Around the League: Week 22 3/21-3/27

[Mori Chu]

Quality "men", those Lakers.

The story is really odd. Clarkson and Young apparently deny it so much to the point Young is considering suing the chick now she's backing off. After watching "Fantastic Lies" (awesome 30 for 30 on the Duke Lacross case BTW) I tend to not pass judgement based off a claim that the girl is now back tracking on.

There's a common misconception among men that there are a lot of women out there who would falsely accuse a man of abusing them to get money, or to get after the man financially or ruin his reputation. One thing to keep in mind is that in general, cases of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are underreported if anything. Usually the women feel embarrassed and ashamed and they don't want to make it into a big media frenzy. If you look at the Bill Cosby situation, many women came forward and said that he raped or took advantage of them, but people tended not to listen to the women.

I'm not saying that every accusation is true, but I'm saying that we should be careful not to always jump to being doubtful and suspicious when a woman accuses a man of mistreating her. The data and stats show that it is much, much more likely that she is telling the truth.

In this particular case, it sounds like what happened to the woman wasn't all that bad. Guys drove by her in their car and made some kind of obscene gestures at her. Sounds like maybe they grabbed their junk or made a thrusting motion or a jerking-off motion or whatever, and probably said something lewd. I don't condone that kind of behavior, but luckily we are not talking about a rape or anything where she was touched against her will. She seems to be backing off once she realized that the guys who did this to her were her coworkers. I think it probably really did happen to her, but that now that she knows the guys were Laker players, she's trying to avoid ruining what must be a nice job at the Lakers by backing off of the accusation.

Unfortunate situation for all involved. If the Laker players really do drive around town acting like that, maybe the NBA should talk to them about how to conduct themselves in public as members of the NBA family.

[Mori Chu]

Some quick googling finds this data. Wikipedia says that the instance of false accusation of rape is in the 2-10% range.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape

This article on Jezebel also puts the number in the 2-8% range.

http://jezebel.com/he-said-she-said-the ... 1720945752

[Mori Chu]

Have you seen Kevin Durant's new signature shoes? These are horrendous!

[EDC]

He is just missing a colorful wig and a red nose.

[INFORMER]

Minnesota's starting five is so ridiculously talented. If they can nail their coaching hire this offseason, that team is going to contend in two years.

[Mori Chu]

Yeah, Minny is probably the best young up-and-coming team in the league.

[Sunsfan4life]

Quality "men", those Lakers.

The story is really odd. Clarkson and Young apparently deny it so much to the point Young is considering suing the chick now she's backing off. After watching "Fantastic Lies" (awesome 30 for 30 on the Duke Lacross case BTW) I tend to not pass judgement based off a claim that the girl is now back tracking on.

There's a common misconception among men that there are a lot of women out there who would falsely accuse a man of abusing them to get money, or to get after the man financially or ruin his reputation. One thing to keep in mind is that in general, cases of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are underreported if anything. Usually the women feel embarrassed and ashamed and they don't want to make it into a big media frenzy. If you look at the Bill Cosby situation, many women came forward and said that he raped or took advantage of them, but people tended not to listen to the women.

I'm not saying that every accusation is true, but I'm saying that we should be careful not to always jump to being doubtful and suspicious when a woman accuses a man of mistreating her. The data and stats show that it is much, much more likely that she is telling the truth.

In this particular case, it sounds like what happened to the woman wasn't all that bad. Guys drove by her in their car and made some kind of obscene gestures at her. Sounds like maybe they grabbed their junk or made a thrusting motion or a jerking-off motion or whatever, and probably said something lewd. I don't condone that kind of behavior, but luckily we are not talking about a rape or anything where she was touched against her will. She seems to be backing off once she realized that the guys who did this to her were her coworkers. I think it probably really did happen to her, but that now that she knows the guys were Laker players, she's trying to avoid ruining what must be a nice job at the Lakers by backing off of the accusation.

Unfortunate situation for all involved. If the Laker players really do drive around town acting like that, maybe the NBA should talk to them about how to conduct themselves in public as members of the NBA family.

