Meeropol = Ivy Meeropol, the documentarian who made a movie about the man, Roy Cohn, who "helped to send her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, to the electric chair, leaving her father orphaned at the age of ten." Now, Meeropol has a movie about E. Jean Carroll.
A few days ago, Carroll finally received the $5.6 million she won in her lawsuit against Trump, and Meeropol said: "This historic moment shows that our legal system — established almost 250 years ago to serve as a check against absolute power — still works. E Jean used to sign off from her television show in the mid-Nineties saying, 'Fate loves the fearless,' and it couldn’t be more appropriate today...."
Much has been made of the fact that Carroll is not a perfect MeToo victim.
"It instead focused on 'the girl with a job,' which would guide coverage for decades. Its glossy pages contained fashion, beauty and sex tips but also coverage of abortion, sexual violence and women’s growing financial independence.... The magazine’s Women of the Year awards, introduced in 1990, became a cultural touchstone.... Those it recognized included Anita Hill... 'I don’t know very many magazines, neither Time nor Newsweek, that gave me that much interest,' Ms. Hill, now a professor at Brandeis University, said in an interview, adding that it had given her hope. It took a place like Glamour, she said, 'to understand what the moment could mean to women.' But like its peers, the magazine got pinched by the digital age...."
Back in the 1970s, before I went to law school, I worked in a job that required me to read a lot of magazines, and I read all the mainstream women's magazines every month, so I know what Glamour was back then: The hippie era is over. The no-makeup look requires makeup. Here's how to transform your office outfit into a nighttime getup that will wow onlookers. Oh, to have had a blog! But back then, you just made jokes with co-workers. I considered Glamour horrendously outdated, but who knew it would take 50 more years to die? And it's not even completely dead yet. It's still squeezing dollars out of Amazon Affiliates links, like a one-person self-publishing writing operation in a remote outpost in the Midwest.
On the front page of The Washington Post right now:
Can you even guess what that's about? I tried and I guessed wrong. I thought maybe there was a prediction that Justice Thomas might be conscious of a likelihood that he'd be leaving the Court within the next 4 years and he might be swayed by a desire to control who appoints his replacement. But, no, that would also be a ground to demand that Justice Breyer recuse himself.
Here's the column. The reason is that he might be carrying a decades-long grudge against Joe Biden for the way he ran the Senate Judiciary Committee in the hearings on his confirmation.
"One of the impacts of 1991 was my desire not to really work with the government in any way... I always said, I think I can be more effective as an outsider, as opposed to an insider. And now, I'm willing to evolve myself, to work for change inside."
That's from "Anita Hill vows to vote for Joe Biden and work with him on gender issues" at CNN. She did an interview with CNN. Anita Hill is the person who most prominently brought sexual harassment in the workplace to the forefront of American culture, and she did this in the Senate Judiciary Committee when it was chaired by Joe Biden.
I'm not going to fault her for offering to work on the inside, after 3 decades devoted to her "outsider" approach, but I will fault CNN if it did not, in the course of its interview, bring up the charges of sexual harassment that have been made against Biden. Is the name Tara Reade in the transcript?
"Notwithstanding all of his limitations in the past, and the mistakes that he made in the past, notwithstanding those -- at this point, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I think Joe Biden is the person who should be elected in November," Hill told CNN's Gloria Borger. But it's not just because he's running against Donald Trump, she adds. "Its more about the survivors of gender violence. That's really what it's about."
All his limitations and mistakes in his past? Is that including what Tara Reade says he did or does Anita Hill think Reade lacks credibility? Did Anita Hill hold back from supporting Bill Clinton, given all the allegations against him? It was disheartening, after Hill's Judiciary Committee testimony in 1991, to see so many purported feminists put Democratic Party power above the cause, and I hear echoes of that decision in Hill's "at this point, between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, I think Joe Biden is the person who should be elected."
Biden called her, seeking her support, all the way back in April 2019. Her support is strategically useful to him. She said at the time that he failed to apologize:
"An apology, to be real and sincere, has to take responsibility for harm," Hill told CNN. That's not what she heard when she spoke to him at the time. She wanted to hear him acknowledge the harm done to victims of sexual harassment. "He didn't take responsibility. He didn't hold himself accountable in any way, except that he was sorry that I felt I wasn't treated fairly. He didn't take ownership of his own role as chair of the committee." She called the conversation "unsatisfying." After that call, Biden told ABC's Good Morning America that he acknowledged his role as chairman in her treatment.
"As the committee chairman, I take responsibility that she did not get treated well. I take responsibility for that," Biden told ABC in April 2019. Hill was listening. She now says she believes he's evolved.
He's "evolved" and she's "willing to evolve" herself. Whatever that means. Ostensibly, it means I will rearrange myself into what is politically effective.
