Social life is a network between people, a set of relationships of dazzling number of variables, conditions, and complex systems that no computer will never be able to model. That doesn't stop companies from trying to monetize it, but it is still more complicated than anyone person could ever understand.

One thing I find fascinating is secrets. We all have secrets, some of us are pretty good about hiding them and others aren't. But secrets happen more than just someone keeping their mouth close. With social networks, you also have partitioning where two sets of networks don't connect. For example, most of the people online know me as t'Sade, most of the people in my physical life know me by a different name. The number of people who know both is very small… that I know of. You may read my mainstream writing and my stuff and not realize they are the same person; at least I hope so. But, if someone was to connect the two, suddenly things would change.

Secrets

In the last few weeks, I encountered that. While talking to another friend (let's call him BB), I found out that our shared friend (AA) who accused of raping his daughter (CC) thirty years ago. AA and CC are rumored to have had a nasty fight two years ago and CC decided to burn her father by posting a website with all of AA's personal details, address, pictures of the court papers, and everything else. Along with big words “AA is a pedophile!”

With hindsight, a lot of things make sense. AA had a business which he sold under rather strange circumstances; he also didn't want to talk about it. He also had to move rather quickly and to a rather distant location, which kind of sucks because I liked talking to him. The time between the rekindled accusation fits decently close together.

Secrets never stay that way

The reason BB knows about this is because apparently CC spent quite a lot of time calling everywhere AA went and tried to get him banned. From his favorite locales, to the school across the street, to his hobby groups. BB was in charge of one of those groups at one of those locations and they was involved with the initial calls from CC. They decided not to talk about it (maybe with AA, I don't know) and so it remained a secret.

The reason BB told me is because of BB's social network. They has a friend (DD) who is a rape victim who is pressuring BB to stop interacting with AA entirely. They also has business associates that CC had contacted that spend their time pressuring them to also stop interacting with AA.

All of this has caused BB to stop interacting with me because of my association with both AA and BB. In effect, the friction of a secret caused a second friend to stop interacting with me under strange circumstances.

Curiosity

After finding out about this, I decided to look at it myself. It was pretty easy to find the website and I actually read it. The entire thing was written from an anonymous point of view, just a proclamation that AA is a pedophile along with supporting evidence. Enough that caused BB's network to basically damn AA.

I'll admit, when I read it, it made me worry. And I spent a few weeks thinking about it before I really could talk about it.

So, from the page itself:

• It happened thirty years ago.
• It happened in a different state.
• There was a lawsuit for a Jane Doe victim.
• AA was accused of raping a fifteen year old.
• He was given a misdemeanor instead.

Rape

Rape is an incredibly damaging thing. Fluffy was raped by a family member a long time ago and it still haunts her. Not the movie or book version of haunting, but a thousand little things trigger her. We don't watch certain movies, we don't wrestle, I can't touch her at night, and she won't read my stuff. She has body issues in fear of being too pretty and is terrified when someone pays attention to her. It is more than a cloud hanging over her, its a poison that has sunk into her mind and body.

I write rape fantasy and she knows about it. She also knows that I would never consider them in real life and they are only for the written word. Just as it is a terrifying thing for her, she understands that I write because of many reasons and has never asked me to stop.

Of course, that means that some readers will assume that since I get off on rape fantasies, I'm in favor of it in real life. I'm not, but there is frankly no way of proving that. If you are guilty of a crime, I feel the punishment should be appropriate; for rape, castration with a brick is right up there. Also, fantasy is not real life. They are two completely different things.

The legal system

The legal system is a nasty little thing for most people. It's a big scary black box because it requires an entirely different (and alien) mindset to really understand.

When someone as emotionally charged as rape fails to get a conviction, it is understandable that people feel that it has failed. It's devastating to know something happened, but to see it slip away because of a technicality or a different interpretation of laws.

This makes it easy to view AA is guilty even if there was no conviction. It follows the entire “apple doesn't fall far from the tree.”

Legal side note

As a side note but one that most people won't say is equivalent:

When my mother was brought up on fraud charges, I was desperately hoping they would convict her. She is a psychopath and has thirty years of continually destroying people's lives. When she managed to weasel out of it by throwing me and her mother under the bus, it was probably the worst feeling in the world. I lost my house, my job, and almost my life (attempted suicide) because of her. She did something similar to her own mother, who thankfully had the sense of getting a lawyer to defend herself instead of naive me who didn't.

