Surprise! It’s Kind of Standard for Sexual-Assault Accusers to Face Scrutiny!
I can’t believe I even have to explain this this, but posing as a sexual-assault victim is a despicable thing to do. It hurts actual victims by making the public even less likely to believe their stories, while many are already too afraid to come forward because they’re worried they’ll be written off as liars. I know the president of Project Veritas, James O’Keefe; he’s always been kind to me, and yet I still have to say that I’m absolutely horrified by these actions.
.. (Because a 14-year-old from a broken home definitely had the resources to take on a district attorney in a he-said-she-said legal battle!)
.. As a I previously wrote in a column for National Review, the Washington Post’s reporting about Roy Moore was nothing like that Rolling Stone campus sexual-assault story that turned out to be false. Rolling Stone relied on only one, single unidentifiable source, while the WaPo had four on-the-record victims — and their stories were backed up by more than 30 corroborating sources.
.. The worst part of all of this, though, is that it doesn’t even matter: The fact that Project Veritas’s sting backfired, and wound up being an additional argument for the victims, will be completely lost on anyone who needs to understand it. O’Keefe himself knows this; he actually sent out a fundraising email after the news of his botched sting broke (insisting that “we already got our story”), and I’m sure he’ll get donations from it.