Smithline apologized to his lawyers and retracted her claim. She said was was "manipulated by Ms. Wood" and Wood's "associates," to such an extend that she willingly "spread publicly false accusations of abuse" against Manson, who she dated for a brief time.
"I succumbed to pressure from Evan Rachel Wood and her associates to make accusations of rape and assault against [Manson] that were not true,” Ashley Morgan Smithline, now 38, said in a declaration.
Smithline said that she was "manipulated," not by Mason, but by Wood, into saying horrible things about Manson, including rape, abuse, and sado-masochistic torture. She went on national tv talk shows and said this, and now she claims it was all a fabrication, and that Manson did not rape her.
The admission is rather stunning, not so much because the allegation was false—so many of them in the Me Too era have been—but because Smithline had the nerve to admit that she'd faked it. She said she didn't fake it for money or fame, but that she really believed it. The reason she lied is because she'd been convinced by Wood into believing thigs had been done to her that had not been done. Smithline lied not to gain notariety for herself, or necessarily even to hurt Manson, but to please Wood.
Smithline likely gained acceptance from Wood, and Wood's friends, by claiming she was victimized by Manson. The accusations against Manson were really about the relationship between women, and Manson was the means to an end.
Yet for years now, we have been told to "believe all women." T-shirts were printed up, and entire movement was made, a phrase was coined, donations were solicited, all in service to the idea that when a woman comes our publicly, shifts her hips to one side, and bravely points her finger accusingly at a man, it simply must be true. The idea was that a woman would never lie about something like this, not for fame, not money, not clout, because it was a measure of courage to speak publicly against a big strong man who'd done you wrong.
That concept of womanhood, however, is incredibly naive, and it paints women as perpetually honest, forthright creatures who could never tell lies or bear false witness, who could never have ulterior motives to their accusations, who could only be speaking out with courage and bravery. This is just nonsense, as any woman could tell you, and the notion that this is what women are—perpetually believable—is even more infantilizing than anything the patriarchy could cook up on its own.
Women, like men, can see opportunities before them, and can use those opportunities to attain their desires. Those desires may not always be forthright, direct, and transparent. Instead, a woman who makes an accusation could be lying, could have convinced herself of a lie, and could be doing it entirely in service to some hidden motivation.
Beleiving anything else is simply giving into the paternistic ideas upon which Me Too and Believe All Women were based—that a woman simply can do no wrong when she makes public allegations, that the only reason she would do that is to gain justice. But the truth is that, from Phaedra to the biblical schemes of Potiphar's wife against Joseph to the origins of Salem Witch Trials and into the present day, women have used false claims to gain their aims—not always, but they sure do know how.
Whether spurned in affection, as with both Phaedra and Potifar's wife, both of whom made false allegations against men who would not return their romantic intentions, or in the case of Salem, where a group of girls sought acceptance among each other and so made claims against those outside their circle, women are well-known to be not naive fools who only speak truth due to their divine purity as interpreted by a patriarchal perspective that would infantilize them, but as conniving, opportunisitic, and aware of their own power as are their male counterparts.
Despite their opposition to religiosity and their refusal to look at a true history of our past—or perhaps because of it—the contemporary left has a distorted view of women. They at once believe women to be powerful, full of agency, able to consent to all manner of sexual depravity, yet simultaneously believe women to be instant victims who would never lie, and would never bring a false claim for the purpose of enhancing their own power or influence, or simply for vengeance.
Manson may be no innocent, but he is likely not a rapist.
Yet no matter what legal remedies he and his attorneys may seek, he will forever bear the burden of these lies, told in a climate of massive cognitive dissonance, where women were believed to be both totally independent and capable, yet innocent enough to warrant that their words of accusation always be believed. The brief and destructive era of Me Too and Believe All Women should come, finally, crashing to a close.
