How to Avoid False Accusations Rape: Self Defense in the Feminist State. By John Davis. Coppell, Texas: Old Town Publishing, 2015. 138 pages. No price on book but Amazon.com gives price as $11.99. Review by J. Steven Svoboda.

Eminent, retired lawyer John Davis, who once served as Assistant Attorney General, has written a short, punchy, accessible guide to help younger men in dating circles or attending college to stay safe from false accusations of rape.

Steven Svoboda book review

The author makes a point that bears emphasizing over and over that “false accusations of rape are a mirror crime of the crime of rape itself… motivated by rage and a desire to exert harm and power over the victim.” Davis rightly calls for substantial criminal penalties for false accusers, who all too often are female and get treated with kid gloves because of their sex.

In retelling the story of Brian Banks, recently made into an excellent movie that bears watching, the author spells out one of the downsides of our culture’s current imbalance toward female concerns. A high school student fabricated the lie that Banks raped this woman and then she did not want to recant because she feared having to return the $1.5 million her lawsuit had netted her family. So Banks missed the chance for a lucrative and illustrious professional football career. Now the Indian government has effectively started rewarding rape accusations without any evident investigation of the claims prior to the payment.

Davis shows us how the basic bedrock of our legal system, the presumption of innocence, has been turned on its head in the rush to criminalize even healthy, mutually agreed examples of male sexuality. Some provocative ties are made to the Ku Klux Klan and to the benefits to women back in those days of lynching black males for asserted sexual misconduct with white women that all too often had absolutely no basis in fact. Shockingly, it is more common for women to make false rape accusations than to be in fact raped.

Useful tips are offered such as advice to save all emails, text messages, voicemails, etc., and a recommendation to tape record or video record sexual encounters. Even if the recording was unlawful without notice to the other party, the false accusation victim may be able to get it into evidence under a “lesser evil” principle.

Davis expends a considerably percentage of the book in reproducing extended excerpts from an actual Maryland Supreme Court opinion in which the state supreme court affirmed the man’s conviction for rape. Reading it conveys the utter innocence of the man, the consensual nature of the sex, the level of fabrication of the false accusation, and the unfairness of the legal system.

I cannot entirely agree with Davis’ views advising against any sort of involvement with a rape survivor. Without going into too many details, in my own life, I have dated more than one woman with such a history, and I did not suffer any negative impact from the ones with whom I was involved.

I am not sure where Davis obtained his basis for saying the majority of women have rape fantasies, but again based on personal experience, I can definitely say that a significant percentage of them do.

Informed consent laws and their criminalization of ordinary dating behavior is usefully explored.

Davis ends his short but trenchant book with seven invaluable rules for men seeking to avoid false accusations. Highly recommended.

NCFM PR Director Steven Svoboda book review, How to Avoid False Accusations Rape: Self Defense in the Feminist State.