LAWRENCE, Kansas — Less than two hours had passed since the not guilty verdict came down, and their names and photographs were already published and viewed millions of times on social media.
Some said the 19-year-old should be prosecuted for accusing Terrence Shannon Jr. of rape when a Douglas County jury decided no such crime could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Others said the Chicago native and University of Illinois men’s basketball star should sue her and her best friend, also 19, for damaging his reputation and possibly his NBA dreams.
“Kuddos,” one person wrote on X, the site once called Twitter, “for making sure these girls can feel one percent of the pain tsj went thru cuz of their fake claims.”
Another person posted on the site: “Don’t falsely accuse someone of something that could change their life forever. Hope she struggles to find a job when she graduates because of this. Nobody will be able to trust her”
The mother of the woman who accused Shannon of rape told the Chicago Tribune during a brief phone call that her daughter has received death threats and messages telling her to kill herself since her name and screenshots of her social media accounts were publicly shared.
“It’s been horrible,” she said, her voice breaking. “It’s just so emotional. I guess I was just so naive of the fact that this is what would happen and these awful people.”
Her daughter sent the Tribune a text message asking for more details about this story and then did not respond to two subsequent messages.
Experts say the young woman’s experience underscores an all-too-common reality: While high-profile athletes accused of sex crimes are often able to repair their careers and images, even if those allegations are proven in court, the women who accuse them can be the targets of online harassment campaigns that, ultimately, can scare sexual assault survivors into silence.
“Too many people assume it’s ‘easy’ to report rape victimizations. It isn’t,” said Joanne Belknap, a criminologist and professor emerita at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Underreporting of rapes will undoubtedly be strengthened by the extreme doxxing of this woman and her friend.”
What makes a false rape accusation?
One of many issues Belknap sees in the aftermath of the Shannon trial is its blanket characterization as an example of a false rape accusation.
“That’s when I get upset,” said Belknap, whose decades of work includes research on sexual victimization and intimate partner abuse.
To start, she said, we have to understand what statistics tell us — and do not tell us — about the prevalence of false rape allegations.
An oft-cited estimate puts the range of false rape allegations in this country at somewhere between 2% and 10%. But the number is likely much lower, Belknap said, as that estimate only accounts for instances when a person reports an allegation to law enforcement. According to federal estimates, two-thirds of rapes and sexual assaults go unreported each year; studies suggest the number is even higher on college campuses.
“It is vital to remember that while false rape charges, and especially convictions of such charges, are reprehensible,” Belknap said, “it is also true that rape survivors are typically very reluctant to report to the police, recognizing that they will likely be blamed and their names dragged through the mud.”
To be sure, false rape allegations, though rare, do happen. This country has a long, shameful history of white women falsely accusing Black men of sexual violence — accusations that resulted in imprisonment and lynchings.
In 2006, a media frenzy erupted in North Carolina when three members of the Duke University lacrosse team were accused and later cleared of raping and sexually assaulting an exotic dancer whom one writer and researcher called “the archetypal false accuser.”
Nine years later, Rolling Stone retracted its story about a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity when, among other issues, it learned of apparent fabrications by the alleged victim at the center of the story.
In 2018, a 19-year-old Long Island, New York, woman was sentenced to one year in prison after she admitted she’d lied about being raped by two college football players.
After reading about the Shannon case, Belknap’s view is that it shouldn’t be included among those examples. Instead, she said it appears to illustrate long-standing and wide-ranging shortcomings in the criminal legal system’s response to rape accusations.
“To get a felony conviction, unless you have a lot of evidence, it’s just going to be hard,” she said.
At Shannon’s trial, the state’s case centered largely on testimony from his accuser, who said the 23-year-old slipped his hand under her skirt and digitally penetrated her vagina in September while at a crowded bar near the University of Kansas campus. The woman’s friend also took the stand, telling jurors she was at the bar that night but did not see the alleged assault take place.
DNA swabs taken from Shannon and his accuser offered no link between him and his accuser, and revealed no male DNA in the woman’s vagina or genital area.
That lack of DNA evidence was one of several criticisms leveled against police by Shannon’s defense lawyers, who argued during the trial that the investigation had been sloppy in failing to interview possible witnesses and an alternative suspect who was near Shannon the night of the alleged sexual assault and who had been accused of a similar crime, two weeks earlier, in the same spot in the bar where Shannon’s accuser said she was assaulted.
At the end of the four-day trial, it took a Douglas County jury — seven men and five women — about 90 minutes to reach the unanimous verdict of not guilty to one felony count of rape and an alternative count of aggravated sexual battery, also a felony.
But for women like Shannon’s accuser, Belknap said, if a jury or judge decides that there is not enough evidence for a conviction, there is too often the assumption that the allegation must be false.
“This is how it gets twisted,” she said.
Still, she added, “it is really brave for rape survivors to come forward, and a lot of times they realize that it’s going to be hard and they’re going to be blamed. They do it because they do want justice. And they also do it because they want to protect future victims.”
