[8/17] Woman ordered to pay Army colonel she accused of rape $8.4MM after he claimed the false alleg

DailyMail.com ^ | 8/15/17 | Harvey Day

[MisterMagic]

A jury has ordered a female blogger to pay an Army colonel she accused of rape a total of $8.4million in damages.

Susan Shannon, 52, who now lives in Everett, Washington, first alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Army Colonel David 'Wil' Riggins in 1986, while they were both cadets, on her blog in 2013.

She said she waited three decades to come forward about her experience because of the army's 'code of silence'.

[miss marmelstein]

Chicks shouldn’t be at Annapolis or on a submarine or anywhere else including the police force or the fire department where men serve alone. I don’t think they should even be dentists after one of them tried to pull my tooth and took two other male dentists to help her out before my pain medication wore out.

We used to know this.

I don’t give a damn what freepers who have daughters in the armed forces say about this. It was ridiculous to start this crap and we are seeing the results.

[Alberta's Child]

I don’t know for sure. It’s apparently written in the letter that has been cited in the media reports, but she could also just fabricate a story that she indicated her preference for confidentiality when she spoke with Rep. Ashoo or Feinstein or something like that. It would be hard to prove otherwise.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Unless he wants it repeated, over and over in his jurisprudential history, he should file suit...

[miss marmelstein]

I agree; I hope he can destroy her in the law courts but who knows at this point - it is indecent women against decent men. And as you know, I speak up for decent women here at FR because we have some really indecent men here.

[AndyJackson]

This is a terrible headline. She wasn’t ordered to pay $8M because he claimed she injured him. That judgment came about because he was able to demonstrate his damages to a judge and a jury and demonstrate that her allegations were false and that they damaged her.

There was a judge and a jury and evidentiary proof inbetween the claim and her obviously malicious lies about him.

[snarkytart]

I’m curious why she would send it as she didn’t want to be exposed? And why she took a lie detector test?

[mountainfolk]

If Ford had her repressed memory recovered by a psychiatrist then I think, however this lie of hers comes out, that she will spend the rest of her miserable life spending frequent visits to another psychiatrist trying to justify to herself what she has done to a good, and innocent man and his reputation. Kavanaugh has gone thru this for a reason and the experience should make him an even better Supreme Court Justice.

[unlearner]

Is there a reason why you just decided to join Free Republic today and start posting articles?

Just curious.

[CodeToad]

You posted in freepmail the following, so allow me to make it public since you haven't the adult courage:

"I’d thought about making this public, but I prefer to deal privately with this, regarding your comments that you say that girls have rape fantasies.

Out of my circle of women friends, how many seven-year-olds want to be molested for years by a family member? How many girls, under the age of 10, want to be raped repeatedly by their father? How many want their nasty drunken uncle to diddle them when they are 8? Or my BFF who was raped by her husband, repeatedly, because “I can do what I want because we’re married.”

I’m fortunate. I got away from two guys who were demanding sex with me when I wasn’t even 12. Unlike the woman in question, I can recall with stark detail and clarity of such events 30+ years later - and so can my friends, save one who was traumatized so horribly that she has memory problems from PTSD.

When did Conservativism become Islamic in that women have no standing in their lives?

It bothers me that you have such a cynical view on events and first think that it’s sexual fantasies of attention seeking women. It’s not. It’s an absolute nightmare, and one that a rapist most of the time gets away with it - because when a girl or woman does speak up about it, they are immediately shouted down, saying that it’s impossible, or that she’s a hoe, or that she was deserving it. Rape fantasies are power trips for guys, demonstrating power via sex. It’s about control, domination, and destruction.

I’ll have you in my prayers tonight that you can soften your heart to women and girls (men and boys, too) whose lives are destroyed by such violence, and then have scorn heaped upon them when they tell the truth and aren’t believed.

Women like Dr. Ford make it 100x more difficult for those who have been abused to speak up and out. But buying into the liberal fallacy that it never happens is rubbish. Are there some who do? Yes, there are liberal women who have such. But conservative women never want to experience such things, ever, especially after it happened before they turned 10."

