@Chase I'd love to hear what you have to say about the multiple accusations - assuming he's not guilty, what would make it more or less likely that multiple women would come out of the woodwork to make FRAs twenty years on? I don't think the vast majority of women would do that sort of thing just to get a bit of money, even if given an opportunity, so it seems to me that there is some common chip on their shoulders. Either he treated them badly enough that they still want to get revenge 20 years later, or they have an opportunity to attack that church .. or maybe hollywood is just so much of a rat's nest of messed up people that these things will catch fire out of nowhere.
There is a known tendency during
moral panics for multiple people to accuse the same target of something once the first accuser comes forth. Multiple people accuse the same woman of witchcraft during witch hunts, for example. Once one person accuses her, others start to pile on. It is normally mostly/all women engaging in this pile-on accusation. At which point the hysteria evolves into mass hysteria.
This was known, established psychology at the start of the 20th Century, but it’s been buried and sanctioned in academia and popular thought for decades. Never refuted (because it’s solid and well-evidenced), simply not something you are supposed to talk about or ever acknowledge.
I know a guy who has dealt with a multiple-accuser rape scenario. In his case, three women came forward to accuse him of rape all at once. He’d only slept with one of them. I got very detailed breakdowns from him of all three cases. He was a bit of a cocky asshole, confidently persistent (not in any kind of way that would be considered ‘rape-y’), and was too cavalier IMO in how he left girls after an attempted hook up or an actual one. The girl he slept with wanted to keep dating him but he didn’t want to keep dating her. The other two girls had boyfriends and went with him in the heat of the moment, kissed him or he fingered them, then ‘came to their senses’ and broke it off and left. The most feminist of them (one of the ones with a boyfriend) started talking to people about three months later, found other girls he’d slept with or made out with, and looked to see who she could recruit to go after him. One girl he’d slept with who was not part of this accuser set came to him and warned him the feminist girl was doing this – building this team of rape hunt avengers. The girl in question had declined the feminist girl’s offer to be one of the accusers, and told her off / defended the guy, but the feminist girl proceeded regardless.
I don’t know enough of the Masterson case to know how the women came together or what (or who) triggered the prosecution. They started prosecuting in 2017 I believe, or 14 years after these incidents. I will tell you in 14 years memories can change a LOT.
I’ve had conversations with women about things from the past (not sexual) where the woman insists it was a certain way, that events happened in X, Y, Z fashion, or that she did something or did not do something or I did something or did not do something, and I very clearly remember it another way. Sometimes I’m able to find evidence that her memory was faulty (something written, or some video, or other people who remember the event and it’s not how she remembers it) and they’ll be stunned that their memory changed so much. Sometimes I have found memories that changed in myself – I go back and read some old journal or some old report of mine from years ago and something I very clearly remember happening one way I wrote about at the time it happened as having happened a different way.
So you can have scenarios (not saying this happened here, just a hypothetical) where a woman is a LITTLE bit drunk… years go by… there’s a rape mass hysteria going on and women are looking for rapists under every rock, hiding behind every bush… a woman looks back on some sexual encounter she had that she now feels bad about for whatever reason (maybe she even felt great about it at the time it happened) and starts “remembering” that actually she wasn’t a little bit drunk… actually she was REALLY drunk… heck, maybe he could’ve even DRUGGED her!
There’s all kinds of psychology you can go into here. You notice it’s never women who are super famous living awesome lives who become these Hollywood accusers. Why would a woman want to tell people she was raped by a Hollywood star? In a society that lionizes victims, and particularly rape victims, there’s a certain status tied to being a rape victim. A rape victim of someone FAMOUS? Those victim points are off the dial. Women who have status from other sources don’t need “victim status.” But those victim status points can be very attractive.
Remember, the modern West is a victim culture. The more you can position yourself as a victim, the more status you have in Western society, which is a managerial society where people are largely not permitted to do things on their own, and instead must appeal to bureaucracies to intervene on their behalf. Claiming a victim status allows you more leverage in getting the bureaucracy to come down on your side in a dispute.
As far as Scientology, a lot of ex-Scientology members turn very hostile to both Scientology and people they knew within it. A lot of apostates of ANY religion turn this way. Probably why Muslims are tolerant of conquered non-believers, but a non-believer who is an apostate gets death.
Why would a woman suddenly decide 14 years later that she was raped and something needs to happen to the guy? We can certainly come up with all kinds of excuses for “why she wouldn’t have accused him then” or “why the time was right to accuse him now” but let’s set that aside and look at it from a pure standpoint of “what’s the benefit to her NOW?” Why would someone wait 14 years, then suddenly get angry enough to reopen some old encounter and make a huge stink about it? This court case started in 2017. They waited 14 years, then opened up a case they then spent 6 years dealing with. You know whatever these women are doing now this whole thing is constantly at the top of their minds and has defined their lives for the past 6 years. I don’t care who you are, that is a huge mental penalty to incur, having some tangled up he-said she-said court case about something that happened many years ago defining and steering your life.
Again, we return to the hysteria aspect of it. Everywhere all across the media, people are being whipped into angry frenzies about all kinds of hysterias – rape, viruses, racism, sexism, men, women, dating, sex, population replacement, income inequality, runaway inflation, criminality, war – and they are being brought into these dark, negative states and polarized there. They’re being brought into very aggressive states and conditioned to seek outlets for their aggression; some kind of external tormentor. Of course the actual tormentors are the media and the other forces who are setting up all these hysterias and pushing them so hard, but people don’t see that; they just fall for the hysteria itself, then turn on each other.
When you start talking about rape, rape, rape, rape, rape all the time, telling people that everything other than sign-on-the-dotted-line contractual sex with a referee present is or could be rape, then you start seeing women lauded as brave and powerful for coming out with some dusty old rape story and winning in court against some shell-shocked guy who still can’t even believe he’s being accused of “rape: redefined”, you are going to trigger some women – especially those whose lives aren’t great, or who have some sort of disorder – to target the aggression they are feeling at whoever might fit the bill.
You can’t try to think too logically when you’re in the midst of a mass hysteria. Innocent people become the targets of people who aside from their accusations are also otherwise normal, innocent people.
What you end up with is normal, good people eating each other in the midst of an insane cultural maelstrom.
The only thing you can do is try to steer clear of the storm, or else make for higher ground if it looks like the storm is veering your way.
Chase
