In the Apple TV series ‘Your Friends and Neighbors,’ the protaginist, Coop, played by Jon Hamm is falsely accused of sexual misconduct, he’s fired from his job, chaos ensues.

Here on Reel Girl, we’ve been tracking movies, series, and books where sympathetic male protagonists are falsely accused of sexual misconduct. Here are the series I’ve watched in THE LAST MONTH that depict charges of rape, sexual assault, violence against women, and sexual misconduct manipulated, fabricated, simply made up to manipulate victims. That’s right, the sympathy is with the victims of manipulation. Poor Coop did nothing wrong. He’s a good guy. And as a viewer, our empathy, once again, is directed to the promising man.

When we as a audience, as the public, watch this story of victimhood on repeat, we get trained in real life to look for motives, to distrust stories of sexual misconduct, violence against women, sexual assault, and rape. These stories influence our ability and capacity to believe women, and when we hear stories like Jane Doe saying she was raped by 7 men at Cornell, we have a biased filter that has created our cultural mythology, from the Bible to Greek Mythology to HBO to not believe women.

‘Your Friend and Neighbors’ makes a mockery of all the work women have done for equal rights and protection in the work force. Even the woman who Coop had sex with isn’t the villain in this story, their mutual boss wanted to fire Coop and manipulated the relationship for that end. See how vulnerable women’s rights make us all?