Journalists who recognize the harm of facile or false allegations invariably focus on rape. This ignores the harm done to women by false allegations, of course, and shows ignorance, besides, of a significantly more fertile yet equally damaging source of wrongful prosecutions: the civil restraining order.
Unarguably there are few miscarriages of justice worse than when rape is falsely alleged and the victim of the false accusation is nevertheless found guilty. That’s a life brutally scarred or ruined for absolutely nothing—and ruined not by a lone malefactor but by the state itself.
Most negative commentary on rape allegations, though, focuses on cases where the evidence is less than conclusive or is found to be utterly false.
Just as there’s no quantifying the effects of being raped, there’s no quantifying the effects of being falsely accused of rape. The stigma is devastating, and public sympathy is nevertheless scant. Even online support groups for victims of false allegations of rape may be accessible to screened subscribers only, so distrustful and averse to scrutiny are the men who are maligned this way.
If, however, an allegation of rape is officially determined baseless, its victim has at least the solace of being able to say so. This hardly dispels the psychic effects, but it does mitigate external ramifications, like access to jobs.
False restraining orders, in contrast, often aren’t discerned as false (and restraining orders may be awarded in spite of false allegations’ being detected), and the consequences their recipients must live with are more than psychological. The damning records are preserved indefinitely. In some regions (like Massachusetts), to merely be accused of domestic violence in an ex parte civil court procedure is to be recorded in a state registry as a violent offender. Even if claims are later dismissed when the accused is given an opportunity to defend him- or herself, that is, even if a judge later recognizes on record that s/he’s “innocent,” s/he’s still “guilty” according to the system, and “guilty” is all a background check will reflect.
The implications of restraining orders, what’s more, are generic. There’s no specific charge associated with them. They’re catchalls that categorically imply everything sordid, violent, and creepy. They most urgently suggest stalking, violence, and sexual deviance.
Rape, it should be noted, may be among the actual allegations made by a restraining order applicant—and unlike in a criminal trial, a judgment grounded on such an allegation, amid others, may be affirmed in spite of the allegation’s merits’ never having been assessed.
Restraining orders don’t determine anything. The procedures from which they issue are too accelerated and loosey-goosey to be conclusive.
That no punishment attends the issuance of a restraining order is a tacit acknowledgment by the state that it may be based on nothing more substantive than hearsay and innuendo, and that its implications should be discounted.
They aren’t discounted, though. They’re regarded just as gravely in some respects as felony sentences. Restraining order recipients are denied jobs, leases, and loans. Some are prohibited from working with or around children—and even from attending their own children’s school events (sometimes based on accusations they’re never granted the practicable opportunity to contest in court—and always based on accusations they’re at most given a few minutes to controvert, typically without benefit of legal counsel).
Restraining order rulings are inevitably sketchy at best. They’re indeterminate but nevertheless treated as decisive—and they never go away.
“On the force of the plaintiff’s testimony, the court concludes it’s a crocodile.”
Victims of false rape allegations are socially disgraced and alienated, and psychologically tormented. Victims of false restraining orders may be, too, and besides may lose everything of value to them or have it taken from them by the state. People report spending as much as $100,000 or more to defend themselves in protracted litigations whose seed was an accuser’s filling out some paperwork and having a few-minute chinwag with a judge. They report losing their homes, becoming estranged from their children, and being permanently barred from employment in their fields of qualification and expertise.
Negative associations that attend a charge of rape are unquestionably more sensational and severe than those that accompany the issuance of a restraining order, but on balance the lived consequences of a restraining order may be comparable if not worse.
False allegations of rape should emphatically be called out by reporters to check the impulse that prevails today to credit finger-pointing as fact (particularly finger-pointing by women). Because the implications of rape are so loud and urgent, revelations of false allegations are loud and urgent, too. They arouse consciousness and conscience.
The question that they should stimulate and have yet to, however, is that if people will lie about rape, what won’t they lie about and what quieter and subtler lies and their consequences are being overlooked?
Exposure in the press would indicate that newsworthy instances of dubious or false allegations of rape are few. The problem with giving exclusive attention to them is that it hides more than it reveals.
The cancer of false allegations is far more advanced and widespread.
Copyright © 2014 RestrainingOrderAbuse.com
TALKING BACK to restraining orders 
Joel Bond Gunch
November 24, 2014
2:29 AM 11/24/2014
Just a few observations here, Todd. I argued in my brief to the appellate courts (who didn’t listen btw, and even altered the facts and law to suit the fraud outcome) that being charged with a crime would have provided me with more safeguards than being civilly charged as a stalker. As an accused stalker you have no right to counsel appointed by the state to represent you if you cannot afford it. You have no right to a jury trial, or a transcript, or the Brady rule by which the prosecutor is required to turn over evidence that may be exculpatory, or reveal that his witnesses are rotten scoundrels. All these safeguards, including the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, you have guaranteed to you in criminal court.
