False Rape Witch Hunts Gone Wild
Since last year, we have been following another interesting false rape charge in an area of Maine which has an exorbitant amount of rape charges for its population (60,000). They are averaging 4 rape charges per month.
The shameless tactics of Mary Kellett, and Michael Povich continue in the state of Maine. It makes one wonder what they are really doing in their capacities if they feel it necessary to prosecute every false allegation this vigorously.
Here is what they’ve been up to lately. These cases should be dismissed with prejudice. Instead, they enable the behaviors of this sick woman. Her name is Ligia Filler, and she is a man’s worst nightmare. Here is a sample of evidence that Ms. Kellett has been fighting hard to suppress.
The state of Maine, Michael Povich, and Mary Kellett are guilty of trying to block this evidence and the Filler’s continue to run out of money to help this poor man. This must stop and stop soon.
According to victims of prosecutions in Maine’s Bar Harbor region, what is taking place is a modern day Witch Hunt. Court documents suggest that numerous men are currently facing charges of sexual misconduct in a small county of little more than 50,000 people.
At the center of these prosecutions is a 44 year old Assistant District Attorney Mary N. Kellett, who has a reputation for prosecuting men on questionable evidence and questionable probable cause. As in the Salem Witch Trials, these prosecutions are often based solely on accusations with no physical or corroborating evidence.
Accusations against men in the county are widely publicized along with their pictures, identities, and details of their private lives. Members of this small community, who make up the jury pool, are presented with the notion that when a prosecutor files numerous charges of sexual abuse that there exist a solid, or at lease a reasonable, basis in evidence to justify the arrest, detention, and a public prosecution of these men.
But the evidence presented in courts very often shows that any accusation made regardless of the evidence was used to prosecute the accused men. Some local attorneys have asserted that county prosecutor Mary Kellett ignores evidence and the search for truth, but instead focuses on getting men convicted for the allegations made by women. Kellett has made statements that she does not believe women lie about rape. And even when some trials illustrate that the accuser engaged in consensual sexual activity, Kellett herself later characterizes the activities as punishment, done out of anger, and rationalizes why they were not consensual.
These beliefs are shared by the most extreme feminists who for years have asserted that all sex between men and women is rape, and that women just don’t realize that they are being raped even by their partners. In Hancock County Maine, this extreme feminist philosophy is being put to practice by the District Attorney’s office. The prosecutor treats female accusations as evidence and absolute truth. A team of sex offense responders at the DA’s office immediately embrace female’s accusations and coach them through the process. In the name of public safety, men are immediately stripped of numerous Constitutional rights and effectively forced to disprove the accusations against them in a public criminal trial.
The public’s notions that prosecutors are faithful guardians of civil rights and conservative discretion prove to be false in Hancock County. In practice, the prosecutor’s credibility is publicly re-enforced solely through wide publicity of rare convictions. The line between justifiable and unjustifiable prosecutions of men is blurred by selective media coverage.
Little if any publicity is given to the bulk of the cases involving men who were criminally charged and prosecuted with little evidence beyond accusations, sometimes made by their girlfriends, wives, troubled step children, or occasional sex partners. These men may remain in jail for months, lose everything they have, sometimes can’t see their children, and never repair their reputations or the damage done to their lives. No articles are written about how these men manage to put their lives back together, get employment after being falsely arrested and prosecuted for rape, or how vulnerable they become to future false allegations by other abusive females in their lives.
The prosecutors like Mary Kellett act with full immunity for their actions against men.
And it’s not just for alleged sex crimes for which men are systematically punished by the District Attorneys office in Hancock County. Men in the community have been criminally charged for such alleged crimes as splashing water on their wives, spitting, for “terrorism” due to offensive song lyrics, visual aggression, and for what often can be viewed as any action against a female. But at least those “crimes” don’t carry the stigma and a 30 year prison sentence which comes with each class “A” gross sexual assault charge, which is a frequent charge against men in Hancock County, and one of the easiest and most profitable for a prosecutor to undertake.
Dr. Demosthenes Lorandos, who is a psychologist and an attorney, states that “the crime of Rape has been known as the easiest criminal allegation to make by an alleged victim, and the hardest to disprove by the defendant.” And that “a series of bias laws has made it easier to obtain convictions”.
