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It’s tough to get excited about anything surrounding a gang rape trial. Regardless of what happened on the night of the incident, regardless of whether or not the accused party is convicted for the alleged crime, every possible outcome is a bad one.
If the crime was committed and the accused party is not convicted, that means a guy got away with a heinous crime. If the crime was committed and the accused party is convicted, a woman was still raped. If the crime was not committed and the accused party is convicted, a woman just sent a man to jail for a horrific crime that he didn’t commit. If the crime was not committed and the accused party is not convicted, that false accusation makes it harder for actual sexual assault victims to come forward and seek justice, along with permanently damaging the reputation of the accused.
All of those outcomes suck – this case is no different.
This case only makes it harder for actual sexual assault victims to come forward -especially in cases regarding high profile athletic figures. This gives actual credit to the people who claim “gold digger” every time an athlete is accused of rape. And those people will continue to dig their heels in every time another false accusation is discredited. Sexual assault is a rampant problem that’s not getting the universal acknowledgement it should because of a handful of false claims. Yet time after time we hear about cases of false claims because of this misguided belief that they will still “raises awareness” of the problem.
The other result of this case is that it has irreparably damaged the reputation of a man who we now know to be innocent, at least in the eyes of the law. Seriously, my first instinct was to say “in the eyes of the law” there because I don’t totally trust that he’s not guilty. He could be COMPLETELY innocent here, yet the accusation itself has permanantly burned the distinct possibility of guilt in my head. That won’t go away any time soon. And a (potentially) completely innocent Derrick Rose will have to deal with the weight of those looks and those comments and those accusation for a very, very long time. See, there it is again.
At this point all there is to do is put this darkness behind us and move on to real basketball talk.
I’m almost done a flaming hot Russell Westbrook blog and have a Clippers piece on the way right after that. If you haven’t already, go check out the monster Warriors column from this morning. And go to The What’s The Action NBA Preview page for all the basketball content you could ever need heading into next Tuesday.
Basketball talk is awesome.
This shit is way too dark.
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