Category: Sexual Assault

NEW PRESIDENTIAL MATH: COUNTING SEXUAL ASSAULT ACCUSATIONS

Tara Reade’s sexual assault accusation against Joe Biden has produced some apoplectic commentary predicting the death of the #MeToo movement (here, here and here).  It’s time for a collective deep breath. The movement may be undergoing some natural growing pains, but it is very much alive and well.  If you don’t believe me, ask Harvey Weinstein (New York State Correctional Facility) and Bill Cosby (Pennsylvania State Prison).

The theory of the case for a faltering movement lies with an ambitious rhetorical flourish that guided #MeToo’s branding: “Believe Women.” It perfectly captured the abrupt – if long overdue – paradigm reversal involving sexual misconduct. Suddenly, hundreds of powerful men were losing their jobs and reputations based on women’s sexual harassment and assault complaints, along with substantial corroborating facts.  

For way too many years, women complaining of sexual abuse were not only disbelieved, they weren’t taken seriously. The men said it never happened, or if it did, it was consensual: “He said, she said.” And “he said” was the default position for being taken seriously. The #MeToo movement reversed those power dynamics and made “she said” the default position.  Hence, “Believe Women.”

Yet, the phrase was never intended as a legal standard of proof. It didn’t advocate that a woman’s accusation of sexual abuse, in and of itself and without regard to evidence, meant the guy did it, end of story. In hindsight, “Listen To Women” might have been a more elegant choice of words.  But “Believe Women” had a righteous symmetry to it in a culture where many sexual assaults went unreported due to the cultural propensity to believe men and disbelieve women. 

Now comes our malignantly divisive political environment where everything in sight is a potential weapon.  During the 2018 confirmation hearing on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, a parade of Democratic leaders, including Joe Biden, trotted out the “Believe Women” mantra after Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when the two were in high school.  Kavanaugh denied the allegation, just as Biden denied Reade’s accusation.  That has produced an uproarious Republican chorus of hypocrisy charges against Biden and his defenders.  Tara Reade is a woman, their syllogism notes, so she must be believed, just as Biden and the Democrats insisted that Blasey Ford must be believed. 

Inconsistencies, particularly those based on disparate facts, is a way of life in politics. They also constitute fair game for criticism. But here’s what they won’t do: turn the clock back on the #MeToo reckoning that women’s sexual abuse charges must be taken seriously. The very fact that Reade’s accusation against Biden has been the biggest non-pandemic story for the past 10 days is evidence that she is very much being listened to.

What, then, do we do about that story?  For starters, we ought to feel sad. Really sad.  The Democratic primary process discarded every candidate who was not a white male pushing 80. In an understandable obsession to dump Trump, the working assumption was that this wasn’t the year to “risk” nominating a woman or a person of color.  The final two white geezers standing were Biden, 77, and Bernie Sanders, 78. Since the former vice president was seen as electable, and Sanders was seen as a socialist, the endgame didn’t last long.  As a result, in the most important election of our lives, the presidential sexual abuse allegation box score now stands at: Biden 1; Trump 20+. Although the forced choice is clear, just doing the math is sad. (Elizabeth Warren may have a plan for this, but if she were the nominee it wouldn’t be needed.  Just sayin’.)

We need to take Tara Reade’s accusation seriously. Based on everything I’ve read, her complaint, although definitively unprovable, is nevertheless credible. Reporters spoke with two of her friends who said Reade described the alleged 1993 assault to them back in the 1990s. Most of the 20-some sexual assault and misconduct complaints made against Trump involved similar corroboration. 

The natural inclination in this overheated political moment is to grab hold of those facts that support our desired election outcome. The Trump campaign has already produced video ads portraying Biden as a creepy groper. Some Biden supporters are attacking Reade’s veracity and questioning her motives. In the Twittersphere, there is a battle between “I Believe Tara Reade” and “Tara Reid is a Liar.” Viewing sexual assault charges through a political lens diminishes the gravity of all such offenses. 

Biden’s response to Reade’s accusation was a mixed bag. On the positive side, he didn’t call her a liar, question her motives or denigrate her in any way. In other words, he totally discarded Trump’s playbook on dealing with sexual assault charges.  On the down side, he waited too long before responding, relying instead on leading Democratic women, many of them his potential vice presidential candidates, to sing his praises.  

