Monday 18 November 2019

The Great Reading Gang-Rape Hoax Of 1982 (And Its Aftermath)

On January 18, 1982, the BBC screened a controversial documentary. A Complaint Of Rape was part of a series using a fly-on-the-wall camera technique; its subject was not simply the police but their methods. Part of a series called simply Police, this episode caused outrage and led to changes in the way rape complainants are dealt with by the police in Britain.

The outrage was due to the way the complainant in this particular case was treated. A young woman was seen sitting in a room with three male detectives who obviously did not believe her story about being gang-raped by three men. To say the detectives were dismissive would be to understate the case. Among other things, they accused her of being a prostitute. As it turned out, they were not far off the mark, but the viewing public was not to know that.

The outrage over this perceived ill-treatment was augmented by something far worse. Earlier that month, John Allen had stood trial at Ipswich Crown Court for the rape of a teenage hitchhiker. Allen had pleaded not guilty, but after the girl broke down in court he changed his plea. What happened next was extraordinary. Instead of sentencing Allen to a substantial gaol term, Judge Bertrand Richards said the girl had been “guilty of a great deal of contributory negligence” then fined him £2,000. This led to the MP Arthur Lewis asking the Attorney General if the Lord Chancellor would dismiss the judge, to which he received a one word answer: “No”.

Unlike this poor girl who was clearly denied justice, the young woman at Woodley Police Station was not a rape victim, she was a head case, and a far greater danger to innocent men than they were to her. Obviously the detectives knew this, but you wouldn't know this if you read contemporaneous reviews of the programme.

If you are skeptical, see if you can find A Complaint Of Rape on the regular Internet. You won't be able to, for good reason, any critical investigation would tear its bogus narrative to shreds. One of the men behind the programme was Roger Graef. When he was asked to comment on it in 2017, he fell strangely silent, although 9 years previously he had already backtracked slightly when he wrote an article for the London Evening Standard in which he urged women not to drink too much and give out mixed signals to men.

Roger Graef — one of the men behind the 1982 Reading gang-rape hoax.

The truth about the 1982 documentary was not long in coming out but was not widely disseminated. On January 29, the Reading Chronicle published a letter from Mrs E.M. O’Rourke who wrote “I believe there had been no rape in the legal sense, but no-one doubted the woman’s story was substantially correct”. Seven days earlier, the Bradford newspaper Telegraph & Argus published a letter from a correspondent who pointed out that “she had (a) made a similar complaint that proved groundless and (b) she had a history of mental disturbance”.

History and future! On February 1, she was arrested for creating a disturbance in the centre of Reading, and promptly Sectioned. This was apparently not the first time, nor the second, she had been taken off the street in this fashion.

In spite of non-partisan reporting by the Reading Chronicle, the country heard only the whinings of the sexual grievance industry which to this day continues to spout vacuous statistics and factoids about how many men get away with rape aided and abetted by the police.

In June 2016, another documentary with the same title was screened. This focused on an allegation made by a young Spanish tourist in Bedford who the previous June had gone voluntarily with a man who had by his own admission drunk nine pints of beer. There was no suggestion of money changing hands, but their relationship had been confined to sex in his hotel room. For whatever reason, it had not ended well, and she accused him of rape. A prompt investigation led not only to his arrest but to exculpatory CCTV evidence and an earwitness. Even so, a woman detective assigned to the case had clearly drunk the feminist Kool-Aid, but thankfully the CPS declined to charge him. Think about this, what couldn’t most men do after drinking nine pints of beer?

At the end of this second documentary, the viewer was treated to the same contrived feminist statistics: 9 out of 10 rapes go unreported. How does anyone know if they are not reported? And only 6% of reported rapes result in conviction. There is an obvious solution to this: the authorities should stop bringing so many weak cases. In addition to that, women should be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves, and gratuitous false accusers need to be severely punished.

While fortunately (grooming gangs aside) gang-rapes are rare, false allegations of gang-rapes are not. Here are a few examples from both sides of the Atlantic:

November 2005: At Oldham, Lancashire, single mother Sherelle Deblasio has sex with four men, then filled with shame decides to frame them for rape. Fortunately, three of them had smartphones.

March 2006: the outrageous Duke University hoax. The false accuser in that case received no punishment, and went on to murder her lover.

September 2009: the notorious Hofstra University case — the reprobates concerned were saved by mobile phone footage.

February 2010: Teenager Cheryll Dannatt has sex with three men, the fourth declined. The next day she tells her mother she was gang-raped.

May 2014: At the Cirencester Mad Hatter’s Ball, Cirencester, four students have sex with Miss X. Yet again, video evidence saves the wrongly accused.

Sadly, rather than tackle the problem of false rape allegations and the abuse of alcohol that leads to so many rapes — real and imaginary — the focus of the sexual grievance industry is squarely on the erosion of due process, making it easier to convict the guilty and innocent alike. In the United States it has become positively dangerous for any man especially a student to have sex with a woman who has consumed any quantity of alcohol, while in Canada no evidence is required to convict a suspect, only a story. Along with statutes of limitations, jury trials have long been abolished, making Canada arguably the most dangerous country in the world for a man to be falsely accused of rape. And we haven’t even mentioned the ludicrous #MeToo Movement yet.

[The above article was published originally on Medium, September 15, 2019].

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