And then there are the more obscure cases:

  • In Oregon, James Anderson was accused in 1989 of raping a fellow patient at a substance abuse clinic. He subsequently served a prison term. Anderson may or may not have been innocent, as he has consistently claimed; but the case against him was based solely on the woman's testimony, and her serious credibility problems were kept out of the courtroom by the judge's application of the rape shield law.

    • At the trial, the defense attorney questioned the woman about the fact that the morning after the alleged rape, she did not say anything about it to clinic staff members. The woman claimed that she was too embarrassed to talk about it; the prosecutor picked up on this point in his summation, scoffing that the defense expected a rape victim to "just walk up to one of the staff" and discuss "those most intimate details." But there was something the jury didn't know: The day before, she had discussed equally "intimate details" -- an alleged earlier rape and childhood sexual abuse -- with one of the clinic counselors. The jurors never heard the counselor testify about this and never saw his notes, which contained the comment that "client ... has a lot of other issues around incest/rape," because all information about the woman's sexual history had been ruled inadmissible.

  • In 1993, Charles Steadman, an 18-year-old Wisconsin resident, was tried on charges of raping his 22-year-old foster sister. He claimed that the sex was consensual, and there was no evidence of force or struggle. The jury never found out that when the woman filed the complaint against Steadman, she herself was facing charges of sex with minors. (She was eventually convicted and received probation with mandatory psychiatric treatment.) The defense wanted to argue, quite reasonably, that this could have given her a motive to lie -- particularly since she had earlier had a sexual relationship with Steadman when he was a minor. She might have thought that being a victim might improve her legal prospects as a defendant; she might have worried that if her encounter with Steadman became known, it would get her into more trouble with the law and with her family.

    • None of those possible motives could be introduced at Steadman's trial: The alleged victim's legal problems were related to her past sexual activities and hence inadmissible. Steadman was convicted and given an eight-year prison sentence.

    Like many such cases, the Kobe Bryant case is primarily a "he said, she said" matter, with ambiguous corroborating evidence that county judge Frederick Gannett characterized as weak even as he sent the case to trial. The woman's sexual activities prior to the alleged rape may well be relevant to the physical evidence; if, as the defense has hinted, she engaged in consensual sex shortly after her encounter with Bryant, it may well be relevant to the question of whether she was raped; if she is mentally unstable, it may well be relevant to her credibility.

    These are wrenching questions. Obviously, a woman with a history of mental illness or substance abuse could still be a rape victim. Obviously, the prospect of having embarrassing personal details exposed in court (let alone paraded in the media) may discourage victims from coming forward. Just as obviously, suppressing relevant evidence may result in sending an innocent person to jail. And if it's frightening to put oneself in the place of a sexual assault victim who finds herself on trial in the courtroom, it is no less terrifying to imagine that you -- or your husband or brother or son -- could be accused of rape and denied access to evidence that could exonerate him.

    For some feminists, the dogma that "women never lie" means that there is, for all intents and purposes, no presumption of innocence for the defendant. After the 1997 trial of sportscaster Marv Albert, defending the judge's decision to admit compromising information about Albert's sexual past but not about his accuser's, attorney Gloria Allred decried "the notion that there's some sort of moral equivalency between the defendant and the victim" -- forgetting that as long as the defendant hasn't been convicted, he and his accuser are indeed moral equals in the eyes of the law. Wendy Murphy has blasted Kobe Bryant's attorneys for feeding uncorroborated rumors about the alleged victim to the media maw. Yet, appearing on Fox News, she made the claim, highly prejudicial to Bryant and so far untested in a court of law, that the woman "suffered pretty terrible injuries" the likes of which she had not seen despite having prosecuted "hundreds of sex crimes cases."

    In a law review article published in 1977, when rape shield laws were being adopted across the country, Columbia University law professor Vivian Berger, generally a supporter of feminist law reforms, cautioned against "sacrificing legitimate rights of the accused person on the altar of Women's Liberation." Twenty-seven years later, we are still grappling with this issue, and Berger's warning remains as timely as ever.

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