Always Believe the Woman? Stanford Employee Arrested for Lying About Rapes

A Stanford University employee has been arrested after admitting that she lied about two different sexual assaults. Police say that Jennifer Ann Gries of Santa Clara, Calif., first reported a false sexual attack in August when she showed up at an emergency room claiming that a man grabbed her and dragged her to a restroom, where he sexually assaulted her.

In October she went to Stanford Hospital to get another rape examination after she told the nurse that she was returning to her office when a man grabbed her arm, forced her into a basement closet, and raped her. She again declined to speak with the police.

Subsequent examination of the rape kits found that they “were not consistent with her story.”

Associated Press:

In January, during an interview with a District Attorney’s Office investigator, Gries is said to have admitted to lying about the rapes and written an apology letter to the man who was the target of her allegations.

“She stated she was upset with the victim because she felt he gave her ‘false intention’ and turned her friends against her,” prosecutors said.

Gries was charged with two felony counts of perjury and two misdemeanor counts of making a false crime report to nurses at two different hospitals, prosecutors said. It was not immediately known if she had an attorney who could speak on her behalf.

In other words, the sexual assault accusations were purely for revenge. How nice of her to write an apology to the man who went through unholy hell and may have had his life ruined by this treacherous woman.

We’re told that false reports of sexual assault are “rare.” How is “rare” defined? The numbers are all over the place. Anywhere from 2-10% are estimated to be false allegations. Another meta-analysis reveals that 5% of reported sexual assaults are false. This has led to the cavalier statements that “almost no one” is accused falsely of rape or sexual assault.

So how much is “almost no one”? It’s important to remember that about 65% of sexual assaults aren’t even reported to the police. But if you take as a baseline the 298,000 rapes and sexual assaults reported in 2020, that’s nearly 15,000 men whose lives have been destroyed by women making false claims of sexual assault.

True, 15,000 is an unscientific number. It may be more or less. But how many lives are worth sacrificing in order to “believe all women”?

Fortunately, justice doesn’t work that way. And while all women who suffer the terrible trauma of being so personally violated need to come forward, the notion that we should devise a system that makes it easier to convict the man accused of assaulting them just to spare a woman from reliving the trauma may be emotionally satisfying for women but doesn’t serve the cause of justice.

It’s never been about what anyone “believes” if a sexual assault has occurred. It’s what the prosecution can prove. That’s why we have the rule of law instead of a howling mob of activists screaming for a “justice” that doesn’t exist.