Do you believe the victim by default?

Of course not.

I don’t automatically believe the victim, but in the description above, a drunk teenager is not capable of giving consent, so it is assault.

Yes^ I agree. I watched it progress from it being an allegation to him somewhat admitting it.

It’s a bit of stretch to look at a single video and try to extrapolate a ‘default’ stance. Sort of like people trying to prove scientific rules with a single experiment.

That said, you need to look at who is doing the accusing and who is the victim. What’s the motivation of the accuser to lie, and what’s the motivation of the victim to make stuff up?

And that doesn’t go just for assaults (or potential assaults) like this. It goes for bank robberies, murders, fraud, or even playground bullies.

Who benefits ? (cui bono, for you Latin lovers). As a general (not 100%) rule, the one who stands to benefit is the liar.

When someone claims to be a victim I try to look at the entire story before deciding. If the story seems contrived, I try to find more facts. I also try to look for motives to see if there is any reason for making up a story. As with all facts, you try to find confirmation before passing a judgement.

I am really starting to believe that when someone makes false claims against another that person ought to face the same penalty they were trying to push on the other. In the case given, if the young lady was sexually assaulted, the comedian ought to face the penalties which might be criminal charges with jail time. If it is found to be that the sexual assault never happened then the young lady ought to face the same penalties her accused was facing. In cases like this, the comedian’s reputation is permanently tarnished unless he can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was innocent. If it is a lie, the young lady gets a whole lot of attention with no downside as things are right now. That incentivizes more cases like this. And with every one of them, the public believes the accuser less and less which hurts those that actually were attacked.

No, but for every guy who probably gets falsely accused, there are probably 10 that win in court despite being guilty, because it’s her word against his or because she was too drunk or drugged to recall details or too ashamed or traumatized or afraid to report it right away.
Hard proof is often difficult to come up with unless you find more victims.
Now, in the case of a child, I think I would lean on the side of the child.

Nineteen isn’t exactly a child and not illegal but grown men who want to protect their reputation shouldn’t be trying to have sex with a 19-year-old. I believe they are still too easy to manipulate or intimidate into doing something they don’t want to do.

I don’t “believe by default”, but in the situation of a woman claiming sexual assault, the context tends to bring many factors which tend to lend weight to her claim, since even just being the conversations around being sexually assaulted have huge social consequences for a woman, as do the conversations around making an accusation, and several other considerations, such as the emotional impact of bringing such charges, and the legal and social risks around not being believed, the fear of various form of reprisals, the statistics on successful outcomes of rape prosecutions, and on and on and on.

And, even just the studies of overall statistics on the number of false accusations, puts the odds at al least 90% truthful, and that doesn’t even characterize the nature of those accusations. I expect that if one looked at the body of cases of false sexual assault accusations, many of them might tend to have certain distinctive qualities to them – certainly, some fraction of them were made, but were not very credible, so that if you do have a credible-seeming accusation, the odds of it being truthful seem likely to be well over 90%.

So without any other information, while I wouldn’t say “believe by default”, I would tend to say, “at least 90% likely is truthful”.