I worry that this effect of this stunt isn’t to discredit Chuck Schumer. Instead, the point might be to discredit people who come forward with allegations. It there are high profile cases of definitely false allegations made for political reasons, then the claim that an allegation is false and being made for political reasons gains strength.
I hope what everyone is learning from this and the recent O’Keefe stunt that it’s actually not at all easy to make false claims of sexual assault against someone. The idea that it is easy to do so and we need to be hyper-vigilant about it is nonsense.
Real claims are often dismissed as false. That means the test we use for detecting valid sexual assault claims has a high false negative rate. Tests with a high false negative rate often have a low false positive rate.
