It ends up everything about the UVA gang rape accusation was just a big lie. Rolling Stone should be so proud of its editors.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/03/23/charlottesville-police-to-issue-report-on-u-va-sex-assault-investigation/
I don't know if the conclusions reached in this report necessarily means the story was a "big lie". It just means the police department found no substantial evidence that it occurred.
I agree, it doesn't look good though and if this young lady made this story up there should be severe consequences.
When absolutely nothing in her story can be corroborated by evidence, including:
that a party occurred on that day
that there was an individual with that name at UVA, much less the fraternity
that her story was consistent with anything she said about the day with her friends
that the named individuals were people from her high school- who were not UVA students
that the picture of the college individual was from her High School - and that she had not seen the guy in years
I think sums up that she made the story up and slandered others.
Will she be charged with a crime? If so, what?
if she filed a police report, she could be charged with falsifying one, but the reporter is unlikely to face legal issues given the high burden of proof to show that the journalist (a) knew it was false, and (b) knew it was going to hurt someone, and (c) did it anyway
I mean the accuser.
yeah, that was the first part of the statement
So is falsifying a police report a felony? Or a misdemeanor? This woman could have ruined a lot of lives if she did what she is accused of.
So this is big news on the forums now? I must have missed the shocked posts when it was still an alleged gang rape case.
What's the BIG LIE? That rape occurs on campus? Whether this case is real or not, pretty sure that isn't the lie.
And yes, anyone who relies on Rolling Stone for their 'news' is an idiot.
Mirth, not sue how you could miss all of the press on this at the time. Every news organization made it a big story for over a week. The big lie isn't that rape happens on college campuses, but that this was such a big story and yet all of the facts have been proven to be totally made up.
Doubtful she will be charged with a crime. She refused to file a police report and showed up for the interview with the police with her attorney - and said nothing. There could be a tort action for libel/slander.
This was a very big news story, and of course Obama made public comments about it. Then the story collapsed.
Yeah. The same thing that happened to that Duke LaCrosse team. Remember?
It's obvious that there are some sociopaths out there who have few qualms about placing these accusations to ruin innocent peoples' lives. Good thing there is due process, despite some stupid shits portraying it as truth from the start and using it to further their own agendas.
This kind of thing doesn't happen all the time, but it happens enough that everyone shouldn't be so quick to judge based on a single account.
Quote from: Nefaro on March 24, 2015, 10:42:10 AMYeah. The same thing that happened to that Duke LaCrosse team. Remember?
Not quite the same thing. In that one, the DA actually filed charges based on her false report.
He lost his job.
She got charged for false report (and is now in jail for attempted murder).
Duke lacrosse coach never got his job back, though the team was reinstated.
Faculty never apologized to the kids for the full-page ad they took out demanding "justice" for the "victim"
That case had the added drama of both racial and class-warfare overtones in one of the most racially- and class-divided cities in the South, and a crusading SJW DA that couldn't wait to "take down" those privileged Dukies.
Quote from: bayonetbrant on March 24, 2015, 10:47:32 AM
Quote from: Nefaro on March 24, 2015, 10:42:10 AMYeah. The same thing that happened to that Duke LaCrosse team. Remember?
Not quite the same thing. In that one, the DA actually filed charges based on her false report.
He lost his job.
She got charged for false report (and is now in jail for attempted murder).
Duke lacrosse coach never got his job back, though the team was reinstated.
Faculty never apologized to the kids for the full-page ad they took out demanding "justice" for the "victim"
That case had the added drama of both racial and class-warfare overtones in one of the most racially- and class-divided cities in the South, and a crusading SJW DA that couldn't wait to "take down" those privileged Dukies.
Not exactly the same, but certainly related in the false accusations of rape and entities jumping to crucify the accused as if they were already guilty.
The UVA incident may not have been blown out of proportion near as much, but you can see some similarities at the start. Fortunately other witnesses quickly called bullshit instead of allowing some result-oriented DA run a victimhood inspired witch hunt. It still proves the point that false rape accusations are regularly used to ruin innocent peoples' lives.
This is why trial by jury, being able to see the evidence against you, and being able to confront your accusers is so important in a civil society. This is important no matter how traumatic it is for the victims to experience.
