The late Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist and a brilliant author and theoretician, wrote a book called Intercourse. She was immediately accused of having said that all sex is rape.
Anyone who actually read the book (I have, and there's a copy on my bookshelf) would know that isn't what she said. She said that sex which wasn't mutual and reciprocal, which consisted only of one person doing something to another rather than two people doing something together, was rape.
Dworkin explained that in male/female intercourse, the male penetrates the female and the female engulfs the male. This is, in mutual, reciprocal intercourse, usually simultaneous. But if the female is not an active partner and is simply penetrated by the male, even if the act is consensual, it is rape, not sex. In countries where young girls are given in marriage to older males, this may be the only kind of intercourse they ever experience. In patriarchal societies where females are expected to submit to males, it is not uncommon for any active participation in intercourse by the female (no less actual enjoyment of the act) to be considered improper and immoral. A female who actively participated in and enjoyed sex, would be considered a whore.
I had a long online argument about this with a male Orthodox Jewish Israeli settler. He insisted that all heterosexual sex was penetration of the female by the male. He was totally incapable of grasping the concept that the female might be the active partner or that the act could be mutual and reciprocal, rather than just the male penetrating the female. According to his beliefs, sex was something that males did to females, not something that males and females did with each other.
Not only was the false allegation that Dworkin had said that all sex was rape so widely propagated that Dworkin became the most hated female in the world, but it led to her being given a date rape drug and raped in France, an event that caused her to feel so deeply humiliated and depressed that she died not long afterward. As she was old, fat, and unattractive (Rush Limbaugh is an example of a male who was old, fat, and unattractive, and whose vilification of feminists didn't harm his career), and as she was unconscious during the act (she woke up to find herself in such a position that it was obvious she had been raped even though she had no memory of it), the rape was apparently due to anger by ignorant males who believed the lies and thought they were getting revenge on a feminist who'd said that all sex was rape. What was done to her was exactly what she'd written about--there was nothing mutual about it. The rapists hadn't wanted to have sex with her, they wanted to fuck her over and they did.
Many highly respected authors and academics and even some self-proclaimed feminists repeated the lie without ever reading the book. Very few copies were sold.
In most cases, anyone who critiques a book in such a way as to make it obvious that they hadn't actually read the book, would not be considered to be a respected or reliable teacher or academic. A student who did that probably wouldn't get a passing grade.
In this case, I know of nobody whose academic career suffered because they repeated something that wasn't true in criticizing a book that they obviously hadn't read. Some even claimed to be admirers of Dworkin and eulogized her after her death, while continuing to repeat the lie.
That's okay. Life isn't fair and nobody ever said that it was. But I reserve the right to remain pissed off about injustice, however weird it may make me seem.