Studies have found that false accusations are quite rare, but when they do happen, they tend to share several important characteristics. To anyone familiar with false rape accusations, the striking thing about this story is that it’s so undramatic. False stories typically have a lurid quality, often involving bizarre forms of cruelty that don’t always strictly make sense.
A good example is the University of Virginia student who accused several fraternity brothers of gang rape in a 2015 Rolling Stone article that was later proved to be fabricated. In the article, the accuser said that her attacker jumped her and crashed them both through a glass table to the floor, where he and six other men proceeded to rape her on the broken glass for three hours while calling her “it” and behaving with inhuman brutality.
In another famous case, a stripper hired to dance at a party at Duke falsely accused members of the lacrosse team of rape. In her story, the accuser described being suspended from a ceiling in the bathroom while three men attacked her at once. In another version of her story, she said she had been raped by 20 white men.
The reason for this dramatizing tendency is clear. There’s no point in making up a rape story that may cause people to minimize the seriousness of the allegation or make them think, “So what?” It’s crucial to a false accuser to tell a story so horrific that no normal person could fail to be moved.