Anyway, I'm not surprised in the slightest to find nothing about Tara Reade and the harassment allegations against Biden in this CNN interview with Anita Hill. Once again, women are expected to support men, and the interests of women are deferred because a man must advance. Alternatively, Hill really wants a job for herself within the Biden administration, and it is a case of a woman doing what she needs to do to advance her career.
Perhaps in part to atone for his shabby treatment of Anita Hill, Biden was especially prominent in the Obama administration’s overhaul of Title IX treatment of claims of sexual discrimination and harassment on campus. You can listen to Biden’s strident speeches and rhetoric on this question and find not a single smidgen of concern with the rights of the accused. Men in college were to be regarded as guilty before being proven innocent, and stripped of basic rights in their self-defense....
In 2014, the Obama administration issued another guidance for colleges which expanded what “sexual violence” could include, citing “a range of behaviors that are unwanted by the recipient and include remarks about physical appearance; persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient; unwanted touching; and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.” By that standard, ignoring the Reade allegation entirely, Joe Biden has been practicing “sexual violence” for decades: constantly touching women without their prior consent, ruffling and smelling their hair, making comments about their attractiveness, coming up from behind to touch their back or neck. You can see him do it on tape, on countless occasions.
Of course, his argument about all of that is that it wasn't sexual. Who thinks that hair smelling and neck nuzzling was a sexual advance on all those little girls (even if it always was on girls and not boys)?
He did not stop in 2014, to abide by the standards he was all too willing to impose on college kids. A vice-president could do these things with impunity; a college sophomore could have his life ruined for an inept remark.
Biden is now claiming simply that he never did what Tara Reade said he did. Let’s posit that he didn’t. Too bad.... By Biden’s own standards, he’s guilty as charged. He never got affirmative consent from Reade, and she feels and believes he assaulted her.
He says the entire incident didn't occur. There was no gym-bag-in-the-corridor encounter at all. Or... was there? Did Mika nail that down or not??
He never got affirmative consent for countless handsy moves over the decades that unsettled some of the recipients of such affection. End of story. By Biden’s own logic, it is irrelevant that he didn’t mean to harm or discomfit anyone, that Reade’s story may have changed over time, that she might have mixed motives, that she has a record of erratic behavior, a bizarre love for Vladimir Putin, and a stated preference for Bernie Sanders, who was Biden’s chief rival. It’s irrelevant that she appeared to tweet that she would wait to launch her accusations against Biden until the timing was right. And her cause has been championed by the Bernie brigade. The many red flags and question marks in her case are largely irrelevant under Biden’s own campus standards....
Bottom line: "I’ll vote for him anyway, because Trump."
"He was the vice president of the United States for eight years. He’s been a front-page news figure since the 1980s. Thought experiment: Imagine that an allegation came forward against Ken Starr. We all know that, because Starr was involved in pursuing the Lewinsky story, any whiff of sexual impropriety would instantly be framed as a hypocrisy story even long after Starr has left public service. Biden chaired the Hill-Thomas hearings in 1991; how is that not the same thing? We were constantly told that the Kavanaugh allegations should be judged by a low bar because the hearings were 'a job interview' and he’d be confirmed to a powerful, life-tenured job. Well, presidents have a lot more power than any individual Supreme Court justice, including the power to appoint lots of life-tenured federal judges and justices. Isn’t this Biden’s job interview?"
In my view, the Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade accusations are at just about exactly the same level in seriousness, importance, and credibility. The obvious difference is which political party supports the accused. If you don't treat them the same, you're showing that you're doing partisan politics. It's what we saw in the 90s with Anita Hill and Paula Jones. I know I've treated like cases alike on a principled basis and I have done it for decades. But I don't see too many other people stepping up to that challenge.
While defending the taping as necessary to protect herself if her credibility were questioned, Tripp also consulted with a New York literary agent before beginning her secret recordings. Her initial concerns proved warranted when officials and pundits questioned her motives and attacked her character.
Tripp soon became a recognizable member of the wide cast of characters in the impeachment drama, so much so that actor John Goodman appeared as Tripp several times on “Saturday Night Live.”...
That was back when women who came forward and exposed sexual harassment in the workplace were treated as fat, ugly, old, jealous, self-aggrandizing freaks. But America had not yet learned about sexual harassment... other than that time we watched the high-profile, televised attack on Clarence Thomas. Who portrayed Anita Hill on "Saturday Night Live"?
"This crisis calls for all leaders to step up and say: 'The healing from sexual violence must begin now. I will take up that challenge.'"
I'm trying to understand why Anita Hill has another op-ed in the New York Times. Or, I guess it wasn't an op-ed. There was this interview with her, back on April 26th, which begins with the news that Biden apologized to her, and it was more or less clear that she didn't accept the apology:
But I cannot be satisfied by simply saying, “I’m sorry for what happened to you.” I will be satisfied when I know that there is real change and real accountability and real purpose to correct the issues that are still there.