Not surprising that most of the innocent men who are exonerated by the Innocence Project through DNA evidence, sometimes after decades in prison, were falsely accused and convicted of rape. Some studies have placed the rate of false sexual assault reports at 50% or more. That rate jumps to almost 80% when accusations are made during divorce or child custody disputes with girlfriends or wives.
And yet in Maine, media coverage remain eerily silent about local false allegations and prosecutions of innocent men whose lives and reputations are destroyed as a result. The female accusers are never named and continue to live in obscurity even after their accusations prove false. Instead, the local reports graphically focus on covering the accusations against men, and at times even imply that the acquitted men have cheated justice.
One Bangor television station aired an interview with a local rape crisis center official who stated that even if a woman falsely accuses a man of rape, it is most important for law enforcement to believe the woman, act on her report, and do exactly what she wants them to do. This implies that arresting, charging, and publicly prosecuting innocent men is less harmful than for authorities to question the words and motives of a woman making the accusations. This appears to be the policy adopted in the Bar Harbor region of Maine.
Crime statistics for the region have consistently shown a low rape rate, yet not long after becoming a prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Mary Kellett offered her own statistic of the Bar Harbor region. Speaking to a local newspaper she stated that it could be difficult to find jurors in the area for sex cases because many people have been victims of sex offenses or have been accused of committing them.
An anonymous victim of prosecution by Mary Kellett stated: “I will never have any faith in the justice system. They aren’t interested in the truth. It’s a game for them. Some day this will go down as witch hunts.” “My family just wants to put this behind them. But it will never be over. I’m still receiving hate mail because of my support [for the accused]. [The prosecutor] used every unfair, low trick in the book to get a conviction and when a jury of 12 called him not guilty they then say ‘just because he wasn’t found guilty doesn’t mean he’s innocent’. I lock my doors and windows and turn the dogs out at night.”
One case which has received some attention is that of Vladek Filler, a husband who was accused of sexual assault by his wife during their bitter split up and custody battle. Filler, a self employed honors graduate from Babson College, decided to leave his wife after 16 years and get custody of his two sons. Child Protective Services and Court investigations granted Filler temporary custody of his children. His wife was found to be a threat and had her supervised visits with them suspended.
Prior to being arrested and charged for his wife’s accusations, Filler sought help from a local domestic violence organization which turned him away and chose to give assistance to his abusive wife instead. Filler sought a protection order from court and his wife decided to drop the “nuclear bomb” of divorce and custody battles. She accused Filler of abuse, child molestations, and spousal rape. She demanded immediate custody of their children. A video about the events appeared on YouTube.
Despite absence of any corroborating evidence other than his wife’s accusation, the children were taken away, and prosecutor Mary Kellett had Filler arrested, charged, and eventually convicted. What emerged after his January 2009 trial were revealing details of how prosecutions of men are conducted by prosecutor Mary Kellett and the Hancock County DA’s office.
Filler was apparently not allowed to present any evidence at all of the bitter custody battle, his wife’s troubled past, or her false claims of abuse in another custody battle with another man. nKellett, in turn told the jury “there was no evidence that the sexual assaults did not occur”, and placed the burden on Filler to prove his innocence. Kellett suggested that if forensic and physical examinations were conducted they would impede justice in this case and that statistically Filler was more likely to sexually assault his wife than a stranger. Aware that Filler was prevented from presenting evidence, Kellett repeatedly told to the jury that a child custody dispute did not even exist and therefore could not be a motive for false accusations by his wife.
When considering the disturbing details of the Filler case, one can’t help but to wonder how something like this could happen in our justice system. What is taking place in Hancock County Maine is extremism based on a myth that men are inherently bad, and are a threat to helpless and innocent women; that the State needs to punish and control men to maintain order within relationships and families. This is not much different from how Puritans viewed women accused of witchcraft in their community. The way men are being characterized in Maine has caused the public to be fearful and suspicious of men. Maine’s Attorney General Janet Mills, a former co-founder of the Maine Women’s Lobby, recently stated that her number one priority is domestic violence, and that “We need to send the message to boys and young men in Maine”. Such views from Maine’s top law enforcement official are made despite numerous credible studies suggesting that women are just as responsible, if not more, for domestic violence and child abuse.
