Sports Illustrated granted its “Inspiration of the Year” award to Rachael Denhollander, the woman who single-handedly led the charge to take down serial sexual predator Larry Nassar. Denhollander launched the criminal case, Title IX investigation, and media chase that exposed Nassar’s decades of abuse to the public for the first time. She undoubtedly deserved the accolade.
She did not deserve to have her story presented by Christine Blasey Ford.
Unlike Denhollander’s crusade, Ford’s story is at best mixed. Ford could not provide any evidence or contemporaneous corroborating witnesses of anything she claimed happened. And her accusation against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh remains uncorroborated and credibly denied to this day. Every witness she named who supposedly attended the party where she claims Kavanaugh assaulted her has no recollection of such a party ever occurring.
Yet Sports Illustrated chose to have Ford upstage Denhollander by presenting her the award in a one-minute video. Not only does the choice distract from the heroic subject of the accolade, but it also does immense damage to the cause of the #MeToo movement.
Women need the societal space to be allowed to come forward with allegations of sexual misconduct, to be heard, and to be allowed to return to their normal lives without shame or attacks if the evidence presented against the accused does not satisfy the preponderance of the evidence.
Nothing suggests that Ford intentionally lied in her allegations. She simply didn’t prove anything, and allowing such a thin case to derail Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS confirmation would have set an extremely dangerous precedent where evidence-free allegations and, eventually, fabricated ones could be used as a political weapon. Further, attacks on Ford after the confirmation would discourage women from coming forward with their stories, which would be equally awful.
So Sports Illustrated’s blatant attempt to reignite the most politically heated case in the post-#MeToo era hurts no one more than victims. Sexists across the country already want to find reason to believe the lie that society issues incentives for women to craft false allegations. Sports Illustrated just offered bigots fodder for that conspiracy, elevating Ford, who had no evidence, to the same tier of heroism as Denhollander, who had more than enough evidence to put Nassar behind bars for life. The conflation is not only disrespectful to Nassar’s victims, but dangerous in further poisoning the victims’ rights movement with politics.
I credit Sports Illustrated with celebrating a modern-day hero who likely protected hundreds of other women from Nassar’s reign of terror. But for more women to come forward in the future to take down monsters, the media can’t give sexists and bigots more forage for their false notions that women across the board have something to gain other than justice in accusing men of sexual assault.
