The truth in between

Sometimes something happens, something bad or controversial. After the fact, someone who wasn't there is presented with conflicting versions of events. When faced with differing accounts, the third party has a dilemma. After all if stories conflict then they cannot both be right. It can be convenient to use a guideline to start out. There are different sayings but one variant goes

There's one side. There's the other side. There's the truth in between.

Another variant is "three sides to every story". One side, the other side, the truth.

Now this might seem a reasonable approach to being presented with conflicting accounts of things. But it can be a bit dangerous. The problematic part is the "in between", or insisting that there are 3 sides.

The issue is that there might actually only be two sides. It is possible that one side is in fact the accurate account, and the "other" side is either mistaken or intentionally attempting to mislead or obfuscate about what happened. The "three sides" up front conclusion can give undue credibility to the side which is presenting a false account. It also basically accuses both sides of "lying" to make themselves look better, or at least having a mistaken memory. That may not be true.

So to an honest person, just being involved in some factual dispute, they can be branded a liar under the "three sides" doctrine due to there being a conflicting account. That's not fair to the honest person, and allows the dishonest side (who may not care so much about his reputation) to smear the honest person by presenting a contrary account and then insisting they are both wrong/mistaken/lying, as "the truth is somewhere in between". It also invalidates the honest side if the third party insists up front that both accounts are inaccurate, and there is some unknown/unknowable truth in between.

I suspect the issue is, it may be impossible for a third party to determine after the fact what really happened when the events are in dispute. However it is better to just go with "we can't know for certain", or "there are differing accounts", than to reach a possibly false conclusion of three sides. There may not necessarily be a third side.