The new op-ed just repeats what was already clear: She doesn't want to be the Accepter of Apologies. To put her in that position is to suggest a ritual of absolution. It doesn't and shouldn't work that way.
Said Anita Hill, after Joe Biden called her and talked to her for a long time about the hearings he chaired on the confirmation of Clarence Thomas. Quoted in the NYT. What, exactly, is Biden supposed to say about how he handled things?
[S]he cannot support Mr. Biden for president until he takes full responsibility for his conduct, including his failure to call as corroborating witnesses other women who were willing to testify before the Judiciary Committee. By leaving them out, she said, he created a “he said, she said” situation that did not have to exist....
In recent interviews, Ms. Hill and others involved in the confirmation fight portrayed Mr. Biden’s handling of the hearing as at best inept and at worst deeply insensitive. They fault his refusal to seriously investigate her accusations and take public testimony from other potential witnesses who said the future justice had acted inappropriately with them. Justice Thomas has denied any inappropriate behavior.
"This, in turn, is the exact same problem Biden will inevitably face as a presidential candidate.... And by 2020, there’s simply no reason to do that again. Most of the party’s bench consists of people like Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker, who are young enough not to have participated in the [Iraq] war debate in Congress.... Foreign policy experience theoretically should be a big Biden advantage over his rivals. But in reality, on one of the only foreign policy controversies voters actually paid attention to or remember, Biden got it wrong in a big way.... Old, mostly funny articles like '9 Times Joe Biden Creepily Whispered in Women’s Ears' will get fresh rereads for the #MeToo era, especially because Biden himself can’t seem to decide what he thinks about his handling of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings — alternately apologizing for having mishandled things and griping that it’s unfair for Anita Hill to blame him.... The entire spectacle of once again re-fighting every intraparty battle from the past two generations of Democratic Party politics would be bad for almost everyone at a time when Democrats should be talking about their ideas for the future rather than raking over the past."
That's the headline at NPR (with audio). What's unfair about the Senate hearing? Hill says:
"In a real hearing and a real investigation, other witnesses would be called, including witnesses who could corroborate, witnesses who could explain the context of the experiences of Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh during that period in their lives, as well as experts on sexual harassment and sexual assault."
I think Hill is using the idea of corroboration very broadly, since there are no other witnesses for the incident Blasey alleges nor are there witnesses to her contemporaneous hearsay about the incident. Hill is, I think, talking about witnesses who heard Blasey tell her story after Kavanaugh became a Supreme Court prospect, decades later, as well as general experts on how to understand and interpret the behavior and testimony of those who tell of sexual victimization.
Hill goes on to reject the Senate as the investigator. The Senate, she says, is not a "neutral body." And, speaking of her own experience before the Senate Judiciary Committee, there is "an inherent power imbalance."
The Senate has the constitutional role to decide whether to confirm the nominee. I resist the idea that it "cannot be fair." It must be fair, and if it is not, it still makes the decision. It makes a lot of decisions, and many of them are unfair or believed to be unfair. Yell and scream about that. I guess that's what people, including Hill, are doing. The Senators are responding to the political pressure, and whatever they do, they'll be criticized. Delay or don't delay. Vote yes or no. And there are lots of elections in 6 weeks, so we the people who think the Senate is unfair/fair will have our say.
NOTE: This is the fourth in a series of posts about Kavanaugh this morning. Comments on this post should only be about this article. Here's my post warning you that a series of posts is forthcoming. If you want to draw attention to other articles, do so in the comments section for that post, not this one.
I'm overhearing the television, so I'm not going to link to anything, but I keep hearing the indicia of elite status — notably, that Blasey is a college professor.
I'm trying to think of how her allegations should be handled, and I want like cases to be treated alike. When will one allegation from long ago justify delaying the Senate confirmation process and the opening of new investigations?
The answer cannot be: when the accuser has elite status!
I'm thinking of how Paula Jones was denigrated 20 years ago. "If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find," James Carville said famously.
[Carville] with Hillary's assent — set the tone on how the Clintons would treat women who dared accuse former President Clinton of sexual harassment....
[Paula Jones] wasn't fancy or rich, just a working woman sexually harassed by Bill when he was governor of Arkansas. But she was denigrated by Clinton's top advisers as "trailer park" trash, as someone so craven she'd crawl on dirt for the cash to slander Bill.
She was telling the truth. It was a straightforward sexual harassment case. If Bill had been a private-sector CEO, he'd have been fired.
But Hillary and Bill fought back, using the "nuts and sluts strategy," denigrating Jones and others, including Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and the intern Monica Lewinsky.