Such gender biased rhetoric demonizes boys, men, and fathers and leads to the numerous falsely accused men to face years in prison and the perpetual skewing of domestic violence statistics.
So powerful is the myth against men, that despite difficult fiscal and economic times, the flow of funding to the domestic violence industry continues to be strong, as does the prosecution of men. The message of the rhetoric being sent to the girls in Maine is “blame the boys for everything and the State will do the rest”, so maybe the message to the boys in Maine should now be “God help you”.
John Lukas is a long time warrior against the gender biased policies of the domestic violence industry and a victim of the system as it exists today. His focus is on domestic violence practices and policies that are often in contradiction of their actual intent. He runs http://wadvpress.org . | More from John Lucas
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October 23rd, 2009 at 8:06 am
WOW, its so hard to believe this type of system exist in this day and age!! But I know full well it does, unfortunately not Just in Maine, alltho they do take it to a extreem! I bet there wold be no investigation if a man passed out at a womans house and days later said that she date raped him!
I hope something happens here, its time a federal presedence is made!
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:15 am
We know that there are far too many real rapes…both to women and to men. It is an horrendous crime but it is seldom about sex. Little is being done to prevent this crime….and the best thing to do is to keep our homes intact. Much of this (80%)is due to displaced anger from those from fatherless homes yet via the VAWA and other biased laws, our nation is producing broken homes in record numbers. Many Christian ministries are aiding and abetting this destruction of our homes
http://shatterdmen.com/Fathers%20who%20needs%20them.htm
No one disagrees that rape is an horrendous crime but few would disagree that a false accusations is just as horrendous if they realize what happens to the accused. This is a crime in which it is very easy to get a man in trouble with very little risk to one’s self. Few of these false accusers are ever charged with anything other then for their disconvenienting the authorities and costing THEM money. Meanwhile, it will have cost the accused tens of thousands of dollars, jobs, families and far too many times, their very life. For each of these who have been falsely accused, there are women who are adversely affected too. They have mothers, aunts, sisters and often daughters who many times have their life ruined by these false accusations against their loved one.
All rape accusations need to be considered seriously as no doubt rape does indeed occur. But a balance needs to be maintained between the claims of the accuser against the all-too-often legitimate denial of the accused. (there are NO false rape accusation hot lines)
Women who are found to have made a false sexual assault complaint should receive the same jail sentence as the male victim would have received if he had been convicted. That will put the brakes on fake rape.
Just as in domestic violence, when we fail to listen to BOTH sides, we make it more dangerous for everyone involved.
http://www.shatterdmen.com/False%20Witnes.htm
October 23rd, 2009 at 10:41 am
The State of Maine prosecutor resembles a State of Minnesota prosecutor Kathleen Morris who about 20 years ago had similar witch hunt when feminist agnda was in its peak of hysteria. Media gave her great coverage and reported how she carried a gun for her protection. Eventually she was out of office and according to Yahoo is now in privat practice.
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/03/13/us/around-the-nation-minnesota-plans-inquiry-of-prosecutor-s-conduct.html
http://reviews.armchairinterviews.com/reviews/nightmares_and
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20089593,00.html
http://local.yahoo.com/info-24293834-morris-r-kathleen-morris-wolf-shakopee
October 24th, 2009 at 12:28 pm
This is a very well written article. This Mary Kellett woman is a real monster and needs to be stopped. The frustrating thing about this problem of false rape accusations, and it is a wide spread epidemic, is that the media fuels it. The media has every incentive to report false rape claims as legitimate and no incentive to recant when they have made a mistake. It is hard to approach members of the press and convince them that this is a serious problem and needs to be covered. They just don’t want to hear it.
October 24th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
@Rohara
Firstly, I want to thank you for the truly excellent article that you recently wrote for MND concerning the Kevin Driscoll case.
I did not link to it on angryharry for reasons to do with ‘effective activism’ – which are too complicated to go into here. (I will, however, post a link shortly.)
Secondly, I was very pleased to see the arrival of another MRA who is prepared to do more than just lurk around on forums.
So. Thank you!
With regard to MRAs taking on those prosecutors who treat men like dirt simply because they have been accused of something – as, indeed, does John Lucas above (another truly excellent article) what we also need to do is to PERSISTENTLY email the URLs of such articles to law enforcement agencies and to the media.
