Famous False Sexual Assault Allegations in Modern Times

Hey everyone, this is Michael Wington here. If you follow my channel, you know I’m a criminal offense lawyer. I specialize in sexual assault trials, cross-examination, and things like that. So check out my website if you’re interested, know my background.

But I really what I’m doing here today, I’m I’m giving a class that I’m going to be giving here later this week called Why Would She Lie? And it’s really a class about why people would say something that’s not true, maybe exaggerated, maybe say something that they think is true and it’s not true, or deliberately lie. And so it’s a broad topic that is very important because in every sexual assault case, this is the big question that gets asked no matter what the case is, no matter the facts, the jury, your friends, your family, anyone you tell this story to is going to ask this question like, “Well, why would this person lie?” And a lot of times you don’t have an answer or not one that you can explain or that one that people can believe.

And really, this is probably the most dangerous question you’re going to get in any sexual assault trial. Even if the allegation’s false, that concept of why would she lie, why would they lie, why would he lie, is going to be in the jury’s minds. And that’s something the government, the prosecution really hammers home in their closing, even if the person is lying. Now, this presentation is about people that say things that are not true, factually not true.

And we’re going to look get into what it means to lie and why we shouldn’t be using that word as often as many of us do in these sexual assault cases. And often it we end up assuming the burden when we go in there and start saying he or she lied for this reason. The burden then shifts to the defense. So, I’m going to teach you some techniques that I developed on identifying lies, how to spot them, expose them, and empower the jury to find your client not guilty without having to make a moral judgment such as, “Oh, she’s a liar.

He’s a liar. He’s bad. He’s good.” We don’t want them making those decisions.

We want to make it easy for them. What we want to do is to reframe the question, not having the whole trial about, oh, is he or she lying? Without even really defining the word lying, we really want the jury to be asking, is his or her story reliable to convict? Is it reliable enough to convict beyond a reasonable doubt?

Are there enough inconsistencies? Is there a motive? Are there other things that should make me stop and hesitate? The problem is when you go all in on the he or she’s lying, you got to believe she’s lying.

And that’s your only angle, it makes it very difficult in today’s climate to get a not guilty verdict. So the reality is people lie, people distort, people say things that are not true, that are not 100% accurate for various reasons. Not every time someone says something that’s not accurate, that’s not 100% truthful, are they doing it because they’re evil, because they’re malicious. Now, some people are, and we’re going to get into that in a second, but you don’t want to assume that everyone who says something that’s not accurate, is just a big fat dirty liar that is just making up lies.

Like don’t go in there with the liar liar pants on fire defense because it turns jurors off in some cases unless the evidence is so overwhelmingly clear. So there’s six primary reasons and I’ve written an article about this and I also have a book on this topic that I wrote. We’re not going to get into all the citations right here now. We’re going to just talk about the general principles.

We don’t have time to get into all the citations and the research and the studies, but these are six primary reasons why people lie. You have number one, malicious revenge. They’re just trying to get back at someone. We see that a lot in the movies, and we all know people who have probably lied to get back at someone.

There’s self-protective lies. Someone who says something not with the intention of hurting someone else with that being their main focus, but they’re doing it to protect themselves. Like they got caught doing something wrong, caught caught in an affair. So, they claim that it was non-consensual, for example.

They end up hurting people in the long run if they’re making a false allegation, but that isn’t their primary motivation. We have emotional distortions. We’re going to get deeply into that here in a few minutes. Those are people who say things that aren’t true, but their belief in their truth is not accurate, but it’s based on how they feel on their emotions at the time.

And these folks are fairly dangerous. We’re then going to get into mistaken memory. This is pretty straightforward. These are people who actually believe that something happened, but their memory has been slightly altered or maybe their memory wasn’t super great to begin with or it’s been contaminated by friends and family, law enforcement.

And then we have personality driven deceit. That’s similar to the emotional distortion. That’s people that have generally cluster B personality disorders where they literally have a mental disease that influences how they remember and things they do and say that are that are not accurate at all in many cases. And then we have social reinforcement is another reason why people can say things that aren’t true.

You know, they might be told that something is true or we might they might be told that’s a bad guy. He’s a bad guy. He did this to other people. And they start believing, “Yeah, I guess what he did to me was bad.”

So, let’s get into it. Malicious lies. These are dangerous people who make a lie, say a lie that is absolutely false. It’s calculated and it’s done with the intent to seek revenge.

And a lot of times it’s re revenge driven. This is one of the primary reasons why people make these lies. When someone is betrayed, they’re hurt, their husband, boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever cheats on them, it becomes about payback. And when you’re dealing with with these types, you really need to document everything that goes to the motive.

The key is the motive and keeping as much evidence as you can to expose the motive on the witness stand. Timelines are very important. I’m not going to get into all how to do cross-examinations or all these more elaborate impeachment techniques, but timelines are important. You reported him after you caught cheating.

You can do a whole series of questions on things like that, and you let the jury understand that the timeline goes to show in and of itself that the person was fined on day one, and then six weeks later after they found their husband or boyfriend, girlfriend cheating, now all of a sudden the person did this, that, and the other. So, I always have my client make a timeline very detailed from the beginning so that we can start preparing that early on. And we have three really three types here that are malicious liars. You have they’re all manipulators.

