not be punished because they were being genuine, and similarly there should be no publicity about the situation until AFTER the legal system has completed its investigation because the accused should not be tried by the public based on simply an accusation.

For a genuine accusation, the legal system could find it not-credible and the events didn't occur as claimed, it could find it not-credible and the events did not occur as claimed, it could find it credible and the events didn't occur as claimed, it could find it credible and the events did not occur as claimed. Similarly for a disingenuous accusation.

There are THREE separate scales here, that are unfortunately disconnected: (Everyone would like these three scales to be highly correlated, but they are controlled by different people and thus only weakly correlated.)

  1. Genuinity - whether the accuser genuinely believes in the accusation (misguided or not is irrelevant)

  2. Credible - whether the legal system finds the accusation credible and prosecutes (this can happen regardless of the other two scales)

  3. Actuality - whether the events did occur as described.

Breaking these three things down into "true" and "false" does a disservice to the entire system.

Genuine claims that are credible and that actually happened should obviously result in a conviction - everyone wants that to happen.

Disingenuous claims that are credible but did not actually happen is something that everyone should want to avoid.

Disingenuous claims that are not credible and did not actually happen is the most dangerous of all, and is what people here are fearful of - that in the feminist push for all claims to be treated as genuine, the credibility and actuality scales will be ignored.

When we allow the feminists to simplify the issue and continue to fight on grounds of true/false, they will always win because of optics. It is easy to make our arguments appear to be about acquitting genuine/credible/actual events.