With women empowered to reveal those matters from their past by the many who have dredged up the offenses, large and small, real, perceived or imagined, provable or not, names are being dragged through the mud without opportunity to challenge. And condemnation flows regardless of proof.

In a weird way, the fact that these accusations aren’t made through official channels, which would be a good thing, serves as a detriment. There’s no way to oppose or challenge the accusations. The ruin of reputation is swift and merciless. There is no forum to vindicate one’s conduct. There is no place to prove one’s innocence. Or is there?

Victims of sexual harassment and assault are saying “Me Too” as the country goes through a culture shift following revelations about Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and other major celebrities accused of everything from crude comments to rape. On college campuses, that shift has been playing out for years, due in part to student activism and to increased attention to campus sexual violence from the Obama administration.

But defamation lawsuits like the one Jane faces are a new tool in the battle over Title IX enforcement and are proving to be serious obstacles to students filing sexual misconduct complaints. Activists, college administrators, and lawyers say they’ve seen a spike in defamation lawsuits over the past couple of years as defenders of accused students say they’re too often victims of overzealous school disciplinary panels — a view echoed by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

This, by dedicated ally to the cause, Tyler Kingkade, reflects the backlash to false accusations, that those accused are responding by suing their accusers for defamation. His post presents the use of defamation suits as a weapon to silence the accuser, which, of course, it is. What Kingkade ignores, of course, is that it should be.

It’s difficult to track how many defamation lawsuits arising from campus sexual assault cases are filed nationwide, but lawyers and victim advocates provided numbers that point to a clear uptick. Colby Bruno, a lawyer at the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston, said that a few years ago, about 5% of her cases arising from alleged campus sexual assaults involved an accuser facing a defamation suit; now a little more than half do.

Defamation is the legal mechanism to constrain false accusations, which is a terrible thing to advocates who believe that accusers are entitled to be believed without regard to the accuracy of their claims or facing any consequences for lying. The problem is that the fear of a defamation action will be sufficient to push an accuser over the edge of remaining silent.

Sometimes the mere threat of a defamation suit is enough to deter a student from going ahead with a sexual assault claim.

“I’m hearing lawyers talk more about it as a strategy, even if they don’t use it,” said Brett Sokolow, a lawyer who runs the Association of Title IX Administrators.

While Sokolow falls shy of a credible source, having no close and personal relationship with truth, he may well be right here. If an attorney defending an accused who denies that an offense happened has a tactic available, he would be remiss not to use it.

Does this make the threat of, or initiation of, a defamation suit improper? Hardly. This is the means by which the legal system provides an opportunity to a person who has been falsely accused, defamed, to address the wrong. Shockingly, not just the accusers get access to a legal remedy, but the falsely accused as well.

While there is certainly a deterrence aspect to making a valid accusation, on top of the litany of excuses commonly proferred for purported victims who fail to take action, is this reason to denigrate the availability of defamation as a means of recourse? Hardly. Defamation is one of the many causes of action that provide a historic check on the many wrongs people do to each other.

On the other hand, it’s not without its own check. Many states have anti-SLAPP* laws for the purpose of making a defamation action a risk in itself if it’s false, which would provide a swift and severe mechanism to prevent the improper use of defamation actions to silence accusers. Unfortunately, some states, and most importantly, the federal government, have no anti-SLAPP legislation.

The problem here, Kingkade’s breathlessly one-sided post notwithstanding, isn’t that there is a remedy available to the falsely accused that might chill valid accusations, but that there isn’t a remedy readily available for false defamation actions used as a tactical weapon. There will still be some accusers who are deterred by the idea of being sued, being tested, but that’s the nature of our legal system. Nobody gets a free ride. Not even when there’s a hashtag.

The common thread throughout this problem is that the truthfulness of accusations, whether of sexual misconduct or defamation, should be subject to scrutiny, and a viable means available to address lies and bad faith.

*SLAPP stands for “strategic lawsuit against public participation.”