Schadrach

You only asked about rape/SA, so it was the only topic I responded to. According to FBI stats, the 8-10% is actually pretty typical for many other crimes too, but falsely accusing someone of most other crimes aside from something like murder is going to have consequences that are either shorter term or less severe (reputational consequences of being falsely accused of beating someone up are smaller than being falsely accused of rape, for example). Also, rape/SA often has the accusation itself as the primary or occasionally only evidence against the accused, and sometimes that is enough especially in older cases where any physical evidence would be long gone.

inconvenienced

“Inconvenienced” to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.

The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were “inconvenienced”, and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.

false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations

In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.

The distinction between rape and sex is consent. Whether a given sex act is consensual or not exists only in the minds of those involved in it (consent is a mental state, not something directly observable from outside), unless communicated and when communicated only the communication exists which is likely not in any fixed form.

How bad does the damage from the false accusation need to be?

One I’m fond of pointing to as evidence that they happen is Tracy West accusing her ex Louis Gonzales. He spent three months in jail while it was being investigated, and only got out because he happened to have a very heavily corroborated alibi for the day that left only a 6 minute window during which he would have had to travel a total of 2 miles, obtain a duffel bag full of forensic countermeasures, subdue and rape the victim, dispose of said duffel bag in a manner it would never be recovered and return. And that 6 minute window was not when she originally said it happened, until they allowed her to revise her statement which became much fuzzier about when it happened. Also there was evidence that she was researching the way she was tied up in the days leading up to her being tied up exactly that way. By all appearances this case was about a custody dispute over their kid, and despite the case being dropped because it was physically impossible for him to have done it she still got to use it against him because fucking family courts. He eventually got a finding of factual innocence from CA courts and had the entire thing expunged from his record - to be clear, this essentially requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you could not have committed the crime. When he was interviewed by an LA paper about the case, he’d developed an obsession with being as publicly visible with as much paper trail as possible at all time, just in case because of how lucky he was with his alibi from this case (if he’d eaten before he left to get the kid, his alibi wouldn’t exist and that alibi is the reason he only spent 3 months in jail).

How about Brian Banks? Kid with a real chance of going into professional football, Falsely accused, threatened with 41 years, plead to 5 years + 5 probation + registering as a sex offender on advice of his lawyer. The accuser sues the school and wins $1.5M. 9 years later, his accuser contacts him on Facebook and they speak. He secretly records the conversation, in which she admits to having lied but refuses to tell authorities that because she was afraid that they might make her pay back the money. The video gets released publicly and the Innocence Project gets involved. He goes on to briefly join the UFL and then NFL after not having meaningfully played for 11 years (time that would have been the prime of his career if not for the accusation).

Speaking of the Innocence Project, what’s your opinion of them? It tends to vary for left leaning folks - either they like it because a lot of the people exonerated are POC or they hate it because a significant majority of people exonerated by it were imprisoned for some flavor of sexual assault. Go look at their list of cases: https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ According to the site when filtered for sex crimes 184 of the “more than 250” people were imprisoned wrongly for a sex crime. 124/184 of those exonerated by the Innocence Project that were imprisoned for a sex crime were misidentified by an eyewitness. For sex crimes, that eyewitness is very often the alleged victim.

SA is hard to get a conviction in.

Yeah. It turns out that something that usually has no witnesses beyond the accused and accuser, often has little or no evidence other than the accusation itself and the sole difference between it and an otherwise common and legal act exists solely in the mind of the accuser is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

Even today, the workplace death rate for men is something like 20x that of women.

Jello is just kinda… Meh.

Prior to the development of instant gelatin aka Jello, gelatin was extremely labor intensive and thus expensive. It was rich folk food that suddenly had a massive crash in price and difficulty to make. So it was in everything for a while, until it stopped being seen as this super high-class thing that the poors finally had access to.

Imagine the price of caviar suddenly plummeted to $0.01/oz, and what the next couple of years of cooking would look like as a result.