If a relative of yours claims to have been robbed, assaulted, or raped, I hope your first instinct isn’t to rattle off the reasons why people falsely accuse others of such crimes, send them links, and demand a court reach a verdict before you form an opinion.

Your response really has nothing to do with Bill Cosby. Yes, people are falsely accused of rape. (Typically not by over 40 women.) Because stastistically some reports of rape are false doesn’t mean we should disbelieve them all or remain intensely skeptical to the point of absurdity, which is what you’re doing under the guise of “innocent until proven guilty” — an important legal standard, but not something that prevents people from believing whether or not an event occurred in time.

People have been falsely convicted of crimes and guilty people have beaten the charges. Other crimes have never made it to court! Unless you think the courts have successfully convicted only criminals — and not only that, but all criminals to ever exist — then surely we can reached informed opinions of our own contrary to a court’s approval or lack of action or crimes coming to light decades later.

No one is rushing to judgement on Bill Cosby. They are calmly and rationally understanding that the reasons people falsely accuse others of rape are moot for this case, as they are so overwhelmingly unlikely as to make anyone who believes in them an Illuminati Lizard-level conspiracy theorist, believing, without supporting evidence, that the good and decent man could only admit to drugging women under oath because 40+ lying women hatched a secretive plot to force him to.