This essay focuses only on false rape allegations that may be motivated by earlier trauma. The subject matter is likely inflammatory, but the intention is to compassionately understand the complexities of those who would lie about such an experience. If you’re someone who has strong feelings about false rape allegations, take a few breaths before reading — or maybe skip this essay entirely. Note that the essay is not meant to be a persuasive piece built on hard evidence; it is simply an outlining of an idea. Also note that the author is a former crisis advocate and a survivor of documented sexual violence.
The prevalence of false rape allegations has long been contested by scholars, survivor advocates, feminist activists, and others. While it is true that some rape allegations are false (and there is a history of racial injustice to reckon with there), extant literature suggests that such allegations are exceedingly rare. Scholars in this realm also routinely note that the vast majority of rapes are never reported in the first place.
Though they are a thin slice of all rape allegations, many scholars have sought to understand false allegations and the possible motivations behind them. Research shows that there are often straightforward reasons people falsely allege rape. Kanin’s seminal study on the subject documented three primary motives: providing an alibi, seeking revenge, and garnering sympathy or attention (though it’s worth noting that his approach was overly reliant on the testimony of law enforcement). Other researchers have generally replicated these findings.
I’ve become intensely interested in the last demographic mentioned in Kanin’s report: those who make false rape allegations to achieve sympathy or attention. This fraught, complex motivation is borne out repeatedly in the literature. In noticing patterns in the types of individuals who make these or similar false allegations (socially disconnected, under-employed, etc.), I began to wonder whether some false accusers are operating under prior trauma that has never been meaningfully addressed. In those cases, perhaps the survivor is seeking sympathy for a falsified trauma as a proxy for the real one.
The idea of a false trauma narrative standing in for a real one is not entirely new. For instance, in a deeply uncomfortable 2021 article published in The Atlantic, journalist Helen Lewis unspools how a range of behaviors — such as factitious disorder — may be a means of garnering sympathy for someone’s overlooked experience of trauma or oppression. Lewis speaks in particular about the growing phenomenon of white and/or straight individuals who falsely assume a marginalized racial or sexual identity.
People who fake a marginalized identity are often attempting to distance themselves from being implicated in oppressive systems. However, Lewis argues that such individuals often also seize on a minoritized identity as “a type of suffering to which [they believe] people would pay attention.” Citing a number of real-world examples, Lewis contends that “there are people out in the world claiming pain that isn’t theirs — and hurting others in the process. But many are doing so because of the pain that is theirs” (emphasis in the original).
None of this is to say that feigning a marginalized identity is anything other than grotesque, self-serving, and the epitome of privilege (not to mention the fact that it does real harm to actual marginalized individuals). And obviously, identity-faking is not an exact parallel to trauma-based false rape allegations. Still, there is potentially a throughline in all of this: that people who feel their pain is unaddressed may go to extreme and unethical lengths to address that pain another way.
Lewis’ argument reminds me of several recent examples in which people have spun a false trauma narrative in order to seek sympathy for real pain. For instance, I can’t help but think of the 2019 Jussie Smollett debacle when I think about false allegations. Smollett’s story unfolded at the intersection of a rising racial justice movement and increased LGBTQ+ awareness on one hand, and Trump’s presidency and right-wing backlash to social justice movements on the other. Thus, when Smollett’s allegation appeared to disintegrate, a media furor ensued — with countless commentators asking how anyone could possibly fabricate a hate crime.
Even if Smollett’s entire story was a hoax (he continues to maintain its veracity even into 2022), I didn’t understand the national uproar at the time and I don’t understand it now. This is not because I continue to believe the hate crime story after it fell apart. It’s because I have no doubt that Smollett had experienced a lifetime of antiBlack racism and homophobia leading up to the events of 2019. It makes sense that a man who’d experienced lifelong oppression might find it cathartic to bring that oppression to light in a stark, tangible way. If the story was a hoax, fine. But it was also arguably a plea to be witnessed.
In a CNN article on the Jussie Smollett story, journalist Emanuella Grinberg also asked why someone would lie about being victimized. Grinberg quotes Cornell professor Gail Saltz on the matter, and I found Saltz’s insight compelling. Saltz says that people who make false allegations “may feel that they have been abused by the system that they live in . . . Maybe they’d been psychologically harmed, so this [alleged harm] doesn’t feel that far a stretch from what actually happened to them, but this is what they need to demonstrate it.”
The above anecdotes merely provide tangential support for the idea of trauma-based false rape allegations. I’m the first to admit that current literature on false rape allegations does not prove or disprove this idea. However, this may partly be because researchers do not ask false rape accusers if they have prior trauma — in fact, they collect only the barest information about an accuser’s demographics. I see this as an enormous failure of curiosity and nuance on the part of those interacting with false accusers. Our understanding of false allegations would plausibly be richer if it were regular practice to ask accusers about their trauma histories — including whether they’d ever disclosed that trauma, whether they were believed and supported, and how they feel about it now.