And in those emails we need to express the following.
1. Our utter disgust at those people (media or legal) who are part of this foul enterprise.
2. Our determination to keep harassing them and to keep telling the public just how despicable is their behaviour.
3. A warning to them that they have NO HOPE of stopping us, and that we are growing both in size and in power – which we are.
We should also try to pressure MRAs such as Glenn Sacks, Dr Helen etc to talk about these appalling situations – even though talking about them is nowhere near enough.
We need people like Glenn Sacks to attack officials BY NAME in much the same way that he attacked BY NAME those who produced the Boys Are Smelly Tee shirts.
Finally, it would only take a concerted effort by 4 or 5 of us to exert a huge effect over this particular issue and, hence, become a real headache to those who treat men so appallingly.
We just need two or three good writers – “bruisers” who will whip up anger towards those evildoers who need to be targeted – and two or three MRAs who are prepared to get hold of numerous email addresses that are particularly relevant to the enterprise.
Remember: These people cannot afford to give us any publicity. This means that they cannot afford to attack us publicly.
Furthermore, those who are higher up the ladder than they are, will not be too pleased if they see their own standing being undermined by the actions of their underlings.
And, of course, there will be many MEN within their own organisations who will feel exactly the same way as us. And so they cannot even count on their own staff to support them – especially the lowlier ones.
MEN are half the population.
So we do not need to fear these people.
October 24th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
The details of the disturbing Vladek Filler case mentioned in this article can be found here: http://www.fillerfund.com
October 24th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
@ Observer.
Thank you posting the link within your comment. Just in case some may miss it, it’s worth of repeating. That is factual reporting,
http://www.fillerfund.com/marykellett.htm
October 24th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Great article. I looked at that Filler site and it’s an outrageous case. This should all be covered by CNN or FOX.
I completely agree with Harry. People need to take action to make a difference. There needs to be solidarity and a clear call for specific actions from the men’s rights activists. These radical feminist prosecutors need to be exposed at every opportunity. They must be publicly called out by the likes of Glen Sacks and others. If men’s rights activists are not being aggressive enough and putting out endless press releases about this, then who is going to care? Certainly not the main stream media or the corrupt officials who are doing this.
October 25th, 2009 at 3:21 am
Every divorce lawyer is well aware of the advantages for a woman to make a domestic abuse charge when planning on filing for divorce. If a woman is not already aware of these advantages, she most likely soon will be through coaching by law enforcement and children services. When child custody is in question it is extremely beneficial especially sex abuse charges, because it requires no evidence to achieve its agenda. These dirty tricks are almost always ignored by the system and media as the article explains and men’s lives are ruined. It’s been 20 years ago when I had this nuclear bomb of divorce dropped and fought it for 10 years when I gave up the fight, not from guilt, but from a mental break down (exhaustion and suicide attempt) and finances. The article is way off base in the amount of money it takes to “PROPERLY” defend oneself against such charges and still have little chance of out right winning the case with prejudices. Most often you will be forced to settle in some form or another. After abandoning my quest for child custody and taking a plea bargain, going to court fighting my X-wife (and system) for 10 years, there has not been one single accusation for the last 10 years. That in itself should be proof enough without going into all the evidence against the x-wife or her lack of evidence. Regardless all our talking about these injustices is in vain without getting laws changed and the media to begin exposing these truths and above all societies perception.
October 25th, 2009 at 6:55 am
The Maine witch hunt featured yesterday doesn’t seem to appear today.
Because of its importance I would have expected it to remain prominent. I intended to use it in the latest update to my book “Save the Males.” Has the scandal been disproven somehow?
October 25th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
@Falsley Accused & Convicted
I am sorry about what happened to you man. Here Here about getting laws changed, but without media attention we might as well form a giant cry circle. Getting media attention is what this is all about. Very few people ever e-mail newspapers or politicians. The laws aren’t going to change themselves, and the PC media is more than happy to ignore all these stories. The jails and the streets are full of innocent broken men.
@ Richard
I think this story got bumped down by newer articles.
October 25th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Richard Doyle and Mike
Good to see you you post againm the wise man from the prairie and Mike I wish MND would keep this story prominently displayed
October 25th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
[...] False Rape Witch Hunts Gone Wild | MND: Your Daily Dose of Counter … [...]
