The #MeToo movement accomplished three important things. First, it made apparent how much more common sexual assault and workplace sexual harassment are than many realized. Second, it established a societal right for women voicing an allegation to be heard. Third and most importantly, it created a general consensus that social consequences ought to be felt if an allegation seemed true more likely than not.
This was true even of older accusations, so long as there were contemporaneous corroborating witnesses. Seeing as most sexual abusers tend to be serial offenders with predictable patterns of behavior, even the more thinly sourced allegations could be bolstered by a series of women — dozens, in some cases — independently alleging similar offenses. This tendency has also helped filter out weak, lightly corroborated or uncorroborated allegations, as those against the since-vindicated Charles Payne and Aziz Ansari.
The #MeToo movement has done overwhelming good for society. Our movies are being written and produced by fewer and fewer predators who treat women like chattel. A child predator doesn’t represent the people of Alabama in the Senate, and a serial groper doesn’t represent Minnesota. Fewer people who view women as their property to rape and pillage (or at least pinch and harass) are shaping the media narratives of how we consume our news. Across industries, women have more space to speak out and demand basic respect from their male colleagues.
But this only works when the #MeToo is considered the social implementation of the justice process — a system that still abides by the general rules of due process in demanding that allegations be evaluated with empathy but also on the basis of evidence. Once allegations, no matter how passionately they’re shared, are taken at face value in the absence of evidence, or worse, in spite of exculpatory evidence, a movement about justice for all becomes a war that pits men against women. And that makes women less likely to be believed.
It’s why we cannot take one word seriously from so-called feminists when they continue to rehash the Kafkaesque smear campaign against Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Unlike the cases of Les Moonves, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Roy Moore, Kevin Spacey, Steve Wynn, Eric Schneiderman, Mario Batali, Bryan Singer, and even Donald Trump — just to name a few — the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh lack a single witness claiming to have either seen the alleged events directly or to contemporaneously hear about them from the accusers. And those are the more credible ones — I am excluding Michael Avenatti’s orchestrated hoax involving Julie Swetnick, as well as the “new” accusation starring a “victim” who apparently denies the allegation in question.
From an overhead perspective, the first and more serious of the two Kavanaugh allegations makes less sense now than it did a year ago. Christine Blasey Ford’s charge was one of violence — that Kavanaugh, a stranger at a party, seized her from a hallway, threw her on a bed, locked the door, and violently mounted and groped her. This is the kind of behavior that studies indicate predominately comes from repeat offenders. Yet not one other allegation of such a nature exists against Kavanaugh.
Still, the accusation must be weighed on its own merits — but that’s where it really starts to fall apart. Not a single one of the witnesses called upon by Ford remembered the party in question ever even happening. The person most inclined to corroborate any aspect of the allegation, Ford’s friend Leland Keyser, said that she doesn’t “have any confidence in the story,” and that was after she came under pressure to say otherwise.
The only piece of evidence against Kavanaugh in this case is Ford’s account, which is lacking key details (such as the year when it happened). And her own friend, who was supposedly at the party that no one recalls ever happening, doesn’t believe her. So why should we?
The less serious case of Debbie Ramirez is similarly uncorroborated. She alleges that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a drunken dorm party. Yet not a single person who was there corroborates that either the party or the incident ever happened. The only person who remembers hearing about such an instance at the time claims to have heard about it from other people who also weren’t at the party.
That doesn’t mean that Ramirez is lying. It does mean that like Ford’s allegation, hers does not remotely meet the preponderance of evidence.
A man who more likely than not assaulted a woman — even if it was over three decades ago — does not have the morality or temperament to issue rulings from the highest court of the land. A justice-fueled movement demands that we investigate, not that we take allegations at face value. The #MeToo movement rightly demanded that the Senate Judiciary Committee publicly investigate and evaluate the allegations against Kavanaugh. The investigation came up empty.
Already, the Kavanaugh overreach resulted in backlash against the #MeToo movement. Whereas four in ten Americans overall believe the movement went too far in the wake of the Kavanaugh hearings, a whopping three in four Republicans believes so. From November 2017 to the weeks after the Ford allegation went public, YouGov found that the public became more skeptical of sexual assault and misconduct accusations. Fewer than half of men polled in 2018 said that the #MeToo movement made them uneasy about working with women, but now that figure has reached 60%.
In a vacuum, this backlash is wildly unwarranted. Although Republicans and Democrats are now equally concerned that men will sexually assault or harass women and that women will falsely accuse men of doing so on the other, women are experiencing sexual assault at rates multiple factors greater than they’re falsely reporting assault. About 3% of all women will be raped. Less than 10% of those allegations will be false, perhaps as few as 2%.
But if Kavanaugh can lose his life and his career over allegations with not one shred of evidence that would be admissible in court, then the backlash will only grow.
