“[Tina] Renton still has nightmares about her time in the witness box. ‘During the day I can cope with it. In my sleep…. You can’t control your subconscious.’ She dreams of ‘running and never being able to find anyone able to help you’ and of ‘standing in court, people laughing at you, but you don’t know why.’”
—Amelia Gentleman, the Guardian (April 13, 2013)
Above are the words of a woman who was the prosecuting witness in the rape trial of her stepfather.
Below are the words of a man who was repeatedly accused by a prosecuting witness (his estranged wife and the mother of his children):
I couldn’t flee and I could not fight. I was never going to be allowed to heal or recover. I wish I were better at articulating the psychological and emotional trauma I experienced.
I could fill a book with all the lies and mysterious rulings of the Court. Never have I experienced this kind of pain. I asked for help, but good men did nothing and evil prevailed.
Correspondences between the man’s and woman’s statements are obvious, as are contrasts between the man’s and woman’s treatment under the law.
The woman prevailed in criminal court. She also authored a book. The man was hectored in family court until he killed himself, and his wife obtained a court order granting her the intellectual property rights to his final words, which she attempted to expunge from every nook and cranny of the Internet.
Tina Renton, quoted in the epigraph, accused her stepfather of “raping and assaulting her multiple times during her childhood,” and a jury found him guilty. The trauma Ms. Renton describes, however, isn’t the residue of being physically violated by a parental figure years before; it’s the aftereffect of being psychologically violated in court.
She defended herself and was taunted and denounced as a liar.
“It is hard being accused of being a liar,” she says. “I would never have put myself through the trauma of a court case if it wasn’t true.”
Her stepfather was sentenced to 14 years. Still Ms. Renton reports having nightmares about her experiences in court, and certainly no feminist is going to contradict her claim of trauma.
Why, then, are feminists the most adamant critics of those who allege they’ve been falsely vilified or persecuted in civil and family court (where there is no standard of proof)? Is it reasonable to argue that being falsely called a “liar” is more traumatic than being falsely called a “stalker,” “wife batterer,” “child abuser,” or worse? If feminists understand the trauma described by Tina Renton and sympathize with it, why are they the most unyielding obstacle to reform of restraining order and domestic violence laws that make false accusation easy and rewarding? Ms. Renton, a woman, very plausibly says she was caused lasting injury by being falsely accused of lying. Yet some feminists assert that a man’s being falsely accused of rape is insignificant. How is this not only hypocritical but heinous?
When it’s asserted that rape victims face “being raped all over again” in court, what’s meant is that they face being lied about, misrepresented, defamed, badgered, and shamed. They face, in sum, being falsely accused.
This is compared to being raped.
It must be appreciated that those falsely accused in civil or family court (women among them) are traumatized by exactly the same treatment (including by their judges), and many of them may also have been abused by their accusers, including violently. Moreover, the abuse they receive in and from the court may be aggravated (exorbitantly) by having their children taken from them, being cast out of their homes, and/or being forced to pay their false accusers’ living expenses.
Feminists seem to have no difficulty imagining the psychic scars caused to rape victims by being denounced and disparaged in criminal court.
For feminists to identify with complainants of false accusation in civil and family court, then, they need only imagine what it would feel like for those rape victims to be forced to surrender all they value to their abusers and pay them for the privilege of being lied about and publicly humiliated.
Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
*The quoted Guardian story includes a case of a woman who prevailed in court but nevertheless committed suicide. “Her son, Oliver, told a newspaper how profoundly the cross-examination had affected her.”
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 
I know that i have been devastated by being falsely accused by a man who told me he was more deeply in love with me than he had been his wife who was deceased. I feel totally “raped” and ashamed that I had a restraining order put on me for what? Responding to a man’s declarations of love for me? I am not sure that I will ever recover. And to hear in court that he wasn’t ready for a relationship when he already was in a relationship with me? It is still hard and I am not sure I will ever recover from it…and I still love the man though I can never trust him again or see him again. I am grieving for my good name and the pride I had as a woman who never chases after men. I was made to look like the villainess in the movie Fatal Attraction. But in truth I was blindsighted and bewildered by Michael’s filing a restraining order on me because I sent a few emails to him that were blocked and so had no way of knowing that he was mounting evidence against me in his spam folder. The other JP would not have let it get to that point and in fact a month later when I filed an OFP on him, turnabout is fair play, I did not have any solid proof that he was a danger to me except that he was hearing voices telling him to kill people…not enough evidence to protect me in fact as the JP said that his injunction would protect me. Not so. But at least I moved away and am no longer in fear, a fact that he is not aware of to my knowledge. I gave the court my new address after the final hearing where my appeal was denied because my “evidence” could not be considered on appeal as it mysteriously did not make it into the court record in the lower court. The word “meshuggah” was part of the oral argument but again I am not sure that he is being held by that. It has been a horrendous few years..