We have the charmer, we have the controller, and we have the consumate victim. Someone who’s always a victim. And sometimes they’re mixed together. And so these are these are dangerous people to cross-examine in the sense that they know what they’re doing.

They’re calculating. They’ve been plotting this out sometimes for years trying to set you up. They’re often well coached and ready to get into the court and just take your guy down. Like they’re looking forward to taking your client down whenever the day comes in court.

And if they don’t, so be it. The guy or the lady had to sit through a whole trial. Now, I’m going to often say the guy in these cases. 9% of the people that are accused of sexual crimes are men.

In my experience, I’ve had a few where the men are accused by men. I’ve had a few a few where a woman was accused. I can count them on my hand, like two cases where a woman was accused. Neither one of those cases ever went to court.

But so it’s mainly men that are in these situations in my experience. Not to say that it couldn’t be a woman. So when you’re dealing with these types, you have to again instead of just coming out full blast, liar, liar, pants on fire, she’s a big fat liar. He’s a big liar.

You have to talk to them about whether or not expressions like this. It’s not about whether they’re bad or good. It’s about whether the story adds up. And this is going to be a theme throughout.

It is about whether or not their story is coherent, it’s backed by physical forensic evidence, whether it is corroborated, and whether it adds up. That’s what this is about. Rather than, oh, you have to find this person’s a liar, and that’s what the whole case is about. Because you can lose a case where your client’s innocent if you go with that route, and you don’t and you don’t do it the right way.

So, then we have self-protective lies. A lot of people try to act like, “Oh, this isn’t such a big deal. They were only doing it to protect themselves.” I think any lie where you’re putting someone’s life, freedom, and liberty on a line are bad.

But we see these a lot when there’s an affair where someone gets caught cheating, where someone’s going to get in trouble. Like in the military, we see these a lot where they’re doing it not with the plan like I’m going to screw that person over. They’re really doing it with the intent of I’m going to protect myself. And if someone goes down in the process, so be it.

I mean, really, we have these fears. Often there’s a fear behind that lie. Fear of getting caught, of getting cornered, of losing someone or something like losing a spouse, a partner, a lover, losing a job or embarrassment or shame, not wanting to upset your parents. What’s the cross strategy?

I mean again we could teach a 4-hour class on crossing people that are lying and making false allegations. I don’t have time for that. This is a one hour CL. So you have to again make it clear that before the trigger the trigger is key.

What triggered the lie? What triggered the self-p protection? And you have to build it out with a whole series of questions. Remaining calm, remaining have your impeachment materials backed up, ready to go, and not go in there super hyperaggressive.

You want to go in there like you’re a professor exposing the inconsistencies, the timeline, be cool and calm, and get the jury to believe you, to trust you, to like you. And in Vader, you can ask questions like, “We all know someone who lied to avoid embarrassment.” or ask them who knows someone who lied to avoid embarrassment. I think everyone has lied to some extent to avoid embarrassment.

Probably not a lot of people have lied to, you know, that would that lead to a sexual assault, but we can all relate to that. Then we have the next type of lie. This is someone who’s mistaken or confused. They actually believe what they’re saying.

Like they’re they believe that they were assaulted or they believe that something happened and they speak with conviction. They really are sincere about their feelings. You got to be really careful with these types because they might not in fact understand or believe that they’re lying. They are saying something that’s true that it is not true, but they think it’s true.

This is where the whole sincerity issue becomes a problem. Studies show that juries believe that a person who’s more sincere, meaning they really believe what they’re saying, they’re emotional about it, they’re more accurate, and often they’re more credible. People that are more confident are more accurate in their storytelling. That’s that’s the perception.

It’s wrong. You could hire an actress or someone who’s really believes something happened and they can get up there and cry and tell the whole story with conviction and they’re 100% wrong. I mean, there are plenty of people in jail. The D innocence clinic has cleared or freed that were put into jail by people who had a sincere belief that what they were saying is true when and they were in fact wrong.

They identified the wrong person. So you got to make that clear to the jury and you have to make it clear throughout your case. So some of the cross topics and what leads to this often alcohol. You have memory contamination from friends, family, law enforcement.

You have repeat interviews. You got to look into this. Was the person repeatedly interviewed when they really weren’t sure. And you got to look at the first interview.

I’ve had plenty of cases where the person doesn’t know. They don’t remember. And the agent thinking they’re doing what is right starts injecting things, memories in stories, and rephrasing what they think happened or injecting stories of other people or their own personal experiences. That happens more often than than you would believe.

And then the person adopts that and then it becomes part of their story, but it’s it’s not part of their actual memory. So years ago, many years ago, I started working with a lot of forensic psychologists on my cases. They’re brought in on a lot of my sexual assault cases. And not until then did I really start understanding that there is a lot more to people who say things that aren’t true, the people who lie.

It’s much more complic complicated than oh, they lied because they want revenge or they lied because they don’t want to get caught. There’s a whole category, and that’s really the main point of this lecture, of people who say things that aren’t true, and they do it because they have personality problems. They have personality disorders. And so, yeah, that’s what I learned is that there is personality that basically personality drives perception.

