Opinion

OPINION: There’s Something Fishy In Ford’s Testimony

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Armando Simón Forensic Psychologist
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There have been hundreds of men who, in the past few decades, have been falsely accused (and worse — convicted) of sexual assault. 

Admittedly, the exact numbers are unknown because this is a subject that is deliberately ignored by both leftist academics and journalists who adhere to the feminist dogma that all men are rapists and/or child molesters, and who promote this vile doctrine at every opportunity.

The reeking spectacle that occurred Friday was just such an instance. The accuser was never confronted with the blatant contradictions in her evidence, nor with details of her past that would indicate that she was acting for political reasons.

Indeed, her story had holes big enough to drive through in a truck. Yet we saw grown men cowering, terrified to bring this up, scared at the automatic attacks to the accused by the leftist media, petrified of well-orchestrated shrill screams from protestors (as was Jeff Flake of two shrieking feminists and 14 journalists covering the ambush). In other words, cowardice, lacking backbone) was evident for all to see.

And, of course, as usual, the leftist media indulged in their usual lynch journalism.

Inherent in the shrieking of protestors and of the snarky media is the underlying assumption — which must never be questioned — that women are incapable of lying, or of manipulation. Here is a very tiny sample of instances where women have been caught falsely accusing innocent men of “rape”:

  1. A student by the name of Caleb Warner was accused of rape by a female student. He was suspended from the University of North Dakota. But the police charged the accuser with filing a false police report when Warner produced evidence of her asking him to have sex with her. Robert Kelley, the university’s president refused to reinstate Warner.
  2. A man spent four and a half years in prison falsely accused of rape until evidence was revealed that the woman had actually requested sex 29 times, whereupon he was freed.
  3. Emma Sulkowicz dragged a blue mattress around Columbia University’s campus in 2014 to dramatize her plight as a rape victim. The accused provided indisputable proof that she had lied in accusing him. Mattress Girl became famous, lionized by third-wave feminists.
  4. Sherita Dixon-Cole of Grapevine, Texas, was driving drunk when she was stopped by a trooper and arrested and taken to jail. The next day she stated that the trooper offered to release her if she consented to have sex. The cameras showed that she had lied.
  5. Robin Levitski, a student at Clarke University, claimed to have been abducted and raped by an individual she met online. She subsequently admitted to lying in crying rape when her family found her sex photos.
  6. In Allegheny College, one John Doe had consensual sex with a Jane Doe. When the latter went to a party and saw him with another girl, she subsequently cried rape. Evidence proved her wrong.
  7. For over a year, Nikki Yovino insisted that she had been raped by two football players. It turned out that she had been lying the entire time. The sex had been consensual. The only question remaining is whether she had sex with both at the same time.

The above instances involved boyfriend/girlfriend. The same phenomenon applies to married couples.

But, for the sake of argument, let us be fair — in fact, let us be more than fair — and bend over backward (not as much as the Republicans in the committee, who looked like pretzels) and assume that Ford was sexually assaulted.

In the field of psychology, there are certain facts that are written in stone. One of them is that memory is unreliable. Most people think of memory as if it was a spool of film, which can be rewound in order to remember something, and it will be accurate. This is false.

Memory can be contaminated. Memory can be affected by social influences. The dates and times of past events can be erroneous. Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, now at the University of California, Irvine, has done extensive work in this area and is considered the expert in the field of memory malleability. And all this does not take into account the farce that was “recovered memories.”

So if we agree, for the sake of argument, that something indeed happened to Ford decades ago, as she claims, and if we take Kavanaugh’s reputation, testimony and alleged witnesses — as well as his supporters’ testimonies — into account, the conclusion is still blurry and subject to hard evidence. 

As a psychologist, she should know this. Regardless, this will not make the slightest impression on those protesting Kavanaugh.

Armando Simón is the author of The U and A Cuban from Kansas.


The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.