- Joined
- Nov 12, 2015
Captain Kirk never said, "Beam me up, Scotty!" Human memory is kind of trash.
He did say several close variants, which all run together, likely because putting the "Beam me up" part first lets you know that a Star Trek reference is coming from the outset, whereas starting it with "Scotty" (since he did at least once say 'Scotty, beam me up') is very mildly more ambiguous.
The difference between "Beam me up, Scotty" and these rape allegations is that one is an example of human memory tweaking existing events, and the other bears all the hallmarks of inventing something in your mind nearly wholesale and then obsessing on it. The specific phrase 'Beam me up, Scotty' may never have been spoken, but there are enough variants of something close, and enough fairly dead-on parodies where Kirk does say specifically that, that it's understandable that people misremember it. It's sort of the difference between, say, recounting your sexual assault and getting the order of two things mixed up (whether he opened his pants first or yanked off yours first), and the ridiculously broad generalizations and massive inconsistencies in stories like Ford's and Eichenwald's ("uh, it was in a, uh, or maybe we were in the, uh, well maybe it doesn't matter where it happened, but he was wearing, uh, I mean his hair was, uh, well none of that matters but I'm sure it was him").