If the new standard on sexual misconduct, as recently articulated by Joe Biden, is that all women deserve to be “heard” and then have their allegations set aside, why wouldn’t we lend that same courtesy to other men? How about for Matt Lauer?
For the first time since his abrupt firing from NBC in 2017, Lauer on Tuesday addressed the specific allegations that he had engaged in a pattern of sexual harassment and assault.
In an essay for the website Mediaite.com, Lauer denied that he ever mistreated anyone, though he admitted, as he has done in the past, that he had at least one consensual affair with a woman on Today’s production team.
There isn’t really that much differentiating Lauer from Biden, who has been credibly accused by a former staffer in his Senate office of having sexually assaulted her nearly 30 years ago.
Except one thing is very different — the media’s treatment of the two.
The corrupted #MeToo movement pursued Lauer when the national media and, coincidentally, the Democratic Party imposed the rule that every accusation of sexual misconduct by a woman was to be taken at face value, virtually unchallenged. That was their actual position. The goal of that whole scam, of course, was to bestow license to liberals to take down any man who stood accused, including President Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
But since then, the paradigm has shifted. Democrats have been challenged to play by their own set of rules, so they’re curiously no longer interested in the game. And the media are suddenly finding all sorts of complicating factors that make believing women by default a little difficult.
In his Mediaite column, Lauer accurately stated that his main harassment accuser, whose name is known, did not claim to have been raped or assaulted until two years after her complaints at NBC got him fired. However, she did admit to having consensual sex with Lauer both before and after the rape she now alleges. Meanwhile, the independent evidence corroborating her claims is kind of a mess. She discussed her affair with others without alluding to any sort of assault, and she claimed to have confided in a new boyfriend who now says she did no such thing.
Biden, in contrast, faces an accuser in Tara Reade who never acknowledged any consensual relationship with him. And her allegations have been corroborated by multiple people, including a former neighbor (like Reade, a Democrat) who says she remembers being told about the supposed assault at the time it happened.
Earlier this month, feminist author Linda Hirshman wrote a New York Times op-ed stating that even though she believed Biden had sexually assaulted Reade, voting for him would nonetheless be “worth it.”
At least that’s honest, if a little obscene. It’s a lot better than the liberals in the media who have otherwise pretended that accusations of sexual misconduct are suddenly too complicated to settle without video evidence.
Ruth Marcus, an editor at the Washington Post, could only shrug when she wrote in April, “What to make of former Joe Biden staffer Tara Reade’s allegations that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee sexually assaulted her in 1993?”
New York Times liberal writer Michelle Goldberg said that Reade’s claims merely left her in “doubt.” That is, “doubt about Biden and doubt about the charges against him.”
But then, shouldn’t we “doubt” the allegations against Lauer? Should we wonder whether he didn’t just have a consensual affair with a production staffer that went badly, and whether she didn’t seek revenge later?
Why shouldn’t all accused men be treated like Biden? Or is he just different?