So what is the standard we are creating? How will we apply it in the future? I'm seeing analogies to Anita Hill, but how is Christine Blasey Ford like Anita Hill other than that she's challenging a Supreme Court nominee? Anita Hill worked with the nominee (Clarence Thomas) in a professional context. That was not in question. With Blasey, we only have her assertion that she was once in a room with Brett Kavanaugh. How will we treat other women who assert that they were once with the nominee? What is the principled plan that we can agree on?!
I think the Democrats believed the Kavanaugh accusation would play out differently, that Republicans would resist and obstruct, but Trump saw how they were playing and chose not "to play into their hands."
Here's the quote in context:
"I feel so badly for him that he's going through this, to be honest with you. I feel so badly for him. This is not a man that deserves this... this should have been brought up long ago and that's what you have hearings for, you don't wait until the hearing is over and then all of a sudden bring it up. When Senator Feinstein sat with Judge Kavanaugh for a long period of time a long, long meeting. She had this letter, why didn't she bring it up? Why didn't she bring it up then? Why didn't the Democrats bring it up then? Because they obstruct and because they resist. That's the name of their campaign against me. Resist. And they just obstruct. And, frankly, I think they're lousy on policy and in many ways they're lousy politicians, but they're very good on obstruction. And it's a shame. Because this is a great gentleman. With all of that, I feel that the Republicans, and I can speak for myself, we should go through a process, because there shouldn't even be a little doubt. There shouldn't be a doubt. Again, they knew what they were doing. They should have done this a long time ago, three months ago, not now. But they did it now. So I don't want to play into their hands."
You can think about how the hand would have played out if the Republicans had been the ones to "obstruct and... resist." I think that's what the Democrats pictured, when they waited until after the hearings: "They did it now." Trump sees that as a deliberate play, and he's not going to let it work the way they planned. After what they did... "we should go through a process." That's surprising. Now, what are they to do?
The mysterious silence from Dr. Blasey and her lawyers was another turn in a drama that has gripped the Capitol since Thursday....
Dr. Blasey, thrust suddenly into a spotlight that she never sought, has been inundated with vulgar email and social media messages, and even death threats.... Dr. Blasey, who has two teenagers, has moved out of her house, is arranging for private security for herself and her family, and is effectively in hiding, [an unnamed person close to her told the NYT]....
Democrats and Republicans, meanwhile, are clashing over the scope and shape of the hearings. Mr. Grassley said Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey would be the only witnesses, prompting pushback from top Democrats, who are demanding an F.B.I. investigation to search for additional witnesses or evidence, and to avoid the specter of a “he said, she said” debate that will not get at the truth.
One possible witness is a friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s, Mark Judge, who Dr. Blasey said was in the room with Judge Kavanaugh when the assault occurred. Mr. Judge had told the Judiciary Committee that he does not remember the episode and has nothing more to say, seemingly foreclosing the possibility of an additional witness interview, at least for now.
He could be asked about his problems with alcohol-induced amnesia, his observation of Kavanaugh's drinking, and any alcohol-induced amnesia he saw in Kavanaugh, and he could be pressured to admit that he's unreliable as a witness to the nonoccurrence of any event from his heavy-drinking years.
“We have two diametrically opposed stories,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said on the Senate floor. “My view: Professor Ford is telling the truth. But if you don’t want the hearing to be just a ‘he said, she said’ affair, an independent investigation, a background check by the F.B.I., is essential.... We must not repeat the mistakes of the Anita Hill hearings,” he said. “They were rushed, and they were a debacle.”
That is, once the hearing was scheduled, Democrats switched to saying they didn't want it. And Blasey (Ford) seems to have become unavailable. Going public with the accusation now looks a bit like a bluff. But — not wanting to play into their hands — the bluff was called. And now they want a new deal: an independent investigation. Trump rejected that (in the clip above).
Anita Hill has been brought in, with an op-ed in the NYT, saying the Clarence Thomas hearings were not done right and the Senate needs to handle the woman's allegations about sexual misconduct properly this time. She says "The job of the Senate Judiciary Committee is to serve as fact-finders, to better serve the American public, and the weight of the government should not be used to destroy the lives of witnesses who are called to testify." But her idea of fact-finding is not for the Senators to question Blasey directly, according to Hill, who says:
Select a neutral investigative body with experience in sexual misconduct cases that will investigate the incident in question and present its findings to the committee. Outcomes in such investigations are more reliable and less likely to be perceived as tainted by partisanship. Senators must then rely on the investigators’ conclusions, along with advice from experts, to frame the questions they ask Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Blasey. Again, the senators’ fact-finding roles must guide their behavior. The investigators’ report should frame the hearing, not politics or myths about sexual assault.
So the new hand has been dealt. How do you not play into that? I'm using Trump's idiom. If it seems wrong, let's talk about that.