Who you are, what your personality is, it can drive your perception. So if you fall into certain categories, you’re more likely to interpret things around you in a certain way. Now I’m going to break down these here in a second. And these are what we call emotionally driven distortions.

You know, like in this movie Play Attraction, if you all seen saw it, Michael Douglas has an affair with this woman. They’re both professionals. It was consensual and she won’t let it go. And she’s upset about it.

She’s emotional about it. And she keeps trying to hunt him down. I don’t want to ruin the movie, but it’s a terrifying movie. I highly recommend it.

It’s very scary. Even I watched it the other day with my family. My family’s all grown up, by the way. My kids are and they were disturbed by it.

And this movie is an older movie. And this is what we call the concept of when feelings become facts. I feel violated. That does not mean I was in fact violated.

I feel you took advantage of me. I feel you’re bad and you’re evil. You’re you’re an abuser. Not that you were the person was abused.

It their feelings overtake their reasoning, their logic, their logic. And it becomes the facts. It becomes a fact in their mind and they will go on the witness stand and say it as if it is a fact. And it’s wrong.

It’s incorrect in many situations. And they also do what we call the regret rewrite. They regret it today and tomorrow they’re going to redefine it. And so basically what they’ll do is look back at their entire relationship.

We’ve had many of these cases where the husband for whatever reason, boyfriend, husband leaves the spouse, cheats on the spouse. Sometimes they don’t want to be with the spouse because they’re just intolerable and terrible person. And then the spouse, the one who feels that they were wronged, will go back and rewrite their entire relationship from, “Oh, it was loving. It was great.

I wanted to stay with him to he’s been abusing me since our first date. I’ve had that happen many times. And we have to literally systematically dismantle it piece by piece by piece. And it’s a challenge because these people are very believable.

So we call this the story drift. You know, you have to cross-examine the people when their story changes over time. And so, for example, we’ve had cases, this comes from a case the morning after you texted your friend, I feel weird about last night because they had consensual sex. She knew he was had a boyfriend.

Three days later, she says to her girlfriend, “I didn’t realize he had a girlfriend. I feel he took advantage of me.” So, now she’s starting to feel like I felt weird about it. Basically, she cheated with a guy who had a boy, I’m sorry, a girlfriend.

And then six months later, it turns into a rape case. So, you have to get those text messages. You have to be able to lay these things out on cross- examination or you’re going to be in trouble because the evidence is going to be her testimony against your client. And if your client doesn’t testify, guess what?

We have one story, one version that of the quote truth. Remember, personality drives perception. And you see this all the time when people talk about, “Oh, my exhusband, he was so horrible. My ex-wife, she was the biggest beep in the world.”

And you look back at all the family pictures and them at Disney and them on dates and they’re texting each other. I love you. I love you. I love you.

Now all of a sudden, their personality and what happened to them and and their way of, you know, internalizing what quote happened to them. Maybe the guy dumped them, maybe they broke up, maybe she cheated. And you mix that with personality. And then we have this perception of what happened.

That’s if you don’t take anything from this class, take that. Now, I want to get into cluster B traits. I’m not a psychologist. So, if you’re watching and and you’re one of those comment warriors, I never said I was psych psychologist.

People, I am a lawyer who deals with psychology all the time and psychologists. I know quite a bit about this. I deal with it on a daily basis going on over 25 years. Okay.

There’s four types of cluster B personalities. They are generally dramatic people. They’re hyper emotional and they are erratic. The four types we will get into here in a second.

And why does this matter? I get attacked in my comments by people who probably have some sort of personality problems. They just viciously attack things when I’m even reading out of the DSM5, out of the psychological textbook who defines that defines these disorders. And they get angry that I’m quoting out of a textbook and saying you shouldn’t say this about these these people.

You shouldn’t use the word borderline. You shouldn’t listen folks. All I know I could care less about how you feel about it. But if you’re a lawyer or you’re someone who’s being falsely accused, it matters.

I don’t care about, you know, your feelings. If you’re going around accusing people and falsely accusing people of crimes they didn’t commit. It doesn’t matter what your disorder is. It’s wrong.

And our job is to stop it from happening in to expose it to help people expose lies being made against them. But you can’t do that unless you are calm, detached, and unemotional. You have to be able to recognize the patterns. If you can recognize the patterns of these folks with these personality disorders in these patterns in these false allegations, then you can do effective cross-examinations.

You can control the witness. You can expose the witness as a liar and you can expose the falsehoods and hopefully win your case. But you have to I’m going to say this again. You must be detached, calm, and professional.

If you go in there super aggressive, super argumentative, super obnoxious, super mean, we’ll call it mean, in your big a-hole, the juryy’s not going to like you and they might overlook the inconsistency. So, you have to be a good, nice, professional person and be calm and collected. Okay, we are not diagnosing too. That’s another comment I get.

Oh, you’re diagnosing. I’m not diagnosing anyone. I’m literally telling you what’s in the literature in the courtroom. You’re not diagnosing.

