Tag false rape claims

Borderline Personality Disorder, Procedural Abuse, and Feminism: A Victim’s Reckoning of Their Tolls

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“I hate this world and almost everybody in it. People use each other. I find most of you disgusting. My brothers are disgusting. The people I used to work with are disgusting. You’re shallow, you’re two-faced and hypocritical, you’re judgmental, you cause me more pain than you could ever possibly know. You don’t want me around? Guess what? I don’t want to be around you ugly motherf[—]ers, either. You cause all of your own problems, heap them onto other people, and then blame those people for your problems. You bitch about the amount of pain you’re in, then tell other people to get over their pain.

“I am done with all of you. I am done with your lies and your shitty society, and most of all, I am done kissing your ass.”

—Mrs. Nathan Larson (May 9, 2014)

Virginian Nathan Larson has had a tumultuous year.

He married a woman he met online (April 23, 2014); then she moved out (June 21, 2014) and accused him, among other things, of rape (August 2014 through January 2015); then they divorced; then he learned he was a father when the news reached him that his ex-wife had committed suicide.

The quotation above is from an online post of his former wife’s published between their marriage and their separation. Below is an excerpt from a digital diary entry of hers written when she was a teen (which included a “hit list”):

I hate the students at […]. They are arrogant and foolish. My one dream, my passion is to achieve a machine gun or something and shoot every f[—]er in the school. I want to pump them full of metal, their blood splattered on the tiles. I want to make a massacre that becomes the worst in American history. There are only a few people who I would spare. Everyone else…I would love to see them writhing on the ground in pain, blood oozing out of a million holes in their body.

Nathan’s wife, who was an arguably troubled woman, abruptly terminated their relationship of “75 days total” and then informed him she had miscarried their child. In August 2014, she accused him of rape to the police, but he declined to talk with them and was never charged. In November 2014, she began to accuse him to the courts.

This wasn’t a trial run, either. The accusations brought against Nathan by his wife mirrored charges she had made against a previous partner, also to damning effect.

She petitioned three ex parte (temporary) restraining orders before successfully obtaining a permanent order against Nathan in January of this year (by default). Its alleged bases were “domestic abuse, stalking, sexual assault, and physical assault.” The order was petitioned in Colorado, and Nathan would have had to travel a significant distance to be heard in his defense. “Not wanting to invest money and emotional energy in fighting it, and knowing it would be hard for me to successfully contest it, I didn’t show up to the hearing,” he says. He elected to “move on.”

The two were divorced in April 2015, and that seemed to be an end on it.

Two months later, Nathan was told his (then) wife had given birth to a child in February, presumably the one she had told him she had miscarried. This information reached him along with the news that his former wife had killed herself following her commitment for “suicidal depression” and allegedly hearing voices compelling her “to hurt or kill the Child.”

Nathan must now contest a “dependency and neglect petition” in Colorado asserting he’s an unfit parent.

What follows are his reflections on his marriage to a woman who he alleges had untreated borderline personality disorder, on feminism, and on “abuse culture” and its damages.

Nathan Larson (with his new fiancée’s infant cousin)

Having the benefit of distance from the situation and more calmness about it (especially now that she’s dead), I would say that we both made a lot of mistakes during and after the relationship. There are some people who say that it’s a mistake to enter into a relationship with someone with untreated borderline personality, because it simply won’t work, no matter what you do. Unfortunately, once you get into a relationship like that, your sense of reality can get distorted because you’re so in love, and they’re so convincing, and they get so many other people to agree with them, that you too start to believe it if you don’t have enough of an understanding of BPD to realize what’s happening and why.

For example, suppose you used to argue with your BPD partner, and occasionally lost your temper and had to apologize for saying something unkind. Because they’re so sensitive to minor betrayals, they might claim that you horribly emotionally abused and bullied them to get your way, and then tried to be sweet to them and make up, just like in the classic model we’ve been taught of the cycle of abuse. If you’re still thinking this person is the most wonderful person in the world, then logically you might think that you really did emotionally abuse them, because why would such a wonderful person say it if it weren’t true? Plus, they are clearly very upset over how you treated them, and they broke up the relationship over it, and now they’ve told everyone in your circle of friends and family about it, and many of them are telling you they agree that the breakup was your fault because of your emotional abuse.