When he finally issued a 1,006-word response, 659 of those words were about pro-women policies he supported. Although his record on women’s issues is certainly relevant to the campaign, making it the major portion of his defense to a sexual assault charge was cringeworthy. At best, it was a non sequitur. At worst, it was using a voting record to get a pass on a sexual abuse accusation. Either way, it was tone deaf.

Yet, on balance, it was a more enlightened Joe Biden than the one who ramrodded Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination through his Senate Committee in 1991, never taking Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual misconduct against Thomas seriously.  Even at 77, the former vice president remains an educable work-in-progress. The same cannot be said of Trump.

Therein lies the reason why there is no lingering mystery about what to do on November 3. Our choice is between Trump and Biden. It’s the difference between darkness and light, between ineptness and competence, between evil and mostly good. So, take Tara Reade seriously. You can believe her every word and still be compelled to vote for Biden.

Here’s why: Donald Trump is an accused serial sexual assaulter and admitted groper, who just let tens of thousands of Americans die while he denied the Coronavirus. He needs to go, and a vote for Joe Biden is the only way that will happen.

As Don Rumsfeld said in another context, you go into an election with the candidate you have, not the candidate you want.

WE INTERRUPT THIS RECKONING TO BRING YOU IN-JUSTICE KAVANAUGH

Not even a week-long retreat to the abundant beauty and tranquility of a Rhode Island seashore was sufficient to tune out the wailing cries of a wounded nation. Oh, the sunsets were spectacular, and the serenity of the waves rhythmically meshing with each other cast a rare, momentary spell of harmonic convergence. But the peaceful stillness of the moment quickly yielded to people and their electronic devices, all digitally connected to a world neither serene nor harmonious.

Waves pounding the shoreline were drowned out by the anxious mutterings of those monitoring the week’s top story. Try as you might to ignore them, select, key words kept bouncing along the shore, like seagulls stalking an incoming fishing boat. Kavanaugh. Ford. Trump. Grassley. Flake. FBI.

A woman deep into her eighties and seated in a wheelchair consulted her smartphone and then yelled, “Crap,” to her friends, explaining that Flake had just announced he would vote yes on confirmation. “What’s this world coming to?” she asked, without an answer.

Two locals stumbled out of a tavern one night and, adhering to the Rhode Island prohibition on pronouncing the “r” sound, demonstrated how everyone had their own takeaway on the Kavanaugh story. Said one to the other: “The mutha fucka couldn’t even get laid in high school.”

By week’s end, we – Melissa, my wife and Rhode Island guide, and I – bade a sad farewell to our Newport escape, and an even sadder adieu to the illusion that the United States Senate would do the right thing and keep a deeply flawed man off our highest court. Instead, we returned home to grieve over this maddening disorientation: Senators who found Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations credible had rushed, in a surreal whirlwind of male anger, to make her alleged attacker an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Now indelible in our collective hippocampus is the laughter and cheering of a Mississippi political rally as the president of the United States mocked and belittled Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony about an attempted rape. I will leave it to more knowledgeable moral philosophers to determine which is worse: a Supreme Court justice accused of youthful sexual abuse who lied under oath and displayed a demeanor of raging anger and partisan indignation, or a president who ridicules and makes fun of a sexual assault victim, and who has, himself, been accused of sexual misconduct by at least 16 women. Either way, we have them both, a disgustingly shameful package.

As we enter the second year of our #MeToo reckoning, it is painfully obvious that we have a split-screen approach to dealing with sexual harassment and assault. Outside the Washington beltway, accusations are now taken seriously, investigated thoroughly and the perpetrators are knocked off the highest of pedestals and shunned. Inside the beltway, not so much. In the most cynical of Machiavellian politics, ideology trumps sexual misconduct, provided you have the votes.

Stephen Wynn was a casino magnate. Charles Dutoit was the conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Peter Martins was the leader of the New York City Ballet. Shervin Pishevar was the founder of a venture capital firm. Matt Lauer was co-host of NBC’s Today Show. Russell Simmons was the founder of Def Jam Records. Leslie Moonves was the CEO of CBS. All of these men, and scores of others, were accused of sexual misconduct. They vehemently denied the allegations. There was no proof beyond reasonable doubt. But based solely on the credibility of the accusations, these men were forced out of their privileged positions. Indeed, there should be a high burden of proof to deny a man his liberty. But privilege can and should be denied on the basis of believable accusations

Sadly, that is not the way the political world works. If it did, Brett Kavanaugh would not be on the Supreme Court. Republican Senators, and even President Trump, found Blasey Ford’s accusations credible. (For example: Senators Charles Grassley, John Coryn and Richard Shelby.) But they all voted to confirm their guy because his ideological bonafides as a conservative judge outweighed the credible possibility that he is a sex offender.