We are not diagnosing to the jury. We are getting them to see patterns and to recognize patterns of people that are not reliable. They can call them whatever they want, but I’ll call it this. They we’re getting them to recognize problematic people who are not credible, who say and do things that are not accurate and lie, exaggerate, and have a lot of inconsistencies.

We want them to see those patterns and be like, “Oh, that reminds me of the ex I had or that reminds me of a friend I knew who was always exaggerating.” So, what we have to do is turn psychology into our cross-examination. Use it as your road map, not your argument. You cannot go in there and argue, “Oh, that person’s a narcissist.

That person’s borderline personality disorder.” You can’t do that. Maybe a psychologist maybe can do that. But what you can argue and show them is that person exaggerated about this.

They wouldn’t answer questions. They lied to the police on this occasion. They said on this day they love you. They they want to be with you.

When you told them no, then they called you a rapist. Those are the patterns we’re talking about. Now, going back to credibility, you don’t have to People think you have to go to battle and destroy the credibility and expose that witness. You don’t need to do that.

You need to be calm and let them in their behaviors, in their refusal to answer simple questions in a simple yes or no manner, let that destroy their credibility. I have taken down many people on the witness stand on cross-examination and exposed them as liars, exaggerators, or not credible simply by being calm, kind, and professional, not jumping into the arguments that they try to start with me. When they ask me a question, I ignore the question and I go back to my questions because I’m the one controlling the questioning. I am the cross-examiner.

You don’t want to be emotional or combative and you want to be prepared. If you go in there halfcocked and try to take down someone who is intentionally trying to frame your client falsely and you go in there without the impeachment material, without practicing, without thinking it through, emotionally charged, angry, aggressive, you are really hurting your case and your client. So you confront and expose people that are liars and people that have personality problems that are making false allegations quietly, professionally, and never, ever, ever take the bait and engage in an argument with them. That gives them control.

They rely on emotional emotionality, instability, and chaos. Do not let the courtroom turn into that. Let them try, but you want it to be a one-sided argumentative obsession. You want them to be refusing the answer, and you want to be sitting there repeating the question until you get the answer.

Now, now let’s get into the actual breakdown of the types of personality disorders, which I have found and the literature supports lean to, you know, that come up in a lot of these cases. Okay? They come up in a lot of my cases and they come up there’s studies done all around the world on people that do make false allegations and who they are, what type of people they are and it goes back to our original question. Why would you lie?

The fact is a lot of people lie about a lot of things and the fact that people even ask that question like why would someone lie? It just goes to show that that person is naive. Now you can’t tell them oh you’re just being naive. You have to show them and answer them through evidence, through proper cross-examination, and through your presentation of the case.

So, these are the cluster B cast members. You have the borderline. They kind of like a chameleon. They blend in until they explode.

You have the avenger. That’s a narcissistic person who’s going to hunt you down and take you out for payback basically. You have histrionic personality disorder, which is, you know, attention-seeking, a performer. Then you have the anti- social person, basically a sociopath that is a predator.

Okay? They hunt people and destroy people for fun. Okay? Sometimes you’re a mixture of you can be a mixture of all these.

You can be narcissistic and antisocial. You can be a little bit of each. And you just [clears throat] need to know the criteria. Now, the jurors already know these types of people.

They probably have some in their family. Everyone in their family, for the most part that I know, has someone who is a narcissist. Doesn’t have to be like a bombastic narcissist, but it can be someone who’s just manipulative, self, you know, self-centered, entitled, lacking empathy, and so forth. The jurors know these types.

You have to expose those character traits, those personality traits to the jury through evidence and on cross. Let them see it with their own eyes. First one I want to talk about, I see this a lot and we see these traits a lot. Again, I am not up there diagnosing people, but we see the traits, and we’re going to get into the traits here in a second, but borderline personality disorder very common in my experience when it comes to false allegations.

This is these are the core traits. Now, this is coming coming out of the DSM5. I had to summarize these or would be a huge block of text and you couldn’t even read it. Let me move let me Sorry about that.

Let me move my my camera here so you can see. So we’re talking about extreme emotional instability, fear of abandonment. We have intense rapidly shifting emotions. You have, you know, idolization to devaluation.

Now that’s they call that basically splitting is where one minute they love the person. I’m so in love. He’s the man of my dream. She’s the woman of my dreams.

I want to marry you. They usually go from hot to cold. And they go from 0 to 60 like that. Like they meet you and a week later they want to run off and get married to you.

But the second that they think you’re going to that you upset them or that they think that you’re going to abandon them, they go you go from being that the greatest husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend to the biggest piece of [ __ ] a rapist, a horrible person, the worst person I’ve ever met in my life. And it sometimes happens like one afternoon to the next. They’re also very impulsive, reckless, and they have chron chronic feelings of emptiness. And a lot of what they do, they’re very kind of raw.

I’ll say people with these traits, a lot of them, they fear being abandoned. They have some trauma from childhood or growing up. The literature is not exactly sure how you get some of these disorders, whether it’s genetic, whether it’s how you raised or combination. It’s a little we don’t really know.

