By all indications, at least some senior members of the White House staff were aware of the domestic violence allegations against aide Rob Porter long before they seeped into the press this week.
The Daily Mail reported on Thursday, for instance, that “senior White House aides” were informed of the allegations against Porter back in November.
In Thursday’s White House press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said the claims were under investigation before Porter resigned. Shah added that both Porter’s denials and his accuser’s allegations were taken seriously by officials.
The New York Times reported that Porter “had misled [John] Kelly and several other aides about the severity of the allegations” and “portrayed the women as making up stories to cause trouble, and few, if any, aides in the White House considered conducting their own investigations to discover what might have taken place,” based on the accounts of two White House sources.
The Porter saga has arisen at a defining moment, a time when #MeToo is barreling through workplaces around the country, rapidly exposing the persistence of mistreatment and sparking conversations on how best to deal with men accused of it. For all its excesses, one of the movement’s most important impacts will surely be intensifying the pressures on employers to prioritize and scrutinize misconduct allegations.
#MeToo’s revelations about the frequency, nature, and gravity of misconduct have reshaped the way society understands it.
Part of what’s most shocking about the Porter story is that the White House appears to have made mistakes in handling the allegations at the very moment #MeToo consumed the national discourse.
Managers and employers and supervisors are still learning, and still adapting to the sudden intensification of social (and legal and political) pressures to handle accusations appropriately. The White House almost certainly could have done better— and must do better in the future. This story is yet another reminder that while we are not yet in a post-Me Too moment, and won’t be for a long time. The only way we’ll pave a better path is by learning from the mistakes of the past.