This toxicity of placing politics above morality and decency has been decaying our republic for some time. Trump is Exhibit A of this phenomenon. He boasted about grabbing women by their genitals. He is a serial liar. He has had extramarital relationships with a porn star and a playboy centerfold. Yet, Trump is embraced by evangelical Christians only too eager to give the sinner-in-chief a pass because they like his policies.

We encountered the same perverted moral reasoning 20 years ago with Bill Clinton. Liberal and feminist leaders not only gave Clinton a pass on Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, they mocked and ridiculed his accusers, insisting it was all a “vast right wing conspiracy”. The accusations, however, were every bit as credible as those offered by Blasey Ford. Jones said Clinton exposed himself to her and asked for oral sex. Willey said he grabbed her breast and placed her hand on his crotch. Broaddrick said he raped her. In each case, there was corroboration from friends the women had confided in immediately after the alleged incidents. Gloria Steinem, one of the giants of the women’s movement, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times in 1998, defending feminists for standing with Clinton. She insisted – in the case of Jones and Willey – that he was guilty only of having made some “gross, dumb, clumsy sexual passes”, but that feminists stood with him because his policies were strongly supportive of women’s rights.

It is way past time that we remove the asterisk from all positions of political power when it comes to sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement should not be gerrymandered to apply only to Hollywood moguls, business executives and media celebrities. The reckoning needs to encompass presidents, supreme court justices and others wielding political power. If we really want to heal our culture, and no longer tolerate sexual misconduct anytime, anywhere, then there can be no more passes for sexual predators on the basis of their political policy portfolios. #MeToo can be fully transformative only if it also applies to #ThemToo, powerful men at the highest levels of government.

KAVANAUGH RIDES THE RAPIDS ON TRUMP’S RIVER OF DENIAL

As Brett Kavanaugh continues to deny his way to the Supreme Court, we are witnessing the nauseating effects of Trumpian Justice, a bizarre jurisprudential model in which the vigor of denial obliterates any search for the truth.

There’s an amazing passage in Bob Woodward’s just-released book that perfectly captures the Republican game plan to beat back sexual misconduct accusations against the judge. The author recounts a conversation in which Trump offered advice to a friend who had acknowledged some “bad behavior toward women.” According to Woodward (Page 175), the president told his buddy never to show weakness.

“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” Trump is quoted as saying. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny everything that’s said about you. Never admit.”

This is the closest thing Trump has to a moral code. At least 16 women accused him of sexual misconduct. He called each one of them a liar. Then he was elected president. Denial worked well for him, and he has been championing it ever since. He was the only major Republican leader to stand by Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in the face of credible accusations that Moore molested young teenagers years ago. “He totally denies it,” said Trump in his endorsement of Moore. “You have to listen to him.” Even after former aide Rob Porter resigned over domestic abuse allegations from two ex-wives, the president stood by his man. “He said very strongly that he’s innocent,” Trump told reporters. “. . .you have to remember that.”

The Donald even carried his denial creed into foreign policy. Remember the Helsinki summit? Discarding his own intelligence agencies’ compelling evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the president stood with the Kremlin, saying: “President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.” He’ll take a good strong denial over facts any day, particularly if it advances his interests.

Right now, Brett Kavanaugh could not have a better denial mentor than Donald Trump. In pursuing his personal manifest destiny of a lifetime Supreme Court seat, the judge has stuck steadfastly to the Trumpian script. Responding to allegations of an attempted rape in high school and an incident a year later when he allegedly flashed his penis in front of a fellow Yale student, Kavanaugh used phrases like, “completely false allegation”, “this never happened”, and “a smear, plain and simple”.

No wishy-washy, plain vanilla denials for this guy. No, these were Trump-trademarked denials, filled with righteous indignation of steroidal strength. The judge didn’t merely deny the allegations, he “categorically and unequivocally” denied them. So strong were the denials that news organizations exhausted a thesaurus of adverbs expressing strength. Fox News had Kavanaugh “vigorously” denying the claims. In USA Today, he “forcefully” denied them. He “strongly pushed back” on NPR, “fiercely denied” the accusations in The Hill, and “strenuously” denied them in The Daily Beast.

