> This isn’t usually true. The burden of proof is really high in a criminal case, so you can fail to get a conviction even when there is fairly good evidence of guilt.
Using just the example of rape, there is rarely "fairly good evidence" because it's an event that typically happens in private. If the victim is unwilling or afraid to immediately be examined by (potentially abusive) police, then there is no contemporaneous evidence of the event. It becomes "he-said, she-said" right away.
Other types of assault may happen with eye witnesses, but even then, if your eye witnesses can't get you convicted of a crime, then they're probably not going to help much in a civil suit.
> the person claiming defamation would have to prove the person was lying
This is true in the US and most countries, but the problem is that the suit itself can be expensive and painful enough that the victim just deletes the blog post (or disavows it) to make it the suit go away. They may do this even though they'd likely win the case eventually.
> but if I write up a blog post about my experience being assaulted, does that mean I can’t have my blog indexed by Google? I don’t have the right to promote my story and get as many people to read it as possible?
No, no one has "the right" to have their website indexed by Google. Google is a private, for-profit business, not a public utility. People should have the right to speak (and in the US they do), but they don't/shouldn't have the right to be published and promoted by private companies.
Taken to its logical extreme, if Google were allowed or forced to index everything on the web, they would also have to include (and promote) sites that they may find morally repugnant, which is a violation of their First Amendment rights.
Using just the example of rape, there is rarely "fairly good evidence" because it's an event that typically happens in private. If the victim is unwilling or afraid to immediately be examined by (potentially abusive) police, then there is no contemporaneous evidence of the event. It becomes "he-said, she-said" right away.
Other types of assault may happen with eye witnesses, but even then, if your eye witnesses can't get you convicted of a crime, then they're probably not going to help much in a civil suit.
> the person claiming defamation would have to prove the person was lying
This is true in the US and most countries, but the problem is that the suit itself can be expensive and painful enough that the victim just deletes the blog post (or disavows it) to make it the suit go away. They may do this even though they'd likely win the case eventually.
> but if I write up a blog post about my experience being assaulted, does that mean I can’t have my blog indexed by Google? I don’t have the right to promote my story and get as many people to read it as possible?
No, no one has "the right" to have their website indexed by Google. Google is a private, for-profit business, not a public utility. People should have the right to speak (and in the US they do), but they don't/shouldn't have the right to be published and promoted by private companies.
Taken to its logical extreme, if Google were allowed or forced to index everything on the web, they would also have to include (and promote) sites that they may find morally repugnant, which is a violation of their First Amendment rights.