The Buffalo Bills have some apologizing to do.
In August of last year the Buffalo Bills cut punter Matt Araiza after he was hit with a lawsuit alleging that he was part of a gang rape at a party. The problem is, it turns out the victim is a big liar — and after viewing videos of the alleged incident and talking to witnesses, the prosecutor declined to press charges. The alleged victim’s initial charges read like a horror novel.
The graphic allegations in the civil lawsuit, however, created a public frenzy. It included a claim that during an Oct. 15, 2021, party at a home near the SDSU campus, Araiza led the girl into a bedroom where “at least three other men” waited.
“Once inside, Araiza threw [the girl] onto the bed face first,” the lawsuit read. “[The girl] went in and in and out of consciousness while” suffering through “the horrific gang rape.” It lasted an hour and a half, the lawsuit read, before she “stumbled out of the room bloody and crying” in part because “multiple piercings had ripped through the skin during the attack.”
Too bad for the accused, as none of it was real. Of course, their lives were all ruined. Araiza lost his NFL contract, which he worked his whole life to get.
Araiza remains out of football despite prosecutors announcing on Dec. 7, 2022, that after conducting their own 124-day investigation, they wouldn’t press any criminal charges in the case. However, few details, let alone their reasoning or additional exculpatory evidence, were included in the initial statement.
A fuller picture of what police and prosecutors found, however, is now available via a 200-plus-page transcript obtained by Yahoo Sports of a 100-minute meeting in which a deputy district attorney offered a detailed explanation to the girl and her attorneys.
Perhaps most notably, the district attorney’s office concluded that Araiza couldn’t have led the girl into the alleged gang rape because he “left” the home at about 12:30 a.m., an hour prior to when evidence suggested the alleged gang rape would have occurred.
He wasn’t even there! You’d think that would have been cleared up a long time ago, before he lost his job, but it wasn’t and now he’s being punished for a crime he didn’t commit and was never arrested for. The victim was 17 at the time of the party but told everyone there she was 18. She was also filmed having several sexual encounters with men at the party while enjoying herself.
“There’s nothing in the videos that sound like you’re saying ‘stop’ or ‘this hurts’ or anything like that,” Ted Mansour, an investigator for the San Diego County district attorney’s office, said at the meeting.
The prosecutors offered to show the girl and her lawyers all of the videos they culled from cell phones. The girl watched one during the meeting before deciding that was enough. None of the lawyers in the civil case, or Araiza himself, has seen the videos because they involve sex with an underage girl. Araiza’s legal team is trying to acquire the videos through a court order as a way to defend him against the allegations.
How much longer will we punish men who are simply accused by women? What the alleged victim did in this case is not rare or unusual. I’ve written an entire book about the women who do this called “Believe Evidence: The Death of Due Process from Salome to #MeToo,” and you can pick it up on Amazon today. The most important chapter teaches young men how to avoid lying wretches like this. It’s a must-read for any college-aged male who wants to make it out of college without a rape allegation. Get it.
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