What We Can Learn From the False Rape Accusation Against Alex Pereira

The Messages Our Society Gives to Young Women

Alex Pereira is an extraordinarily talented UFC fighter from Brazil. Despite the fact he speaks very little English, he’s quite popular:

Apparently, he hooked up with a woman who has a trashy, semi-popular TikTok channel:

The two of them ended up having sex, followed by the woman, Meredith Brown, accusing him of rape in some videos she posted to TikTok.

This was intriguing enough to write about for a couple of reasons.

The first is that if you do nothing but listen to her account of the “rape,” you’ll find it was nothing of the sort. It was an awkward situation that led to awkward sex that she later, quite understandably, felt awkward about. That turned into a false rape accusation that, along the way, spotlighted a number of things wrong with the messages we give to young women in 2024.

So, let’s dig into this accusation a bit. It’s really something.

We’ll start out by describing what she says happened in her first 10-minute-long video:

Apparently, a friend of Meredith Brown is seriously into martial arts and started following Alex Pereria’s translator. The translator reached out to her friend and invited her to meet him after a UFC event. He also asked if she had a friend for Alex Pereira.

Meredith Brown claimed she really didn’t even know who Alex Pereira was at the time.  So, the two women meet the men in New Jersey, and they got invited to the gym where Alex Pereira was training. Her friend even got to train with Pereira a little bit.

They all met up afterward and she noted that Pereira came on to her right out of the blocks. She said he even made comments about her butt. He also tried to kiss her, but she said she pushed him away. She also noted that Pereira didn’t seem to speak English and all communications between them had to be done by his translator.

The guys invited the two of them to hang out at what sounded like an autograph signing and when the ladies declined because it was hot, the guys suggested dinner. The women were taken to the hotel where Alex Pereira was staying and they had an awkward moment because he apparently meant for them to be taken to another hotel, across the street. She suggested that was because he may not have wanted to hook up with them in the same hotel he was staying at for his UFC fight, but it seems just as likely that he had to prep for a fight that night and couldn’t spend his whole night entertaining some girl he’s hoping to hook up with before a big fight.

In any case, both guys went across the street, bought the girls some pizza and wine, and continued talking with them. She noted Alex Pereira was handsy and was “coming on to (her) the whole night,” which she said she didn’t like. She claimed Pereira asked her to “go to the bathroom” with him multiple times, presumably to have sex. She said she consistently told him “No,” and was very nervous, adding that she asked her friend not to leave her alone with Alex because she was uncomfortable.

Apparently, that was necessary because the translator was hitting on her friend, which seemed to surprise her for some reason, and she may have been afraid her friend would take off with the translator. She also noted that she told the translator to tell Alex that she didn’t put out on the first date and that he had to, “work for it.”

Alex’s response to that was that he really liked them and wanted to take the two of them on a trip to the Dominican Republic. Interestingly, she responded that she wanted to know when that would be so she could pack and get ready for it. In any case, everyone had to split up at this point because Alex had to go fight and the women went to watch the fight. They were supposed to get back together after the fight to go out to some strip clubs.

That’s a summary of the first video. So, what do we have here?

Essentially, we have two women who decided to go on a double date with two guys they barely knew. Pretty much consistently, from beginning to end, Meredith Brown noted that Alex Pereira was openly, unambiguously trying to get in her pants. She claimed this made her uncomfortable, which would actually be quite understandable, but she was STILL willing to go to strip clubs and/or the Dominican Republic with him.

Now, let’s summarize the 2nd and 3rd video:

After the fight, Alex’s translator met with the girls at the hotel, but it took Alex quite a while to get back because he apparently had press obligations after the fight. She even said that they discussed going back to a hotel the two girls had gotten beforehand because it was taking so long.

Still, Pereira eventually gets there, she says, at about 2 or 3 AM. At this point, Alex says he doesn’t want to go out. He gets into bed, orders food, and persistently asks her to get into bed with him. She then says she chose to get into bed with him because, and I quote, “I was naïve, I guess, I didn’t think anything was going to happen,” although she also noted she intended to “cuddle” with him.

According to her, even while her friend and the translator were in the room, Pereira kept trying to paw her vagina and she kept moving his hand back to her waist. Eventually, Meredith Brown and her friend told the guys they were tired and wanted to go to sleep, so her friend got into another queen size bed in the same room with the translator and the lights went out as Alex Pereira CONTINUED to try to paw her and she continued to move his hand away.

This goes on and on and eventually, he got frustrated. Pereira got out of bed, yelled something she couldn’t understand, and started putting his clothes on. She said he told his translator that he wanted him and the other girl to go to another room. Before they leave, Meredith Brown asked the translator to tell Alex Pereira that she was nervous, she freezes up during sex and she doesn’t have sex the first time she meets someone.

