Click Here For The Original Timeline Introduction

Jump Straight To An International Timeline Of False Rape Allegations 1674-2015
To Types Of False Rape Accuser
To Legal And Technical Stuff
To Links Page

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This page was added October 25, 2019 when the False Rape Timeline was moved to its own domain. If this is your first visit and you are new to false rape allegations, I would suggest you read the original introduction first.

I began work on the International False Rape Timeline in January 2016, shortly after completing a very short timeline for the previous year. How and why I came to set it up I explained in my live hangout of October 12, 2018.

I went public with the Timeline on June 13, 2016. My three original intentions were:

(1) To include only false rape allegations that were reported to the legal authorities, usually the police, with perhaps an odd attempted rape and serious indecent assault case.
(2) To include cases only from the start of the Old Bailey proceedings until 2015.
(3) To put all the cases on one page.

I decided shortly to include some cases that were not reported to the police, and to add more cases of false allegations of lesser offences, but generally these have some exceptional feature, like if a case was widely publicised or the result of a conspiracy; for an example of the latter, see the May 10, 1994 entry for Albert Thompson.

With the advent of social media, it would be impossible as well as pointless to try to catalogue every single such false allegation, so generally I have included only those that garnered significant publicity or which have some special feature as stated above. Obviously, this is a subjective view, so I will not expect everyone to agree with me.

I have also added a few real rapes, the reason for which is made clear in the relevant entry, and a few false allegations of non-sexual crimes, like the hoax perpetrated by the American lesbian Charlie Rogers.

Also, I decided to add false rape statistics from various cities, counties, states...and sundry publications (including video clips) such as the original paper on the fallacious rape trauma syndrome.

Since the 2006 Duke lacrosse hoax if not before then, false rape allegations and the issues around them have generated enormous controversy, most of it contrived, so ending the Timeline at 2015 was never going to fly, whatever I thought at time.

As the number of entries piled up, putting all the cases on the one page would not be practical, so with any entry that runs to more than about five lines, the reader will generally find a single line introduction and a link labelled click here for more. This has allowed me to expand some entries considerably, see for example the Shelly Korous case, for which the falsely accused Jack Rebolledo has kindly supplied me with extensive documentation.

If you are not interested in the technicalities of archiving reports, you may skip the next few paragraphs.

When I set up the Timeline, I used links to many archived webpages, and continued to add them. On Easter Sunday 2017, I was rechecking some links when I received an error message for a Mail Online article. I checked others, and sure enough, I received the same error. On contacting the Internet Archive I was informed by Wayback Machine Director Mark Graham “...playback of dailymail.co.uk is currently being blocked based on the value of their robots.txt file.”

There was also a blog post to that effect. By May 14 the same year I had replaced all the archived Mail Online links with PDFs. I had similar problems with the Canadian National Post. The solution I hit on was to save such pages to disk, remove any “robots.txt” and “no archive” instructions, reupload to a holding directory on this website, archive, then delete the upload. I had already done this with some pages from other sites protected by robots.txt.

Like the medium itself, many modern webpages on especially news sites are dynamic, which is why you will find English language advertisments on non-English websites, and current advertisements on pages that were created years ago. Due to their dynamic nature, such pages are often huge, and may contain hundreds of files including in sub-directories. No sane webmaster wants that sort of stuff cluttering up his site, much less his hard disk, even if said pages are much simplified.

Shortly, I hit upon another solution, I would convert such pages to PDFs, initially by printing to disk with Google Chrome, and then mostly by saving the relevant page as a WORD document before converting it. This latter allows easy editing of files that may not display properly using the Google Chrome method.

I have since realised that simply copying a webpage to a WORD file, editing it, then converting to PDF is a lot more effective. Most webpages converted to PDF files have the original url appended to the end of said file, and have additionally been archived. I was surprised at how quickly some webpages disappear, especially from news sites. Indeed, many news sites, including a large number of UK sites, have disappeared since I started the Timeline. For example, surreymirror.co.uk has been incorporated into SurreyLive at getsurrey.co.uk. At the time of writing, the dead url redirects to the new site, but I doubt this will last. I was equally surprised, pleasantly so, that some new articles have been around for decades.

