RE: letter to the editor

The other night my husband and I had it out at the grocery store. He commented on a post I wrote, and I deleted his comment. He was pissed because I censored a comment that someone (though I was pretty sure it was him when I deleted it) made about something I wrote, and he was also pissed because since I wrote that post, things have changed. The original post was about how a woman was raped at night near a place where I had just gone running alone the night before. I don't intend to stop running or change my life because of it, but I do intend to go running before dark if I'm going alone, stay in areas where people are, and consider carrying my cell phone. A few days after the woman reported the assault to the police, she recanted her story. In a follow-up interview with the police, she admitted that she had consensual sex with a man she met on the internet.

Let me begin by saying that I firmly believe that she should be charged with false informing and anything else applicable to this kind of case. She wasted police time, she scared countless women, and now she's confirmed many people's beliefs that women will cry rape for no reason. His comment was along the lines of, "Why don't you mention that the slut had consensual casual sex with a guy she met online?" I tried to explain that if someone read my post and then read his comment, they'd forget in an instant what I had written and only feel anger toward her for lying. Go ahead and feel anger toward her! That's fine. But I know my message is still valid and shouldn't be lost because of reactionary feelings.

I don't know who she is, and I don't know why she made the false accusations, but I do know that despite the fact that she wasn't in fact raped, I was offered a little wake-up call to be more careful. He was pissed because anyone reading that post would still think that she had really been raped, and he felt that it was wrong for me to have not immediately taken the post down or at least corrected the facts.

That 19-year-old did something really stupid, and I hope she is properly punished. But just because that bad thing didn't actually happen to her doesn't mean that bad things don't happen, and it also doesn't mean that the lesson I feel like I learned isn't important.