Many people say that losing everything isn't as bad as being raped. And I'll agree, but twenty years later, it still rots in the back of my thoughts. I've made decisions because of those incidents, lost friends and didn't make others because of it, and generally it has poisoned me. So, there is at least some similarities to both long-term, psychological damages.

The accused

With CC's effort, the legal paperwork and calls and spreading the knowledge, AA's life has taken a rather nasty downturn. I see him moving and selling his company as part of it, more so because CC points it out in the website that he was doing it to avoid the accusations. CC helpfully points out the links to everything else as part of her claims.

It's terrifying to look at because I think about my own children.

My struggle

It took me a long time to think about it. There is a lot there and a lot that made me want to drive AA over with a truck. In the end, though, when the emotional “save my children” died down, I had a chance to think about it.

The first is he was accused, dragged into court, but not convicted. CC's website hammers on the accusation (complete with scans of the paperwork) but spends no effort on what the courts actually convicted AA of doing. In effect, it is saying that the mere accusation is enough to declare AA a pedophile.

If he was convicted, he would have been on the sex offender's list (even thirty years ago) and wouldn't be able to live near a school or do half the things he did. If the legal system determined that he was guilty, then he would have suffered for these thirty years. But, it didn't. All the evidence and lawyers brought into the case wasn't enough to convict him of raping his daughter.

So what CC is doing is basically putting him on court in the public opinion. The effort of sending emails to groups, calling places, and generally posting a big sign is that effort. She is trying to destroy him by using the facts of the accusation and saying that the legal system failed her.

In the end

My first problem with this is res judicata which says you can't be sued for the same thing twice. Once a ruling has been made, it is closed until conditions changed. The fact that CC has not sued AA again kind of implies that no new evidence has shown up or witnesses have appeared. So, with one avenue of getting justice gone, she is going with the court of public opinion which is far less forgiving of the accused as demonstrated by BB's struggle to interact with AA.

The second is that the website doesn't identify CC as the person who created the site. It is purely an attack website against him that doesn't bring anything else to light. No new evidence, nothing other than “thirty years ago, he was accused and he got away!” I feel that if you are going to accuse someone, you should be willing to do it in the light.

If there is a danger CC, I would agree to anonymity, but I can't see where AA has no way of harming CC anymore. And if you have such a vile attack site, why won't she stand behind it? She would be able to tell her story better but I suspect there isn't much else to say.

The third is that thirty years passed before it came up. Now, I have seen Fluffy dredging up things many years later, but this is different. This isn't anything new, this isn't anything other than just bringing up the past and throwing it out there to see where it sticks.

People never change

I hate this phrase. Everyone changes. I'm not the same person I was five years ago and I'm a much different person from ten years ago. Every little thing build on the next one. The idea that AA is the exact same person he was three decades ago can't be right.

But, that page pretty much says that. “Once a rapist, always a rapist.”

One size fits all

To add to that, everyone makes bad decisions. Sometimes they make terrible, horrible, life-altering decisions that will haunt them forever. But even if AA did rape CC, that doesn't mean he's going to wander across the street and rape every child in the school. Just as there are a billion different people, there are a billion different triggers and ways of dealing with it.

Things changed

In the end, I'm not going to stop interacting with AA. I'm not going to shield my children from him or worry that he's going on a rape-spree with the local school.

I do this because I continue to have faith in the legal system despite its failures, the fact that he hasn't done anything since to cause him to be dragged once again into court, and actually the vileness of CC's attack against him.

He was accused and he wasn't convicted of it. I have to trust that because I can't assume every lawsuit that I disagree with is wrong. I have to obey the system because that is one of the frameworks we function in. The court of public opinion is a hard one to fight, but vigilantes and mobs rarely do justice, they only hurt people without giving them a chance to defend themselves.

That doesn't mean things won't change. Every time I look at AA, I'm going to think about it. In a way, CC succeeded because she poisoned my opinion of AA, which means that it's going to haunt me. He may have raped her, I don't know. I won't ever know and AA will never tell me. But, it will rot in the back of my mind because now I know it may have happened.

It also poisoned AA's life. Even if I choose to honor the legal system, most people won't. So, I'm stuck in the position of following what I think is right (he was tried and not convicted) verses the sheer weight of people who have already found him guilty because CC said he was guilty. And that means it will cause friction in my relationships and put me in a position where one of my friends says “either you are my friend or AA's friend, but not both”.

Which is exactly what happened to BB.

And now I'm aware of some of the things that are between AA and BB, which means things will change there.

EDIT: The previous last sentence was a bit harsher than I intended.