Leave it to conservative Republicans to throw cold water on this culture-changing #MeToo moment. In their desperate rush to stack the court before the midterms, they have brought a year’s worth of momentum to a grinding halt. Prior to this sorry episode, we seemed to be on our way to changing the protocol for sexual misconduct claims. The accusers were to be taken seriously, respected and listened to. Thorough investigations were to be conducted. And any unwanted sexual contact was absolutely wrong.

For virtually every man so accused during the reckoning, there were thorough investigations that lasted weeks, if not months (examples: Leslie Moonves, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, Matt Lauer, Jeffrey Tambor). Many of the men accused of inappropriate behavior issued apologetic responses and went out of their way to respect their accusers, a huge cultural shift in tone from days gone by (examples: Lauer, former New Republic editor Leon Wieseltier, Geraldo Rivera, James Franco and Richard Dreyfuss). Compare, for example, Kavanaugh’s fortified denials to Charlie Rose’s response to multiple sexual misconduct allegations: “It is essential these women know I hear them and that I deeply apologize for my inappropriate behavior.”

It is now throw-back September – in an election year – and the retro-Republicans of the United States Senate appear hell-bent on ignoring sexual misconduct claims against Kavanaugh while bullying and disparaging the women who made them. It’s altogether proper to thoroughly investigate sexual impropriety accusations against a celebrity chef before letting him back into the kitchen, but if we’re talking about a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, don’t waste time looking at the facts, just measure the guy for his robe and get him on the bench before the base heads to the polls.

Unless at least two Republican senators decide to put process above politics, Brett Kavanaugh will soon take his place on the bench of the nation’s highest court. There will be no FBI investigation into the accusations against him. Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell will take their victory laps. It will be left to the rest of us to sort through the ashes of this disaster. We must find a way to make sure that our values of gender equality, fairness and decency are never again torched in the public square, and that even the strongest of denials never trump an honest search for the truth. The first step in that journey begins on election day.

A SCRIPT FOR THE KAVANAUGH FINALE

Here’s a modest proposal for ending the Brett Kavanaugh melodrama: Strap down the judge with polygraph equipment and ask him about Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault accusations. If he fails the lie detector test – the same one Blasey Ford has already passed – his nomination is off the table. If he passes? Then he joins Clarence Thomas as the shamed-but-confirmed male caucus of the United States Supreme Court. Put the whole thing on pay-per-view and give the proceeds to a #MeToo organization, just like CBS is doing with Les Moonves’ severance pay.

Okay, as Jonathan Swift did with his Modest Proposal, I jest. Still, there is more poetic justice in that scenario than we are apt to see from Chairperson Charles Grassley and his 10 fellow white male Republican elves who control the Senate Judiciary Committee. Oh, to see the gnashing of all those pearly white conservative teeth over the sight of an originalist judge wired to a lie detector machine! Would the American Civil Liberties Union come to his rescue? The ACLU has long led the legal battle against polygraph testing in employment situations. On the other side? You got it: the conservative, originalist bar, including Kavanaugh and his Federalist Society buddies.

The far right has long adored lie detectors. Just ask Vice President Mike Pence. Only days ago, he offered to be polygraphed in order to prove that he did not write the anonymous New York Times op-ed that labeled Donald Trump amoral and unhinged. (Do we live in interesting times, or what?) Kavanaugh himself has waxed eloquently on the usefulness of lie detectors “to screen applicants for critical law enforcement, defense and intelligence collection roles”. Writing the decision in a 2016 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals case, Kavanaugh called polygraph testing “an important tool” to keep undesirables out of significant jobs.

It may be an important tool to Judge Kavanaugh in the abstract, but now that it affects him personally, don’t expect to see him in a blood pressure cuff and skin sensors anytime soon. The polygraph is not going to resolve this issue. The question before the Senate is not about truth. It’s about votes. As long as the Republicans hold together, they can push the nominee over the finish line, and lock in a conservative majority on the court for a generation or more. As soon as two Republican senators jump ship, however, Kavanaugh is finished and Trump pulls out his Federalist Society list of reasonable facsimiles.

