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.