“Believing Victims” - A Primer - American Crime Journal |

Helpful and unhelpful understandings of an important idea

Last week I did a dumb thing and wrote a blog about a figure who I have seen attracting a fair amount of attention on social media and in my social networks: Sascha Riley, who claims that he is an early Jeffrey Epstein victim between 1979-85, or thereabouts. In my article, I argued why I found these claims to be unlikely.

I haven’t heard very much since then from people who think they have compelling evidence that I was mistaken. What I have heard a lot of, though, is a question about why I would look into these claims at all. Why, they want to know, would I do this? Don’t I “believe victims?”

The obvious thing to point out is that the claim “believe victims” is just question-begging. Who should you believe? Victims. How do you know they’re victims? Because you believe them. I don’t understand the accusation that I am failing to believe victims when the question of whether or not Riley is an Epstein victim is exactly the matter under discussion. If he’s not a victim, then the phrase “believe victims” doesn’t apply, anyway. Even then, surely we can all agree that there are some allegations that could come out from people claiming to be Epstein victims that we would not uncritically believe. If I wrote a blog that I had spoken extensively to someone who said that Epstein trafficked him to Fred Rogers, I can’t imagine I’d get the same support as the same people who say they’ve spoken to Epstein survivors of Andy Biggs – even if I provided the exact same amount of corroborating information (which is none).

The second thing to point here is that absolutely no one in the history of the universe has ever actually applied this standard evenly. A person who is devoted to Q Anon can feel proud of themselves for “believing victims” because they believe every single story that comes down the pipe about Hillary Clinton drinking blood, while also completely ignoring the incredibly well-founded evidence that Donald Trump sexually assaulted E. Jean Caroll. Likewise, I’m sure there are people who believe that Trump threw a baby in Lake Michigan but don’t believe that Joe Biden raped Tara Reade. At the very least, no one believed that Emmett Till assaulted Carolyn Bryant, even before Bryant retracted her story. So even among the most ardent of believers, it seems that everyone acknowledges an exception.

But at the same time, no one wants to side with a sexual abuser, or be slow to respond to a claim that someone has been victimized. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to defend people who claim in public that they have been assaulted. Lots of people also viscerally identify with the experience of not being believed. They don’t want to do that to someone else.

I think it’s worth, then, taking apart the question of what exactly it is we’re talking about when we talk about the importance of “believing victims.” No one actually believes that we should believe all claims about victimization, full stop. But what are we left with, then?

Here’s how I think about it.

Most Interpersonal Claims of Victimization Do Not Depend Upon the Hearer to Investigate Them

There is a huge gulf between the spaces where the advice of “believing victims” sprang up and the kinds of places where it is invoked now. I first started to hear this language in college when I was doing bystander intervention training to prevent sexual assault, or to assist someone who has been the victim of a sexual assault. If someone tells you they have been sexually assaulted, investigating whether or not they were is not your job (unless you are a law enforcement agent). Your job is to provide them with care to make sure they get the help that they need quickly, and resources to make a decision about what they will do next. Of course in this situation you should operate from a posture of belief. You should not refuse to take your friend to the hospital because you are not convinced they were raped (do you really need me to say that?). Take them to the hospital. The truth of what happened is not the immediate concern. Your role does not change and it is not your job to decide if it’s true or not. Investigations of these matters – whether they’re by law enforcement, HR departments, elder boards, or so on – are practices that really ought to be left up to professionals.

This doesn’t pertain to claims made in the media where your goal is not to provide support or care for the person making the claim. In these situations, the call to action is different: to accept the person’s testimony and then act in some specific way on the allegations. Therefore, your immediate interest in the truth is much more justified, and should be significantly keener than it would be if you were faced with a personal request for support alone.

This is not the same situation as being approached by a friend or acquaintance. Tara Reade, for example, did not go public with her claims that Joe Biden raped her in the hope of getting emotional support from you and me. The apparent motive of making these claims was to reveal information about him that would change voting behaviors. In these situations, it’s completely reasonable to ask whether or not one is being called upon to do something for valid reasons. It is not a personal disservice to Tara Reade to have questions about her story – we don’t know Tara Reade and we aren’t forgoing a duty of care to her by asking these things. People also might reasonably come to different conclusions about the accuracy of Tara Reade’s story. I would argue that some of the data makes her story quite plausible, and some of it does not. But I also would say that you should not feel any guilt about not wanting to take Reade’s story on faith and act on it without any further evidence. If this is the case that advocates want to make – that all beliefs about victimization have to be believed and acted upon – this does absolutely nothing for care of sexual assault survivors. All it does is open up a political sphere based entirely on unverified sexual assault allegations that provide sporadic benefits for the claimers and their handlers, but not women or children as a whole.

