
Celebrity basing over the summer seemed particularly lurid and accuracy-challenged.
If you go strictly by the unsubstantiated headlines, former Vice President Al Gore sexually assaulted a masseuse, laughed in her face and got away with it. All that supposedly happened during a trip to promote himself as a best-selling author and all around cool guy.
This is not a perfect organization. Not too many are. But the enduring — founded in 1992 — strength of the Innocence Project is its absolute refusal to write off people or cases as lost causes. And circumstantial evidence, malicious media reporting and horrendous police work, not to mention inadequate legal representation, can make some of these cases look pretty hopeless.
In fact, the men involved had been recorded repeatedly asking the “victim” if she was “sure” she wanted to do what was about to take place. Her answer? “Yeah, sure. I want to.” Her rape allegations immediately followed.
The Michael Jackson story, of course, refused to go away, but that annoying matter of his legal vindication kept popping up at the most inconvenient times. Whatever he had done or hadn’t done could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the bottom line in the legal system. But Big Media and Big Lies are free of such constraints.