Meanwhile, this Capitol Hill political crisis has brought out hardball tactics eerily reminiscent of the ugliness that surrounded the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill fiasco 27 years ago. The focus inside the beltway is much more about counting votes than addressing the meta issue of what happens to women who accuse powerful men of sexual assault.

The Republican boys club in the Senate has attacked Blasey Ford’s veracity and “suspicious” timing every day since the California research psychologist went public with her accusation. Overcome with their hunger to get their man on the court, this aging Senate fraternity of old white guys wants to know why these women wait so long to make their accusations. How many television appearances, books and op-eds by sexual assault survivors will it take for us to learn that women who speak up subject themselves to a whole new round of abuse that, in many cases, is worse than the original assault?

Last week at this time, Christine Blasey Ford was in the middle of her life: doing research, teaching classes, raising children. Following a torrent of death threats after her name was revealed, she and her family had to flee their home. She is unable to work. She and her husband are in an undisclosed location and the children are being cared for elsewhere. Why, indeed, don’t women speak up more often about this stuff?

Meanwhile, Grassley and his crew are busy planning the stagecraft of a Senate hearing, should Blasey Ford decide to appear. Mindful of the horrendous optics from the Anita Hill hearing, where the young law school professor was grilled by a gaggle of old white men, Grassley suddenly noticed that all of the Republicans on his committee are men. He said earlier this week that they may bring in a woman to interrogate Blasey Ford. Borrowing from their own rhetoric, the Republicans have had 27 years to put women on that committee. Why wait until the last minute?

Over at the White House, Kavanaugh is being thoroughly prepped for his testimony. I get the importantance of preparing a judicial candidate for testifying about various legal nuances, like saying, “Roe v Wade” is “settled law”, but declining to call it “correct law” so he can vote later to unsettle it. But how many more ways are there to say that he did not, in a moment of drunken abandon at the age of 17, throw himself on Blasey Ford, grope her, cover her mouth to stifle her screams and try to undress her?

It’s important to remember that this moment in time is not just about the political composition of the Supreme Court. It’s also about how we view sexual assault and harassment, and how we treat the perpetrators and the accusers. We are, after all, in the middle of a reckoning on that subject. Giving Christine Blasey Ford, in 2018, the Anita Hill Bum’s Rush Treatment of 1991 is a perverse reversal of moral thought in this post-Harvey Weinstein world.

Here’s how this story should end: Without making a factual determination on the sexual assault allegation, the Senate should reject Kavanaugh’s nomination. Such a decision does not “convict” the judge of anything. But it acknowledges the reality that Blasey Ford could be right. Why take the risk of putting a man who attempted to rape her – and then lied about it – on the country’s highest court? It’s not as if he is facing jail time. He remains on the country’s second highest court. He can commiserate with fellow Judge Merrick Garland, who was denied a Supreme Court seat by Senate Republicans without so much as a whisper of bad behavior.

Such an endgame doesn’t alter Republican dreams of a conservative Supreme Court. The bull pen is packed with like-minded ideologues just waiting to take a seat on the bench. What it does do, however, is send a clear message that we have entered a new era, a time when we take accusations of sexual assault seriously, a time when one brave woman coming forward can change the face of history, and not ruin her life. Sadly, I strongly suspect we have not yet reached that time.

CLARENCE THOMAS AND ANITA HILL REDUX

Right smack in the middle of an optimistic #metoo reckoning comes a revolting development, casting serious doubt over whether our misogynistic culture has changed at all in the past 30 years. Welcome to the Anita Hill Story – The Sequel.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Christine Blasey Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist, said she was sexually assaulted at the age of 15 by then 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh, who is a Senate vote away from becoming a Supreme Court justice. She told the newspaper that Kavanaugh was “stumbling drunk” when he threw her down on a bed during a party. While his equally intoxicated friend watched, Ford said, Kavanaugh pinned her down on her back and groped her while attempting to remove her clothes. She said she tried to scream but Kavanaugh put his hand over her mouth. She said she was able to escape only when Kavanaugh’s friend jumped on top of them, momentarily freeing her assailant’s hold. She said she then ran into a bathroom and locked the door. Ford did not report the attempted rape at that time, but says she has been traumatized by it throughout her adult life and has undergone therapy to deal with it. She provided The Post with notes taken by her therapist detailing the assault.