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I think your mind is healing, Martha. You sound collected. I’m proud of you, and you should proud of yourself.
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Reblogged this on Falsely Accused.
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Are you crazy? The person who is falsely accused may suffer great trauma through the court process, but they have *not* been *raped!* When a rape victim comes to court, that person faces the perpetrator of physical violence against them, intimate personal violence. They are forced to review the horror of the experience with the perpetrator sitting just feet away. They will be cross examined, treated as criminal themselves, and after all that, the perpetrator is often set free. There is no comparison at all.
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How do you know “they have not been raped”? How do you know they have not been assaulted? How do you know they haven’t been psychologically tortured?
How, in short, do you presume to know anything? How does the court?
You mistake reaction for cognition. So does everyone else, which is why these problems persist.
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This woman’s story may help you see. It doesn’t matter what she says now. She has no credibility.
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The post quotes a victim of physical rape. By the poster’s own terms, one who has been falsely has *not* been physically raped. Your response makes no sense. I know the purpose of the site is to decry the injustice of being falsely accused. Just have some sense of proportion please. It’s terrible to be falsely accused. It can have many horrible consequences. It’s still light years away from being raped. Not figuratively raped. Actually raped.
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No, my response makes no sense to someone who is immune to sense.
What have you been falsely accused of, and what were the consequences?
You say the post “quotes a victim of physical rape.” Who says so? You do, and I do. Do the police? Do the courts? No. This woman has no credibility and never will.
Consider, too, how she speaks of her relationship with her rapist. She lives around him.
You’ve just spoken about the “horror” of a rape victim’s having to be near her rapist in a courtroom.
What’s disproportionate about this contrast?
Actually raped means groped and penetrated. Do you imagine some of the people who’ve had their homes, lives, livelihoods, and children taken from them wouldn’t sooner have to live with the former trauma?
This isn’t “light years away from being raped.”
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A rape victim is not “raped” in court, but the word is used, and it’s not used to describe the process of “reviewing” the “horror of the experience”; it’s used to describe the process of being denounced as a liar and assaulted with words.
False accusers may be the actual offenders, and all those accused in civil protective order procedures are treated as criminals. Rulings, what’s more, are entered into police databases.
These “rulings” may be formed in 10 minutes. They may even be by default, meaning based on no trial of any kind.
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A man facing a false rape accusation stands to lose his (current or future) family, job, home, his social status, university place, career prospects, reputation, friends …… he is at risk of violence/ retaliation (falsely accused men have been murdered in the past as ‘street justice’ for their crimes – crimes they did not even commit). And if sentenced to jail a falsely accused man faces being beaten up repeatedly and raped repeatedly, and all without any sympathy or helplines or counselling or even any privacy to heal.
A woman falsely accusing a man of rape is therefore threatening him with an ordeal which will last his entire lifetime and include being raped/ assaulted repeatedly over a number of years. She is threatening to destroy his life.
How threatened would a woman feel if a man threatened to take her from her family, put her in a cage and subject her to beatings and rapes for years before releasing her back into society as a social leper who would be shunned by all (rather than shown the sympathy she would be craving by this point)? How traumatising would that threat be to a woman? That is the trauma experienced by a man when he is falsely accused of rape by a woman in court and that accusation is treated seriously.
They say rape is all about power. Which is more of a loss of power (a) having all of society on your side except one cruel person (the rapist) (b) having all of society against you because they all see you as scum of the Earth (ie a rapist) even though you are in fact innocent?
