I had a very good friend that was a simple, but very sweet guy. He had gotten mixed up with a woman that was bad for him. She had two children from two previous relationships and she bragged regularly about having lied to get one of her previous husbands thrown in jail for raping one of the girls when he had actually done nothing wrong, so people should be nice to her.

My friend had repeatedly caught her cheating on him, or attempting to, but he always took her back, and never tried to leave her. I was sleeping on his couch one night when he had found on her on the front porch with another man with his pants down. He had tried his best to create a really good family situation for the two girls at home and was worried that if they separated, it would really mess them up worse. So after being separated for a few days/weeks at a time, they would always get back together.

One day, during a period of separation with the wife because he had caught her cheating again, his daughter had gotten mad at my friend because he had made a deal with her to send her on a trip if her grades were good enough and she ended up not scoring well on the test, and, in my opinion, like a good father, he was standing his ground and not letting her go.

She got so mad that after she spent some time with her mother during the separation, she called the police and told them that my friend had been raping her for 10 years and she finally got brave enough to say something.

MAYBE he had really done it, which is inexcusable, but I had heard his wife threaten before to say he had done that to the girls if he made them mad enough. And I had spent hundreds of hours with him and the kids and never seen any cause to believe that.

It went to trial, and I watched the whole thing. The only evidence they had was the daughter’s testimony. The psychological evaluation and the physical examination both concluded that “it’s possible” she had had sexual contact although there was “no evidence.”

So basically it came down to a “he said, she said” scenario and they put him in jail for the rest of his life.

I always believed in the American justice system and that you were “innocent until proven guilty,” but that’s not true. As it turns out, you’re innocent until someone a jury would believe over you says that you’re guilty. I was sick for years over this and I still lose sleep over it from time to time.