So, does that change anything with respect to Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination? “No way, not even a hint of it,” says a lawyer close to the Trump Administration. “If anything, it’s the opposite,” said the attorney. “If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried. We can all be accused of something.”

Roll the clock back 27 years. Anita Hill, a young law school professor, accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with the policing of such workplace conduct. With Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination hanging in the balance, Hill told how her boss made repeated advances to her, talked about the size of his penis and described vivid scenes from pornographic movies. None of that kept Thomas off the court. Hill was excoriated by an all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, with a seemingly bipartisan mission to get past the discomfort of Hill’s testimony in order to put Thomas on the bench. Said one of the senators back then, “If that’s sexual harassment, half the senators on Capitol Hill could be accused.”

As a measurement of just how far we haven’t come in nearly three decades, compare that unintended condemnation of the male gender to today’s utterance from the White House. At least the 1991 version exonerated half of the men in Congress. The Trump lawyer put the entire gender at risk of a sexual assault accusation.

Let’s get something straight here. This is not about the politics of a Supreme Court nomination. As noted earlier in this space, there is an overflowing pipeline of ultra-right-wing judicial candidates waiting to replace Kavanaugh. Surely they aren’t all attempted rapists. This is about coming to grips with a critically deep cultural divide over the way men use sex as a cudgel of power over women.

Even after a year of growing #metoo awareness and conversation, there is abundant evidence that we have not fully apprehended the depths of our divide. There remains a painfully enormous lack of symmetry between the accusers and the accused, or – in 99 percent of the cases – between the women harassed or assaulted and the men responsible.

Finally-fallen CBS CEO Leslie Moonves whines about “ancient” accusations from more than 12 women who he sees as destroying his career. One of those women, Phyllis Golden-Gottlieb, is now in her 80s. According to Ronan Farrow’s reporting for the New Yorker, Golden-Gottlieb has been tormented for half her life by memories of Moonves forcing her to perform oral sex. To her perpetrator, it was just another day in the office. To her, it was jarring her soul and traumatizing her life.

Then there is Tom Brokaw, former NBC news anchor and a revered journalist. Multiple women came forward to recount, in the kind of detail that seemed etched in their minds forever, how he forced himself on them. Here’s how Brokaw described his reactions to those accusations: “I was ambushed and then perp walked across the pages of The Washington Post and Variety as an avatar of male misogyny, taken to the guillotine and stripped of any honor and achievement I had earned in more than a half century of journalism and citizenship.” What his accusers lacked in eloquence, they made up for in detail, a result of painful memories of being forcibly kissed and/or groped by a man far more powerful and respected than themselves, as long as 50 years ago.

The examples go on and on. Some of the men are simply slimeballs, incorrigible serial abusers. Others, however, have led decent, respectable, productive lives. Their transgressions – big or small, multiple or single – share a common thread. They all crossed the same line by abusing power to obtain some form of nonconsensual intimacy. In many cases, those moments of transgression may have long been erased from the perpetrator’s memory bank, by way of an alcoholic backout, or the redundancy of similar behavior. Meanwhile, their actions were deeply seared into the psyches of the women they hurt, leaving lifetimes of deep scar tissue.

The days ahead offer a poignant moment in dealing with this cultural divide. If Christine Ford ends up ridiculed and shamed like Anita Hill was, the damage will be far, far worse than simply seating Justice Kavanaugh next to Justice Thomas. It will mean we need a complete resetting of our moral compass. It will mean that even an enlightening #metoo movement is insufficient to make us grasp the difference between right and wrong. And to understand that when it comes to this type of wrong, there is no statute of limitations.

THE REAL CESSPOOL OF POLITICS: CREEPY GUYS WHO GROPE

Another day, another cringe-worthy tale of men who grope. Following the news hasn’t been this depressing since the body count days of the Vietnam War. Tongues jammed into mouths, breasts fondled, hands up skirts, all unilaterally executed by men because nothing stopped them, not their sense of decency, not their warped notion of consent, and certainly not the power imbalance that gave rise to these encounters.

It has been said – to the point of becoming a cliché – that we are now engaged in a “national conversation” about sexual harassment and assault. If this little chat is going to take on any real heft, we desperately need a change of venue to someplace – anyplace – outside of Washington. The nation’s capital is an unholy shrine to the very worst of male privilege and the notion that sex on demand is a perquisite of power, one that rises to sexual misconduct only in the opposition party. Letting these folks revamp the moral hierarchy of sexual interaction would be like turning a conversation on pedophilia over to the College of Cardinals.

