A Tenuous Relationship with Truth

Back in early June, Simcha Fisher posted an appeal on Facebook asking for donations to help pay for Donna Provencher’s lawyer, so she could fight her defamation case.

In the course of this plea, Simcha asserted:

For reference: The guy suing Donna for defamation is the same guy who said Adele Chapline Smith made up her rape to cover up bad grades.

Let’s start by being perfectly clear: Simcha included this detail in order to discredit the plaintiff. Immediately before giving this background (“For reference . . .”) she asserted categorically that “there is no merit to his claim. She [Donna] did not defame him.” And immediately after, she asserted, just as categorically, “The purpose of the lawsuit is to harass and intimidate her, and to discourage further advocacy for rape victims.”

We let it slide at the time. (We have lots of material, and we didn’t want to be the first to publish the plaintiff’s name--but Donna and NCR broke the silence so now we can.)

But this week, Adele Smith (President of Dinah’s Voice) posted the screenshot on her FB wall:




Simcha patently misrepresented what the plaintiff said. He was perfectly explicit, that he was not calling Adele a liar,

that is not to say I don't believe Adele, or think the accused here is innocent, I just want to point out that that isn't slamdunk evidence of lack of consent.

At no point did he say what Simcha clearly and unambiguously asserted that he said, “Adele Chapline Smith made up her rape to cover up bad grades.” In fact he went out of his way to be clear he was not claiming that.

The fact that Simcha said this in order to help raise thousands of dollars for her friend makes it look like, not just further defamation of the plaintiff (as it clearly was, given that Simcha was clearly saying this to discredit him publicly) but fraud. 

Did Simcha Fisher get too close to her source? 

Whether Simcha willfully misreported what the plaintiff said or whether she lost her objectivity and let herself be taken in by someone else’s falsehoods doesn’t matter at the moment. The point is she set out to discredit him publicly based on false information. As a professional journalist, she should have known better, and she should have checked her facts before she set out to discredit him publicly. Whether through outright malice or simple incompetence, the bottom line is that Simcha Fisher can’t be trusted to report basic facts accurately.

But here is the point we really want to make: CASC has the screenshots of what the plaintiff actually said (their president is the one who published it). They knew that he didn’t say what Simcha reported that he said.

CASC’s whole agenda is summed up in the line, “Believe women.” Their whole case amounts to, “trust us, there is a pattern of mishandled rape cases.”

When will they realize that they are destroying their own case not just by having a woman like Donna Provencher as their VP of Communications but by outright defending her inexcusable slander (see also the second part of the story here) or by allying themselves with Simcha Fisher, both of whom have spread demonstrable falsehoods about gravely serious matters, with the express purpose of destroying an innocent man’s reputation?