ADDED: This post caused me to do a fair amount of research into the phrase "play into their hands." I'm not sure what the original metaphor is, but you can see from the post that I assumed it was poker. Anyway, the phrase means to do something that unwittingly advantages your opponent.
With three hours to go until the president’s address to Congress, Rhodes grabs a big Gatorade and starts combing through the text of the State of the Union address. I peek over his shoulder, to get a sense of the meta-narrative that will shape dozens of thumb-suckers in the days and weeks to follow. One sentence reads: "But as we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands." He retypes a word, then changes it back, before continuing with his edit. "Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks, twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages — they pose an enormous danger to civilians; they have to be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence."
Later, she said, “Look I believe she is credible... But based on what I know at this stage she is credible,” which doesn't explicitly walk back the idea that maybe not everything Blasey said is true.
But then Feinstein came back with a sledgehammer: "During every step of this process, I’ve found every single piece of information from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford eminently credible, sincere and believable. She knew this would have a huge effect on her life and she was incredibly brave to come forward."
Trump is making us the story by making us the in-house villain of his rallies.... My colleagues’ instinct has been to fight back. During a live stand-up from Trump’s Tampa rally this week, CNN’s Jim Acosta was taunted by the crowd, which had been chanting “fake news,” “go home” and “CNN sucks.” Said Acosta: “We’re staying right here. We’re going to do our job and report on this rally to all of our viewers here tonight.”
A noble sentiment, but better to “go home” — so Trump can’t use the scenes to his benefit. Eric Trump retweeted video of Trump supporters chanting “CNN sucks” at Acosta during his stand-up, adding the hashtag #Truth. The president retweeted his son....
Stop letting him make us the story.
UPDATE: I just heard on the Tucker Carlson show that Blasey has announced that she will not testify until after an independent investigation is done.
Hill accused Thomas of asking her out insistently, and making several lewd comments about porn movies, pubic hairs, and his own sexual prowess. Hill herself acknowledged that her allegations didn’t amount to “sexual harassment” as defined by law, just that they made her uncomfortable and she thought them inappropriate. I don’t want to relitigate the Thomas-Hill he said-she said, but even accepting Hill’s allegations at face value, they were nothing approaching what Weinstein or some of the others who have been in the spotlight lately, have been accused of–no assault, no battery, no exposing himself, no quid pro quo, no drugging victims, no shenanigans with minors. Surely we want to distinguish between those allegations and alleged rude and obnoxious behavior.
Bernstein only links to one article, "Anita Hill on Weinstein, Trump, and a Watershed Moment for Sexual-Harassment Accusations" by Jane Mayer at The New Yorker. It's a short article, but it mentions Trump 10 times. My first question was: Does it mention Bill Clinton? Because the Clarence Thomas hearings raised the national consciousness of sexual harassment, but it happened for political reasons at the time, and for equally political reasons the issue got suppressed again when it seemed more important — to the kind of people you'd think would want to forefront the issue* — to protect Bill Clinton. Even during the 2016 presidential campaign — the one Trump won — it was necessary to keep protecting the old President because his wife, who'd vigorously defended him against "bimbo eruptions," was (for some insane reason) the Democratic Party's candidate for President.
The answer to my question — does the New Yorker article mention Bill Clinton? — is no. I did my search of the page yesterday when I first noticed the article, and because of the Trump-but-not-Clinton focus, I declined to read it. I have been angry about the politicization of sexual harassment for 20 years. I'm trying to force myself to read Mayer's article now (because Bernstein linked to it), but it's almost impossible for me. Okay. You can do it....
In a phone interview, [Anita] Hill emphasized that sexual-harassment cases live and die on the basis of “believability,” and that, in order for the accusers to prevail, “they have to fit a narrative” that the public will buy....
So... essentially: politics. Hill was believed by the people who wanted to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court and not by those who wanted him on. Paula Jones was disbelieved by those who wanted to keep Bill Clinton in the White House, but believed by those who wanted him out.
Hill knows this:
Her case, like those of the women who accused Trump, she says, “was cast as a political story.” In such situations, “everything gets interpreted through a political lens, and it makes it almost impossible” for people to seriously consider whether the accused harasser “is the right person to represent you. It just becomes ‘This is our guy’ and ‘people are trying to bring him down.’ ”
_____________________
* Gloria Steinem in 1998: "We would not be doing our job if we didn't take into account that this president and his policies are crucial to the lives and welfare of the majority of women in this country. That's not bending over backwards: that's being sensible. Having said that, if Clinton had raped women, beaten up Hillary - real private sins would not be forgiven, no matter what the value of the public behaviour." Real sins? Real sins? What the hell?
I have my own experiences that have come back to me very vividly, and I found it really hard to sleep, hard to think, hard to communicate. A lot of the feelings I’ve been having about anxiety, about being honest, the guilt for not speaking up earlier or taking action. True disgust at the director who assaulted me when I was 16 years old and anger that I felt at the agents and the producers who made me feel that silence was a condition of my employment.
