Hollywood starlet-cum-liberal icon Alyssa Milano has had a revelation of sorts. Maybe, just maybe, holding to the “believe all women” standard as ideological dogma actually does more harm than good.
Milano has faced a barrage of harassment from supporters of Bernie Sanders, the presidential hopeful who will never, ever be president. Her crime? The actress refused to grant instant credence to a rape allegation against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The only details we know for a fact about this sole assault allegation against Biden are these: Tara Reade, the accuser, worked in Biden’s Senate office from 1992 to 1993. She complimented him, specifically with regard to his sexual assault advocacy, as recently as 2017, and she now supports both Sanders and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In 2009, Reade blogged that she left the Capitol because she moved to the Midwest for her husband’s new job. In 2018, she claimed she did so because she saw “the reckless imperialism of America and the pain it caused through out the world.” In 2019, she accused Biden of touching her on the shoulder and “running his index finger up” her neck right as a slew of other women were claiming Biden inappropriately sniffed their hair or kissed their heads. This year, Reade went on two left-wing outlets to claim that Biden forcibly fingered her without her consent.
There is no evidence proving that Reade is lying. But given her evasiveness with the press, there’s also none that she’s telling the truth. The Intercept claims that there are two contemporaneously corroborating witnesses, but they neither disclosed the nature of what Reade alleged at the time nor agreed to speak with any nonpartisan media.
So the sensible standard would say this allegation lacks the evidence to be considered proven; we ought to let it go for now and let the accuser live her life.
But we don’t live in sensible times. We discovered that when the Democratic establishment decided to cast aside any semblance of due process in the hopes of derailing the confirmation of now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and now, it’s being used against them.
After weeks of harassment from the Very Online Left, Milano explained her motivations and what “believe all women” means to her:
If you ignore the literal words “believe all women,” this assessment is eminently correct. For most of human history, women have been silenced, or worse, ignored, when they’ve come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct. The #MeToo movement understood this, and in its early days, it demanded the right that women be heard, but not necessarily believed.
An eleventh hour sexual assault allegation slowly leaked by partisan actors in the hopes of securing a desired political outcome? Where have I heard that before?
It was clear that the Kavanaugh trial’s greatest casualty wouldn’t be Kavanaugh. It would be future victims of sexual assault. It’s basic human decency to argue that women deserve the right to raise their allegations. It’s entirely another to throw away the notion of due process and rally around a partisan outcome.
As I wrote last year:
Prior to the Kavanaugh hearings, PerryUndem found that fewer than 1 in 5 Republican men were more inclined to believe a man accused of assault than the woman accusing him. Today, that figure has spiked to more than 1 in 3.
Treating Tara Reade’s unproven allegation as fact would only further compound this problem. What’s more, Biden doesn’t deserve the Kavanaugh treatment — because no one does, and women don’t deserve the contempt that comes with a culture treating men as collateral damage for political expediency.
If Reade wants to let other news outlets actually investigate the story and further evidence does emerge, then so be it. Until then, it is unproven. She ought to be allowed to live in peace, and Biden, an objectively good man, ought to be able to run a campaign free of tendentious smears from the Bernie Bros.
Some may want to run a victory lap around Milano and her newly woke minions, but I’d prefer to put this whole unsavory matter to rest. Listen to women, trust evidence, and take your conclusions seriously. That ought to be the end of that.