The translator does that, but then both he and her friend leave, which leaves Meredith Brown alone with Alex Pereira. He then got back into bed and started trying to take her clothes off. She tried to talk to him, but she said he didn’t understand what she was telling him. At that point, she referenced some other sexual encounter she had (presumably, she was raped) and said she decided to stop resisting his advances and put on a sexual performance for him to make it end.

Then she got into the more graphic details of the sex. I’ll spare you most of it, but she did say the only time he spoke English was to ask her to “help him put in” and she did try to do that. It didn’t work, but he did manage to do it himself – anally. After they finished sex, he took a shower. She still claims she was scared of him, but when he finished the shower, he came back to bed, kissed her on the forehead, and spooned her to sleep. The next morning, her friend and the translator came back (presumably after spending the night together) and they left.

Now, before we get into some of the bigger issues, let’s sum this encounter up.

This woman and her friend went on a double date with Alex Pereira and his translator. Pereira was putting his hands all over her and making it clear he wanted to have sex from the first moment they met. There was nothing subtle about it. Pereira never forced or threatened her and although he was extremely pushy, she spent the entire night successfully fending off his sexual advances and they only went forward sexually after she chose to get into bed with him, declined to leave when her friend did, and stopped resisting his advances.

Let’s just call it like it is… this is not rape. Not even close. On the contrary, it sounds like she had uncomfortable, awkward sex, felt bad about it, and decided it was rape based on that feeling as opposed to what Alex Pereira actually did.

Furthermore, we do need to again note we haven’t heard Alex Pereria’s side of this. We can also say that morally, neither of them should probably be hooking up with people they just met. Furthermore, yes, this may be just a PR grab by Meredith Brown or revenge because she never got that trip to the Dominican Republic (as far as we know), but we don’t have enough information at this point to know those kinds of things.

That being said, there are some repeating themes we keep seeing in the messages our society sends to young women that show up in this story.

First off, it was absolutely a good thing when people challenged the attitude that women were “responsible” for their own rapes because they wore a sexy outfit or flirted with a guy. Let me repeat that: It was absolutely a good thing when people challenged the attitude that women were “responsible” for their own rapes because they wore a sexy outfit or flirted with a guy.

That being said, we’re increasingly taking this whole concept so far in the opposite direction that many people treat women like they’re helpless bystanders when it comes to whether they have sex or not. This woman, by her own admission, willingly got into bed with Alex Pereira and chose to stay there with him alone despite the fact that he didn’t speak English and had spent the last 30 minutes trying to put his hands in her panties. If Alex Pereira had actually raped her, it’s absolutely true none of that would excuse it, but it’s also far, far past the point where any reasonable person should be asking, “If you didn’t want to have sex with him, what were you doing there at that point?” Rape is never excused or okay, but our society should also be willing to tell women that they need to take the most basic precautions about putting themselves in sexual situations.

Second, I get the attraction a woman would have to a rich, famous, good-looking guy. However, as she tells it, there’s absolutely nothing else in this story that was appealing about Alex Pereira. They DIDN’T EVEN SPEAK THE SAME LANGUAGE. Yet, you get the impression if he had moved a little slower and been willing to take her on a few trips, she’d probably have been thrilled to date him. At some point, we have to ask what messages young women are getting about what they should value in a man. Is it to look for a good guy? Someone who cares about them as a person? A man willing to spend a lifetime taking care of them and their children or is it just, “As long as he’s really good-looking or has a lot of status and money, nothing else matters.” If it’s the latter, there are going to be a few happy guys racking up incredible body counts and enormous numbers of women wondering why they spent their twenties being used for sex without ever finding a guy that really liked them.

Last, but not least, can “women do anything a man can do” or are they “fragile flowers” that need more protections than men at all times to survive?” Because all too often, it feels like our society encourages women to play whichever role benefits them the most at any particular time. Women aren’t just as good as a man in the office, they’re BETTER, but if someone puts up a swimsuit calendar or tells an off-color joke no man would bat an eye at, they’re suddenly delicate little flowers that are going to sue for sexual harassment. If a woman and a man both get drunk and the two of them end up mutually having sex, was the woman “raped” because she can’t be expected to be responsible for her actions when she drinks, but he can? Are women sexually liberated adults who can make their own choices or if two adults have sex and the encounter doesn’t go well, does it become “rape” just because the woman regrets it? Do we actually need long lists of things for couples to specifically consent to because women aren’t capable of saying “no” or leaving if they don’t want to have sex? How do we nod along when women say they’re “girl bosses” in one situation and then accept it when they want to be treated like children who can’t possibly be expected to handle the same level of responsibility as a man when it’s convenient for them? Pick a lane.

Put another way, on the one hand, what you’ve just read about is one person’s version of an encounter between a woman and a man. On the other hand, this story is also the fruition of a lot of toxic ideas we’ve been feeding to young women for a long time that aren’t healthy for them, for men, or for society as a whole.

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