By Alexandra DeSanctis
Friday, April 17, 2020
In October 2017, reporters publicized the stories of
women who claimed to have been sexually harassed and assaulted by Hollywood
producer Harvey Weinstein. Since then, our country has been in the grips of a
reckoning. The outpouring of similar tales in the months following the
Weinstein story seemed as if it would never end; every other day we heard about
yet another celebrity accused of using his fame to mistreat the women around
him.
It was the birth of a movement, #MeToo, which at its
worst has been captured by those who insist we must believe every woman who
claims to have been assaulted. For centuries, these advocates say, women’s
stories have been disbelieved, and now it’s time to tip the balance of power
and believe them all, no matter what.
But at its best, the #MeToo movement represented a
promise, to men and women alike: Fear and raw power would no longer derail
justice. For the first time, women — and, much less frequently, men — who had
been abused would have society’s backing to tell their stories publicly and, if
they presented enough evidence, to expect that the men responsible would face
consequences.
When Christine Blasey Ford came forward in 2018 with the
claim that a teenaged Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her, progressives
revealed their unwillingness to accept a #MeToo movement that didn’t “believe
all women.” Her story deserved investigation, but when all was said and done,
it was problematic in several key aspects, among them that Ford couldn’t produce
anyone to affirm she and Kavanaugh had ever met, that she had told no one about
the alleged assault for decades, and that she later gave conflicting accounts
of what she believed had happened.
None of those facts perturbed Kavanaugh’s ideological
opponents in the Democratic Party and the media. Armed with a fresh reason to
take down a man they were already determined to reject, Senate Democrats put
him through the wringer. Their journalistic allies helped them along by doing
little to vet Ford’s claims and giving air time to far less credible accounts
of his alleged sexual misconduct.
Consider the New Yorker article by Ronan Farrow
and Jane Mayer, telling the story of Deborah Ramirez, who claimed that
Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her at a party when he was a freshman at Yale
University. The reporters were unable to find a single eyewitness to confirm
that Kavanaugh had been at the party Ramirez described or anyone who had ever
heard Ramirez recount this accusation.
One friend of Ramirez’s told The New Yorker, “This
is a woman I was best friends with. We shared intimate details of our lives.
And I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I
didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening.”
Farrow and Mayer noted, too, that “in her initial
conversations with The New Yorker, [Ramirez] was reluctant to
characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty.” In fact,
she was willing to go on the record only “after six days of carefully assessing
her memories and consulting with her attorney,” at which point “she felt
confident enough of her recollections.” Inexplicably, the article was published
anyway.
Even worse, media outlets lent credibility to the
outlandish tale of Julie Swetnick, who, again without corroboration, alleged
that Kavanaugh had “spiked” drinks at parties in high school to facilitate gang
rape. Not only did outlets report on this claim despite the lack of evidence,
but they purposely
withheld evidence that a woman identified by Swetnick as a witness denied
ever having witnessed Kavanaugh’s alleged misconduct.
By publicizing accusations that lacked the most basic
aspects needed for credibility, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee
jettisoned their responsibility to seek the truth and instead used vulnerable
women as pawns in an effort to tarnish a political enemy. In doing so, they
made it less likely that subsequent women who publicized their credible
accusations would be believed.
A year and a half later, Democrats and the media are
again undermining the principles of #MeToo, this time by ignoring and
downplaying sexual-assault allegations against Joe Biden. While Biden himself
has said in the past that we must believe every woman who alleges assault, he
has since changed his tune. Now, he and his prominent backers — including one
of Kavanaugh’s most vigorous critics, #MeToo celebrity advocate Alyssa Milano —
have begun singing the praises of due process.
Meanwhile, reporting on Tara Reade’s accusation against
Biden has ranged from nonexistent to shoddy. Almost unbelievably, Biden himself
has yet to be asked about the allegation, nor have the many Democratic
politicians who have endorsed him.
The New York Times waited 19 days to report on the
subject, and, after publishing the piece, later removed a crucial line: “The Times
found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and
touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable.” There was no
editor’s note explaining the deletion.
Later still, the Times Twitter account deleted its
tweet that had included this line, noting that it had been removed because of
“imprecise language.” Times executive editor Dean Baquet, in a
subsequent interview with the paper’s media columnist, Ben Smith, said, “Even
though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into
the paper, I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and
made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of
sexual misconduct.”
Baquet further told Smith that differences between the
paper’s reporting on the Biden allegation and on the Kavanaugh allegations were
because “Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s
status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious
allegation.” As Dan McLaughlin has pointed out on National Review Online, it is
clear that the Times is comfortable dissecting its opponents while
coddling its allies — and the latter are apparently given editorial control
over what the paper publishes.
And it isn’t just the Times. A search for “Tara
Reade” on CNN’s website, for instance, returns zero results. Columnists at
leading papers have further (inadvertently) exposed the double standard. At the
Washington Post, Ruth Marcus wrote a column in October 2018 with the
headline, “Does it matter what Kavanaugh did in high school? Well, yes.” She
has written an entire book around her conclusion that Ford told the truth about
Kavanaugh. Her recent column on the Biden allegation, titled “Assessing Tara
Reade’s allegations,” concludes, “My gut says that what Reade alleges did not
happen.”
Two columns by Joan Walsh in The Nation are also
ripe for contrast. In September 2018, her piece was called “The Heart-Wrenching
Trauma of the Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh Hearings,” with the
subtitle, “It’s difficult. It hurts. It’s unfair. But women will keep telling
our stories.” This time around, her tone has changed from melodrama to nuance:
“The Troublesome Tara Reade Story” and “Left- and right-wing Biden haters
demand that the media investigate her sexual assault charge. It did — and uncovered
many reasons to doubt.”
Michelle Goldberg, columnist at the Times, did
much the same thing. Her piece on Reade is called “What to Do With Tara Reade’s
Allegation Against Joe Biden?” and the subheading, “A sexual assault accusation
against the presumptive Democratic nominee is being used to troll the #MeToo
movement.” Her reflection on Kavanaugh bears the much more provocative title,
“Pigs All the Way Down,” with the subtitle, “Kavanaugh and our rotten ruling
class.”
None of this is to say that Reade’s story ought to be
believed outright, though she does have one key fact in her favor that Ford did
not: She can establish that she personally knew the man she is accusing. But
contrasting the coverage of this claim with the coverage Kavanaugh received
reveals that far too many in the media care far more about weaponizing
sexual-misconduct claims against conservatives than they do about uncovering
the truth.
Our feckless media establishment weakens our political
process, to be sure, but it also undermines what #MeToo, at its best, stood
for: the idea that wronged women could tell their stories and guilty men would
be punished. That promise means nothing when a man’s guilt is determined by his
political views rather than by the evidence, and when a woman is ignored or
derided if she claims to have been the victim of the Democratic Party’s man.
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