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This is the part that's very weird to me, where they seem stuck in some sort of Schrödinger's Rapist situation, where if he did it then it's very bad and they feel for the victims, but if he didn't then they have his back. Any situation is bound to have some uncertainty, but you can't live in both worlds, where you feel bad for the alleged victims, but also want to write your letter for the accused as though he's innocent. They certainly can do what you suggest and simply use "I can't reconcile blahblahblah" or they can say he did it, but that he still has redeeming qualities. But this notion that you feel bad for someone that you don't think was victimized is weird. If my best friend was accused of rape, but told me he didn't do it, and there wasn't any physical evidence, I wouldn't move even the slightest fucking bit off of, "she is a vile liar and I have his back 100%". In a character letter, I would write whatever I think would help him the most, but I would never even have the slightest inclination that I should apologize to the liar for any pain I caused.
I suppose this is just the product of sincerely internalizing "believe victims" while battling with the cognitive dissonance that you're pretty sure this one is actually lying.
Of course you can. One obvious scenario would be if some dirtbag looked kind of like Hyde (it helps that the character kind of looks like a dirtbag), and got close to several women by convincing them he was famous. Then he raped them. This presents us with a situation where Danny Masterson is completely innocent, and yet leave the women with the internal experience of having been raped by Danny Masterson.
I'm not saying the above happened, or that I even believe the above happened. But it's a very easy position to take if you want to defend your friend and you're also a celebrity that needs to be careful not to get torn apart by the me too crowd. You just start the letter like: "I feel for these women, and I believe their trauma is real, but this has to be a case of mistaken identity because {insert character witness and trauma memory formation points here}"
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I don't think it's the product of anything sincere. It's the product of fear and cowardice, of wanting to mouth the socially appropriate lies when it isn't your ox being gored. I'd even posit a third darker view: they think/know he did in fact do the things he was accused of (Masterson was, after all, a man who DJed under the alias DJ Donkey Punch and was disciplined for on set behavior in the past) but don't think it was a "real" crime. That brandishing a gun at a woman after sex is normal behavior or that the Church was justified to poison the accuser's dogs because Scientologists gotta stick together.
I think this is another needle you can thread rhetorically and philosophically quite deftly. It's perfectly possible for the sex to have been bad, even traumatizingly bad, for her without him committing any crimes. I can feel bad for her that she thinks she experienced something unfortunate, even though she wasn't the victim of a crime.
But this isn't what the Kutchers did. They flailed about aimlessly managing to look both guilty and wrong at the same time. Just goes to show in any controversy DADD: Don't Apologize Double Down.
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