There is no question that something happened to Dworkin last year, something that has devastated her psychologically, and it seems that the disbelief of even her closest associates has been a significant part of her distress. In her essay, Dworkin writes that she called her feminist gynecologist in New York a few days after the incident. She says the doctor told her that a gynecological exam would prove nothing one way or the other and that being called on a Sunday had made her decide to get an unlisted number. The doctor's coldheartedness toward a patient she had treated for 10 years is not explained further. Even Dworkin's "mate," gay feminist John Stoltenberg, who has made a home with Dworkin for 25 years, did not really believe her. "John looked for any other explanation than rape," Dworkin writes. "He abandoned me emotionally. Now a year has passed and sometimes he's with me in his heart and sometimes not."

To compound her misery -- whatever its source -- Dworkin writes that she lost her beloved father in December and was herself hospitalized a few weeks later, after she was found wandering and delirious with fever on a New York street, suffering from pneumonia, cellulitis (an infection of the soft tissue of the legs) and blood clots. Immobilized in the hospital for a month, her muscles atrophied and she couldn't walk. It would take a heart of diamond-bright stone to remain unmoved by her plight.

"I used to worry about taking a Valium or two to fall asleep in strange hotels," she writes. "Now I take on average 12 pills to sleep and they only work sometimes. How can I close my eyes and voluntarily become unconscious? For the first time in my life I go to shrinks, a lucid one who prescribes drugs and an empathetic one whose specialty is in dealing with people who have been tortured. I have been tortured and this drug-rape runs through it, a river of horror. I'm feeling perpetual terror, they both tell me. I stare blankly or I say some words. I'm ready to die." All of Dworkin's symptoms, the depression, the self-doubt, the free-floating anxiety, are classic reactions to major trauma.

"As I read Andrea's confession, tears came to my eyes," Bright writes. Her comments on the question of the truth of Dworkin's accusations are typical of those of more sympathetic observers: "Let's put the rape story aside -- I don't have to ascertain whether Dworkin has been assaulted on this occasion or not. She is hurting, and something is wrong." That is one truth in this situation, at least. Pain is pain. Even when it is "deserved" or "self-inflicted" (and we never hesitate to judge about that, even in the absence of definitive evidence), it is still pain.

The real bottom line, though, is that Andrea Dworkin -- that ugly, lunatic, "man-hating" feminist -- has publicly cried rape without offering sufficient evidence. In the current political climate of this brave new millennium, women have been forced to concede -- on perfectly logical grounds, of course -- that women do not always tell the truth about rape. So over time the default response to the charge has changed. Now, instead of a tendency toward belief and sympathy when a woman claims she has been raped, there is considerably more caution and doubt.

This may be only right, but there is an ugly lesson in Dworkin's story that all women should heed. It says that if you aren't considered a reliable witness to begin with, or if you are already considered a social outrage, the proof that you offer to overcome that tendency toward doubt had better be utterly unassailable in every respect, or the real gangbanging will begin.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"