But we see these traits a lot in our cases. So, how does this come up in a false allegation context? They often arise when the person thinks they’re going to get rejected or they fear that they’re going to get rejected and they’re it’s like a roller coaster of emotion. One minute everything’s great, we’re in love, we’re doing very risky sex and we’re running off to Vegas.

Next day, I hate you. The guy says, “Okay, I’m out.” And then the person’s like, “No, don’t leave me. I love you.

I want to.” And that’s kind of what we see. They tend to exaggerate and give inconsistent statements and they have intense courtroom behavior. Their direct examinations are master classes in acting and they’re doing it out of raw emotion.

So imagine Meyer Street or some actress like that up there giving an Academy Award-winning performance. When they’re done, most of my clients are like, “Oh my god, I’m going down. I’m innocent, but I’m going down.” I said, “Hold on, wait.

We’re about to do the cross.” And not until you do the cross and expose them live and in real time does the real personality come out. And they often rewrite their history. They look back at consensual encounters and two, three years later sometimes postconlict and say, “Oh yeah, that was all that was not consensual.

I love you. You’re the best thing that happened to me.” A day later, “I hate you. You ruined my life.”

A day later, “Oh, I love you. Who I want to spend the rest of my life with you a day later. I hope you burn in hell. I’m going to ruin your career.

I see it all the time. As a matter of fact, some of the top experts on this topic wrote this book. I hate you, Don’t Leave Me. It’s a It’s a book about borderline personality disorder.

I encourage you to read it. Then we have narcissistic personality disorder. Most of you listening this are thinking, “Oh my god, that I know that I know someone like that. It’s that cocky, arrogant, loudmouth.”

Yes, that could be potentially a narcissist. Okay, but there are some subtypes that aren’t that type. That’s called an overt narcissist. The types that I see a lot are more sinister.

They’re sneakier and they’re people who fly below the radar. And you don’t realize that they’re truly narcissists until you get to know them. And really, if you if you don’t know what a narcissist is or what a narcissistic personality disorder or what the criteria are, you would never see it coming until you get blindsided. Lack of empathy, grandiosity, a sense of entitlement that is not earned, fragile self-esteem, they’re exploitative in their personal relationships, and they’re hyper sensitive to criticism.

Those are some of the main criteria, not all of them. And to be diagnosed, by the way, that’s why we’re not diagnosing. We don’t diagnose, and I’m not a doctor, so I can’t do that. But there’s certain you need to have certain criteria and traits viewed over a certain period of time.

There there’s all these criteria you have to look at before a doctor can actually or a psychologist can actually diagnose you. Okay? So that’s why in court we don’t diagnose. We highlight things like lack of empathy, exploitative, they lie, they’re they’re entitled, things like that.

And then people can say, “Oh, that is that type of person and that’s a bad person.” So, there’s three subtypes that I want to hit on. These are very common in my experience in false allegations. The covert narcissist.

They’re always the victim. Super higher sensitive. They’re emotional. They use pity and drama for control.

Ever meet someone that the within minutes of meeting them, you know, their whole dramatic story, how they’re abused, the ex-husbands, ex-boyfriends, ex-wives, they’re they’re the ultimate ultimate victim and they’re kind of like a life sucker. They’re very negative. They’re probably going to manipulate you and they and they use that manipulation of me, I’m such a poor little victim. They talk really quietly and next thing you know you’re giving the person money, a person a ride and then you start seeing, wait a minute, I met all the exes that they’re talking about.

They’re actually nice people. And the common denominator is the covert narcissist. So then we have the parasitic. Those are more exploitative.

And again, it doesn’t have to be some, you know, beautiful handsome person that’s a narcissist. They can be someone who’s not attractiveness has really nothing to do with it, but [clears throat] someone who manipulates others, maybe someone who moves in with their mom and dad and they’re entitled to move in with their mom and dad even though they’re 50 years old and a gambler and just a bum. And they’re using them for money, housing, leverage, drugs. And they use sympathy again, victimhood for gain, and as manipulation.

There’s plenty of people mooching off their parents who are taking care of them and they’re doing it through manipulation and they’re sucking out of their parents even when they should be taking care of their four kids that they had to four different people and they’re not taking care of them, their parents are. And then we have malignant. That’s basically a sociopathic narcissist, cold, vindictive. They hunt people, they destroy them, and they do it for fun.

Super dangerous. You know, so how does this come up in false allegations? They do it to preserve their ego. If they get rejected, we see it a lot.

Some of them seek admiration admiration as a victim because in some cases if you’re a victim, everyone treats you like a hero. You get special treatment. For example, in the military, you get money. You get you get awarded as a hero, as a survivor if you’re a victim, even if you’re not.

And a lot of people use that to get, let’s go back to the criteria, to get entitled things that they think they’re entitled to. They’re entitled to recognition. They’re entitled to privileges. They’re entitled to move to whatever the base they want.

In reality, they’re not, but they use the allegation combined with their narcissistic traits to do these things. So, common thing we see, he left. So, I reported him. The source of admiration disappears.

The person’s ego fractures, the accusation restores control. If you’re a real narcissist and you want to control your ex, falsely accuse them. You falsely accuse them, you now have them by the throat for years and you could just keep adding to the allegation. It is a question of control.

