A New Hampshire College student has been arrested for submitting a false police report. She lied about being drugged by a UNH fraternity. That’s tantamount to attempted rape. Sadly fake rape is not as uncommon as you’d think. So, the burning question is, what’s the punishment for that?
Related: Female Student Gets One Year in Jail For False Rape Accusation
I have long argued that the tendency to report fake rapes does an injustice to women who are actually assaulted. Rape is real, and it happens, and it is awful. These women need support and deserve justice.
On the flip side, using their right to justice as a tool to get even with someone is sinister. And while I am unclear about her motivation, in this case, Olivia LeClerc filed a false report. She lied.
LeClerc is accused of presenting police with a drug test which showed she had benzodiazepines (Xanax) in her system after a social at Kappa Sigma the last week of February. Later, she recanted her story, police said, admitting that she had forged the document.
The cops are pissed and for good reason. They allocated resources to investigate these claims, as they should. But the punishment for that is not going to be equal to the actual crime.
The more heinous modern example, outside the Kavanaugh accusations, is the Duke Lacrosse Team scandal. Lives and livelihoods ruined over a lie.
Olivia got the frat shut down. The national suspended the chapter pending the investigation. Not every young man in that fraternity is a saint but they are not guilty of this. What amounts to attempted rape. And yet, they had to wear the scarlet letter placed on them by a disgruntled co-ed and UNH is still investigating.
The fraternity or Olivia?
The culture is so corrosive to men these days that it may be difficult to tell. Mansplaining, Manspreading, and toxic masculinity. Search the latter on the UNH website and you’ll get a few hits. Papers, talks, it’s a thing. It creates a culture.
One where Olivia “imagined a date-rape drug” into her own drink then went to the police. Except there was no drug. The police investigated, found no cause, and at some point, Olivia admitted the truth.
What’s the punishment for that? Not what the police will charge her with but UNH? Is there an academic or professional price for trying to destroy someone else’s life for fun or out of spite? Or do they brush it off and look the other way?
And where do the so-called women’s rights group stand on these sorts of things?
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