An upstate New York woman has been charged with false reporting of a crime after police say she claimed she was raped. In reality, she was angry at the man because he wouldn’t give her a ride home.
Jessica Gallagher, 27, met a man on a dating app and told police that he abducted, blindfolded, and raped her. Police say she later admitted that she made up the false rape claim because the man refused to drive her home.
Gallagher was arraigned on Tuesday, and is currently being held in the Wayne County jail. Her next court appointment is on July 18, according to the New York Post.
There’s a cultural push in America today to always “believe the victim,” with “victim” standing in place of those who should rightfully be called, initially: “accuser.” We’re also told that “women never lie” about being raped, yet there’s a long history of frivolous rape claims just like Gallagher’s.
Just last month, Sacred Heart University student Nikki Yovino pleaded guilty to falsely accusing two football players of rape. Yovino said she made up the accusation because she wanted sympathy from another student on whom she had a crush. The motive behind Yovino’s false accusation is similar to that of Jackie Coakley, the woman who not only made up a rape claim, but a fake rapist, in a story published and retracted three-and-a-half years ago by Rolling Stone. Coakley invented the rape claim after a fake terminal illness failed to woo a fellow student.
Coakley wasn’t punished in any way by her university (she did not file a police report), and Yovino will be sentenced to “three years, suspended after she serves one year in prison and followed by three years’ probation,” according to the CT Post.
Those are severely lacking punishments for attempting to destroy the lives of innocent people (Coakley did not attempt to destroy a life, but her accusation did do great harm to her school and a fraternity), but so it goes with false accusations of rape. Activists claim that highlighting false accusations keeps real victims from coming forward, as if a liar suppresses truth tellers. Pretending no one ever lies about rape does more harm to the cause than anything else, because reasonable people know that some people do lie, and become skeptical of people claiming otherwise.
Gallagher will likely receive little to no punishment for what she has done. At least the man she accused has not been named, and might therefore be safe from the reputational ruin that comes from a false rape accusation.