One last thing you want want to know, this is my non non psychologist criteria. You want to know if someone’s a real narcissist. A quick way to know from from my perspective is are they always the hero in their stories or always the victim? Like either they’re the greatest person ever and they did all this great stuff and all they do is talk about themselves or they’re always being wronged and they’re the victim sometimes in the same sentence.

Histrionic personality disorder. This is [clears throat] someone that is extreme attention-seeking behavior. They also have rapidly shifting shallow emotions. They tend to say stuff like, “Oh my god, that guy’s such a creep.

He’s so creepy. They talk in very vague vague. Vagueness is key here. And so their statements might be very vague like, “Yeah, the creepy guy came over and he kind of like took advantage of me.”

These people are very easily led. Look at number this one towards the bottom. Suggest stability. They’re easily led.

Law enforcement often get these people to say all sorts of things because they’ll go along with whatever gets them attention. It is extreme attention-seeking behavior. How does that come up? Well, if they get rejected, if they’re not getting enough attention, if people don’t really treat them the way they’re entitled to be treated, they become very theatrical and they’re very difficult witnesses to deal with on when you’re sitting there going through an investigation because they’re always crying.

They’re very dramatic. They’re a lot of actresses probably have this and actors have this. They’re just great storytellers and they quickly shift narratives because they have to constantly maintain the sympathy. But on cross they crumble.

These folks are pretty pretty easy to expose on cross. They cannot answer a simple question in many cases. So that’s what you need to do is have a planned cross. Be consistent.

Be prepared. U where does this come up? Again, attention seeking. When they go into court, think about attention seeking, right?

You don’t get enough attention. So, what do you do? What do you do? You make your allegation.

You go into court. Everyone’s surrounding you, law enforcement, prosecutors, victim advocates, all these people there watching you and admiring you as the victim. You’re It’s the ultimate in sympathy and it’s ultimate intention grabbing. But on cross, when you get up there and you’re crossing them, they tend to have a lot of problems because they were no longer getting that positive attention.

They’re now actually being impeached, exposed, and being forced to answer questions. I’ve had these types, people with these traits get up and run out of the court, never come back because they literally got exposed in front of a live audience. And the victim advocates often don’t do them a favor because they all they do is tell them what they want to hear. They make it sound like it’s going to be easy and they’re never going to be questioned until you hit them with a devastating cross.

Remember, lots of drama, few details. They perform on emotion, not memory. So, let them go big. Let them let them go big on the direct exam.

Knock them down fact by fact on cross with the contradictions. Do it calmly. Antisocial personality disorder. And what is that?

[clears throat] Antisocial personality disorder is pretty much a sociopath. Now, it doesn’t say that in the DSM5, but if you most doctors and psychologists will tell you that it’s sociopathic behavior. What is it? So, these people break laws.

Maybe they don’t get caught. There’s a lot of wealthy people who do this all the time. Never get caught because of their status or privilege. But they do things like stealing, lying, all sorts of crimes.

And it’s a pattern of it, not just one time. They’re also deceitful. So when someone asks me the question like why would someone lie? I mean someone who’s antisocial, one of the criteria of their mental illness is deceitfulness.

Like this is in the in the criteria that the doctors look at the person is a liar. So if you have this disorder, part of it is this is a decent amount of people in our in our country and a lot of people who end up in a criminal situation, both the defendant and the accuser, are often these types of folks, they have no remorse. So imagine you commit crimes, you lie, you have no remorse, you harm others, and you have no empathy. You’re superficial, you’re impulsive, you’re aggressive, and you manipulate and exploit for personal gain.

Sounds like a real peach. But these people are smart. So, they will infiltrate relationships. We all know people like this.

They will get into situations of leadership. They’ll get into situations where they’re they’re maybe even married to you or dating you, and you’re thinking, “What is going on here?” Like, “This person’s this person is bad.” because they have a po person personality disorder and they feel no remorse.

So I see on all these reality she TV which I admit I watch sometimes with my daughter my wife where these people do bad things and lie and cheat and stuff and the other sides I just want an apology. They will never they can’t it’s a mental illness. They cannot that’s part of their disease. They cannot have remorse.

They don’t have remorse. Okay. They don’t care. They don’t care.

So, you’re gonna you could sit there all day and night getting trying to change them or get them to understand, but they lie all the time and they do it for fun. So, these types, they do they’re the type that would make an allegation like we talked about in the beginning. They do it intentionally with malice. Like, I’m going to take down the head of the class in my medical school.

I’m going to claim that he sexually assaulted me or that he harassed me or that she cheated on the exam. They’ll lie about stuff like that to take people down. I mean, there are plenty of movies where mean bad people do this stuff, but they’re out there amongst us. They will they will make and doctor evidence.

They will lie and they’re very very convincing at lying to your face. If you’ve ever dealt with one of these people, they are will lie and they are they’re like professional actors and have no empathy or remorse for you or about what they did. So, this person is not a victim. They’re a strategist with no empathy.

They do things to gain power, to hurt people, and they’re very dangerous. The key is spotting them and identifying them. So now let me expand the screen here. I don’t know.

