Lisa Avalos is an American academic. I hesitate to say legal scholar, but that is what she is classed as. She first came to my attention in the furore caused by the suicide of false rape accuser Eleanor de Freitas.
Judging by her haircut, she finds the idea of consensual sex with a man every bit as revolting as actual rape. If you think this is unkind, consider the words of a similar if somewhat older feminist legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, who wrote in 1989:
“Compare victims’ reports of rape with women’s reports of sex. They look a lot alike. Compare victims’ reports of rape with what pornography says is sex. They look a lot alike. In this light, the major distinction between intercourse (normal) and rape (abnormal) is that the normal happens so often that one cannot get anyone to see anything wrong with it.”
If Avalos is not as toxic as MacKinnon it is only because she is nowhere near as well known.
In 1999, she published Hindsight And The Abortion Experience... which takes an empathetic view of what for all decent women is an emotional, turbulent or even a life-shattering experience. Unfortunately, like all her kind, Avalos is incapable of showing such empathy towards men.
Included below are four overlapping papers:
Prosecuting Rape Victims While Rapists Run Free... (2016)
Policing Rape Complainants... (2017)
The Chilling Effect... (2018)
Victim Recantations... (2018)
The publication dates of the above are not important, but a few points. In early 2018, when I first received Prosecuting Rape Victims While Rapists Run Free..., it was dated, or rather misdated 2019. One version of Policing Rape Complainants...is a document dated 5/5/2017 1:54PM. The Chilling Effect... is dated precisely January 6, 2018. Victim Recantations... is dated March 2018; it was co-authored with Heather Huhtanen and Kimberly A. Lonsway.
Avalos is far from the first feminist airhead to believe a) women never lie about rape, and b) those who do, warrant not punishment but compassion. In May 2019, she was recommended a grant for a so-called study She Must Be Lying To Us!
In spite of the overlap, the four publications listed here cover a lot of ground, and as to be hoped if not expected, not everything Avalos says is invalid. At times, the police do not investigate rape as thoroughly as they should, but this is hardly unique to rape. Crimes both trivial and heinous are at times not investigated thoroughly. To give just one example of the latter, in August 1985, Jeremy Bamber slaughtered his entire family: parents, sister, and her twin sons. Then he staged the crime scene and played out a cameo he nearly got away with. If the police had carried out even the most cursory investigation, they would have realised Sheila Caffell could not possible have overpowered her father then committed suicide with a rifle. The officer in charge appears to have been more concerned with wrapping up the case and getting back to his round of golf. It was left to members of Bamber’s extended family to uncover the evidence that led to his conviction.
A woman who reports a rape may be disbelieved for a number of reasons, the main one being the police are not idiots. They realise some women have sordid encounters which they regret sometimes immediately, that some lie to cover up their own misdeeds, out of spite, revenge, or for dozens of other reasons from the trivial to the serious. Many seasoned detectives and experienced patrol officers have personal experience of this, as in this classic case (entry for February 20, 2008). Note the ludicrous rebuttal by the airhead rape crisis counsellor.
The case of John Worboys, mentioned in The Chilling Effect... from page 830, led to much criticism of the Metropolitan Police, but this man had a unique modus operandi, and many of his victims didn’t realise they had been drugged, much less sexually assaulted.
Regarding the false claims Avalos makes specifically, in the first three publications she cites the cases of Rhiannon Brooker, Eleanor de Freitas, Layla Ibrahim, and Gail Sherwood. All four can be found in this database; the de Freitas case has its own page with evidence compiled largely by her victim, Alexander Economou. The Brooker case also has its own page which includes both an appeal transcript and a seven minute interview with her victim, Paul Fensome.
In the de Freitas case, Avalos alludes to this lying, conniving little tart as a victim of “gender-based violence”, and in view of her aforementioned comments about poor police investigations, it is as well to point out that it was left to the victim to carry out his own investigation. Being a man of means, Alexander Economou hired a private investigator, and obtained CCTV evidence that showed de Freitas shopping with him happily after she had supposedly been drugged and raped. Had he not done so, he may well have been charged, perhaps even convicted. Needless to say, Avalos has nothing to say about this, nothing good anyway. As far as she and her ilk are concerned, any behaviour by a rape complainant is consistent with her having actually been raped, in other words, the accusation is the evidence - crimen exceptum. The police officers in that case appear to have drunk the Kool-Aid, but there is no need for you to!
Avalos adds insult to injury in Policing Rape Complainants... when she says at page 495 the police ignored the best evidence in the case: “the two-hour long, video-taped interview [she] gave [them]”.
Then she alludes to Economou as John Doe - as if his no one knows his identity - adding:
“For the avoidance of doubt, by detailing how the police and CPS dealt with Eleanor de Freitas there is no intention of impliedly asserting Doe’s guilt.”
No, of course not. It is clear from the evidence Avalos obtained that Eleanor de Freitas was damselling the police, and it is a matter of record that she took plenty of time to get her story straight.
The Brooker and Sherwood cases stand out for the degree of fabrication involved. The Sherwood case is ridiculous because she claimed to have received letters from her imaginary stalker (which she burned) and to have been confronted in her own home by a man dressed in motorcycle gear. When a woman (or anyone) claims to have been victimised repeatedly over a period of time, and when no credible corroborating evidence is found, the conclusion is obvious. In any case, the police went to considerable lengths in this case to investigate her claims, including covert surveillance. Avalos interprets this as disbelief, but does it matter? If they thought she was lying, the camera would have vindicated her had she been telling the truth. She wasn’t and it didn’t.
Victim Recantations... is the odd one out of the above publications, but unsurprisingly it is written to the ludicrous gender bias narrative. Thus we are told that false reports of rape often generate significant media coverage which undermines the willingness of genuine victims to come forward.
Or perhaps it makes potential false accusers think twice? In any case, every false report of a rape begins as an apparent genuine report, so who is really at fault here? Avalos and her co-authors don’t like polygraphs. Neither do liars! Herein also, the reader is given all manner of reasons for victims recanting and for the police pressuring them to recant, all manner of reasons but the obvious one. And here it is, although only an allegation of indecent assault, this is one of my favourite short video clips. It is clear is it not, that no assault of any kind happened or could have happened? The police know this but still give the non-victim a chance to recant. She does so, but only after they show her the exculpatory evidence, and although the victim (in this case a police officer) did absolutely nothing wrong, in her eyes it is still HIS FAULT.
And that sums up Lisa Avalos to a tee.
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