And I wish I could tell you that that was an isolated incident in my career, but sadly, it wasn’t. I’ve had multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault, and I don’t speak about them very often, but after hearing all the stories these past few days and hearing these brave women speak up tonight, the things that we’re kind of told to sweep under the rug and not talk about, it’s made me want to speak up and speak up loudly because I felt less alone this week than I’ve ever felt in my entire career.
The answer to the question in my post title seems to be: I wanted the job. It sounds as though she was made to understand the conditions of employment, when she could have gone to the police, and that she decided to join a conspiracy of silence.
She was only 16 years old, which makes the crime worse and her failure to report it more forgivable, but if she was 16, she was surely represented, and there was someone there on her side, someone with much more experience and understanding of how the business works. Yes, I see the word "agents" in that first paragraph. Did the girl's own agent participate in grooming her into the Hollywood life?
You haven't been a girl for a long time, Ms. Witherspoon. I appreciate your confession to "guilt for not speaking up earlier or taking action," but you are saying this after reaping rewards for 25 years, while other girls entered the system and faced a man you could have exposed in 1991. You say you feel "less alone" now, but had the power all this time to help other women feel "less alone." What held you back? Somebody else had to go first? Some reporter (like, today, Ronan Farrow) needed to build a substantial structure around you and others to make it safe?
Why was there no Ronan Farrow in 1991?
1991 was the year that the Senate Judiciary Committee demanded that America understand sexual harrassment, as it grilled Clarence Thomas on charges of sexual harassment. There, the allegations were not about any physical assault, but pressure to go on dates and some remarks about pornography and pubic hair, and the person on the receiving end was no teenager but a Yale-Law-School-trained adult. Once those allegations were taken seriously as sexual harassment, why were there no journalists looking to break stories?
Why wouldn't someone have talked to the Women of Hollywood?
I hear my readers yelling at the computer screen: Because of politics. Sexual harassment was only taken seriously in 1991 as a means to an end, to defeat the conservative Supreme Court nominee. And the Men of Hollywood were liberals and donors to liberal causes and therefore the journalists had no motivation to go looking. Looking the other way was the means to what was the same political end. That's the obvious hypothesis. (It could also be that the knowing, sophisticated journalists understood the desire for sex and didn't want to blow up the whole game. Perhaps they themselves or their loved ones would be vulnerable if rampant exposure got going.)
This has been one hell of a conspiracy of silence. It's full of so many people — people we like, such Reese Witherspoon.
Behind the glossy, smiling faces of the Women of Hollywood, I see a crowd of women's faces. I sense the ghostly presence of all of the women who no to the conspiracy, who didn't want the job enough to go along with a system that victimized them and victimized and would continue to victimize other women.
There's a long way to go to extract yourself from the harm, Ms. Witherspoon. Feeling guilty for not speaking up earlier is a good start. Now, how about naming the man you just referred to? You were 16, and I can look at your IMDB page and see what directors you worked with in 1991. I should think you'd name the man if only to avoid casting suspicion on the 2 or 3 other names from that time.
And what about all the "multiple experiences of harassment and sexual assault"?
It's not enough to stand up at the Women in Hollywood event and spout generalities and say you feel empowered. If the truth doesn't pour out now, the conspiracy of silence will have won.
Said MadisonMan, commenting on my post expressing skepticism about the notion that the Supreme Court is "short-handed" when it has only 8 Justices instead of 9.
If the problem is that an odd number is so much better than an even number, why not 7?
I like this comment too, from Humperdink:
"Shorthanded" is a classic hockey term. One team is down a player, which results in the opposing team having a man (or woman) advantage, appropriately named a "power play". When the shorthanded time frame ends, both teams are at "even strength".
With the Supreme Court, I would prefer the even strength situation, as opposed to a power play. Maybe we would get less highly partisan rulings. Let the lower courts have their fun.
Once you visualize the Supreme Court as 2 teams playing against each other competitively, then it's the odd number that is the problem. The liberals have been playing short-handed for — what? — a quarter century? I'm counting from the year Clarence Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall.
The new Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture treats conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas like a mere footnote while heralding the woman who accused him of sexual harassment, Anita Hill....
ADDED: The special ice hockey meaning of "short-handed" goes back only to 1939, according to the unlinkable Oxford English Dictionary. The oldest meaning of the word is "Niggardly, mean; inefficient, ineffective," as in "My Hostesse was not short, either handed, or witted" (1622). Second-oldest is how I think of the word: "Lacking a full complement of ‘hands’, undermanned, understaffed."