There is some potential evidence for trauma-based false rape allegations in a surprising place: studies on mothers who falsely allege that their children have been sexually abused. Some research suggests that in these cases, mothers may falsely allege that their child has been victimized because the mothers themselves had once been victimized. This article provides an early example of this theory (see Subtype II), but I am much more interested in this 2009 article by Dr. Mary Lindahl, a Clinical Psychologist in Marymount University’s Forensic Psychology Department.
Lindahl’s 2009 study sought to understand parents (typically mothers) who had made false allegations of child sexual abuse across three Virginia counties. To do this, Lindahl convened subject matter experts involved in these cases (e.g., social workers, police investigators, etc.) to better understand why the allegations were occurring. The article’s conclusions were manifold, but one of them struck me: the experts believed that at least some of the false accusers were motivated by their own unresolved trauma. To quote Lindahl: “Some cases seemed to represent the reliving of the mother’s own childhood abuse and the projection of those experiences onto her child (e.g., post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD])” (214).
In other words, maybe when people lie, they are still telling you something important.
People who falsely allege rape are culturally considered to be unsalvageable. This cultural consensus is why we lash out with vitriol when cases emerge such as the alleged gang rape at Duke University or the alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia. In many of these types of cases, the false accusers are already living at the intersection of many forms of vulnerability — and the national campaigns of excoriation and ridicule capitalize on that vulnerability.
Crystal Mangum, the woman involved in the Duke University case, is a perfect example. At the time of the case, Crystal was a Black, 26-year-old sex worker and low-income single mother. She also had untreated mental health and substance use needs. In my recent re-reading of the Duke University case, I was struck by something else: at age 17, Crystal had filed a police report alleging that she’d been raped 3 years earlier when she was 14. Though her police report was not pursued due to lack of a written account, multiple of Crystal’s loved ones have validated her story. It also feels potentially significant that Crystal was still describing this experience in her autobiography years later. While there is no way to causally connect Crystal’s early experiences with her false allegation as an adult, trauma appears as a motif throughout her life.
One thing particularly haunts me about the Duke lacrosse case. According to journalist Michael Hobbes, the medical examiner involved in the rape exam immediately doubted Crystal’s story because every time she prodded a part of Crystal’s body and asked if it hurt, Crystal said yes. This was a red flag, as most rape cases typically involve distinct areas of pain. While I agree that this was suspicious, I can’t help but be devastated by the essence of that story — that when the examiner asked Crystal where it hurt, she replied: everywhere.
None of this is to let false accusers “off the hook,” so to speak. As many people (especially men) have passionately argued, false allegations absolutely can and do upend livelihoods, shatter social bonds, and psychologically scar those who are accused. The fact that some lives are shattered by false allegations is inarguable, and that trauma is valid in its own right. However, that’s not the focus of this essay, so I won’t delve into those details here (it’s been written about with far more detail and zeal elsewhere, anyway!). We can hold this reality while also acknowledging that we still have to understand and respond to the root cause(s) of false rape allegations.
I think reframing (some) false allegations as a trauma response allows for a reentry of basic compassion for the complex, flawed individuals who make those allegations. It gives us a new avenue for recuperating real human beings whose trauma histories warrant excavation and tending. This means recognizing people as complex, multifaceted, and capable of causing harm even while they are also victims of harm (see this thoughtful essay on Crystal Mangum for an example of this sort of reparative work). It means stepping beyond binaries of (you’re a valid survivor | you’re an evil liar), (you’re good and clean | you’re bad and dirty), and (your story is fully provable | your story is worth nothing). Trauma and justice are rarely reducible to binaries and absolutes.
When it comes right down to it, if some false rape allegations are spurred by unprocessed prior trauma, rape culture arguably has a hand in creating those false allegations. After all, a culture that ignores and rejects survivors is also a culture in which survivors may escalate their trauma stories in order to be heard at all. Maybe someone who isn’t believed the first time goes on to construct a second; maybe a 17-year-old rape survivor who is unable to access justice becomes a a 26-year-old who invents a trauma so catastrophic it can’t help but achieve, for better or worse, a real response.
Deconstructing rape culture has been a project for many decades already, and it will continue for much longer. One piece of that project may be to look more closely and with more nuance at false rape allegations, to understand the meaning beneath. This means asking false accusers not just Why did you do it?, but When you made this allegation, what parts of you and your story were going unaddressed?
Again: people who lie to us are still telling us something. We have a responsibility to be curious and persistent in learning what that is.