Returning to the subject of simplified pages, the entry for Andrew Bennett, October 23, 2006 includes a simplified page from a local news website. This is because for technical reasons it was impossible or far too time consuming to create a PDF of the original. This page has now been deleted from the website lynnnews.co.uk but can still be accessed through the Wayback Machine. As with all such HTML pages in this database, the full address can be found at the top of the (source) page.

Talking of simplified pages, and more specifically clutter, below is the original screengrab that accompanies the entry for Ross Stephens (November 29, 2012). Immediately below that is the version without the clutter.

Looks nicer, no?

Here is the original screengrab for the November 15, 2010 entry (Charles Munday). And here is the new version. You will notice the new version does not include the url. This is because it is not a screengrab from the actual site but from my own computer. I downloaded it, edited out the annoying coding error. I decided against contacting the webmaster because I thought the page might simply be deleted. Refer to what I said about (UK) police websites, above.

Be it noted that if you decide to follow a link at the bottom of a PDF page, when you click on it you may be taken to not simply a different page but an entirely different site. The best thing to do is to copy it manually into the WayBack Machine, which should then lead you to the original source. Don’t ask me how or why this happens; I only document the stuff.

In this connection, I offer the following: the original file 2479 – one of the entries for September 2, 2014 – a false report from Banana Walk, Radcliffe, Manchester – was to an article from Asian Image – and the domain asianimage.co.uk. However, when on June 6, 2019, I clicked the link – http://www.asianimage.co.uk/news/11828483.Rape_investigation_dropped_after_false_claim/ – it took me to the same article on the website of The Bolton News. Go figure. From this article it appears the report was published originally in The Radcliffe Times; this newspaper has now it appears been incorporated into the Bury Times. At the time of writing the British Library catalogue lists issues for 2018, but with the rise of the WorldWideWeb, countless newspapers and magazines in the UK and elsewhere have folded; many now exist only on-line if at all. Here is the front page of the last hard copy issue of getreading.

In March 2019, I made a half-hearted attempt to archive a page from nzherald.co.nz, and to my surprise, it did archive, so I began archiving other pages from that site. Another site protected by the robots.txt protocol is dothaneagle.com; I was able to archive a page from this the same day, but at the time of writing there are other problems with that site and many other non-European sites due to the ludicrous GDPR directive.

Reports on police websites don’t generally last for long. When I use these, I archive them as soon as possible.

Since I began work on the Timeline, quite a few news sites have also instituted paywalls or restricted the number of free articles visitors can read on a monthly basis. Here is an example of a message from one UK news site, although I can’t remember which one!

The changeover from http to https caused me a great deal of aggravation re archived pages. Some appeared to have been lost, so I re-archived many of them.

I have tried to archive every single page linked from this database, even when I link to a non-archived page, IMDb pages, for example. However, some pages may not have been archived because at times the WayBack Machine reports a page has been archived but on returning to it, it has not been. That is my experience at any rate.

Traditionally, a newspaper is a physical object, but alluding to the website of a newspaper as a newspaper or cyber-rag is no big deal, with or without the hyphen. Sometimes the on-line version of a story will differ significantly from the hard copy version, and both – especially syndicated articles – may be published by many different outlets. Also, newspaper webpages tend to be updated more frequently than the hard copy, so you may find web articles that do not appear in the actual paper.

For example, I found this June 14, 2007 report in NewsBank, but it was published only on the Wigan Observer website. This weekly local paper was published on the 5^th, 12^th, 19^th, and 26^th of that month. I made a careful search of the relevant issues to no avail. Likewise, a report may not appear in every edition of especially local newspapers. See for example the December 1994 entry for Gillian Small, the February 4, 2000 entry for Paula Reed, and the January 30, 2015 entry for Adam Price.

Some newspapers have different editions for the same area, evening papers especially. From my earlier researches, before the Internet as we know it existed, I found editions of the London Evening Standard that were published earlier in the day, I think at one time the paper produced no fewer than six editions, something that beggars belief when one realises the pages were typeset manually.

In a telephone call circa early 1994, I was informed by the Librarian at its London office that the Guardian had four editions: two published in London, two in Manchester. There were at least two editions of the Daily Mirror. Local newspapers sometimes have different editions, and in addition to that, articles may appear on-line but not in the relevant paper itself, including on days when that paper is not published.