The idea that corroboration of these kinds of claims is an act of public cruelty, and not a basic necessity that journalists and the public have to undertake when called upon to make public action, is how you end up with situations like the infamous Rolling Stone article “A Rape on Campus.” This is an article I’ve discussed in great detail elsewhere. “A Rape on Campus” was, in addition to being false, an absolute catastrophe for the campus-based anti-sexual assault movement. It turns out that in that case, belief of this particular person was actually not what survivors of sexual assault needed generally. We cannot treat public claims calling for public action with the same deference we treat private claims.

The good news is that even when physical evidence is long gone most predators leave enough victims for stories to develop corroboration. Evidence against Bill Cosby went back decades, as did evidence against Harvey Weinstein. E. Jean Caroll was able to call contemporary witnesses who remembered Caroll disclosing Trump’s assault the very day it occurred. When we talk about corroborating evidence in public cases, we’re not exactly calling for unicorns. These events often do leave trails and it’s reasonable to look for them.

Believing People in the Aggregate About Experiences You Don’t Have is Not the Same Thing as Believing One Person Without Evidence

It does happen that sometimes a group of people, by virtue of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. have information about their own experiences that other people do not have. In these situations, of course, believing people about their own experiences is a good standard to default to, over against believing your own perception.

If you are in an office with ten women and fifteen men, and the ten women repeatedly tell you that your workplace is sexist, that testimony is considerably more valuable than the fifteen men who say it is not. This applies to any number of situations. The people whose lived experience is the most relevant to understanding a situation should not be overruled in favor of those who say they are wrong. If a person at your church in a wheelchair says that your church is not wheelchair accessible, it does not matter if everyone else, who doesn’t use a wheelchair, thinks that it’s perfectly accessible. The impacted individuals are likely to be the ones with the most reliable information.

What does not follow from this is that a person with some claim to marginalized status is inherently more believable in all situations than someone who does not. A person who is disabled is a more reliable narrator about the accessibility of your office than someone who is not disabled. A person who is disabled also might approach problems and subjects from a different perspective that’s valuable not just to themselves, but to the broader society – for example, she might approach theology, philosophy, history, or patient care from an insightful perspective that non-disabled people can learn from.

A person who is disabled, though, is not more correct if she says the sky is orange than she would be if she was not disabled. Many claims about the world do not become more or less credible based on who says them. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of inclusivity to move straight from “people from a minoritized community are the experts on their experiences” to “people from a minoritized perspective are experts on everything.” It is also a fundamental misunderstanding of inclusivity to move straight from “people from minoritized perspectives deserve to have their perspectives represented” to “the perspectives of minoritized people are always correct.” Those are two completely different claims. One makes sense, the other doesn’t.

This is exactly how we end up incentivizing phenomena like “pretendians,” or the custom of people faking to be Native American in order to claim some kind of social cache. It’s also how we get people posing as minorities to solicit donations for dubious causes. People know that they can falsify marginalized status to lower the defenses of certain communities, when in actual fact their claim to be marginalized is one more thing about them that people should investigate carefully. And while claiming a history of trauma is not quite the same thing as faking a minoritized status, it’s also how we get people claiming to be survivors of a certain trauma throwing their credibility behind other false claims, and thus hurting innocent people in the process.

The existence of “pretendians” does not mean that Native Americans do not deserve pride of place to talk about those subjects that a Native American would be an expert in. Nor does the existence of deluded false victims mean that survivors of childhood sexual abuse do not deserve pride of place when discussing subjects that a survivor of childhood sexual abuse would be an expert in. But Lauren Stratford’s false defense of Michelle Smith’s false claims did not make either person’s claims more true, and investigating either claim critically early on would have stopped a lot of innocent people from suffering. Some claims absolutely require evidence to act upon, and setting that aside only incentivizes more dishonesty.

