University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan suspended until January the entire fraternity system at UVA. She did it on the basis of a newspaper story whose author—Sabrina Rubin Erdely—and which paper’s editor—Will Dana—consciously and openly stated that they had done nothing to fact check the claims made by this “Jackie” person and which Erdely published.

On the heels of that, we get Zerlina Maxwell writing in another newspaper article headlined

we should generally believe rape claims

That headline, incidentally, originally appeared in the online edition as automatically rather than generally, but apparently The Washington Post thought it better to weasel-word things a tad. What Maxwell said in the body of her article, though, remains unaltered:

We should believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. … Even if Jackie fabricated her account, U-Va. should have taken her word for it….

Which UVA did: not only the allegedly involved frat was suspended, all of them were. As far as I can tell, as of my writing of this the fraternities remain suspended, even with the “Jackie” story exposed as false. I’ll be happy to update this article if someone can show me that Sullivan has lifted her suspension prior to 9 Jan 15.

As a result, particularly of Sullivan’s actions, but actively aided and abetted by Maxwell and triggered by Erdely’s now known to be false story, an entire institution and every member of it has been irretrievably smeared. These young men have had their reputations trashed, or alternatively will no longer be able to claim affiliation with their fraternity or any part of the Greek system.

Worse, the victims of real rape now have an additional hurdle—credibility—to overcome as a result of these three women’s…behavior. Actual rape victims are being raped a second time, in advance.

In the aftermath of “Jackie’s” claim of being a gang-rape victim at the University of Virginia (has the school reinstated the fraternities, by the way?) falling apart under the weight of her lies, we get this from Zerlina Maxwell, of The Washington Post, a woman who represents herself as an actual lawyer, as well as a writer of newspaper articles.

This is what we mean in America when we say someone is “innocent until proven guilty.” After all, look what happened to the Duke lacrosse players.

In important ways, this is wrong. We should always believe, as a matter of default, what an accuser says. Ultimately, the costs of wrongly disbelieving a survivor far outweigh the costs of calling someone a rapist.

So, I guess all those black men who were lynched—without even the nicety of a trial before an all-white jury, mind you—on a woman’s mere accusation of rape were correctly hung.

She says,

This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system.

Because women are outside our legal system. Because it’s the moral thing to do to string someone up—literally or figuratively—and get around to an investigation afterward. Never mind that that’s just going to spring-load the investigation to justify the lynching regardless of any actual facts. Which is what Maxwell and her ilk are trying to do with “Jackie.”

The victimization of the accused, apparently, has no importance. After all, he can’t be a worthwhile human being, else a woman wouldn’t have accused him in the first place.

Never mind that, to alter this lawyer’s closing argument just a touch,

The cost of disbelieving [the accused man], on the other hand, is far steeper. It signals that that [men] don’t matter and that they are disposable….