And I want to say that I think it would be terrible for the Court to have a locked-in 5-Justice liberal or conservative majority. What we have had for the last 2 or 3 decades has been 2 minority factions with 1 or 2 swing voters. Now, these swing voters — O'Connor and Kennedy — could be characterized as conservative. They were, of course, appointed by a conservative President, Ronald Reagan. But conservative Presidents don't necessarily produce conservative Justices. Justice Souter showed that very well.
It has been tiresome dealing with 5-4 decisions determined by a swing voter, what with the absurd attention to how Justice Kennedy thinks about things. Much as I would like to move beyond this era of Supreme Court decision-making, I don't like the idea of a predictable 5-person majority on either the conservative or the liberal side.
I would not mind staying with an 8-person Court, where majorities require the 2 sides to find ways to come together and produce some legal thinking that would feel more like law and less like politics.
Despite a surface appearance of fairness, “Confirmation” makes clear how it wants the hearings to be remembered: Ms. Hill told the whole truth and Mr. Thomas was thus a desperate, if compelling, liar. Her supporters were noble; his Republican backers were scheming character assassins.
This is consistent with how the media conveyed the story at the time and, especially, in the years hence. Yet immediately after millions of people witnessed the hours of televised testimony, polls showed that Americans by a margin of more than 2 to 1 found Judge Thomas more believable than Ms. Hill. Viewers of “Confirmation” were deprived of several aspects of the story that might have made them, too, skeptical of Ms. Hill. The most-salient of many examples....
Go to the link for the details.
I haven't watched the show. I'd have to force myself. I remember the original quite clearly and don't feel any urge to watch actors endeavoring to seem like the real people or to worry about how HBO is trying to manipulate us in the direction I would assume they'd manipulate us. For me, there's no entertainment value and no educational value. I'd rather see a documentary about sexual harassment and the American public mind in the 1990s, beginning with the you-just-don't-get-it scolding that was delivered over the high-tech-lynched body of Clarence Thomas followed by the it's-just-sex championing of the Democratic Party hero Bill Clinton. That was one hell of a transition.
I'm struck by: 1. Calling Hillary Clinton, the dominating presidential candidate, "his wife." 2. Using a gun violence metaphor — "takes aim" — about an American presidential candidate. (Never do this, whatever your politics. It's never needed. And there are weak people with impressionable minds.) 3. Dehumanizing Hillary's opponents as a "machine." 4. The idea that problems relating to Bill Clinton's interactions are manufactured — machine-made — and don't come from real people who think there really was something wrong. (I have always had a problem with the sexual harassment aspects of Bill's misdoings, though I was never a Republican, and I voted for him twice.) 5. A supposedly serious newspaper straining so obviously to carry the Clintons' message: It's old, it's manufactured, it's unfair, it's (metaphorical) violence against women. 6. The mixed metaphor: a manufacturing device, a gun, and — "gain new traction" — a vehicle.
So I clicked. At the article, the headline is different, and much more appropriately journalistic: "For Hillary Clinton, old news or new troubles?" It's so different that I didn't think I'd arrived at the article I'd clicked on. But the byline is the same — Karen Tumulty and Frances Stead Sellers — and I double checked.
Tumulty and Sellers observe that the sexual troubles are old but there's a "fresher case being made" that Hillary has been "hypocritical"...
In November, Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed, and supported.” She has made women’s issues a central focus of her campaign and is counting on a swell of support for the historic prospect of the first female president.
... or, worse, "complicit."
[Juanita] Broaddrick, now a Trump supporter, tweeted Wednesday: “I was 35 years old when Bill Clinton, Ark. Attorney General raped me and Hillary tried to silence me. I am now 73. . . .it never goes away.”
And times have changed. We have "a new sensitivity toward victims of unwanted sexual contact." Interesting. I remember when we had "a new sensitivity" in the early 1990s, when male Senators, chided with "You just don't get it," stepped up and took it very seriously. That new sensitivity got lost to a politically opportune insensitivity when Democrats decided it was more important to protect their President. They subordinated feminism to Democratic Party power, and it required a long struggle to get back to a second new sensitivity. And so, once again, the question is whether sensitivity or insensitivity better serves the interests of the Democratic Party.
If you don't remember "You just don't get it," here's a Washington Post column from May 5, 1994, by Richard Cohen: "Bill Clinton's Anita Hill":
Conservatives (and others) have wondered out loud the last several weeks why The Post, which reported [Anita] Hill's allegations [against Clarence Thomas], was so silent about a similar accusation lodged against Bill Clinton....
As few conservatives failed to note, the Jones story and the Hill story have much in common.... The fact remains that both women have made unsubstantiated accusations of a grievously wounding nature. They both amount to bulletless assassinations...
Ugh! Another cheap gun violence metaphor.
... of character and possibly of career. It's hard, moreover, to gauge their relevance -- although if Jones is on the level, then Clinton has truly given womanizing a bad name. Her story is revolting, and the purported use of state troopers as procurers is deeply disturbing. But liberals had this coming...
