Netflix Series Explores Costs of Not Believing Rape Victims
The series, “Unbelievable,” draws from our award-winning reporting with ProPublica and “This American Life.”
This year, in Bartow, Florida, a man received a 17-year sentence for raping a 13-year-old girl. The same girl had reported a previous allegation of rape against the same man—only to be branded a liar and prosecuted as a juvenile for filing false information with the police.
The second time she reported being raped, the girl had photo and video evidence. The Ledger, a newspaper in Lakeland, Florida, that the prosecutor in the false-reporting case subsequently testified that the girl should never have been prosecuted. A judge, the paper said, later determined she