These are people you respect and trust, and therefore this could not possibly be happening unless you really were abusive!

You start to blame yourself and even tell people, “She left me because I was emotionally abusive” (which of course attracts more criticism, because who would admit that if it weren’t true?). Eventually, you run into someone who hears your account of what was actually said and done, and challenges your interpretation, saying you’re being too hard on yourself, and that this chick is not as great as you seem to think she is. (To which, of course, you may think, “He just doesn’t know and understand her and our deep and beautiful relationship! We were soulmates! What are the chances I will ever find another woman like that? I searched my whole life, and she was the only one like that I’ve ever met who loved and appreciated me so much.”)

If you have good friends, they’ll awaken you to the fact that someone who truly loved you that much would be willing to forgive and come back to you, or at least treat you decently, rather than holding a grudge and trying to make you suffer.

Also, there’s the fact to consider that people with borderline personality disorder idealize and devalue, and they view people as either completely good or completely bad. This means that once they’re faced with the inescapable reality that you’re not perfect, they have to view you as completely evil. They also have to deny any blame at all for the end of the relationship, lest they have to conclude that they too are flawed, which would cause them to view themselves as completely evil. They can’t handle any feelings of guilt; they have to deflect all blame, including the blame for their own emotionality.

Feminists, of course, are not thinking about all this psychology going on behind the scenes.

They’re busy calculating whether being skeptical of the claims of someone like that will make the public more likely to be skeptical of the claims of someone with legitimate, serious complaints, and make those victims more reluctant to come forward. So the innocent who was accused gets sacrificed for the greater good.

Some women with borderline personality disorder are attracted to the feminist movement and voraciously read all of their materials about abuse, patriarchy, rape culture, etc. because it helps them view themselves as a helpless victim of powerful sociopaths, and thus deflect blame.

They can find a community of people who will give them the benefit of the doubt by believing their stories, and confirm their interpretation of what happened. Borderlines also sometimes struggle to find a sense of identity, and the feminist movement can provide that as well. Their victimhood actually makes them useful to someone, since it’s a story they can tell and retell to those who need to be persuaded that political change is necessary to stop these abuses. (Feminists, like advocates for most other political movements, would bristle at any suggestion that their ideology attracts mentally ill people, since that would tend to discredit them.)

Yet what the feminist movement can never satisfactorily explain to them is why, despite all this training in recognizing red flags of abusers, and despite all the tools the system has provided for punishing abusers (e.g., restraining orders, prison sentences, etc.), they keep getting “abused” by partner after partner, while many other women seem to have successful, happy relationships.

The only possible answer is that it’s a combination of sociopaths’ finding them particularly attractive for some reason (maybe they sense they’ve been abused and think it’ll be easy to re-victimize them) combined with the fact that the patriarchy is still strong, abused women are still not being believed, and therefore we need to punish abusers more harshly and give the accusers even more benefit of the doubt.

Then, finally, when we have a world where all you need to do to get a man locked away for life is cry rape without any supporting evidence, rational men will finally stop raping. Except, even if such a system were put in place, these insecure women would still feel victimized by their partners, and they would attribute the “abuse” to these guys’ acting impulsively without regard to the certain punishment.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*An excellent explication of procedural abuse by “high-conflict” people (who are associated with personality disorders like BPD) and why court procedure is attractive to them is here.

That They’re Made in Civil Court, Too: A Response to Megan McArdle’s “What We Don’t Know about False Claims of Rape”

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“Could the number be between 3 and 8 percent? Absolutely. But it could be substantially higher than 8 percent; it could even be that 40 percent of rape accusations or more are false, though I’d bet against that. It’s possible that less than 3 percent of rape accusations are false, though again, I would offer good odds against that. The point is that we don’t know, and the groups that claim to know are wrong together.”

—Columnist Megan McArdle (June 4, 2015)

Megan McArdle is one of a handful of professional journalists (preeminent among them Cathy Young) who objectively negotiate the chasmal discrepancy between statistics that say false claims of rape are almost none and those that say they’re abundant.

