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That reminds me of something I was reading last week. There was a student athlete at Stanford who committed suicide, which is sad and terrible. The reason? She was due for a disciplinary hearing: bad Stanford, I guess. News articles then went into what happened, and they usually framed it as she was facing the hearing because she spilled a cup of coffee on someone.
Hmm. Digging deeper, she had thrown a hot cup of coffee onto another student's face. Okay, this is getting juicy. Maybe he deserved it? What did he do? Well, the news articles breathlessly reported he had been accused of sexually assaulting someone.
Finally, I find out the root cause: he had kissed one of her team members without consent.
These are all obvious questions to ask, and the actual story is pretty straightforward, a series of banal student hijinks that ended in tragedy. But the sheer unwillingness for any news articles to simply tell the story is a result of the dynamics you mention. No one wants to be the bad guy and say "well actually, Stanford didn't brutally murder an innocent girl to help cover up a rapist's crimes," because if you do, you're all of a sudden part of the rape cult, opening you to attack and hurting your career advancement.
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