I don’t think this needs to be as complex as you’re making it. I take the position that peoples’ careers are not normally derailed by baseless accusation. Or mo

I don’t think this needs to be as complex as you’re making it. I take the position that peoples’ careers are not normally derailed by baseless accusation. Or more specifically: they can be, but the likelihood is small enough that it is not worth worrying about. In particular, I would be interested to see examples where peoples’ careers have been ruined by sexual harassment, rape or gender discrimintion accusations that were legitimately baseless. I think that “the court of public opinion” is a red herring, because from what I can tell news outlets that people take seriously put serious due diligence into finding evidence against the accused. And as you said, they do not need to abide by the standard of reasonable doubt that the court system requires. I also think that this discussion is mind of muddied by peoples’ perception of how likely accusations are to be believed. If someone starts a rumor about your job performance, that might be equally believable to a rape accusation, but it’s frankly not serious or “juicy” enough to really spread around. That won’t be reported in a major newspaper or make the rounds on Twitter. It’s just not going to attract eyeballs. But your example of child pornography is a good one, and probably comparable in my opinion. If someone is actually concerned about rumors against, I think it’s fair to give them that rape accusations are more worth worrying about in terms of damage than a rumor that people are going to sort of shrug off and not leave any one team or company. One thing that I like to think about with respect to accusation validity - is there a heuristic we can use to informally determine the likelihood of an accusation before we find the conclusion? For example, if we are self-aware in acknowledging that our bar for truth is lower than a court, can we find commonalities in reaction or public response that are generally unique to people who actually did do the things they’re accused of? It’s not rigorous, but then again it doesn’t really have to be - most examples of careers being ruined by these accusations feature at least three different women. I think that if you can find three unrelated accusations, that’s a reasonable degree of certainty for the public, especially when you consider that these accusers do not typically have an incentive to collude (they don’t get anything material from publicized accusations).