Wrongly accused

Her account also multiplied with each telling - a touch to the leg became a touch to the leg and the vagina; one injury became three. And one claim collapsed entirely: she told police she'd spotted rope at the scene - implying Alan might have done this before. Police body-worn footage showed otherwise. No rope was ever pointed out; none was ever photographed. It was a fabrication.

Yet he was convicted, and spent the next three years inside, of a 5½ year sentence. There are real questions as to whether his lawyers made the right decisions - they'd assumed there was no need to put Alan on the stand, nor call his witnesses, because the complainant's evidence was so thin. His appeal was unsuccessful. Alan wants the world to know what happened to him - and I am happy to have him on my podcast to try to make that happen.

Then there's Martin, a Sydney man who made the fatal mistake of renting out rooms in his house to two young women who cooked up an extortion plot to get free rent from him by threatening a rape complaint. There are text messages from one of them, let's call her Minx One, coaching the other on how to sell it: "Just act scared," she wrote. "Like you're traumatised."

Minx One had her own reasons to want Martin to suffer. She'd been his lover once, and was furious he wouldn't marry her - furious enough, allegedly, to help engineer the whole complaint. Martin paid for it with 34 days in jail.

And it gets crazier. Another man in the house that same night was separately charged by the same complainant, for conduct allegedly occurring in the same bedroom, an hour or two earlier. He was convicted - but ultimately won his appeal and walked free.

There's more. So much more. The police body-camera footage from the night of the raid? Gone - "inadvertently deleted," the police said. Martin returned from custody to find his pillow with "rapist" scrawled on it, his sheets with "YOU BELONG IN JAIL" and "YOU DISGUST US!"

Eventually it landed in the District Court, where Judge Wass SC found the complainant's credibility "very substantially lacking," and identified "a clear motive to lie to obtain financial compensation." Had the prosecution known then what the evidence later showed, she found, it would never have been reasonable to bring the case at all. "It was not reasonable to commence, much less continue the prosecution," she concluded - and granted Martin one of those rare costs certificates.

So how did the prosecution not know all the relevant facts? That's on the sexual assault squad that investigated it - the same outfit that lost the police videos, deleted the footage, and never once looked hard at the story from the accused's side. This is precisely the type of evidence the Law Reform Commission chose not to go near.

Martin has his costs certificate. He's now planning to run a civil suit against police and the DPP for malicious prosecution.

Now these are exotic cases, each one so unbelievable that they leave us scratching our heads that our feminist-led prosecutors had the audacity to run them in court. But I could have shown you any number of the everyday cases now choking our justice systems - usually featuring young men who annoy their partners by not being interested in a relationship or wanting to break up with them. And the women take vengeance by sending them to jail. Doesn't that leave you reeling?

Listen to Paul. He was a university administrator before finding himself carted off to Long Bay Jail on a rape charge. He was nervous about telling the tough inmates what he was in prison for but when he said he had been accused by his girlfriend, they gave him knowing looks and left him alone. "Oh, the old Saturday night set up," quipped one of the prison lawyers when Paul explained his story.

"I could not believe what had happened to me. When the cops fronted me, I said incredulously, 'You're kidding!?' I was so shocked that she would make up that bullshit to punish me for ending the relationship. She was a young single mother, living with her parents and saw me as the ticket out of what had been a very rough life. It was revenge."

Paul's story contains many lessons for all the men who believe it will never happen to them. I've invited him onto the podcast so he can share vital information about what men need to know: about cops fabricating or ignoring evidence and coaching witnesses to change their statements, about choosing the right lawyers and making sure they do their job. Whether to take the stand. Handling a cross-examination. About how getting early release requires "accepting your guilt" and attending farcical sex offender programs where everyone tells the psychs what they want to hear.

It has been valuable and important for society to hear from genuine rape victims, and to see them get the justice they deserve. We tell ourselves that believing women protects them. It's a good instinct, and mostly, it does. But belief without scrutiny doesn't protect victims - it protects liars, at the cost of the innocent men they've accused. And the men paying that price could be your sons, your brothers, your friends.