He had tried to hang himself, and had managed to break some veins, maybe fracture a little cartilage, by the time his wife discovered him. It had been touch and go, I suppose, and a long time in the intensive care unit, but he had truly cheated death.

This 55-year old highly-credentialed university professor didn’t look the part of a depraved rapist — little or no hair, red-faced, bashful, perhaps — but that very accusation caused him such despair that he tried to take his own life.

A student had accused him of this horrible “impropriety.“

Obviously, these charges of sexual misconduct shamed him severely.  He maintained that the charge had been trumped up.  The woman who had accused him had indeed some kind of a psychiatric history.

It is not uncommon for women to make this sort of accusation.

He told me he did not want to hate women.  He also told me that he had a female judge.

I cannot help but think of the E.M. Forster novel “A Passage to India” which draws as accurate a psychological picture as anyone could of the sort of young woman who could make such an accusation.

Strangely enough, I could find essentially nothing about this as part of the psychological literature.  I did find a lawyer who had started a blog online, and said that this was a very large and essentially ignored problem. Read more on False Rape Accusations — Who’s The Victim?…