I was called (but fortunately) not seated for a jury on a capital murder beating death of a two year old girl. I'm sure the Mom had horrible flashbacks when she testified in the trial of her former boyfriend who was convicted of murder.
This is a direct quote from Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo regarding the findings in their report:
Quote
"We're not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter. That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ... we're just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is."
Again, I caution you all against the misogynistic urge to burn this woman at the stake based solely on the conclusions of the police investigation.
God, I love playing devil's advocate sometimes.
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on March 24, 2015, 01:02:34 PM
This is a direct quote from Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo regarding the findings in their report:
Quote
"We're not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter. That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ... we're just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is."
Again, I caution you all against the misogynistic urge to burn this woman at the stake based solely on the conclusions of the police investigation.
God, I love playing devil's advocate sometimes.
Well, we should at least throw her in the lake. If she floats, then she's a witch, and
then we can burn her at the stake.
Does she weigh as much as a duck?
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on March 24, 2015, 01:02:34 PM
Again, I caution you all against the misogynistic urge to burn this woman at the stake based solely on the conclusions of the police investigation.
God, I love playing devil's advocate sometimes.
Devil's advocate aside, how is it "misogynistic" to warn against immediately considering any single criminal accusation, with no supporting evidence, as the truth? The same could be said for any accusation, but this is a good example of one that has no supporting evidence, witnesses, or even further testimony from the accuser. Yet it was deigned to be the truth, from the start, by Rolling Stone, the campus admin (they immediately suspended the fraternity), and authorities.
The police report you cited also hints at this assumption of the accused' guilt, despite no evidence at all:
Quote from: investigation report
"We're not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter. That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ... we're just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is."
The "burning at the stake" reference may instead qualify for the accused persons in this case, with some similarities to the Duke case. Until any further evidence or supporting testimony shows us otherwise, it seems like another false accusation initially perpetuated as true. Not some misogynistic fabrication.
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on March 24, 2015, 01:02:34 PM
This is a direct quote from Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo regarding the findings in their report:
Quote
"We're not able to conclude to any substantive degree that an incident occurred at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house or any other fraternity house, for that matter. That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ... we're just not able to gather sufficient facts to determine what that is."
Again, I caution you all against the misogynistic urge to burn this woman at the stake based solely on the conclusions of the police investigation.
God, I love playing devil's advocate sometimes.
The line in the quote about not being able to detmine what possible terrible thing might have happened to Jackie because of a lack of facts, is... troubling. Does this mean that her allegation is without merit (i.e., lacking robustness/consistency/coherence)? Could she be suffering from a trauma that is muddling her memory? Maybe a preexisting mental health issue?
This is interesting
It means nothing she said was true.
No one seems to have a motive for what she did but it is clear that there was no substance to her claims.
then why would it be couched in terms like
That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ...
just curious wording is all
Quote from: Windigo on March 25, 2015, 10:35:13 PM
then why would it be couched in terms like
That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ...
just curious wording is all
They want to be extremely sensitive to real rape victims. It can be terribly difficult for those women to come forward. The last thing they want to do is discourage reporting of real crimes.
Quote from: LongBlade on March 26, 2015, 09:29:53 AM
Quote from: Windigo on March 25, 2015, 10:35:13 PM
then why would it be couched in terms like
That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ...
just curious wording is all
They want to be extremely sensitive to real rape victims. It can be terribly difficult for those women to come forward. The last thing they want to do is discourage reporting of real crimes.
Indeed.
But at the same time that statement sounded eerily like a pronouncement of guilt, even while announcing there is no evidence whatsoever to show it. Saying one thing while implying another.
That's the reason I likened some of the behavior in this case with the Duke case. The police statement is a good indicator of how circumstances such as the false accusations in the Duke case can easily spiral out of hand by predispositions. The kids falsely accused in the Duke case had their lives ruined for awhile due to such things, so these things should be used widely as cautionary examples too.
LB, your last post is correct. I think that's why the way Rolling Stone and the rest of the press handled this whole thing.
