There was a good thread studying the format of known false accusations of sexual assault and rape by women on Twitter yesterday. I can't find it (which is a bit average of me, sorry) but it was based on a US corpus of data, and its findings can be summarised as what follows.
The majority of recorded known false accusations are:
- Teenagers or women who shouldn't be having sex, or be pregnant, trying to exonerate themselves
- Women who have mental illnesses, or Munchausen syndrome
- Women trying to get revenge on someone close to them
False accusations rarely describe an encounter that was consensual up to a point, then became non-consensual. They tend to offer up less detailed, more black and white scenarios. And they're a small proportion of reports overall.
I would take accounts like Mayorga's at face value. There's a lot of detail, and a lot of corroborating evidence there.
Either it's true, or she's decided off the bat to put herself through a tortuous, anxious encounter with the police and the health system on the night of the incident. Having had a friend who went through that process with me and one other person waiting around in the police station for fifteen hours, it's a pretty horrific journey for the victims of assault.