Only in Washington would a “national conversation” on sexual propriety devolve into partisan chatter over the comparative sins (alleged of course), of Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, and Democratic Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. What’s worse, a 32-year-old Republican stalking and fondling teenage girls as young as 14, or a 55-year-old Democrat forcing his tongue into the mouth of a fellow USO performer and then placing his hands on or near her breasts while she slept? As an exercise in moral relativism, the allegations against Moore are far more serious than those against Franken. Yet, if this moment of reckoning is to be truly transformative, our “national conversation” has to be about more than predation parsing. It also has to go beyond the political leanings of the accusers, as was the case in both the Moore and Franken stories.

Most of the key players in Washington are currently incapable of looking at sexual misconduct accusations through anything other than the lens of their own political interests. So you have GOP congressional leaders urging Moore to drop out of the race because they believe his accusers. Of course they never wanted the albatross of Roy Moore in the Senate in the first place, and are worried about the adverse consequences a pederast senator might have on the 2018 elections. Yet, this same crew of Republican leaders remains perpetually silent on the sexual misconduct accusations made by 16 women against Donald Trump. Meanwhile, the Donald is rooting for Moore to win the December 12 election because “we don’t need another liberal person in there.”

This issue was easier to deal with six weeks ago when the only culprit was Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. There was such moral clarity then. The evidence was as overwhelming as it was sickening. The guy made a career out of forcing himself on hundreds of women. Police in multiple jurisdictions are pursing possible rape charges (here, here and here). For those inclined to view morality through a binary lens of black and white, good and evil, Harvey was pure black and evil.

Then, thanks in large part to the #MeToo movement, things started to get a bit more complicated. Women – and some men – who had been silently churning with the pain of sexual abuse for years, if not decades, started to rise up and name their predators. The list has been growing daily, even hourly. In addition to Moore and Franken, here is a small sampling of the accused: Democratic Rep. John Conyers, television host Charlie Rose, New York Times White House reporter Glenn Thrush, comedian Louis C.K., NPR executive Michael Oreskes, New Republic president and publisher Hamilton Fish, actor Kevin Spacey, political reporter and author Mark Halperin, former president George H.W. Bush and 40 state legislators from 20 states. The allegations run the gamut from rape to fanny pinching. The accused share two common denominators. They all achieved outstanding success in their given fields, and they all stand accused of forcing sexual contact on multiple unwilling partners.

What needs to be part of our “national conversation” is that sexual misconduct is not a behavioral aberration limited to Neanderthal thugs. Men we have come to respect and admire, whether for their art, intellect or leadership, are just as capable – and culpable – as the more stereotypical villains when it comes to sexually harassing and abusing women. We need to grapple with a deeply embedded and toxic cognitive dissonance that separates the virtually universal notion that all sexual contact must be consensual, and the behavior of an alarmingly large number of men whose actions blatantly defy that principle.

This isn’t going to be easy. The daily deluge of #MeToo stories has revealed a gaping hole in our social fabric, one that tears into the basic constructs of human interaction. Sadly, it’s something we should have dealt with long ago. Instead, it comes now, right smack in the middle of one of the most hyper partisan battles ever waged. We have all picked our sides and suited up. The most natural inclination in combat is to rush to the aid of a fallen comrade. Yet, that approach is totally inconsistent with a meaningful national conversation about sexual misconduct.

On a personal level, the Al Franken accusations really hurt. As both a liberal and a native Minnesotan, I put him on the same elevated tier as my other home state political heroes: Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone. I understand that the accusations against Franken are significantly less severe than most of the others. I’ve also read the stories suggesting that Republicans set him up. It still hurts. A good man made bad choices. He is not alone. And that is precisely why this eternal plague of sexual misconduct is so insidious and pervasive. It’s not just the serial predators like Weinstein, Moore and Trump, it’s also all those good guys who made some bad choices and added to the #MeToo Chorus.

Our challenge now is to learn from this. Most guys know the rules. What they have trouble with is the boneheaded notion that there is a waiver for frat parties, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. It might help to read the #MeToo statements and absorb the deep, lasting, tormenting pain of those who have been abused. This has to stop. Now.