QuoteThe UVA Case and Rape-Hoax Denial
Four months after Rolling Stone magazine published a shocking—and soon discredited—account of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville police department has released the results of its investigation into the alleged assault. It comes as no surprise that "no substantive basis" was found for the claim by a student known as "Jackie" that she was raped by seven men at a fraternity party as a UVA freshman in September 2012. What's striking is to what lengths both the police and many in the news media have gone to tiptoe around the obvious fact that the tale was a hoax by a serial liar. This dance of denial suggests that in the current ideological climate, it is nearly impossible to declare any allegation of rape to be definitely false.
At the press conference, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo stressed that the department's conclusion "doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie" and that the investigation is not closed but only suspended until new evidence emerges.
It is, of course, nearly impossible to prove a negative. Short of a surveillance tape documenting Jackie's every movement, one cannot know for certain that she was never sexually assaulted at UVA. But the evidence against her is damning. It's not simply that there was no party at Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity named by Jackie, anywhere near the time when she said she was attacked. It's not simply that her account changed from forced oral sex to vaginal rape and from five assailants to seven, or that her friends saw no sign of her injuries after the alleged assault. What clinches the case is the overwhelming proof that "Drew," Jackie's date who supposedly orchestrated her rape, was Jackie's own invention.
Back in the fall of 2012, Jackie's friends knew "Drew" as "Haven Monahan," an upperclassman who supposedly wanted to date her and with whom she encouraged them to exchange emails and text messages. However, an investigation by The Washington Post and other media last December found that "Haven's" messages were fake; the phone numbers he used were registered to online services that allow texting via the Internet and redirecting calls, while his photo matches a former high school classmate of Jackie's who lives in a different state. No "Haven Monahan" exists on the UVA campus or, apparently, anywhere in the United States (at least outside romance novels). The catfishing scheme seems to have been a ploy to get the attention of a male friend on whom Jackie had a crush—the same friend she called for help after the alleged assault.
Is it possible that someone sexually assaulted Jackie on the night when she claimed to be going out with her fictional suitor? Theoretically, yes. But it's also clear that her credibility is as non-existent as "Haven Monahan."
Moreover, the police investigation has debunked another one of Jackie's claims: that in spring 2014, when she was already an anti-rape activist, some men harassed her in the street off-campus and threw a bottle that hit her face and (improbably) broke. Jackie said that her roommate picked glass out of a cut on her face; but the roommate disputes this and describes the injury as a scrape, likely from a fall. Jackie also said she called her mother immediately after that attack, but phone records show no such call.
Despite all this, Chief Longo wouldn't call Jackie's story a false allegation and even referred to her as "this survivor" (though amending it to the more neutral "or this complaining party").
Meanwhile, in the CNN report on the March 23 press conference, anchor Brooke Baldwin, correspondent Sara Ganim and legal analyst Sunny Hostin were tripping over each other to assert that "we have to be very careful" not to brand Jackie a liar and that "she could have been sexually assaulted." Hostin argued that the idea that Jackie made it all up "flies in the face of statistics," because "only about 2 percent of rapes that are reported are false."
This is a bogus statistic, which Hostin misattributed to the FBI. (According to FBI data, 8 to 9 percent of police reports of sexual assault are dismissed as "unfounded"; the reality of false rape reports is far more complicated, and it's almost impossible to get a reliable estimate.) Even if it were true, it would say nothing about Jackie's specific case. What's more, statistics on false allegations generally refer to police reports or at least formal administrative complaints at a college—neither of which Jackie was willing to file.
CNN never mentioned the evidence that Jackie fabricated "Haven Monahan." Neither did the New York Times, which said only that "the police were unable to track Mr. Monahan down."
Jackie's defenders argue that rape victims often change their stories because their recall is affected by trauma. It is true that memory, not just of traumatic events, can be unreliable; a victim may at various points give somewhat different descriptions of the offender or the attack. It is also true that, as writer Jessica Valenti argues, someone who tells the truth about being raped may lie to cover up embarrassing details (such as going to the rapist's apartment to buy drugs).
None of that, however, requires us to suspend rational judgment and pretend that Jackie's story is anything other than a fabrication. While Jackie is probably more troubled than malevolent, she is not the victim here. If there's a victim, it's Phi Kappa Psi, the fraternity branded a nest of rapists, suspended and targeted for vandalism—as well as UVA Dean Nicole Eramo, whom the Rolling Stone story painted as a callous bureaucrat indifferent to Jackie's plight.
