Man Killed After Woman Claims Rape in False Report to Police
Crime can have serious consequences, but as a bizarre case in Florida just showed, so can alleged crimes that never actually happened.
A disturbing incident that left one person dead is under investigation and raising difficult questions about the “#BelieveAllWomen” narrative that became prominent over the last year.
Like “#MeToo,” the phrase was repeated by many on the left as a rallying call to raise awareness of sexual assault across America. While the admonition to “believe all women” might have been well-meaning, doing exactly that may have cost a man his life.
A 30-year-old mother named Brittany Sorey has now admitted to police that she fabricated a sexual assault story, according to The Smoking Gun. Making a false report of a crime is a bad decision under any circumstances, but in this case it triggered a chain of events that ended in a homicide.
Back in April, Sorey allegedly contacted authorities to tell them that a man she described as Hispanic had forced his way into her Tampa-area home and perpetrated a shocking sex crime.
The woman told police that the criminal had “battered her and vaginally penetrated her with a broken broom handle and a box cutter,” a claim that she repeated multiple times according to police reports.
All was not as it first seemed. Authorities were unable to track down a suspect, though the woman stood by her story.
Meanwhile, there were marital troubles at home, which quickly escalated. “In late-March, Sorey’s husband was arrested for allegedly shoving her to the ground during an argument in their apartment,” The Smoking Gun wrote.
“The dispute, cops reported, was ‘due to infidelity allegations.’ During the altercation, [the husband] allegedly menaced his wife with a Glock handgun,” according to The Smoking Gun.
Money troubles also added to the strange mix. The Smoking Gun reported that Sorey and her husband faced eviction from their home after falling behind on rent payments and were soon forced to move out while the Florida woman sought donations through online crowd-funding.
“After making the sexual assault claim in April, Sorey and her husband moved out of the Largo apartment but allowed a male friend to stay there,” The Smoking Gun reported.
“In an April 20 Facebook post, Sorey informed followers that she was raising money for the Florida Council Against Sexual Violence. That post, however, was deleted [on Sunday] from Sorey’s page shortly after a TSG reporter sent her a text message and left a voicemail on her cell phone,” the outlet noted.
So, how do domestic and financial problems link to a deadly shooting? It appears that several threads converged into an altercation at the Florida home, with Sorey’s dramatic claim of being sexually assaulted at the center of what happened next.
“Sorey’s friend was in the Largo residence on May 10 when a male neighbor showed up at the apartment to ‘confront’ Sorey and her husband ‘over money issues,'” The Smoking Gun reported. “The neighbor, a detective reported, ‘began beating on the front door,’ apparently unaware that the couple had moved out.”
The friend who was staying in Sorey’s home called her to report the pounding on the door. For reasons that are still murky, the woman then allegedly told that friend that “the person knocking at the door sounded like the male that sexually battered her,” according to a police report.
Apparently believing that he had a chance to catch the criminal responsible for Sorey’s violent assault claim, the friend stepped out of the house to snap photos of the man and give them to police. But that isn’t what happened.
“EMS dispatch audio indicates that an ambulance was sent to the Largo home around 10:23 PM to handle a trauma call,” The Smoking Gun reported. When they arrived, they found the neighbor who had been knocking on the door was dead. The friend in Sorey’s house told police he killed the neighbor in self-defense during an altercation.
Remember, the entire reason the friend allegedly tried to go after the neighbor knocking on the door — the same neighbor who ended up dead — is because Sorey claimed that it was the same Hispanic man who sexually assaulted her.
But that sexual assault never even took place, according to police.
With her neighbor dead, Sorey admitted to investigators that she “fabricated the entire report of sexual battery and that it never happened,” the police report states.
While there seem to be more questions than answers in this case, it certainly appears that a false rape claim conjured up for either attention or to raise money spiraled so far out of control that a man was left dead. And that brings us back to “#BelieveAllWomen.”
Yes, serious accusations such as sexual assault should be taken seriously. Of course, they must be. But a far better motto ought to be “#BelieveEvidenceAndReason,” with the understanding that investigating something is different from believing every single accuser with no questions asked.
This is the problem with so-called social justice: By amplifying some alleged victims based on their demographics, the counter result is that other people are minimized. “Social justice” says that certain people should be believed more than others, and that by definition is not even-handed justice.
The reality that many on the left refuse to acknowledge is that blindly believing anyone — regardless of his or her gender — is terrible advice. Men lie. Women lie. To pretend otherwise is dishonest, and worse, can lead to dire and deadly results.
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