Didn’t realize that shrunk. So these these are some red flags. You know you get a sudden accusation after they get in trouble or there’s a breakup. These folks again are emotional and they’re attention-seeking as well.

All of these are emotional attention-seeking behaviors. The thing is their inconsistencies do evolve over time and you need to really get a timeline down and really do a thorough job pre-trial. So again, here’s how we deal with these cluster B type traits. You describe it through actions and show it to the jury.

You don’t diagnose. You stay calm and you expose the patterns. Now again, the jury just needs to see these patterns and see them in the witness. Now, okay, so that’s great, right?

But then what? What about people that are out here saying things that they believe are true? And this is another basis of false allegations. It’s people that are trying to say something because they believe it’s socially or cult culturally correct.

Like they believe that they’ve been abused because they believe for real that every man’s a rapist or every time someone does something that they’re the victim because that’s what they were taught. And like that that that start by believing comes from a movement. It’s part of the hashtagme too movement that I see a lot in my cases where they say, “Well, we start by believing.” Okay, well that’s not a good way to start every single case.

If you’re on the jury, you shouldn’t start that at all. You should be starting at zero. Like I don’t believe anything until someone proves it to me. But you have to identify this with the jury because some of them are taught you start by believing and they start by believing the defendant’s guilty and the burden has shifted and his constitutional rights or her rights are violated and you’re in real trouble if you let these people get on the jury.

Yeah. This is a core principle of the hashtagme too movement. I’ve heard people say no it’s not. But it is.

I literally got this material off some of the hashtagme too websites. So it is and at all the me too rallies you see those start by believing signs. [snorts] Now this becomes a this is becomes another situation we look for patterns and look at the script. They if you go online and you look up what people say happened to them as part of them being assaulted, whether they were assaulted or not is irrelevant.

But the stories that they tell, they often will use the same statements that they hear other people making, the ones that are making false allegations. I froze with fear. I was blacked out. I don’t remember.

I was coerced. I didn’t consent. And some of you may be saying, “What are you talking about this? I never heard of any of this.”

Well, I’m going to show you something. This came out in a few big trials. We Weinstein P. Diddy’s case.

The idea of course of control. And that and that ties back to me too. This idea that the person didn’t use force. They didn’t use threats.

And by the way, I’m not commenting on the guilt of either of those guys. They got convicted of various crimes and we’ll let that stand as is. But I’m giving you an example of how that’s coming up. And it came up in those cases and it’s coming up in cases even where I find or the jury finds the guy is falsely accused because this is being taught this is put out by the Cleveland Clinic very [clears throat] reputable medical establishment.

This idea that power and control is a way of raping people. And it can be, of course it can be, okay? But not every time that someone has sex with someone, they look back, you know, and say, “Oh, he was he abused me. He manipulated me after the fact for whatever reason.”

They feel like that. Maybe it’s personality driven. Maybe the guy in fact was an abuser. Who knows?

But what’s being happening here is advocates are telling people, “Oh, your ex-husband, did he use economic abuse? Did he not let you spend money as you want? Did he ever lose his temper? Did he ever [clears throat] Well, he’s a man, so he clearly has male privilege, and that is a method of control as it is.

He used the K children because he claimed he said he was he wanted to see the kids or he maybe talked to the kids about something. He isolated you because he wouldn’t let you go out to Vegas with your three girlfriends for a girls weekend because you all had no money. But it doesn’t matter. If you fall within these, you’re a victim.

This is what this is showing. You are in this wheel of control and power if you are having sex with someone who uses any of these techniques. And I now I’m sure that’s not what the intent was originally, but I’ve had this come up in many many of my cases where I have to cross-examine a psychologist about this power and control will. And I’ll give you an example here.

For example, this is a breakdown of those things. I’ve had cases where the woman starts talking to her friend who’s a for recently divorced. She starts telling the friend like, [clears throat] “Yeah, you know, I think telling the wife, yeah, your husband, he’s kind of controlling. You know, he doesn’t let you go out with me and drink and party.

He makes you stay with the kids. You know, stay with him and the kids on the weekends.” he has your phone on find my and although you have his phone he doesn’t he has a joint bank account so you all watch each other’s spending and it gets twisted in into a case where the person is now convinced looking at slides like this that oh my god he wouldn’t let me have he wouldn’t let me go to Vegas with my friends that’s isolation and that’s control I literally have had this happen in many cases I’m like he wouldn’t let you go with your friends because the three friends you wanted to go with were constantly cheating on their husbands. They were using drugs.

They’re they’re bad people and you the two you have a twoyear-old kid at home and you don’t have any money. So he you can’t even afford to go to Vegas with your friends. But anyway, that’s a thing you need to be looking out for. And you can find these types of things online to impeach their experts if they bring this up.

Okay. Another thing, another way to get attention and to be convinced that you believe that that you were abused or sexually assaulted when you weren’t. You go online, you start posting hashtagme too stuff, you get this online echo, oh yeah, me too. Oh, look at my story.

And people start actually giving you attention. And maybe you’re a person who doesn’t get much attention. Maybe because people don’t like you. Maybe because you live in an isolated place for whatever reason.

