In January, Selin Gören was attacked by three men in the city of Mannheim and forced to perform a sex act. Gören, who works as a refugee activist and as spokeswoman of the left-wing organization Solid, told police her attackers spoke German and were a “mixed group” of foreigners and locals.

But twelve hours later, Gören returned to the police to admit she lied; her attackers were all foreigners and they were actually speaking Arabic and Farsi.

Gören explained she wanted to avoid the controversy caused when a group of migrants, reportedly of Arabic and North African origins, sexually assaulted and robbed over a hundred people on New Year’s Eve in Cologne. “What really hurts me is that it is a fact that the sexist and over the line incident that happened to me will inevitably lead to more aggression and racism,” she wrote on her Facebook page, in a now-deleted post.