First there was the outrage.

The story Dixon-Cole spun afterward was alarming: She claimed the trooper repeatedly told her he would let her go in exchange for sexual favors. When she said no, she claimed the trooper sexually assaulted her, according to a statement Monday from her attorney.

The 37-year-old North Texas woman’s story was widely shared on social media, aided and amplified by social activist Shaun King, who recently brought attention to the New York lawyer who made xenophobic comments about Spanish-speaking employees at a New York deli.

“This system was not designed to protect us — it was designed to punish us,” King wrote in a blog post, “and for it to do anything other than that — we must force it work on our behalf.”

Here’s the defense strategy. Find someone with a big enough megaphone who’s stupid enough, and wants so desperately, to believe a story of police abuse that he will buy anything, absolutely anything, and start screaming wildly about it. Insert a bunch of emotional adjectives, tears flow, what are the cops gonna do about it?

Well, they can show the body cam video which conclusively proves it was all a big ol’ lie, and the useful idiot bought it, hook, line and sinker.

But the thing about useful idiots is that even when confronted with the fact that they were played for a fool, they can’t manage to wrap their heads around what happened.

On this past Sunday evening, after being contacted by family, friends, and attorneys for a Texas woman named Sherita Dixon-Cole, I was told that she had been sexually assaulted and violently threatened by a police officer while in custody. I was horrified. Sadly, these things happen way too often in our country. I’ve walked victims through this before — many fighting for years on end to prove the truth behind their victimization. Sherita Dixon-Cole’s allegations were genuinely awful. They were also forcefully supported by her fiancé — who was present for some of the encounter they described. Her character and integrity were defended to me by those who knew her well. I probed.

Human beings and the decisions they sometimes make are a mystery though.

Yeah, you probed.

What’s just so baffling is that Sherita was calm and respectful the entire time. Her fiancé was calm and respectful. The officer was calm and respectful. From start to finish Sherita Dixon-Cole was in the custody of the officer for about an hour. It was normal and without incident. Nobody even raised their voices. . . It is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever heard of.

It’s “bizarre” that an encounter happened and it wasn’t horrifying and exhausting? It was “normal.” Thousands of such encounters happen daily that are completely “normal.” Cops are normally calm and respectful. The only thing bizarre is that to the twisted mind, this is bizarre.

I can’t even begin to make sense of why someone would concoct such an awful story — particularly in light of the reality that both police brutality and sexual assaults are a very real crisis in this nation. It does a tremendous disservice to actual victims when something horrible like this is fabricated.

Sit down, Shaun. I have something to tell you and it’s going to make you sad. People lie. They lie all the time. They lie when it’s in their interest to lie. They lie because the truth doesn’t serve them well, doesn’t make them look good, isn’t going to save them. And sometimes they just lie.

But it wasn’t Sherita Dixon-Cole’s lie that “does a tremendous disservice to actual victims,” but the useful idiot who got played, who went onto social media to scream at the mob about this outrage without having the knowledge or capacity to “probe” in any serious sense. But you’re not a serious guy, Shaun. That’s part of your popularity, that you’re just as dumb and simple-minded as those who read you and can’t discern the facts from your nonsensical indulgences.

You got burned by Sherita Dixon-Cole because you want so desperately to be the voice of outrage, to be the guy who screams first about the latest horrible thing. You want to rally the mob and can’t do it without an outrageous story of horrifying abuse, which makes you the perfect mark for the con.

Your apology for passing along a lie, although it’s not really your fault because it could happen and you probed, is better than nothing. But you learned nothing from this experience. You remain a useful idiot who can’t figure out the mystery of how you got played for a fool.