Maybe you’re just toxic. And then you get you get these online people that are supporting you and you could come forward and be like, you know what, hashtagme too, I was abused, too. We have in institutional incentives that also push this. For example, if you report something in the military, I got to fix this slide.

If you report something in the military, then you can get immediate transfer to your base of choosing, whether it’s true or not. Immediate transfer, you get a bunch of benefits. You can get what’s called military sexual trauma benefits. That means you can get up to $50,000 a year for the rest of your life tax-free as a disabled veteran.

All you have to do, you don’t believe me, look it up. All you have to do is say, “I was sexually abused. Someone touched me, harassed me, did something to me, and I was in the military.” And you can go to the VA and apply for these benefits.

And I’ve seen people both now men are jumping on the bandwagon. I did a case recently where all there was five male victims accusing my client [clears throat] and all of them were getting or planning on getting military sexual trauma benefits at the age of 23 because they claimed they were abused and harassed by my client. It was basically a hazing case and and we talk about bias here. I when doing this presentation I wrote in to chatbt what benefits could a person receive from making a false allegation of sexual assault and my the response from AI from chatbt is I cannot create or help distribute material that presents a group of people as fabricated or exaggerating sexual assault claims for gay.

Well, I’m asking what benefits you can get and it’s pushing back and trying to be like I can’t label those people. Like you can’t even label people that are actually lying and making false allegations. That’s all been trained in the AI and it’s been trained into our juries. This is what I also was talking about the institutional benefits up to $50,000 a year for life lifetime health care.

What’s that a month in my state? It’s like 2500 bucks a month for some people for health care. You get to transfer if you’re if you’re here illegally or wanting to be a US citizen. You can sometimes be get a stay in your proceedings.

So you say you were sexually assaulted or abused by your boyfriend or husband, you may be able to be able to stay here and get citizenship. In the military, if you claim sexual assault, they are required now to stop disciplinary action against you. Again, don’t believe me. Look it up.

As long as it isn’t a felony. So you can have a whole bunch of misdemeanors. You’re in trouble getting kicked out and you say, “Hey, my sergeant five years ago touched my butt in the chow hall. All your misconduct is wiped away and you’re going to get go back to the top.

The MST benefits. You also get attention. Attention seeking is a primary reason for false allegations. So now all these people, maybe you’re someone who has no one really likes, you don’t have friends.

Now everyone’s surrounding you telling you’re wonderful. Sorry this happened to you. You’re a hero. You’re a you’re a survivor.

You get to wear ribbons. You get a you get a service dog, things like that. And we’re seeing these things pop up in corporations as well, by the way, these benefits. And some people just want to feel like they’re important, right?

Like who doesn’t? But when you become a hero or a survivor, you do get to have a service animal. I’ve personally seen this many times. You have a person who’s probably very like they looked very young walking through the airport with a service dog garnering a bunch of attention.

People are like, “Oh, what what what happened?” And they say, “I was a I’ve seen this several times. I was a I’m a I’m a disabled veteran.” I’m thinking, “That person is not even old enough to have been in the Iraq or Afghanistan conflicts.”

But I’ve but what ends up happening is a lot of those people I know this for a fact because I it’s a big thing on military bases. They get the service dog. They’ve been in for six months to a year and they’re identified as survivor for life and they get speaking gigs. They get paid to give speeches to universities and colleges with their service dog because they survived allegedly sexual harassment or sexual abuse in the military.

So, in closing, okay, in closing, you know, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, you have to make this clear to the jury. It comes from evidence, not emotion. It’s very important we shut down emotion from the beginning of these cases. Otherwise, it’ll overtake the jury’s decision-making process.

The defense’s mission is to educate jurors on why people lie, expose the patterns without cruelty, and just being super aggressive and mean. Just do it very logically, very calmly, and then reframe the question from morality to reliability. Rather than saying, “Oh, that person’s just a big liar. They’re bad.”

You want it to be more like we talked about in the beginning, that person’s facts are inaccurate. They’re emotionally unstable. That what they’re saying is not consistent. It’s not corroborated, and it’s not backed up by the physical, forensic, and scientific evidence.

In fact, they have a huge motive to lie. And look what they said in the beginning. They don’t remember what happened and now all of a sudden they remember everything and really rely on the facts and the evidence and not emotion and don’t let them get away with that. Give the jury an escape hatch.

Give them a way out, you know. And the way out is that they don’t need to call that witness a liar, unreliable. I mean, they only have to call them unreliable. They don’t have to come up, you know, a big liar, you know, bad person.

Give them a graceful way out. Let them keep their sympathy and still do justice. So if you sat through this presentation, I you know will give you a copy, a free copy of my book. com.

I set it up so you can download the free PDF version of the book and it’s basically a blueprint on actually how to cross-examine and expose toxic manipulators and it has sample cross-examination questions, how to frame arguments and things like that. It’s much more comprehensive than this argument. So, if you enjoyed the class, you know, like the video, share it, u and provide feedback in the comments. Until next time, I’m Michael Wington.

Thank you for watching.more comprehensive than this argument. So, if you enjoyed the class, you know, like the video, share it, u and provide feedback in the comments. Until next time, I’m Michael Wington. Thank you for watching.