While it can be impossible to prove a negative, way too much of this story has fallen through from start to finish. Those guys might have been assholes, but they're not rapists.

If you're innocent until proven guilty, than the accusation should be doubted unless substantiated.

Which is a separate argument from someone saying that this is an instance where women's rights and rape victims' rights groups should protest false rape accusations.

women's rights groups, etc. have to much on their plate to deal with this

people in NC should be pissed that the da or whatever is immune from civil action

By that standard though, no circumstance is. Every piece of this girl's story has fallen through or changed multiple times. When IS the proper instance for victim's rights groups to protest false accusations except when accusations appear to be false?

I mean I can't think of anytime when one can be 100% certain that the woman lied unless she admits it herself.

There are cases where the accusations are proven to be false. However that proof is provided, that has not happened in this case.

News article profiles of the accuser are only journalism until the legal realm takes hold of the information and goes after the accuser for false accusations. When the legal realm is successful in that endeavor, then this case can be used as an instance of false accusations.

I disagree (though I'm not really talking about the profiles of the accuser).

I'm not sure why it only merits that sort of attention when someone legally pursues the matter. What if nothing criminal happens, but there is a civil suit? A positive judgement in a civil case wouldn't prove that the accusations were false as the burden of proof is different. Take OJ and his criminal vs. civil cases. (w/o completely opening that can'o'worms)

This is indeed only journalism, but I don't agree that activism should particularly. be avoided here.

And can you give me some examples of these cases? Because I don't see many courts proving accusations false, just determining that there is no evidence the accusation is true.

Oh really? Because they didn't have too much on their plate to jump on the back of the story and ride it to Notorietyville, did they?

To me, that's the real problem - there's no need to strike back at the accuser if we don't blow up the (similarly unsubstantiated) accusations in the first place. The Court of Public Opinion, rather than the Court of Law, makes this a problem.

i believe that the north carolina attorney general pronounced the three young men innocent in his statement yesterday.

and i did not say that womens groups, etc. should protest, only that they and we should be concerned that women making false accusations could make it harder for a real victim to have her story believed.

But that's always been a concern.

I don't really care what happens to the girl, she's obviously got issues that won't be aided by us going after her. If there is solid grounds for a charge against her, sure, but otherwise I'm not really concerned.

I would like to have a societal discussion about those who were all to eager to nail some rich white kids to the wall, however. It appears white privilege didn't work out overly well in this instance.

But she doesn't. (Not that she has assets worth suing over or that it's a good course of action.)

I never bothered to read many of the full statement by the faculty members, not just the big group one but the, apparently from what I've read about them, more extreme individual statements.

Maybe they are some of the folks the players ought to actually try to recover damages from for defamation, libel and slander.

I feel bad for the accuser, as perverse as that sounds. Of course not as bad as I do about the victims of her false accusations. But the circumstances of her life, especially before this incident really seem to suck for reasons beyond those of her own making.

She does need to be punished, however, if it turns out that her statements can be proven to be false. And I think there's a chance as Nifong defends himself from charges against him, that the nature of her accusations and how they didn't match the evidence will become more clear.

No matter what, it's not appropriate that now that the charges didn't stick at any level, that the media and everyone just kind of shrug and lose interests with kind of a "Oh, well it turned out that these particular rich white athletes weren't rapist but that doesn't mean what we said wasn't generally true" attitude. The people who screwed up these guys' lives need to be held responsible.

Not only were the charges dropped, but North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper ". . .didn't just dismiss all the remaining charges against Evans, Seligmann and Finnerty. He took the extra step of declaring the players innocent . . ." according to the AP.
The prosecutor may be disbarred. I think it may fairly be said that the stripper's accusations have been found to be false.