Sorry, but the fact that some women are raped doesn't negate the fact that many women have rape fantasies and live them out by lying about having been raped.

No one, not me and or anyone else, claimed no rape has ever happened.

Something tells me you, too, are lying about your experience. The fact that you private freepmailed it says it all tome. You know you story to be BS and didn't want anything but sympathy from me. You don't get any. I hate liars. It is all about attention seeking disorders women have. They'll use any lie to gain attention. Your story smells of attention seeking too.

You attention-seeking lying little girls take away the legitimacy of those people who have been raped. I've known women who have been raped, and they don't use it to gain attention.

As far as my "cynical view", you failed reading comprehension: This story is about a woman who LIED. LIED. Get through your thick, stupid head, SHE LIED!

This isn't about anything but yet another attention-seeking liar claiming to have been molested trying to ruin a man's life.

You should say a prayer tonight for yourself, not me. I don't need it, you do.

[CodeToad]

My prior post was to you, not myself.

[morphing libertarian]

any false charges, perjury, withholding evidence, failure to disclose, wrongfully imprison, or withholding exculpatory information motion should result in the person of official serving the time the wrongly accused would have served ion found guilty up too and including the death penalty. This will clean up the system in a year.

[ladyjane]

Yes - there is a lot of rape at Annapolis. It was hard to believe at first. But it’s second hand. It wasn’t me raped but a few others who were and left the academy. Maybe it happens elsewhere but it surely happens there.

I was incredulous too when I first heard. I didn’t believe either when I first heard about clergy abuse.

[BlueLancer]

Yes - there is a lot of rape at Annapolis...

Well, not when I attended ... but then, again, it was still all-male then ...

[Secret Agent Man]

Why not both jail and punitive damages? It finiancially destroys a guys career.

[trebb]

Might get the same results if his wife were to press the charges - plenty of damage to her and the kids...

[daniel1212]

During a six-day trial that ended Aug. 1, a jury in Fairfax County, Va., heard from both Riggins and Shannon at length. And after 2½ hours of deliberation, they sided emphatically with Riggins, awarding him $8.4 million in damages, an extraordinary amount for a defamation case between two private citizens. The jury ordered Shannon to pay $3.4 million in compensatory damages for injury to his reputation and lost wages, and $5 million in punitive damages, “to make sure nothing like this will ever happen again,” according to one of the jurors.

In Virginia, punitive damages are limited to $350,000, and lawyers for both sides said the compensatory damages would likely be reduced to $2 million, leaving a final judgment of $2.3 million against Shannon, a stay-at-home mother of three teenagers. The verdict came just days after a jury in Dallas awarded more than $1 million in damages to a wedding photographer who was harshly criticized by a beauty blogger, causing the photographer’s business to collapse. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/08/11/jury-orders-blogger-to-pay-8-4-million-to-ex-army-colonel-she-accused-of-rape/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.24bb92e84748

[Titus-Maximus]

Kavanaugh would not have denied it under oath had it been true. I believe that.
I don’t know what happened 36 years ago but this man’s life in the intervening decades has been a monument of decency towards women. Rapists and harassers don’t just turn off. There are always more victims. Look at Clinton, Weinstein, Rose, Lauer, they just keep going. That’s why I believed Clarence Thomas because all the women he worked with testified under oath and said they never saw a shred of the harassment that Anita Hill claimed. Over years of working with him.

It was a false accusation against him as it is against Kavanaugh. If K had more women popping out of the woodwork making claims, he would be toast. With absolutely no evidence to go on one must look at a man’s life in totality and determine whether the accusation runs so counter to anything in his life that one must determine the charges are false. That is the decision rational people will make.

I can’t believe her testimony will add anything, the woman has no facts. It could be some kind of emotional break down which will not bring any help. This should have never seen the light of day, and the Democrats, in their undemocratic quest for power have destroyed more lives.

If anything positive comes from this toxic waste, it will be a surprise. Yet, maybe the lesson is that victims go to the police, and get the facts down on paper as soon as possible, unless, of course, it never happened.