‘It was terrible for those women’
Belknap said there’s been a high-profile rape case involving male student athletes at every campus she’s been on. And in every case, she said, the survivors suffered retaliation that hindered their recovery.
While she was working at the University of Cincinnati in the early ’90s, she said, a former student phoned her one day and eventually told her she’d been raped by a star male athlete at the university.
Two other women eventually joined Belknap’s former student in accusing the athlete of sexual assault. After the allegations became public and the women’s names surfaced, Belknap said, the three were publicly shamed during the trial.
“It was terrible for those women,” she said.
The athlete was eventually found innocent of the charges against him.
“Someone I trusted told me in the dorms that night people were celebrating,” Belknap remembered.
About a decade later, Belknap, having left Cincinnati for the University of Colorado, said she found herself pulled into another sexual assault controversy after two women reported being raped by Colorado football players and recruits while at a party.
In the ensuing scandal, Belknap said she publicly criticized university leaders, the athletic director and then-head football coach, Gary Barnett, who joined the program two years earlier after seven seasons at the helm for Northwestern University.
The fallout from her comments was swift and severe, she said. Threats, some deadly, landed in her inbox and voicemail. Random people hurled insults at her. “I went to the chiropractor’s office,” she remembered, “and this woman went off on me.”
‘Untouchable’
Not long after she arrived at Colorado, Belknap said, a student came by her office and told her she’d been raped by a then-professional basketball player whose team had been in town to play the Denver Nuggets.
Belknap said she told the student about counseling services on campus and offered to escort her to that office. But she included words of caution.
“Typically, the way these unfold, the professional athlete is seen as untouchable and women who report them are viewed as liars and gold diggers,” Belknap said.
There have been times over the years when the public has appeared willing and able to look past sexual assault allegations against their sports heroes (Kobe Bryant, Cristiano Ronaldo, Ben Roethlisberger, for example), even if those allegations result in a conviction (Mike Tyson).
The aforementioned athletes, and others, have seemingly managed to avoid permanent damage to their careers.
In Shannon’s case, the threat of career damage was one of the central themes of the federal lawsuit his attorneys filed against the University of Illinois in a successful bid to overturn his suspension.
“His NBA career will tank,” they said in the filing, “as will his reputation, the ability to support his family, his ability to play collegiate athletics (and perhaps professional sports), and his presumption of innocence.”
Upon his return to the court, the fifth-year guard guided the Illini to a Big Ten Tournament championship — being named Most Outstanding Player in the process — and a trip to the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight.
With his trial date looming, some basketball writers predicted he could be taken as high as no. 13 in this month’s NBA draft; others had him falling out of the first round. A recent scan of NBA mock drafts show some still project him to be a first-round pick.
Shannon’s legal troubles did not appear to deter Klutch Sports Group from adding him to the agency’s roster of clients that includes LeBron James, Lonzo Ball and Zach LaVine. Shannon’s agent was in the Lawrence courtroom for the trial, and James posted a message of support for Shannon the day after the verdict.
Since Shannon’s acquittal, the university named him its male athlete of the year and announced that his jersey will hang from the rafters at the State Farm Center.
“Only for the situation he had to go through that he didn’t get the votes to be the consensus All-American that our policy requires,” Director of Athletics Josh Whitman told WCIA 3 in Champaign. “And so we were excited to grant an exception.”
‘Another rape’
Shannon’s accuser, meanwhile, may have little recourse against those who have publicly shared her name and photograph.
“To me, all this doxxing is another rape,” Belknap said. “It should be illegal that they are giving this woman’s name. I don’t know what you do about this, but it seems so wrong to me.”
Laws against cyberbullying and harassment vary by state. Last year, Illinois became one of the few states to enact specific anti-doxxing legislation that imposes civil penalties on anyone who shares a person’s public information online knowing that person “would be reasonably likely to suffer death, bodily injury, or stalking.”
A similar bill in Kansas stalled in committee this year.
Defining what constitutes doxxing has been a thorny question. Identifying a culprit could prove equally difficult.
One of the most prominent posts on X that named Shannon’s accuser and her best friend — and included screenshots of their social media profiles — has been viewed more than 4.6 million times, according to that site’s views count.
The person who posted it wrote in his profile that he is an “insider” at Deadspin and a “senior journalist” with a television news outlet in Fargo, North Dakota. His profile also reads “as seen” in two Sports Illustrated accounts dedicated to coverage of professional football, the NBA and WNBA.
Since joining in April 2023, he’s amassed 413 followers.
A search of Deadspin and Sports Illustrated sites returned no bylines with his name. Representatives from both companies did not respond to a Tribune email asking about his employment or affiliation with their organizations.
An employee at the Fargo news station said he never heard of the man.
Additionally, the man’s profile picture depicts a professional hockey player of a different name. The hockey player told the Tribune he used to have a Twitter account but deactivated it after he tired of reading comments from angry fans.
He said he was unaware that his picture, which is his 2016 headshot from Northeastern University, is being used for a fake profile.