Calls to listen and learn from minoritized people have a shallow overlap with calls to “believe women” or “believe victims,” and it’s not uncommon to hear people mix up the ideas. The reality is that these are different things. You can believe women, generally, when women generally, as a class, tell you that they do not have the freedom to go out at night and enjoy themselves that men do. That is not the same thing as believing a particular woman about a specific claim in a situation where the purpose of that claim is not to secure your assistance. You can believe that women feel pressure to cover their drinks when they go out, and also disbelieve that Ruth Ann Ashcraft was mind controlled by Tom Hanks. These are not the same claims.

To specifically focus on victims of sexual violence: it’s completely reasonable to believe survivors, in the aggregate, when they say that they have faulty memories of traumatic events. It doesn’t follow from that that every single claim about sexual violence is true.

A Claim of Victimization Can Be Used for Oppressive Ends

In the 2016 book Conflict is Not Abuse, Sarah Schulman outlines the ways in which the overstatement of harm is a common tactic to justify violent or oppressive actions by a more powerful party. In essence, person A, or group A, commits some minor offense against person or group B. Person or group B insists that the harm done was actually severe. As a result, person or group B engages in an act of severe harm or cruelty to person or group A.

To use a recent example, in 2025, Oklahoma University student Samantha Fulnecky publicly admitted to failing to complete an assignment in her class, asking her to discuss an article. Instead, Fulnecky wrote a brief discussion of her beliefs, claiming they were in the Bible (she did not cite the Bible). In response, her TA gave her no credit for the assignment. Fulnecky claimed that this was religious discrimination, and after allying with a number of multi-million dollar organizations, successfully got the working-class TA fired.

This is a classic example of overstatement of harm used to justify aggressive action. Fulnecky likely would not have been able to call on large, moneyed organizations and powerful people to go after her teacher if she did not have some kind of claim to being wronged by her – in this class, the claim that she was being persecuted. However, by emphasizing the wrong done to her (she received a failing grade for an assignment she didn’t complete, reframed as an act of persecution), she was able to secure the assistance of powerful people to essentially bulldoze an ordinary, underpaid person.

This happens all the time. And it works because the claim to being victimized is a powerful one. People have empathy for those they think have been wronged. They react strongly to stories that alarm or upset them, and they want to help. And, occasionally those strong feelings can get in the way of critical thinking and the hunt for evidence.

The reality is that, just because someone says they’ve been victimized does not mean they have been. Just because someone feels victimized does not mean they have been. But, the claim to having been victimized can, and does, often provides the cover people need to justify doing oppressive things themselves.

Nancy Mace may well be a sexual assault survivor. She has also used this claim a thousand times to justify bullying her colleague, who has not assaulted her. In this case, our sympathy for Mace as a survivor cannot overwhelm our rational faculties, which would surely incline us to believe that Mace does not have a right to be as cruel as she wants to people who have not assaulted her. Laura Stratford’s and Michelle Smith’s false claims of victimization were used to target and scapegoat working class people who had absolutely nothing to do with their personal experiences of trauma. The fact that Stratford and Smith were troubled women, and possibly victims of some crime, did not make the harm they did to innocent people less heinous.

Conclusion: Believing Victims

There are a thousand situations in which it is completely appropriate to believe what someone is telling you about their own experiences. However, most of these situations involve interpersonal communication, and are not tied up in calls to action besides providing care for the victim.

Skepticism in the public sphere is necessary to combat misinformation. It is not a thing we should shame people for or discourage. We can do this while also having compassion for survivors in our own lives, and while championing the causes of survivors as a class.

A better way to think about believing victims might be this: approach the claim as you would any other. Be as open to a claim about survivorship as you would be to any other claim. Don’t assume skepticism because it’s a claim about violence (which is, as the book Down Girl by Kate Manne argues, is actually a historically common phenomenon.) Attend to the possibility that bias might pressure you not to believe a plausible claim. Believe evidence. Don’t write people off.

But try to believe true things.

Editor’s Note

American Crime Journal would like to thank Dr. Laura Robinson for her continued willingness to examine controversial claims with rigor, compassion, and intellectual honesty. In an era when skepticism is often mistaken for hostility and evidence is too frequently subordinated to narrative, Dr. Robinson’s work serves as a reminder that truth-seeking requires both empathy and scrutiny. We are honored to feature her work and encourage our readers to support her independent research by subscribing to her Substack, where she explores topics ranging from misinformation and moral panics to public discourse and evidence-based inquiry.

Readers interested in Dr. Robinson’s work can follow her research and commentary: Not Peer Reviewed: By Laura Robinson on Substack.