Hello, it’s me, Hagatha. Yes, Hagatha the Witch. It seems that a lot of people have been calling rape accusations across social media a “witch hunt,” and while I’m not usually one get involved in other people’s business, this one in particular has really given me pause.
Would you like to know what an actual witch hunt looks like? Cut me down from this burning stake and I’ll tell you. Seriously, pull me down, I am about to burn.
You might be wondering why I’m almost afire in the first place. Well, I was accused of a crime. And what was I accused of? Floating in a lake. If you were wondering what an actual bullshit accusation looks like, please come and pull me out of this burning pyre and I’ll tell you that it’s “floating in a lake.” You’d have to ask me in person, though, ‘cause I don’t do Twitter.
If someone is being accused of being a rapist by multiple people who the accused had sex with, that is not a witch hunt. That’s just called “the most likely explanation of what happened.” Maybe some people wake up one morning and say, “I want to become a witch,” but I promise you that nobody ever wakes up and says, “Today seems like a good day to make a false rape accusation.”
If more than one person accuses you of raping them and people call you a rapist before going to trial, first of all: You should be lucky you’re even getting a trial. All they found on me were some ointments and boom, I’m labeled a witch just like that.
And I’m not saying modern witch hunts can’t exist. I’ll call it a witch hunt as soon as the accused is currently on fire, just for wearing weird clothing and being single at 35.
In my time, witch hunts were conducted to weed out women who were “immoral” and “improper” by the standards of Puritan society. Weirdly enough, witch hunts were not conducted to weed out rapists, which actually may have been a better use of everyone’s time. Maybe I should tell somebody? Too bad nobody will listen because I’m just a 17th-century witch currently burning on a pyre.
Some of you might be saying, “Why bypass the legal system?” and I just want to remind you that the legal system isn’t perfect, either. For example, someone made a cake out of my urine, fed it to a dog, and watched to see if I would wince. And I did!
In conclusion, I can only hope that in the future people listen to women more than they listen to witches, ‘cause here in 17th-century New England, the state of witches is NOT GOOD. Especially for me, because I’m literally burning to death.
