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  • Konrad Werner: Crap business plan

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Konrad Werner: Crap business plan

Five percent of women who get raped report it. That's five percent too many for Jörg Kachelmann.

I don’t have much time this week, so I’m going to make this brief. Jörg Kachelmann and his wife Miriam are two writers who this week presented their magnum opus: a wretched book called Recht und Gerechtigkeit (“Law and Justice”), in which they finally dealt with the problem of all those women who report rape. For over a year they toiled away, staying up late, refusing party invitations, neglecting the washing up, because they were so consumed with their passion to deal with the problem of women reporting rape. “It’s dirty job, but someone’s got to do it,” they probably said to each other, exhausted after bashing out another chapter, the takeaway packaging piling up behind the desk.

Kachelmann, you might remember, was a famous weatherman who was charged with rape in 2010. His nine-month trial ended with him being acquitted for lack of evidence last May. But, not content with having been set free, he and his wife have now come up with a “victim industry” theory. It goes like this: people go round accusing people of rape and then making money off it.

Apart from the fact that this is A VERY RUBBISH INDUSTRY (“I’ve got this brilliant business idea – get into a compromising position, NOT get raped. Wait, I’m not finished. Here’s the clincher: PRETEND I did. Whaddaya think? I’m going to need a few hundred grand in advance to cover the legal costs, plus alcohol allowance.” Venture capital manager: “That is A VERY RUBBISH INDUSTRY.”), it’s pretty miserable to hand out a blanket defamation of all rape victims just because you got off.

These are not a few people. A study by the German Family Ministry says that one in seven German women get raped or experience “severe sexual coercion” at least once in their lives, and that only five percent of these report it.