The Lie That Kills

There are lies, there are damn lies, and there are lies that kill. Like the lies the adopted son of a well-known university basketball coach made. He told authorities he had been sexually molested and yesterday admitted to the press that it never really happened. “I don’t know how I could have told such a lie,” the liar told reporters. His truth comes too late. His father’s career has been destroyed, his friends have ostracized him, his family has been torn apart, his reputation massacred. This false allegation will follow his father for the rest of his life. And there are so many other cases of false allegation that have killed everything a person built. For example: In 1992, Dale Duke was recently married, when his step-daughter accused him of sexual assault. Duke pled no contest to the charge in order to receive a deferred adjudication, and was later sentenced to 20 years prison for refusing to admit the sexual assault in a Sex Offender Treatment Program as part of his sentence. About a year after, the step-daughter recanted her testimony, claiming that the sexual assault had never happened, and that she made it up. In 2011, Duke’s attorney discovered that the Prosecutors office had never shared with the defense exculpatory information that the girl’s grandmother had told police that she thought the “victim” was untruthful and that her aunt had actually convinced the girl to fabricate the story. This exoneration comes after Duke has served almost 14 years in prison for this “crime” that never happened. Some liars are murderers. A lie that horrible takes the focus off those that are real victims. Those that might end up dead at the hand of their abusers. That’s a lie that kills in my estimation. I pray for their souls and for those that lost everything they ever were and everything they were ever going to be before the lie.