Yes, Chaucer was a rapist. And he paid off his (known) victim to keep her quiet, and then he had his friends in government cover it up.

Our source of this is a notation in a type of English administrative record called close rolls, basically an internal chancery set of records (pages stitched into rolls instead of bound into codices) that catalogued various documents under the king's seal--letters, charters, deeds, summons to parliament, etc. On the back of royal close rolls, other records might be placed to keep them from being lost

It notes a deed of release that a woman named Cecily Chaumpaigne brought to the chancery for Chaucer. It releases him from all [legal or threat of legal] actions tam de raptu meo tam de aliqua alia re vel causa - "concerning my rape or any other things or causes."

Scholars can and have split many a hair over raptus and the double meaning of rapio, rapere as "to seize" and "to rape." In 14th century England, rapere might still be ambiguous, but raptus (as used in the close roll record of the deed of release) pretty clearly meant "rape." Chris Cannon demonstrated this pretty clearly.

But that's just the beginning (or I guess, the middle) of the story.

There are three other records involving Chaumpaigne or Chaucer that are connected by intermediaries. The most plausible explanation for the existence of them is that Chaucer paid off Chaumpaigne--Derek Pearsall refers to it as an "out of court settlement"--but did so through a few friends as an intermediary. (He gave them the money, they gave it to her.) Pearsall points out that during this time period, Chaucer appears to have been working extra hard to earn money. (However, Pearsall waffles on whether Chaucer was actually a rapist, coming very very close to "false accusation for personal gain" territory).

Now, for that matter of "close rolls." The thing about close rolls is that, while things were recorded there for permance, they were not recorded there for accessibility. The whole point about the pages being sewed up end to end to form a...well, a roll. What chancery clerks were more likely to consult was a parallel, sometimes overlapping set of legal memoranda.

There's a memorandum for the Chaumpaign-Chaucer case, too. This public one, written a few days later by chancery clerks, eliminates the phrase "de raptus meo." As Susan Morrison points out, essentially, the originally release was 'cleaned up' for public consumption.

Chaucer was a clerk, he worked in government, he knew the people running the chancery, and we've already seen from the financial angle that he was highly interested in keeping matters about raping Cecily Chaumpaigne quiet. The most likely conclusion here is that he had his friends cover it up, too. And it worked. No one had any clue about any of this until 1873.

Chaucer was a brilliant writer, and through various pathways he ends up genuinely influential over centuries and centuries of English literature. Heck, Chris Cannon--the man who did the work to come the closest we will get to proving Chaucer was a rapist--published a book on the manner in which Chaucer became influential.

But Chaucer was also accused of rape, he paid her off, and he had his friends cover it up. That's not the behavior of an innocent man.

Cannon is currently editing a new comprehensive edition of Chaucer's corpus. Morrison has published a very academic jargony book on Chaucer to enhance her career. Pearsall, as mentioned above, asserts that Chaumpaigne was probably just using a rape accusation to blackmail Chaucer.

And the other most famous 15th century English author, Thomas Malory, was also a rapist. But somehow no one is calling for the erasure of Arthuriana derived from his version, or to rename "death of the author" (le morte d'auteur) to something that is not a pun on "Le Morte d'Arthur.* It's almost like no one actually cares about Cecily Chaumpaigne or that Chaucer was a rapist--performed outrage is just a way to win brownie points instead of addressing serious problems in academia today.