The Northside Sun’s Nikki Rowell, passionately and with considerable citations, advanced the point that every woman in this country is threatened with some form of sexual harassment or has already been a victim of it.
No woman should have to fear sexual harassment, let alone fear speaking out about it. We can all agree on that.
Where I have a problem with Ms. Rowell is her conflation of this issue with the confirmation process that made Judge Brett Kavanaugh an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
She wrote: “…when three women (as of press time) decide to come forward about a person who could potentially hold a life term on the highest court in our country, they are automatically thought to be liars.” This was in support of her contention that vocal victims rarely get a fair hearing.
The phrase “at press time” may or may not have been intended to imply that a long line of accusers was forming.
The three women, in chronological order, were Professor Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and Julie Swetnick (represented by Michael Avenatti). The last two, at press time, watched their stories remain uncorroborated—unless one counts the 2,200 Yale women who signed a support letter for Ms. Ramirez—and ignominiously evaporate.
The Senate Judiciary Committee invited Professor Ford to tell her story and she did. She was a sympathetic witness, and well may have believed every word she uttered, including the now-exposed lies about her fear of flying and her denial of having coached anyone about taking polygraph exams.
But a gaping hole weakened her testimony: she could not cite the time, date, nor place of the alleged misconduct.
Nor could she remember how she got there or how she got home. She could remember the alleged incident, that she had one beer, and that Brett Kavanaugh behaved badly.
Oh, and not one of her friends that she alleged to be present at her encounter with Brett Kavanaugh supported her allegation.
Yet, because she came forward, we were told that she must be believed at all costs. Those costs were heavy, but they were outweighed by the need to preserve a system that, for more than 200 years has maintained that one is innocent until proven guilty. Proven, not alleged.
One of Professor Ford’s “demands” to the Judiciary Committee was that Judge Kavanaugh, the accused, testify first. Think about that. (The demand was not met.)
And also think about this. Ariel Dumas, a writer for The Colbert Report, tweeted this in advance of the Senate vote to confirm the nominee: “Whatever happens, I’m just glad we ruined Brett Kavanaugh’s life.”
Ms. Dumas thereby revealed herself as one of the unruly mob bellowing that a shouted accusation trumps an absence of evidence.
Ms. Rowell is right to worry that victims of sexual harassment and assault are not treated fairly. She is not right to buckle her beliefs to a man the mob would pillory without one shred of corroborative evidence.
An English lawyer named Heneage Finch, defending a man accused of murder, said: “The fouler the crime is, the clearer and the plainer ought the proof of it be.” He said that in 1678. Few have disagreed in the intervening 340 years.
A fictional lawyer named Atticus Finch underscored that same belief in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” set in the deep south of the 1930s.
I suggest you read his eloquent defense of a black man accused without merit by a white woman. His words are fictional; the issue wasn’t. In those years, such an accusation could send a black man straight to the hanging tree.
Give thanks that we figured out how wrong that was. Hope that we have corrected our dreadful mistake. Pray that we do not allow political extremists to repeat it.
William Jeanes is a Northsider.
