> Why is it so hard to believe them?

Because age is the one feature you can still be discriminatory about and nobody will give a fuck.

> Over the past several years, age-gap relationships have been obsessively scrutinized on Reddit, TikTok, Tumblr, and X. No attempt to trace the history of the trend would be complete without a discussion of a viral 2019 post about Leonardo DiCaprio. That year, a redditor made a graph tracking DiCaprio’s age alongside the ages of his successive girlfriends; as DiCaprio moved through his 30s into middle age, the age range of his girlfriends never topped 25. The phenomenon was given a name (“Leo’s Law”) and generated a great deal of ribbing along with many think pieces attributing DiCaprio’s dating record, variously, to the devaluation of aging women or Hollywood’s sexism problem or basic evolutionary psychology. One take that would set the tone for much of the age-gap discourse, if you will, was that DiCaprio wasn’t attracted to these women just because they were hot but because, though they were old enough to vote, their youth meant he could easily manipulate them. As the love-and-relationship website YourTango laid it out, “Given that DiCaprio’s cut-off point is exactly around the time that neuroscientists say our brains are finished developing, there is certainly a case to be made that a desire to date younger partners comes from a desire to have control.” Some tweets took it further; as one contended, “Leonardo DiCaprio is a nearly 50yo predator.”

Bullshit logic. If 25 is the age "exactly around the time that neuroscientists say our brains are finished developing," DiCaprio is the opposite of a predator-- he's consistently waiting for maturity to set in. The social media smear campaign is applying the Kuleshov effect to reframe what appears to be a very transparent, above-board situation into one with an undertone of malevolence.

> In posts like these, the author will often reveal that she herself was a victim of abuse at the hands of an older man. When Alice was 14 and a junior-high-school student in Calgary, a teacher molested her. As reported in an investigative story last year, the detective looking into the teacher’s alleged crimes estimated that he had sexually, emotionally, or physically abused as many as 200 students. After months of grooming her, Alice said, the teacher invited her on an unofficial school camping trip where he forcibly removed her top and exposed her breasts in front of several other students. Nothing else happened between them, but she remained close to the teacher for years and continued to visit his classroom after she’d graduated. Years later, in the midst of the Me Too movement, she and another of the teacher’s victims went to the police. In February 2021, he was arrested, but a few days later he committed suicide. Some victims were relieved they’d never have to face their abuser in court, but Alice was devastated. “I was very much looking forward to looking him in the eye as an adult woman,” she said. She began making the TikTok videos six months later. “If I can’t call out the man that directly abused me, I’m going to call out other ones,” she told me.

"Some victims were relieved they'd never have to face their abuser in court" is a huge red flag of people either testifying against fucking El Chapo or making shit up. Facing your abuser is what separates the judicial system from the Milgram experience.

I believe Alice's story, and there's a case to be made for statutory rape (hence the suicide), but the rest of it is bullshit. This only became "abuse" once her own efforts to groom him into exclusivity failed, hence her repeat visits for years after the fact. The last line is hilarious-- “If I can’t call out the man that directly abused me, I’m going to call out other ones.”

She's transferring her anger from a target beyond her grasp (dead men don't file defamation claims) to literally anybody else. She's not a private investigator, nor even a vigilante. This is school shooter logic.