There’s a line between taking the version of the accused and the version of the accuser. In any crime situation. Many factors, including evidence, determine where this line lies.

In sex crimes where the victims are women, current mores bias it toward “believing the victims”. Whether this is not appropriate is a digression I don’t want to entertain here. Everywhere there are baseline scenarios and sex crimes with female victims have that element. For the effects of this discussion I’m willing to take that as a given.

That said, there are other variables at play. Parent comment was questioning the legitimacy of the entire process, including the reopening by top-down orders of a case that had been already dismissed.

We’re either willing or unwilling to lend credence to the narrative that something about this whole situation is manipulated toward getting Assange, a notorious fly in the soup of major powers with the capacity to pull a bogus extradition off. Skepticism of this narrative is not unwarranted; it has certain elements typical of conspiracy theories.

But: if we do co-sign this narrative, then as of this very moment Assange is about to face unjust trial in the US. In the face of that, we have to consider the character judgments his accusers will be able to sell to the courts.

OTOH the “random girls” have much less to lose in this whole situation if we bias our understanding of the original sex accusations in favor of Assange, considering that the case had already been dismissed and they’ve been kept anonymous enough that they’re unlikely to experience any ongoing life disruption.

The whole matter is made of uncertainties. To bias one’s subjective assessment in one direction is not to believe it wholesale. But overall the shades of gray matter dramatically.