Next time you need a dank party game, try Family Feud by way of Cards Against Humanity. You call out a crime or other act of treachery, and your guests vie to name the most common motivations.
“Drug deal gone wrong!” “Revenge!” “Hatred for women!” “Violent video games and rap music” (OK, boomer) “Physically-emotionally-sexually insecure male facing midlife crisis!” “Structural inequalities leading to socioeconomic immobility” (we all have that friend)
If you want to end the game—or maybe the party—say “Making false accusations.”
People can divine motivations, rationalizations, and justifications for almost anything. Part of the allure of the true crime genre is taking the audience “inside the head” of notorious criminals, whether white collar or violent. Some wrongdoings (crimes or otherwise) have deep roots in the offender’s psyche or personal history. Other times, the motivation for malfeasance is as simple as the person wanting the end state that the act brought about. They wanted that car. They wanted to do their coworker. They wanted some guy gone.
Yet floating the idea of a false accusation prompts two standard reactions. One is denying that they ever really happen. The other is asking with condescending earnestness, “Why would someone do that? What would they have to gain?” What is there to gain from any crime? “But they would invite such negative attention upon themselves!” Ever hear of Sam Bankman-Fried?
These two reactions make up a cycle. People can’t ascribe a motive so they assume that it never happens, and since it never happens there’s no basis for contemplating why someone would do it.
Why would someone make a false accusation? I told you a few paragraphs ago: they wanted someone gone. Oh, you thought that was about murder? Funny, that. Or if not gone, at least badly hurt.
More eloquently, “a person, knowing the charge to be false, adopts that method of gratifying his personal ill will against the object of his malice.”
The 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan is enshrined in culture and popular understanding as a First Amendment case buttressing the freedom of the press. But it is just as much—and, in terms of its consequences, more so—a tort case, restricting libel and defamation. Going deeper into the realm of rights, the Sullivan decision all but erased Americans’ right to reputation.
The Sullivan case is best known for the “actual malice” doctrine. This says that a public official (later expanded to “public figures”) can only prevail in a defamation case against the media if they can prove that the press made the defamatory statement with “‘actual malice’—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
Among the many inventions of the Sullivan decision, this is an inversion.
For most of American history, the plaintiff did not have to prove malice. The defendant had to prove that they did not act with malice. They were presumed to have acted with malice. This “presumption of malice [was] drawn from the fact” that the defendant published the defamatory claim. Courts “presumed the existence of such an intent from the mere act of publishing a defamatory report. If you printed a claim about someone that everybody would understand to be damaging to his reputation, then the law would assume that you must have (maliciously) intended that effect.”
Whereas people today can think of multiple reasons why someone would commit various crimes yet can’t fathom any for why they would make a false accusation, for hundreds of years pre-1964 people had a default explanation for why someone would make a false accusation: malice. Actual malice, in fact, in the original sense of the term.
This presumption of malice and the presumption of innocence travel together in law and culture. Respect for the right to reputation binds them together.
Weakening or dismissing the presumption of innocence puts the loss of reputation at the beginning of the process rather than the end.
When a jury or judge pronounces someone guilty, the first liberty the newly convicted loses is their right to reputation. Before they are sentenced, even before the gavel comes down, their reputation bears the mark of their offense. They are a thief, an embezzler, a fraudster, an abuser. Society considers these offenses so serious that people who commit them go to prison, pay large fines, and lose other rights. The effect on their reputation is similarly large, and extends long after their incarceration.
Weakening or dismissing the presumption of innocence puts the loss of reputation at the beginning of the process rather than the end. It puts punishment before conviction—often before the first bit of evidence is even brought forward, let alone an adversarial process of fact-finding and evaluation.
Why would someone wish to impose a harm so severe that it is properly reserved for the suite of consequences of being convicted? A harm and a deprivation of rights so significant that, in societies with a strong presumption of innocence, it is one of the tools ceded by the governed to the state in order to have ordered liberty, i.e., not be in a state of anarchy, violence, and vigilantism?
Malice is a good starting point, until proven otherwise.
Follow the incentives
George Will was nearly canceled in 2014 for giving a specific example of the maxim that you get more of what you reward.
“When [colleges and universities] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” He was referring to “ubiquitous” “campus victimizations [and] ‘micro-aggressions,’ often not discernible to the untutored eye.” He then used “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, aka ‘sexual assault’” to develop his point for the rest of the article.
The misrepresentations across the media were prolific, the most common being that he was saying that people wanted to be victims of sexual assault.
If I may be so presumptuous as to critique Mr. Will’s rhetorical precision (while I’m at it, I have some pointers for Cristiano Ronaldo’s strength training), he could have more clearly brought forward from the first clause of his sentence that the “status” of victimhood—not the fact of victimhood—brings rewards, and is therefore desirable. No one wants to be a victim. But having the status of a victim brings some indulgences that many people crave, such as sympathy, attention, ironclad believability, absolution, and license. He could have locked down his point by saying that “self-proclaimed victims” or “alleged victims” proliferate.