The mere invocation of the phrase "You just don't get it" during the Thomas hearings seemed to banish common sense, not to mention decency. In Thomas's case, so much -- feminism, the abortion movement, civil rights -- was invoked to justify the public trashing of a man who, whatever his politics, was hardly evil. It's hard to see him now and not wonder what all the fuss was about. Hill was just the means to try to bring about Thomas's end.... Paula Jones is to Bill Clinton what Anita Hill was to Clarence Thomas. It's that simple -- and that regrettable as well.
And thus the new sensitivity became the new insensitivity until a new sensitivity seemed like a good idea again and now — once again for the Clintons — it seems to be time once again for a new insensitivity. As if feminism is nothing but what the Democratic Party needs it to be and believing women depends on whether we like what they are saying.
I get it.
BUMPED: Originally published at 6:53 AM, but it got buried.
"Our parents had Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Their parents had Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Our generation has Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill."
Those are the opening lines of Nina Totenberg's 1994 review of "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. I was looking up old reviews of the book, because the fall of Jill Abramson is the big story of this week (in the United States, anyway). I thought the lines were funny because who knew in 1994 that Monica Lewinsky would soon arrive on the national scene, delivering her extra-large pizza-with-everything that, as a controversy, would eclipse this little pubic-hair-on-a-Coke-can that had (such a short time ago) seemed so generation-definingly meaningful?
And now, here we are, 20 years later, and Abramson has risen beyond her co-authored book about the empowered black man and the gender victim, up through the heights of the NYT and summarily ousted, herself possibly a gender victim, and — look! — they replaced her with a black man. That's the kind of strange justice called poetic justice. It's hard to sort through all of this and figure out what was fair and what was unfair. Alger Hiss and Sacco and Vanzetti — they were allguilty, right? And what of Clarence Thomas? Well, let's see what Totenberg said about what Mayer and Abramson said:
There is no way in a short review to summarize all the bits and pieces of evidence that Mayer and Abramson have amassed. But among other things, they have turned up many new witnesses who testify that Thomas had an avid interest in pornography at the time of the alleged Hill harassment — harassment that Hill said involved his talking to her about pornography. One woman, Kaye Savage, a civil servant who worked in the Reagan White House and who was friends with both Thomas and Hill, describes her shock when she walked into Thomas' apartment and found the walls covered with pictures of naked women. Several co-workers are quoted as saying they heard of Thomas' making remarks about pubic hairs on Coke cans — one of the most peculiar things that Hill alleged, and one that she was accused of making up.
Are "pictures of naked women" pornography? I wonder if civil servant Kaye Savage is shocked when she walks into an exhibition of impressionist paintings. So... the evidence is, the man liked pornography. That puts him into a set of just about 100% of men. Now, if you told me civil servant Savage was shocked when she walked into Thomas's apartment and found the walls covered with pictures of Coke cans or pictures of single strands of pubic hair, that would be some impressive corroboration.
Totenberg continues:
Mayer and Abramson have also spent a considerable amount of time examining the lives, loves, careers and ambitions of Thomas and Hill. Thomas comes out as an often brooding, angry and contrary man....
The angry black man. The classic stereotype of a black man. And now, replaced by a reputedly amiable black man, Jill Abramson is exposed to the world as the classic stereotype of a successful woman: the bossy bitch.
The arc of a generation is long, but it bends toward poetic justice.
"It's clear from the subtitle that Freida Mock's documentary Anita: Speaking Truth to Power will be a rah-rah job, which is fine. What isn't clear, and what isn't fine at all, is why the final work needs to be so shapeless in its hagiography, so triumphal in its vagueness, so hapless in arguing its case."
The problems with Anita start with director Freida Lee Mock’s attempt to fit this story into the template of a generic empowerment narrative. Mock, who won an Oscar for the mostly forgotten Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, directs in a non-compelling, TV-ready style; if viewers close their eyes, the only thing they’ll miss will be the names of the talking heads. Her thesis—laid out, classroom-documentary-style, in the first few minutes—is that Hill is a feminist icon whose testimony led to widespread social change. This reductive take on Hill’s moment in the national spotlight is supported by unconvincing interviewee testimonials, which reiterate that Hill is important, but not why or how. Along the way, Anita repeatedly succumbs to hero worship, drawing attention away from the social forces working against Hill and ignoring the nitty-gritty detail work of feminism in favor of a sugary empowerment high.
I'd like to know if the movie ever mentioned the undoing of this "widespread social change" that happened when a liberal (Bill Clinton) was revealed to have engaged in far worse sexual harassment than anything Anita Hill ever attributed to Clarence Thomas. If Mock doesn't take on that complexity, the whole "Speaking Truth to Power" notion is nonsense.
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