In her Bloomberg View column “What We Don’t Know about False Claims of Rape,” Ms. McArdle surveys complications that foil attempts to arrive at a hard-and-fast figure. Issues like consent, culpability, what qualifies as rape and what doesn’t, and who gets to adjudicate and how—these muddy estimations that are already suspect, because purveyors and proponents of statistics are typically biased by one ideological or political perspective or another. They promote numbers that support their views; they opine.

This writer agrees with Ms. McArdle’s conclusions quoted above, and he finds especially agreeable her honest assessment of the ambiguities and her willingness to acknowledge them in the first place, because this willingness is rare.

False claims of rape made in civil court are not registered anywhere or by anyone.

I’m not a journalist; I’m an analyst. I don’t know what the truth is. I can criticize interpretations that betray flaws, but I don’t find anything in Ms. McArdle’s “findings” to fault. I do, though, detect a blind spot, and it’s a blind spot that’s universal.

What no one appears to know about false claims of rape is that they can be made in civil court. There are no incidence rates for how often this occurs…and there can’t be. Civil rulings, e.g., in restraining order cases, are based on a “preponderance of the evidence” and not on the certainty of individual accusations. The dismissal of a restraining order petition that alleges rape is not recorded anywhere as a “false rape claim”—it’s just rejected—and a verdict in favor of a plaintiff who alleges rape signifies only that a judge was convinced that the heft of his or her claims, possibly numerous, more likely than not indicated a sound basis for the award of a restraining order—and it may not signify that. Orders are also granted if defendants simply default by not appearing to contest the accusations.

False rape claims in civil court may never be accompanied by criminal investigations nor ever conclusively adjudicated. They’re invisible. They are, however, made, and though they may be completely unsubstantiated, they exert a material influence on judicial rulings that have binding legal consequences, consequences that can be extreme.

My wife moved out of my Virginia home in June 2014, and then about a week later announced that she’d had a miscarriage. In August 2014, I got a visit from police detectives wanting to question me about a rape report she’d filed against me, but I declined to speak with them, and was never charged. Beginning in November 2014, she obtained three temporary restraining orders against me, and finally got a permanent restraining order imposed against me in Colorado in January 2015, based on a claim of domestic abuse, stalking, sexual assault, and physical assault. Not wanting to invest money and emotional energy in fighting it, and knowing it would be hard for me to successfully contest it, I didn’t show up to the hearing.

The man quoted above obtained a divorce from his wife, who he alleges had a history of mental illness, in April 2015. Two months later, he learned she had given birth to a daughter in February, who was “presumptively” his. His ex-wife had apparently lied about having a miscarriage.

The information that he was a father reached the man when he was told his ex-wife had killed herself following her commitment for “suicidal depression, and because someone had reported that she had been hearing voices telling her to hurt or kill the child.”

The man was also told there was a “dependency and neglect petition pending” against him for his abandonment of a child he hadn’t known existed.

In the petition, the county attorney notes, “Respondent […] and Father have a history of domestic violence that includes, but may not be limited to, the issuance of temporary restraining orders in cases […], and the issuance of a permanent restraining order in case […], which was entered by default on January 16, 2015, placing the welfare of the child at risk.” The Colorado Children’s Code says that the court shall consider a parent’s “History of violent behavior” in determining whether he’s an unfit parent.

The purported “history of domestic violence” was not established in court and was based solely on his late ex-wife’s restraining order allegations, which started five months after she had moved out, which were made in minutes in another state, which the man denies, and which he never traveled cross-country to attempt to controvert. He hadn’t known his (then) wife was pregnant with his child when her serial accusations to the court began and despaired of his chances of successfully challenging them. He had ignorantly opted to “move on.”

Now his daughter is in the custody of her maternal grandparents, and the likelihood of her father’s ever realizing a role in her life is scant.

This man’s case is highlighted because it was brought to my attention only last week and is still fresh in my mind. Instances of false claims of rape accompanying restraining order petitions, however—including claims against women—have been reported repeatedly here, in comments and in search terms that draw visitors to the blog.

Not even a tentative estimate could be formulated on how often false rape claims are asserted in civil court, but this source of false claims should at least be recognized as inclusive among the unnavigable uncertainties.

Copyright © 2015 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com

*An alternative means of falsely alleging rape in civil court is exemplified here. An extreme case of a fraudulent rape claim’s being alleged on a restraining order petition is here.