What’s Wrong with #BelieveAll Women?
Jay Beecher's 16 October 2026 Spectator essay, "Believe women? No – believe evidence," uses a pending civil lawsuit at Cornell University to reject the "believe women" slogan in favour of testing every accusation against the available evidence. The piece treats the slogan as a well-intentioned but ultimately corrosive shift from "take reports seriously" to an unexamined presumption that collapses the burden of proof.
The article centres on Jane Doe's claim against Cornell and seven former students arising from a night in October 2024 involving heavy drinking, ketamine, and sexual activity at a fraternity house. The lawsuit frames the events as gang rape and institutional failure. Contemporaneous texts and statements, however, diverge sharply from that narrative. Doe told police she was "pretty OK with all of this" despite being drunk. The next morning she recounted the evening laughing. In a text exchange she wrote that "non of the sexual stuff was illegal," that she "really liked being w u and matt," that everyone had been heavily intoxicated, and that "i don't think we should feel any shame for the part. our body our choice." Cornell's internal process expelled or suspended some of the men while clearing others; the original prosecutor declined to take the case to a grand jury, citing voluntary conduct and the absence of clear non-consent. The civil suit, the naming of the seven men online as "the Cornell rapists," and the subsequent involvement of the New York Attorney General (who had already described the experience as "horrific") followed. None of the men have been charged.
Beecher's point is not that nothing squalid or regrettable occurred, but that the contemporaneous record creates enormous doubt, that the account changed after external commentary, and that the presumption of innocence exists precisely for such cases.
The essay traces "believe women" to a legitimate #MeToo concern that assault reports had often been dismissed, then argues that the slogan hardened into "believe women, full stop." That move, it contends, skips the testing of claims and proceeds toward public sentencing. It cites Virginia Giuffre's withdrawn identification of Alan Dershowitz and her later admission that a claimed New Mexico episode involving foreign presidents was fiction, as well as a British case in which a 17-year-old accused of rape killed himself before the allegation was withdrawn. The Latin maxim ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat: the burden of proof lies on the one who asserts, is invoked as the older, more durable standard. The piece notes that most women do not lie, but that every accusation remains a claim that must be tested; failure to do so can manufacture victims among the wrongly accused as well as among genuine ones.
This observation aligns with the argument: the slogan treats "women" as a category whose members are presumptively believable, an assumption that cannot hold for any large group of human beings. The same logic applies to men. Reliability is not conferred by sex; it is established (or not) by the consistency, corroboration, and timing of the specific evidence in each case. Beecher's conclusion is that evidence, not the identity of the speaker, is the only incorruptible guide to the truth.
https://spectator.com/article/believe-women-no-believe-evidence/