Some newspapers having different editions can lead to confusion for the neophyte, or even old hands like myself. When I was researching her case, I came back to a New Zealand newspaper a while later to find a smaller photograph of airhead false accuser Louise Nicholas than I remembered. In fact, it isn’t just the photograph that is different; the associated article has a different title and is sufficiently different textually to be a different article. This message from the start of the microfilm of the newspaper in question explains why. Here is a similar message from the local press in the UK, Coventry in this case. So you can see what it looks like, this file contains the January 18, 2002 front page for three variants of the Coventry Telegraph: Leamington, Nuneaton, and Rugby.

One more example will suffice: file 2158 is a report from the old Burnley Express website. I tried to find hard copy of this, but the actual paper was published Tuesday and Friday. I consulted both editions, ie before and after the web version, and the story appears in neither. It does though appear in NewsBank. This is far from unique; just because you find a newspaper report on the web doesn’t mean you will find hard copy.

I have also found errors in NewsBank, but for the most part these are very minor. As will be seen from this partial screengrab of a NewsBank article, the acquittal of David Cooper is said to have appeared in the August 20, 2015 issue of the Leicester Mercury. In reality it appeared in the following day’s issue on the same page.

Regarding errors more generally, for the most part I have not corrected mistakes for PDF files, though I will sometimes replace quotes (" ") with smart quote (“ ”), ditto apostrophes ( ' ) so ( ’ ). This is purely because they look nicer!

A few words here about NewsBank. This is a marvellous resource, especially if you have access to the international version. However, it does not include every local newspaper. I found the 2009 entries for David Wilson from the Sunderland Echo on the Web. I didn’t archive these, and they were removed. At the time of writing, the paper appears to be archiving old stories, although this appears to be an extremely tardigrade process. The Sunderland Echo is indexed by NewsBank only from 2014 at present, but here are scans of the actual microfilm of the relevant articles.

October 16, 2009, page 5 and October 17, 2009, page 4.

The June 15, 2003 entry for Carrie-Anne Carter was not found in NewsBank as at the time of writing the relevant newspaper, The Comet, appears is indexed only from 2015. I found this article in a secondary source. I could find no further mention of this woman, which for me begs the question, how many such false rape accusers are reported only once by a minor local newspaper, or are not reported at all?

A word or two here about newspapers, magazines and journals. A magazine or journal especially may be published before its ostensible publication date. On one occasion I have found an academic journal on-line months before it was published officially. Though magazines are not usually published so far in advance, no one should be surprised if the October issue of a magazine can be found on the shelf in mid-September.

If you find highlighted text in a PDF file, like this one, it is because it was downloaded from an on-line database, and (in this case) the words false and rape were used as search terms. This can be avoided by downloading the files as WORD documents where possible, and editing them before conversion. On occasion I have been known to miss one or two; in this case I missed more than one or two, but will allow it to ride for illustrative purposes.

Although with JPG images of webpages I have tried to make the urls clearly visible, I have abandoned this where the principle collides with aesthetics. Take a gander at this image from the Maidenhead Advertiser. Here is the original, and here is the version with the url visible. Yuk! A couple of asides here: the image of the author had disappeared by the time I made it, May 28, 2019, and is that a deer in the forest?

A few minor points relating to this database in particular.

It has often been said that America and Britain are two nations divided by a common language. This can be true for Britain alone, sometimes a Londoner like myself will have difficulty understanding a Scottish accent or even a regional English accent. Words also have different meanings. In the UK, kidnapping means taking away someone by force, perhaps at gunpoint. In American legal parlance, kidnapping (or kidnaping) has a much more liberal interpretation. The young Revisionist Eric Hunt was charged with attempted kidnapping for grabbing hold of Elie Wiesel in an hotel in an attempt to lecture him. Unwise though that was, it hardly amounts to a kidnapping attempt.

In the UK, prison officers are alluded to as prison officers; in the US they are known as correctional officers. I tend to use the former. Likewise I tend to allude to police officers as such even if they are called gendarmes or something else.

Finally, in the 3 years plus of its existence, news of the Timeline has been getting around. In 2018, it found its way into a book on the now notorious Lynnwood case. And here is just one of my on-line references. I found this undated passing reference on February 11 this year.