Even after the alleged rape victim Gina-Lisa Lohfink was exposed as a liar, the reporting remained strangely ambivalent.
Just as if one could not know exactly what had really happened between two men and a woman in a Berlin apartment.
It was a cell phone video from that June night in 2012 that provided the evidence to the court: it showed Ms. Lohfink having sex, smiling and waving at the camera.
The judge on the appeal later ruled that Lohfink had done all real rape victims a disservice by her behavior.
The judge allowed himself a sharp dig at the then Federal Minister of Justice Heiko Maas, who had made Lohfink the figurehead of sexual criminal law reform before the case was clarified.
In the case of the singer Gil Ofarim, who last October made serious anti-Semitism allegations against a Leipzig hotel employee, Maas, now Foreign Minister, reacted promptly: Leipzig is not an isolated case.
More action against Jew hatred is necessary.
In the latter, we absolutely agree with him, but according to the latest findings, the rapid ministerial partisanship has proven to be premature.
The public was rightly dismayed by Ofarim's allegations, which on October 4, 2021 made public via mobile phone video that he had been approached in an anti-Semitic manner by a hotel employee and asked him to "pack" his necklace with the Star of David in order to be allowed to check in.
"Shame on you, Westin Leipzig" tweeted many at the time.
The thought that the allegations were something other than allegations of fact was out of the question at the time, doubts about the truthfulness of the allegations should have been rejected as monstrous.
And yet, after several months of examination, the public prosecutor's office has come to exactly this conclusion: the proceedings against the hotel employee were discontinued, instead charges were brought against Ofarim: for defamation and false suspicion, also on the basis of video material.
That only leaves losers behind.
Nobody could have imagined such an outcome in October.
But now that the deception is looming, silence is cowardly.
So far, no statement has been made by Heiko Maas, who is now a member of the Bundestag.
Gil Ofarim has done all real victims of anti-Semitism a disservice.