In this case, at least, there were no specific accused men. But the extreme reluctance to close a rape investigation and call a lie a lie bodes ill for wrongly accused individuals, who may find themselves under a cloud of suspicion even after all the facts exonerate them.
Evading the facts does a disservice to Jackie, too. In a sane environment, she would face disciplinary charges and perhaps mandatory counseling. In a climate where saying that a woman is lying about rape is tantamount to "victim-blaming" and "rape culture"—and where some of Jackie's fellow students say that even if her story "wasn't completely true," it helped bring attention to important issues—she is likely to remain mired in self-destructive false victimhood.
For the rest of us, this episode shows how extreme and irrational "rape culture" dogma has become, and how urgent it is to break its hold on public discourse. The current moral panic may be an overreaction to real problems of failure to support victims of sexual violence. But when truth becomes heresy, the pendulum has swung too far, with disastrous consequences for civil rights and basic justice.
Cathy Young writes a weekly column for RealClearPolitics and is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/03/30/the_uva_case_and_rape-hoax_denial_126087.html
There appears to be yet another twist emerging from this.
A high ranking official in the Department of Education was apparently interviewed by Rolling Stone and made some disparaging remarks about some UVA officials. Those officials now claim that their reputations suffered from that interview. So far this has largely gone unnoticed but as the case has unraveled light is now being shown on areas that were previously neglected.
The following article details it further: http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/08/how-deep-is-this-education-officials-involvement-in-the-rolling-stone-hoax/
This story speaks to the difficult problem in the military and on college campuses of how do you treat people Who claim to be the victims of sexual assault appropriately, while still giving the accused the benefit of being presumed innocent until proven guilty? A lot of the heat the military has taken on this issue has come from poorly navigating that minefield.
NY Post Op-piece.
Facts matter: Left sticks to 'narratives,' evidence be damned
By Naomi Schaefer RileyApril 6, 2015 | 7:44pm
The verdict's in on Rolling Stone. According to no less an authority than the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, the magazine's story last year on a University of Virginia gang rape was a "journalistic failure [that] encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking."
But as with many other stories that don't fit into the right narrative, the media will continue to draw the wrong lessons.
As an AP article noted, "Despite its flaws, the article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama."
Despite its flaws? You mean despite the fact that as far as anyone can tell, the story was made up out of whole cloth?
Even once the police investigated the claims of the alleged victim, The New York Times reported: "Some saw a more complex picture, saying that the uproar over the story and the steps that the university had taken since in an effort to change its culture had, in the end, raised awareness and probably done the school, and the nation, some good."
How has the university benefited from the fact that a fraternity has been falsely accused of a horrific crime? And how has the nation benefited from the false but now widespread belief that violent rape, even gang rape, is raging on US campuses?
Wouldn't it have done more good for people to know that young women are statistically less likely to be attacked on a campus than off one?
But who cares about the facts as long as awareness has been raised? Take the case of Ellen Pao, who filed suit against her former employer, venture capital group Kleiner Perkins, for gender discrimination.
She was seeking millions of dollars in damages to make up for what she claimed was a pattern of women being excluded from important meetings. They weren't invited on a ski trip with other partners. Women were forced to sit in the back of the room during a meeting.
Two weeks ago, a jury decided her claims were completely without merit. And yet from the media coverage, you'd think Ellen Pao successfully exposed a Silicon Valley rife with discrimination.
Here's Farjad Manjoo in The New York Times: "The trial has nevertheless accomplished something improbable . . . The case has also come to stand for something bigger than itself. It has blown open a conversation about the status of women in an industry that, for all its talk of transparency and progress, has always been buttoned up about its shortcomings."
In a Bloomberg article called "Ellen Pao Lost, Women Didn't," Katie Benner declared: "The case broke wide open the issue of sexism in a powerful, influential industry."
Or take the Atlantic, which declared, "Ellen Pao's claim against top venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins seems to have come up short, but it's brought heightened attention to gender discrimination in tech."
