Lets look at the poor french guy who was head of the IMF. A woman makes an allegation about what happened in the hotel room...the guy is dragged off the plane...handcuffed...and the next day dragged into court with handcuffs...unshaven....appears before the judge...sent to the worst prison in the USA....and waits there a few days...until he gets bail. Now if this was a poor sucker he would still be in jail. And yet, he hasn't been proven guilty etc.
Now that is cruel. And if it is proven that the woman lied...what then?
Foolishly I looked at this thread before I logged on, and saw this stuff. The mere fact ... that it is one of those posts ... with dots ... should have warned me to LOOK AWAY NOW. But now I am hooked.
US laws treats an attempt at rape as a serious crime, since rape is an intolerable invasion of a person's body. and a gross disrespect to their rights to decide what is done with that body. I'm OK with that, and so are most men who have learned to respect and love the women in their lives.
US police practice takes allegations of rape or attempted rape seriously, in part since it is well known that this is not an allegation that any normal woman will make lightly, partly because there are so many stupid pigs like whyme about, and partly because they know that on the witness stand the defense attorney will do his best to suggest that she is a whore, either amateur or professional, or that she is mentally unbalanced, or that she is a blackmailer.
A poor African immigrant woman went to the NYPD, who are by no means bleeding-heart liberals, and said that a man had jumped out of the shower and tried to rape her while she was doing her job of cleaning a hotel room. They found her story worth taking seriously, to the point that when they found the man was just about to leave the US for a country (France) which does not have a good record of extraditing its nationals to the US on sex charges (think Polanski), they took rapid action to stop him leaving. He went before a judge as soon as practicable, and both sets of attorneys were free to persuade the judge to give him bail or refuse it. At that time the judge thought it was not safe to do so because of the risk he might abscond: now a later judge has decided to grant bail, but under very strict conditions. Further, a Grand Jury of randomly chosen NY citizens has looked at the evidence for the charges and decided that they should go to trial. No system of justice is perfect, but I think this one is by no means the worst one in the world.
If whyme thinks US prisons are nasty, brutal places, and could and ought to be made better, then I am with him there. If he dislikes the media-generated custom of the 'perp walk' in handcuffs when a prisoner poses no risk of violent attempts at escape, I am with him there.
But the fact that as soon as someone rich and powerful and male is accused of attempted rape by someone poor and powerless and female he breaks out his lavender-scented handkerchief and bursts into tears of pity at the cruelty of it all - frankly that makes me feel like puking.