Lauren Weedman was in her first year at DePaul University’s Theatre School when the lie began.
She was at a party and feeling lost, once a big fish in her high school pond and now a little fish in a huge drama school ocean. Body-image woes also were making her insecure.
Seeking some attention, she called an ex-boyfriend.
She told him she felt fat.
He told her to “stop obsessing.”
Then she told him she had been mugged. That didn’t move him.
Next, for reasons Weedman will question the rest of her life, she told him she had been raped.
That got his attention–and that of her roommate, who had overheard Weedman’s part of the conversation.
In a first-person article titled, “I lied about being raped,” in Glamour magazine’s July issue, Weedman outed her lie nationally, recounting how word of her “rape” spread across campus, drawing sympathy from her friends and bringing her the attention she craved.
Weedman declined to be interviewed for this story.
Soon the lie grew bigger, and the whole charade spiraled out of her control.
To lie about rape is unusual, but false reports do happen, as Weedman’s case shows. According to FBI statistics, about 6 percent of rape reports turn out not to be true. And, truth be told, the consequences of such a lie create many victims.
Lesley Barton, 40, of Glenview was raped four years ago by an acquaintance after she accepted a drink from him at a bar.
While she was semi-conscious, he drove her to the salon he owned and raped her on a tanning bed, she said.
Afraid to tell her ailing and elderly parents, Barton waited a week before reporting the rape to the police.
By then, it was too late to test for evidence of any sort of date rape drug in her system.
The attacker was eventually charged with misdemeanor assault, getting probation but not jail time, Barton said.
Fabricated stories about rape “perpetuate the belief that a woman would lie about something so horrific,” Barton said.
“It’s devastating what rape does to you, your life, your identity. … You’re ashamed, you’re mortified. And then to have this fear that if [you] were to report it, [you] would be disbelieved.”
Women who lie about being raped make it harder for rape survivors to come forward, victims rights activists say.
Lying about rape “calls the integrity and believability of real victims into question and makes it harder to convince the jury to put away real rapists,” said Scott Berkowitz, president of Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network in Washington, D.C.
Others see underreporting, not false reporting of rape, as a major problem, said Anne Ream, who founded Voices and Faces Project, a Chicago-based non-profit initiative for sexual violence survivors.
In 15 years of work, Ream has not knowingly encountered one case of false reporting but has “met hundreds of women who have never reported their assaults to authorities, or to their families and loved ones, because they feared they would encounter victim-blaming and disbelief.”
In fact, over the last four years, only
44.7 percent of rapes were reported, according to RAINN calculations based on U.S. Department of Justice National Crime Victimization Survey data.
Berkowitz sees three reasons a woman would make up a story of being raped: money, revenge and fear.
Other reasons include mental instability, or as in Weedman’s case, a desire for attention.
In her Glamour article, Weedman writes that she now understands she “leaned on victimhood the way an alcoholic uses drinking,” summoning it when she was nervous or couldn’t handle real situations.
Weedman concludes by saying her rape-lie still follows her, molding her very identity in ways that the facts of her actual life fail to do.
The reason she keeps telling her story–to friends, to potential mates–is because she longs not to be thought of as a victim anymore, she says.
What to do if you’ve been raped
If you have been raped or sexually assaulted, RAINN offers these tips:
– Remember it wasn’t your fault.
– Preserve evidence of the attack–don’t bathe or brush your teeth.
– Call a hotline, such as RAINN’s, 800-656-HOPE.
– Seek medical attention.
– Report the rape to law enforcement authorities.
– Recognize that healing from rape takes time.