All I'm saying is innocent till proven guilty. I'm a firm believer in that and I think athletes are big time targets. In this particular situation the girl wrote a book on how athletes harass women. Then backtracked on her intial claim while Young threaten to sue. If it actually happened as she said it doesn't seem likely she would backtrack on the claim. Young, would not considering suing either, he would of been advised to keep it as hush hush as possible.

[Aztec Sunsfan]

Well, you could easily say the same about her before acussing her of targeting people.

"Inocent until proven guilty, women are big time targets, this men in particular are usually self entitled and unable to take No as an answer. It turns out that this men are higher than her in a mutual corporate ladder and could be able to get her blackballed. If this hasn't actually happen, she wouldn't had posted about having captured the incident in video..."

Funny how we are discussing KJ and Cosby's cases with the benefit of hindsight, but tested on a realtime case, we easily put the incocent label back in the athlete's side, revictimizing the woman involved.

[JCSunsfan]

Quality "men", those Lakers.

The story is really odd. Clarkson and Young apparently deny it so much to the point Young is considering suing the chick now she's backing off. After watching "Fantastic Lies" (awesome 30 for 30 on the Duke Lacross case BTW) I tend to not pass judgement based off a claim that the girl is now back tracking on.

There's a common misconception among men that there are a lot of women out there who would falsely accuse a man of abusing them to get money, or to get after the man financially or ruin his reputation. One thing to keep in mind is that in general, cases of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment are underreported if anything. Usually the women feel embarrassed and ashamed and they don't want to make it into a big media frenzy. If you look at the Bill Cosby situation, many women came forward and said that he raped or took advantage of them, but people tended not to listen to the women.

I'm not saying that every accusation is true, but I'm saying that we should be careful not to always jump to being doubtful and suspicious when a woman accuses a man of mistreating her. The data and stats show that it is much, much more likely that she is telling the truth.

In this particular case, it sounds like what happened to the woman wasn't all that bad. Guys drove by her in their car and made some kind of obscene gestures at her. Sounds like maybe they grabbed their junk or made a thrusting motion or a jerking-off motion or whatever, and probably said something lewd. I don't condone that kind of behavior, but luckily we are not talking about a rape or anything where she was touched against her will. She seems to be backing off once she realized that the guys who did this to her were her coworkers. I think it probably really did happen to her, but that now that she knows the guys were Laker players, she's trying to avoid ruining what must be a nice job at the Lakers by backing off of the accusation.

Unfortunate situation for all involved. If the Laker players really do drive around town acting like that, maybe the NBA should talk to them about how to conduct themselves in public as members of the NBA family.

I think it is dangerous to judge an individual case by the statistics. A man should not be presumed guilty because sexual assaults are under reported, neither should a woman be presumed to be a gold-digger accuser just because the accused is famous or rich. Every assault accusation should be taken seriously. Care must be taken not to pre-judge either way. It is way too easy to assume that this situation is a repeat of whatever experience you might have had.

I had a police officer friend who received a commendation for arresting and putting a child molester in jail (mexican man who did not speak English, a stranger to two teenage girls). Later, one of the girls got religion and confessed that they had made it all up because they did not want to get in trouble for ditching school. He was in jail for 5 years.

In other situations, the accused has been totally ignored because no one wants to believe such horrible things about a person. Bill Cosby is an example. So is Kobe and British children's entertainer Rolf Harris.

The public rarely has enough information to make an informed judgment. We assume that the news we hear is accurate. It rarely is. I have had enough contact with news media to be completely dissillusioned about their competency to get even simple stories correct. If they were writing high school research papers, I would flunk them. They are even worse when they have an agenda and have decided to crucify someone to sell papers or stories.

If a law enforcement official refused to investigate, I have a problem with that. If a victim chooses money over justice, I have a problem with that too.

[Mori Chu]

JC: Good points and a fair post. I think we agree that when news like this comes out, people should take it seriously and not jump to conclusions in either direction.

a) Don't assume the woman is an evil lying schemer.

b) Don't assume that the man is a horrible evil rapist.

c) Don't ignore it or refuse to listen/take it seriously.

[INFORMER]

Nice to see Norman Powell coming along.