I found that when a person is charged with a TRO (which is always obtained ex parte, i. e., without notice to the defendant and opportunity to be heard) there is no record made and thus no chance to obtain a recording of the testimony of the accusing litigatrix, even though our Administrative Office of the Courts recommends it in its publication, BEST PRACTICES. So due process violations abound in the procedures used to “convict.” In other words the sow who went grunting before judges to obtain TRO’s against me and contempt citations called show-cause orders against me had the monstrous advantage of testifying in absolute secrecy, in a STAR CHAMBER proceeding, so that I later was only able to receive the disturbing results of her perjured testimony when a uniformed officer showed up to serve me with an order requiring me to appear in court in a few days and show cause, that is, I was now burdened with the obligation to extricate myself, why I should not be jailed for 30 days and fined $500 for criminal contempt. I also found that judges were not advising defendants in my shoes that they were entitled to attorneys appointed to represent them in these NOW criminal proceedings, and men were going to court pro se and getting shitcanned by these terrifying injustices. So after the first show-cause which was void on its face, facially absurd, and thus dismissed even by the coddling judge who served as the plaintiff’s lawyer, I did enough research in NC law to find that I was entitled to an appointed attorney, and believe you me, I damn sure took advantage of it. Another show-cause abruptly came and went because it too was frivolous and based on obvious perjury. It was dismissed because the plaintiff never showed to prosecute it. The last of the three show-cause orders I had time to do discovery with interrogatories and requests for admissions of fact and genuineness of documents (which would have exposed her as a perjurer), and so it was dismissed after my attorney filed motions I had researched and drafted to enforce the discovery rules the plaintiff had thumbed her nose at for 5 months when she had 30 days by law to respond. So she had now become a liability to herself and radioactive in the courthouse with frivolity and malice. Even though it was clear to me all the officials — the clerks, the sheriff and his deputies, the police, and the judges — were going to ridiculous extremes coddling her, and crawling up trees backwards in an obsession to nail me. They COULD NOT get me because I fought them, because she lied under oath and I was truthful, and because I would not throw in the towel as so many men do because they do not understand the inner workings of this pernicious system of fraudulent injustice.
I don’t know how many times during these years of pestilence that the judges told the most obvious lies to try and induce me to give in. For example, Judge Julie Kepple at one point announced to me in open court before a crowd of people in the pews that I was not entitled to civil discovery because “It’s criminal.” This was pure BS. Why this meretricious woman in a black robe thought she could pull that fraud on me I’ll never know except that she’s a radfem with an IQ lower than a goat’s.
So I was never able to extricate myself from the base restraining orders, two of them. I am now mounting a collateral attack whose success is subject to a maze of obstructions called “abstentions” by which the federal courts abdicate their responsibilities to enforce constitutional rights, and right constitutional wrongs. The playing field is not just tilted 45 deg. It’s inverted. That said, a case called _Williams vs. Vonderau_ admits that the stigma of a restraining order is permanent, and therefore even after its year has expired an appeal to have it declared null and void does not become moot.
And yes, all the law-enforcement agencies and the big three credit dirtmongers have these judgments smearing my name with permanent taints to prejudice me for the rest of my life. So I know just a little of what you have suffered and endured, though I don’t have the intricate details of the abuses inflicted on you.
I spent a couple of hours on a comment responding to your previous article. I will post it there.
Because of clicks on my blog, I too have noticed quite an interest in my comments about cyberstalking, and thumbnails of all the efforts which I made to defeat those two criminal charges, at a site provided by NC’s School of Government, SOG, at UNC-Chapel Hill College of Law.
http://nccriminallaw.sog.unc.edu/cyberstalking/
It’s amazing to see how many people who have been caught up in our state’s facially unconstitutional cyberstalking laws are frantic to understand and cope with the quandary they are in. One glaring statistic they find when they read there is that only 16% of the cyberstalking charges in North Carolina result in a conviction. There again, frivolity and malice are at work to persecute the innocent and prove that overreaching laws are passed, and then interpreted, explained, and applied by those whose interests and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. The Bill of Rights, the Supreme Law of the Land, and particularly freedom of speech and expression is being gutted by these prosecutions.
Kindest regards,
Larry Smith
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Moderator
November 26, 2014
That is low. I at least have a (crude) recording of the 2006 hearing I got (standard operating procedure).
Stay safe, Larry. I just took in your latest posts. If you get shot, I don’t envy the cop who has to figure out who the likeliest suspect is.
The planes are beautiful.
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Moderator
November 27, 2014
What does “NOW” stand for, Larry (besides, probably fittingly, the National Organization of Women)?
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