Come up short? She lost.
There was no merit to her claims. If Silicon Valley is so filled with sexist pigs acting illegally, perhaps we could find a case where they actually did that.
What Ellen Pao successfully did is what most people who file frivolous lawsuits do: They make it harder for companies to do business. They make it more expensive to cover their behinds.
They push everyone to make sure they never put anything substantive in an email, and hire large numbers of bureaucrats to ensure that another lawsuit isn't filed. Or if it is, it's settled out of court.
This is not unlike what happened after the Justice Department released its report on the shooting of Michael Brown last summer.
The only "lesson" that could really be drawn from the DOJ report and the grand jury's non-indictment was that you shouldn't knock over convenience stores, but if you do and a police officer catches you, it's probably not a good idea to resist arrest.
But that was not the lesson that others wanted to emphasize. Which is why the Ferguson police now have to try to change the composition of their staff and ticketing policies — though they have no bearing on the case at hand.
Even The Washington Post's Jonathan Capeheart, whose article " 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' Was Built on a Lie" offered a kind of mea culpa for rushing to judgment in the case, concluded: "Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown's death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger 'Black Lives Matter.' "
Actually, yes, it does diminish the importance because it calls into question whether those were real issues at all.
Maybe we've spent too much time around preschool teachers. Maybe we are so used to being infantilized by the media that we hardly notice these rejoinders at the end of every story, assuring us that even if the story was all wrong, the narrative was correct.
Not everything has to be a teachable moment. And if we do need a moral to every story, it would be useful to find one based on the facts.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum.
http://nypost.com/2015/04/06/facts-matter-left-sticks-to-narratives-evidence-be-damned/
Rolling Stone is being sued for Libel. Trial starts on Monday.
Rolling Stone had a big win in the pre-trial motions. They got the college administrator defined as a "public figure." This means she will have to prove that Rolling Stone had "actual malice" which is a pretty big hill to climb. Still, more of the actual facts of the situation should come to light.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ROLLING_STONE_LAWSUIT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-10-16-09-08-28
Quote from: LongBlade on March 26, 2015, 09:29:53 AM
Quote from: Windigo on March 25, 2015, 10:35:13 PM
then why would it be couched in terms like
That doesn't mean something terrible didn't happen to Jackie ...
just curious wording is all
They want to be extremely sensitive to real rape victims. It can be terribly difficult for those women to come forward. The last thing they want to do is discourage reporting of real crimes.
I agree. Quite frankly a major reason women don't report rape is because of the hell they get put through by the legal process, including often not being believed in the first place.
The incidence of false allegations of rape is actually on the low side - the US Dept of Justice, and the UK Home office each suggesting 8% of allegations were false. What that means is that 92% of allegations (on average) are not false allegations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape Some believe the rate is even as low as 2% http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2009/10/how_often_do_women_falsely_cry_rape.html
Do we see a commensurate conviction rate? No. The failure to secure a conviction tends to be excessively low as can be seen here http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/why-are-rapists-not-convicted-uk-1432600 It really is a shameful indictment of our court systems failing women.
Trial Update can be found at:
http://heatst.com/culture-wars/rolling-stone-uva-fake-rape-story-defamation-trial-gets-ugly/
Although Rolling Stone officially "retracted" the story they continue to state that they believe that the article was true. Very Alice in Wonderland approach.
Quote from: airboy on October 16, 2016, 01:00:31 PM
Rolling Stone is being sued for Libel. Trial starts on Monday.
Rolling Stone had a big win in the pre-trial motions. They got the college administrator defined as a "public figure." This means she will have to prove that Rolling Stone had "actual malice" which is a pretty big hill to climb. Still, more of the actual facts of the situation should come to light.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_ROLLING_STONE_LAWSUIT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2016-10-16-09-08-28
I doubt anything comes of it.
That's a pretty loose definition of "public figure". I doubt many people would recognize the college administrator's name, off-hand. ::)
The jury found that Rolling Stone Magazine and the author of the story defamed the UVA administrator. The story was a lie and the jury found that the lie was told with actual malice. In US law this is a very unusual decision.