October 26th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
What ever happened to “innocent until proven guilty”?? This NOT GUILTY or GUILTY thing in the courts is a total abomination of our REPUBLIC’S justice system and our Constitution.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Begin with Jane Roe, of the Roe v.Wade case. Roe eventually admitted that she lied about being raped for the simple reason that, as a feminist, she wanted to make a stronger case for women’s right to an
abortion.
Cathleen Webb lied about being raped out of fear of what her parents would say if she became pregnant. The falsely accused man, Gary Dotson, spent six years (of a 50 year sentence) in prison in spite of her admission that she had lied about being raped. Prosecutors refused to believe she was telling the truth about having lied.
In an investigation of 556 rape cases, reported in Forensic Science Digest, Vol.11, no.4, Dec. 1985, it was found through DNA testing that 33% of the accusations were false. Another 27% in the same study were shown to be false when the women involved admitted lying, or were shown to be lying by lie detector tests. That’s a total of 60% false accusations.
Even the liberal Washington Post reported it’s own study, in June, 1992, wherein 30% of allegations of rape were proven false.
A study by Hugo Adam and Micheael Radelet, reported in Stanford Law Review, 11/87, found 350 cases where DNA proved the accusation false. Sadly, 23 of the men falsely accused had already been executed, and eight more had died in prison. Quite a high price to pay for promoting the false notion that women don’t lie about sexual assault.
Internationally acclaimed attorney, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz published an article in the Boston Herald (8/6/94) in which he discussed a nine year study by a Purdue Univ. (female)
Sociologist, reported in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, conducted in a large metropolitan area, including two large universities, in which the data showed that 40% of the sexual assault allegations were false. The
only definition of “false” was the admission by the supposed “victim” that she had lied. Another study reported in Dershowitz’s article was done by New York City sex crimes prosecutor, Linda Fairstein in 1987.
Fairstein found that, of 4000 reports of rape each year in Manhattan, “about HALF simply did not happen!” To paraphrase the Jerry Lee Lewis song, there’s “A whole lot of lying going on!”
October 27th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
WHY WOMEN LIE ABOUT RAPE
The National Organization for Women , radical feminists, and Women’s Studies departments, often deny that women make false accusations about rape by asking the naïve, simplistic, and self-serving question:
“Why would a woman lie?” It turns out that there are plenty of reasons women lie about rape, either deliberately or out of desperation.
A U.S. Air Force study, “The False Rape Allegation in the Military Community.(Forensic Science Digest.Vol II, No.4, Dec. 1985) investigated 556 cases of alleged rape, and found a 60% rate of false accusations. As part of the study, women who were found to have made false accusations were asked “WHY?”
Motivations given by the women who acknowledged they had made false accusations:
REASON PERCENT
Spite or revenge 20
To compensate for feelings of guilt or shame 20
Thought she might be pregnant 13
To conceal an affair 12
To test husbands’ love 9
Mental/emotional disorder 9
To avoid personal responsibility 4 4
Failure to pay, or extortion 4
Thought she might have caught VD 3
Other 6
TOTAL 100%
The study found that most false accusations are “instrumental” – they served a purpose. If the purpose isn’t avoiding guilt, or getting revenge, it might serve a more focused purpose, for example, telling her parents; “I didn’t just go out and get pregnant, I was raped.” Or, telling her husband, “I didn’t have an affair, it wasn’t my fault, I was raped.”
An unrelated Washington Post article, “Unfounded Rape Reports Baffle Investigators” (6/27/1992) also found a wide range of motivations to falsely accuse men of rape. Anger toward boyfriends was common. One woman had her boyfriend spend 13 months in jail before she acknowledged that she had lied. One woman accused her newspaper delivery man of raping her at gunpoint because she needed an excuse to be late to work.
Neither woman was prosecuted or even reprimanded for lying to the police and attempting to have a man frivolously imprisoned. In another case, police say the young woman who admitted to falsifying two rape reports only wanted a day off from work.
All rape accusations need to be considered seriously, as, no doubt, rape does occur. But a balance needs to be maintained between the claims of the accuser against the all-too-often legitimate denial of the accused.
Women who are found to have made a false sexual assault complaint should be punished with lengthy prison sentences. Perhaps that will make other women think twice before making false complaints.