We can all agree that offenders are bad. But that doesn’t mean that victims are good—they just are.
Will wrote that article before the moral panics that I believe fueled the last decade of cancelation really took off. Two of those, Black Lives Matter and MeToo, were explicitly framed in the language of power.
In a moral panic, everyone is either good or evil. Offenders are bad, so victims become the good.
We can all agree that offenders are bad. But that doesn’t mean that victims are good—they just are.
In a moral panic (or two) fueled by power dynamics, anyone in power or seen as taking the side of power was either an offender, an offender-in-waiting, or an accomplice (remember “silence is compliance?”): bad guys. Anyone out of power was a victim or a victim-in-waiting: good guys. If you want to be among the good guys, align your self with the out-of-power victims. Be an ally. If you want to rise in the hierarchy of the good guys, you have to get closer to the struggle: claim the status of victim.
With the attention economy and content machine in hyperdrive, and with even powerful people fawning to be among the good guys, the status of victim carried more rewards than ever before: book deals, podcasts, major media interviews, creator fame. All were carefully designed to provide sympathy, comfort, social status, agreement, validation, and, of course, attention, lest the (powerful) platforms be seen as the bad guys.
Cultures that prize achievement or bravery guard against stolen valor. Cultures like ours that elevate victimhood must be on guard for stolen sympathy.
The All-American Way
Sometimes it’s even simpler—and more crass—than that. The United States is a great place to be a plaintiff or claimant. It’s an even better place to be their lawyers. Forget about chasing ambulances. The real money is in institutional shakedowns.
John Ziegler’s “With the Benefit of Hindsight” podcast is about 50 hours of deep detail about the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State (if you really want to rattle what you think you know, listen with an open mind). Many of the episodes dissect the evidence presented against Sandusky: the statements of the alleged victims, witnesses, and forensic evidence presented at trial. Ziegler examines the exculpatory evidence that was not presented for one reason or another, as well as the inculpatory evidence against a cadre of opportunists and invertebrates.
Several episodes cover the settlements that Penn State University paid to the alleged victims.
To recap why someone might make a false accusation: money, power, respect.
One of the clearest patterns that Ziegler establishes is that after the first few claimants and, importantly, after it was clear that Penn State was going to settle with claimants with few questions asked, each successive claimant’s allegations got more extreme, less believable, and less provable. Yet they all got paid. Ziegler interviewed family members and acquaintances of claimants who basically said, “Yeah, he made it up for the money, and now he’s got his dream cars.”
Ziegler also draws out the small network of lawyers and advocates who got in on the game early and knew how to play it, enriching themselves with their cut of each check that Penn State signed in lieu of asking even the most elementary questions of the claimants.
Going dark
A false accusation can destroy someone’s life, maybe someone that you held a grudge or some animus against. It can also be a shortcut to getting people to notice you more benevolently or to listen to you for the first time. Those two factors take on extra salience during moral panics, especially those that try to upend societal relations. And, of course, there might be some 6-, 7-, or 8-figure payouts on offer.
So, to recap why someone might make a false accusation: money, power, respect.
But I want to close by returning to malice.
I was having this conversation with someone recently, and I was being unusually delicate. I said to her, “You don’t understand why someone would do this because you’re a good person.” I quickly regretted the soft-pedalling. What I meant to say was, “You don’t understand why someone would do this because you’re not a fucking psychopath.”
I had never heard of the “dark triad”—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy—until I started learning about and researching cancelation. Now I can barely get through an initial conversation with a canceled person without one of us bringing it up.
Canceled coaches, in particular, know exactly what the dark triad is even if they are hearing the term for the first time.
Especially in sport, we celebrate people who are laser-focused on their goals, who go to great lengths and give up so much in order to achieve their ambition. That’s because we assume their goals are benign. But the same attributes that can get you far in sport (or life) can be applied in the other direction. This is obvious in politics and often in business. Less so in sport, but sport creates contexts and relationships that can be manipulated for pure malice.
For many people, it’s easier to understand why someone would do something wrong—even commit a serious crime—than why someone would make a false accusation of wrongdoing.
Maybe we underestimate the depths of everyday treachery, or we’re only comfortable thinking about a subset of offenses committed by people that fit a narrow mold. We can offer explanations for violence more readily than reputation assassination. More than that, we can accept that some people will do violent things, with all the consequences that come with it, more easily than accepting that some people will take a small hit to their own name in order to ruin another’s life with a few words.
You’d think that it would be easier to understand the motivation behind the little things than the really bad things.
Maybe it is.
NB: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.
Photo credit: Hartwig HKD / Flickr, under CC BY-ND 2.0.