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My God, you people are all insane. Rape *is* about power. So is kidnapping and sexual slavery and abuse. Those are actual, real, physical things that happen in the real world. False accusations can do terrible things to someone’s life, I *have* personal, profound experience with this. I was also physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, etc. etc. abused by the accuser for decades (the false accusations occurred when I left). It is not a good idea or particularly useful to compare your own pain and loss to someone else’s. I don’t make a habit of it. However, I am very clear that I was NOT held in a cage and subject to beatings and rapes for those decades. Nor do those false accusations compare in any way to the actual real crimes my abuser committed against me, whatever the consequences of the accusations (and they did have significant consequences). If, at some point, those false accusations somehow result in physical harm, imprisonment or the like, then *those* will be real things that happen to me, and my accuser will not be completely responsible for them, as she is not entirely responsible for the effects I’ve already felt – she may have made the accusations, but there was an entire legal and social system and it’s people that had to cooperate to allow those false accusations to have any effect. You’ve got to try to have some sense of proportion and reality…
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By your reasoning if a person threatens to beat them up and rape them in a cage repeatedly for years this is nothing to be upset about. Only if it actually happens are you allowed to be upset.
But of course this reasoning only applies to women threatening men. But if a man threatens a woman in the same way that’s taken seriously.
If a troll even makes a stupid remark (“you deserve to be raped”) this is taken as a serious rape threat by feminists and SJWs…… but if a woman hauls a man into court on false rape accusations and literally attempts to get his ass thrown in jail where he will be beaten up and raped for years you are telling me this does not qualify as intent to harm?
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False accusation is about power. The motive is the same. The motive is the same. The accuser just uses the state as a proxy bully or rapist. The motive is the same motive. Though that’s not what this post is about, it’s true.
The word rape has become a lightning rod, but it’s just a word that’s crudely applied to acts that may be “light years” different, to use your phrase.
Do you consider murder worse than rape? If you do, then I pose you this question: If I called an emotional violation that led a woman to commit suicide an act of “murder,” would you have a problem with that? Would you call my use of the word murder “insane”?
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https://restrainingorderabuse.com/2015/11/08/court-abetted-trespassing-burglary-larceny-and-embezzlement-a-terminally-ill-mans-story-of-restraining-order-abuse/
https://restrainingorderabuse.com/2015/04/24/the-nightmare-neil-shelton-has-lived-for-three-years-and-is-still-living-a-fathers-story-of-restraining-order-abuse/
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You are missing a fundamental element here. I am NOT invalidating the experiences of people who are falsely accused, nor am I saying that terrible things don’t happen as a consequence of those accusations. You attack me as if I did. Ironically, I came to this site because I am living life after false accusations, with an abuser who still, after years, looks to make any accusation she can think up (unfortunately, that is not the worst thing she is doing, there are others involved who I am far more concerned about). But regardless of the very real pain we experience, we are not being physically raped or murdered – those are fundamentally different experiences – and that is a very simple truth.
On Sun, Nov 8, 2015 at 6:39 PM, TALKING BACK to restraining orders wrote:
> Moderator commented: ” > https://restrainingorderabuse.com/2015/11/08/court-abetted-trespassing-burglary-larceny-and-embezzlement-a-terminally-ill-mans-story-of-restraining-order-abuse/ > https://restrainingorderabuse.com/2015/04/24/the-nightmare-neil-shelton-has-lived-for-three-yea > “
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I appreciate the distinction, and I’m sorry for what you’ve endured. To me, though, the difference you draw between pain that originates with a physical injury and pain that doesn’t is nonsensical. That’s not a criticism of you, just of the distinction (which is one you’re hardly alone in defending).
I’ve watched 10 years drain away. Would I sooner tolerate a horsewhipping or being locked in a cage for a month if it meant I could recover that time and the lives that have fallen away during it? Seriously, what do you think? Excepting major organ damage, there’s no physical injury that would have taken a fraction of the toll that lies have.
In your own case, consider what physical torments you might have preferred to the effects of lies. A slap? A beating? A broken arm? Penetration of an orifice?
I hear you saying see things as they are. This is how things are. We use words and phrases like “rape” and “domestic violence,” and these assume monstrous proportions and pulse with malign energy. What these words may “really” mean are “drunken sex” and “she pinched me.”
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