A COLLEGE GROUP FOR TRUMP TO BOND WITH: RAPISTS

If you are a male college student accused of sexual assault, your good bro, Donald Trump, has your back. Yes, this administration seems to have finally found itself a friendly constituency in academia. For those poor partying frat boys, forced to parse the word “consent” in the middle of an all-night kegger, help is on the way.

Remember how President Obama took on the issue of campus rape? Disgusted to learn that one in five female college students had been sexually assaulted, the former president made the subject a keystone of his domestic agenda. He ordered the Department of Education to launch investigations into the way schools were dealing with the problem. Under threat of losing federal funds, those institutions became far more aggressive in handling sexual assault complaints. All that is about to change.

Enter Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her recently appointed leader of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, Candice Jackson. They are on a mission to roll back many of the Obama era policies designed to make campuses safer for female students. The duo spent time last week hearing from alleged sexual assault perpetrators, who insisted they did absolutely nothing to justify their expulsion. DeVos and Jackson also met with representatives of a white male advocacy group called the National Coalition For Men. The NCFM believes there is a huge problem of women lying about being raped by men.

Although Jackson, head of the Education Department’s civil rights office, is herself a rape survivor, the men’s rights lobby couldn’t have found a more kindred spirit. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Jackson dismissed the complaints of more than a dozen women accusing Trump of sexual assault or unwanted advances, calling them “fake victims”. She was equally dismissive of rape complaints from women college students, saying that “90% (of the accusations) fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up and six months later. . .she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’”

DeVos agrees with Jackson that the pendulum has swung way too far in favor of the accusers. They want to reverse course. The Education Department has jurisdiction because Title IX of the Civil Rights Act prohibits sex discrimination at any school receiving federal funds. Under the Obama administration, the department issued 19 pages of guidelines for colleges to use in investigating sexual assault and harassment charges. It also warned the schools that their failure to comply could result in a loss of federal funding. Under the Obama guidelines, schools were urged to use a “preponderance of the evidence” test in adjudicating sexual misconduct complaints. It’s the same standard of proof used in most civil litigation. Basically, it means the party with the strongest evidence prevails.

The men’s rights advocates, however, insist that students should never be expelled and have their lives ruined by what they regard as a low standard of proof. Their solution is for colleges to turn sexual assault complaints over to the criminal justice system and take no independent action. It’s an absurd suggestion. First of all, this is not an either-or situation. A student who is raped can – and should – file complaints with both the school and the police. They are separate systems, with different interests and outcomes. To get a rape conviction in court, the state needs to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt. Such a high standard of proof is justified on the basis that the government is seeking to take the defendant’s liberty away. It’s a different story when it comes to colleges and universities trying to maintain a safe learning environment. Schools routinely expel students if the weight – or “preponderance” – of the evidence shows they committed, say, plagiarism. Do we really want to treat sexual assault as a less egregious campus offense than copying a term paper from Wikipedia?

The ugly truth here is that a rape culture reigns supreme on many campuses, fostering the unfortunate belief that sex-while-intoxicated inherently implies consent. It does not. But many prosecutors shy away from taking such cases before a jury. A he-said-she-said prosecution, laced with an alcoholic haze, is often a tough sell for a jury. All the more reason for colleges to expel students when the weight of the evidence – a bar lower than that of a criminal court – shows that they engaged in inappropriate sexual conduct. Otherwise, a decision not to prosecute means the accused attacker remains on campus.

We have always used dual tracks in dealing with actions that may violate the rules of a workplace or university, as well as the law. And the levels of proof have always been different. We have this unalienable right to liberty, and it can be taken away only upon the highest standard of proof. The right to hold a job or attend a specific school is not so unalienable, and while nobody should be fired or expelled without proof of wrongdoing, the test for that proof is not necessarily the same as that used in a criminal court. A student caught selling drugs on campus, or stealing equipment from the biology lab, is likely to be kicked out of school, regardless of whatever criminal action may be taken. Sexual assault should be treated no differently.

Yet, the men’s rights lobby is pushing a seemingly receptive Trump administration to tell colleges to take no disciplinary action for sexual misconduct until, and unless, there has been a criminal conviction. That might play well for Trump’s base of supposedly forgotten, angry and trod-upon white men. It is nothing short of a nightmare for any student looking for a safe place to learn.