Contrary to the radical historical revisionism that resulted from the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation catastrophe, the initial #MeToo movement was never about a right for all women to be believed. Rather, it served as a correction to a societal whitewashing of the scope of sexual assaults and misconduct in our midst and reasserted the right of victims to be heard and to have their claims be taken seriously. Not automatically believed.
The correction was overdue and wholly justified. Democrats spent decades ignoring the bevy of corroborating witnesses granting credence to multiple rape and sexual harassment allegations against Bill Clinton, and Republicans rebounded by using Clinton as a cipher, deflecting from Donald Trump’s own admissions of groping and spontaneous dressing room visits with Clinton cover-ups as a comparison. Once Hillary Clinton was crushed by the election of another credibly accused sexual assailant, the floodgates could finally open, first in the uppermost echelons of Hollywood, and then finally to cull the worst of the crops in both political parties. The odds of the Democratic establishment ousting Al Franken or Republican voters abandoning Roy Moore were once unthinkable. Yet somehow, they feel far more possible again today than they were for years.
When Democrats saw their chance to derail then-nominee Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation with an eleventh-hour sexual assault allegation, activists embraced a slogan that rewrote the morality of the #MeToo movement. “Believe women,” they said, or even at times, “believe all women.” If you disagreed, it was no longer because you considered the evidence to be lacking or even Christine Blasey Ford’s account heart-wrenching but not quite credible enough to derail a man’s life. Instead, you could either believe Ford or believe Kavanaugh, and if you sided with the latter, you had to believe that Ford was an outright, stone-cold liar.
Of course, for any of us on the sidelines of the fracas, we knew this was a ridiculous binary. Just as it would have been difficult to prove any 30-something-year-old assault did happen, it would be next to impossible to prove someone was lying about it. Factor in the fact that Ford acknowledged that time, youth, and alcohol were all involved, and it’s no wonder how memories could differ or distort or divert without a whiff of malicious intent.
But the lines were drawn, with the nation’s most moronically partisan actors, inadvertently but all too predictably sowing the seeds of their next biggest scandal. Flash-forward to a nation growing stir-crazy and vindictive in quarantine, and now the architect of the Violence Against Women Act, the Obama administration’s most vocal cheerleader of the demise of due process on college campuses, and half of the nation’s last hope to defeat President Trump. After half a century in public life, the final decade of which he served as a lovable elder statesman, Joe Biden is now forced to face the reckoning of bifurcating all questions of sexual misconduct as a matter of whom to believe.
A reasonable response to Tara Reade’s allegation would be to consider both its severity and the evidence backing it. As a question of severity, nearly no one disagrees: A sitting United States senator forcibly penetrating a staff member with his fingers without a modicum of consent, implied or otherwise, is obviously disqualifying, full stop. The evidence is more complicating. On the one hand, reporters rightfully proceeded with some caution given the fact that Reade had previously accused Biden of sexual harassment, not full-on penetrative assault, and her social media posts, which ranged from praising Biden to admiring Vladamir Putin, that have made it hard to discern a clear political motivation. In addition, the first three witnesses all had corroborative problems. But Lynda LaCasse, Reade’s former neighbor, provided an on the record confirmation that Reade had disclosed the specific nature of Biden’s assault just two or three years after it happened, and an unearthed clip of Larry King Live from August 1993 seems to depict Reade’s mother confirming that her daughter had complained about some sort of insurmountable “problems” working for a high-profile senator.
Per my estimation, the evidence renders Reade’s allegation credible, because the timeline is clear and the evidence noncontradictory, but it still doesn’t meet the preponderance of evidence, a common-sense standard for the court of public opinion. Does this mean I don’t believe Reade? That’s not quite accurate, because just as the evidence doesn’t prove Biden is lying, neither does it prove Reade is. The evidence simply doesn’t meet a certain standard.
It goes without saying that sexual assault is a uniquely emotionally charged crime, but the discourse surrounding accusations that must be tried in the court of public opinion doesn’t have to be. We can’t let predators who used their power to evade the law to continue to preside over public life, and there’s no question that the #MeToo movement was long overdue, but if we want to continue to utilize its powers of accountability, we have to treat public trials as such. They must be technical and factual, not devolve into witch hunts of innocent men and smear campaigns against victims. That starts with discarding this absurd binary of whom to “believe.”