Quote from: airboy on November 04, 2016, 05:44:04 PM
The jury found that Rolling Stone Magazine and the author of the story defamed the UVA administrator. The story was a lie and the jury found that the lie was told with actual malice. In US law this is a very unusual decision.
The Administrator?
What about the students who had their lives ruined due to the Trial-by-media attack?
Quote from: Nefaro on November 05, 2016, 12:08:12 PM
Quote from: airboy on November 04, 2016, 05:44:04 PM
The jury found that Rolling Stone Magazine and the author of the story defamed the UVA administrator. The story was a lie and the jury found that the lie was told with actual malice. In US law this is a very unusual decision.
The Administrator?
What about the students who had their lives ruined due to the Trial-by-media attack?
Their trial is coming up soon.
Rolling Stone magazine settled with the UVA administrator after a federal jury had awarded $3 million to the Administrator. This was back in April, but I forgot to post the result. I'm sure that the libeled UVA administrator got a sizable amount of money. The Fraternity also sued and Rolling Stone paid them off also.
Unfortunately, the Obama Admin letter to Universities still prevents anyone accused of campus sexual assault from cross-examining their accuser and makes many of these "campus trials" kangaroo courts. Many University sexual assault decisions have both been overturned by the courts and the male being accused winning substantial damages from the school.
I hope that the Trump Admin Education Secretary DeVoes will eliminate this Federal Policy. Campuses should be in charge of academic crimes and not have a parallel and unfair legal system that does not provide the normal protections to defendants. Our courts can handle crimes of violence. Restraining orders are not that hard to obtain with reasonable evidence. Universities are not equipped to handle criminal cases and the Federal Government should not be trying to strip the rights under the US Constitution from "out of favor individuals" because of political axe grinding.
Most Universities would probably love to get out of the criminal court business, especially when they are not equipped to handle this and are in legal peril regardless of what they do.
Another false accusation, worsened by the authorities withholding exonerating evidence, is narrowly caught at the last minute before ruining guy's life.
Rape trial falls apart after accuser's 40,000 texts are revealed
By Victoria Craw, News.com.au
December 16, 2017
A student has described going through "mental torture" after a rape case against him was thrown out in court because police had failed to hand over more than 40,000 messages from his accuser.
Liam Allan, 22, faced up to ten years in jail charged with six counts of rape and six counts of sexual assault against a young woman over a 14-month period that began when he was 19.
The criminology student at Greenwich University had spent nearly two years on bail and three days in Croydon Crown Court when the trial was stopped in a dramatic fashion after it emerged police officers had failed to hand over evidence that proved his innocence.
The alleged victim had claimed she did not enjoy sex, while Mr Allan claimed it was consensual and she was acting maliciously because he refused to see her after he returned to university.
Now, the judge has called for an inquiry at the "very highest level" to understand why police failed to hand over critical evidence including 40,000 messages from the accuser to Mr Allan and friends.
The messages showed how she had continually messaged Mr Allan for "casual sex", said how much she enjoyed it and discussed fantasies of violent sex and rape, The Times reports.
Outside the court, Mr Allan said he went through "mental torture" over the two year period and relied on the system to uncover evidence that would exonerate him.
When first accused, he turned to a local lawyer he had done work experience with and said he was terrified at the idea of going to prison with sex offenders and worried about what would happen to his mum and flatmates when he was away.
"You are all on your own. I could not talk to my mother about the details of the case because she might have been called as a witness. I couldn't talk with my friends because they might have been called. I felt completely isolated at every stage of the process," he said.
"I can't explain the mental torture of the past two years. ... I feel betrayed by the system which I had believed would do the right thing, the system I want to work in."
The life-changing discovery was made at the 11th hour when a new prosecutor, Jerry Hayes, took over the case one day before the trial began and ordered police to hand over records — including a computer disk that contained 40,000 messages.
Mr Allan's lawyers had already sought access to the accusers's telephone records and messages but their requests were denied on the basis there was nothing of interest in them.
continued..
https://nypost.com/2017/12/16/rape-trial-falls-apart-after-accusers-40000-texts-are-revealed/
Absolutely appalling. Thanks to Mr. Hayes for doing the right thing, but it never should have come to that.