In 2014, Shorten publicly identified himself as the senior ALP figure at the centre of a 2013 allegation of rape, said to have occurred in 1986. Shorten strongly denied the allegations in a statement, which was made after Victoria Police were advised from the Office of Public Prosecutions that there was no reasonable prospect of conviction. When in 2021, Liberal cabinet minister Christian Porter was the subject of a similar allegation, commentators (and even Porter himself) drew attention to the very different media treatment Porter received, although there were differences as well as similarities in the women's stories. Porter stated “There weren’t any calls for him to stand down or public reporting of anonymous, unsourced, untested material designed to try somebody in public while they are duty-bound to remain silent”.