Playing to the crowd of thousands gathered to cheer him on, the president pretended to be Dr. Blasey testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday. “Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer, right? I had one beer,” said Mr. Trump, channeling his version of Dr. Blasey. His voice dripping with derision, he then imitated her being questioned at the hearing, followed by her responses about what she could not recall about the alleged attack.
“How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd applauded. “But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”
.. Then, continuing in his own voice, he said: “And a man’s life is in tatters. A man’s life is shattered. His wife is shattered.” Referring to those who have championed Dr. Blasey’s case, he added: “They destroy people. They want to destroy people. These are really evil people.”
Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, criticized the president’s mocking of Dr. Blasey.
“To discuss something this sensitive at a political rally is just not right, it’s just not right and I wish he had not have done it,” Mr. Flake said early Wednesday on NBC. “It’s kind of appalling.”
.. Mr. Trump’s taunts could inflame a struggle over power and sex that has consumed the capital in recent weeks and risked alienating two of the undecided moderate Republicans whose votes will decide the fate of his nomination, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
.. Earlier Tuesday, the president’s advisers were privately marveling at how measured — for him — he had been throughout the controversy around Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. But his patience appeared to run out on Tuesday night, as Mr. Trump seemed eager to charge up his supporters against Dr. Blasey... Mr. Trump’s portrait of Dr. Blasey was met with cheers and laughter by the crowd of several thousand supporters at the Landers Center in Southaven, Miss. And it mirrored the increasingly sharp attacks against her by conservative news media.. Mr. Trump has expressed similar sentiments in the past in response to sexual misconduct allegations against Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News host who was forced out after multimillion-dollar settlements of sexual harassment claims; Roy S. Moore, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama who lost after being accused of child molestation; and Rob Porter, his White House staff secretary who resigned after two former wives accused him of abuse... Asked if he had a message to men, the president said: “Well, I say that it’s a very scary time for young men in America when you can be guilty of something that you may not be guilty of. This is a very, very — this is a very difficult time.”
This Revolution, Too, Will Eat Its Children
Christine Blasey Ford’s credibility rests heavily on the fact that she vividly described details of the alleged assault, named witnesses, and told several people about them long before Kavanaugh’s nomination. It’s because she has been able to supply this level of corroboration that her claims deserve to be taken with the utmost seriousness, both by the media and the Senate.
But this is not nearly as true for Ramirez
.. Apply a presumption of guilt standard to the people you oppose, and a presumption of innocence standard to the people you favor. Hear something you like about someone you don’t — what used to be known as gossip — and repackage it as “news.”
.. Is it now fair game to draw moral inferences about a nominee because he went to an elite prep school, or was a member of a rowdy fraternity, or said something mean and dumb in his yearbook, or drank somewhat more than he would like to admit?
.. In an age in which our digital footprints are all-but unerasable, such an accounting will become increasingly easy to furnish, and hence to demand. There are advantages to this kind of radical transparency. But it’s hard to imagine who — except for the odd souls who are either morally stainless or utterly shameless — would want to be subjected to the ordeal.
.. To some, all this will be worth it if Kavanaugh is exposed as a sexual predator and stone-faced liar. That’s why today’s hearings are essential — and would have been helped by an F.B.I. investigation and sworn testimony from Mr. Judge. We need to get, as best as we can under imperfect circumstances, the truth of what happened between Kavanaugh and Blasey, two credible witnesses with stories to tell.
But this is not what the Kavanaugh nomination seems to be about anymore. To half the country, it’s about the future of a Supreme Court nominee, pure and simple. To the other half, it’s about that — as well as a paradigm shift in the culture, belated reparation for unequal treatment, and a battle in the service of a moral revolution.
.. it’s worth remembering that revolutions borne by high ideals have a habit of eating their children. If the price of this revolution is the subordination of ordinary fairness to abstract justice, the elevation of rumor over fact, the further debasement of journalism, the devaluation of the rights of the accused, and the complete toxification of public service, it will be a price too high.
Men, Step Up in Today’s Sexual Upheaval
Those of us who are shocked by the abuses can help foster better standards of conduct.
The revelations of the past year have come as a life-changing shock. Hard as it may be to believe, we did not know.
Let me be precise. We were aware of disrespectful behavior in the workplace—men talking over women in meetings, taking credit for their ideas and their work, paying them less than men doing the same jobs, and passing over them for assignments and promotions they deserved. As we too slowly became sensitive to these practices, we did our best to oppose them.
But we were not aware of gross indecency. I cannot imagine why a man would deliberately expose himself to a woman—at a party, in a hotel room, anywhere. But it seems that this misconduct is not rare.
.. We were even less aware of the pervasive abuse of power to coerce unwanted sex. We had heard about Hollywood’s casting couch. But those of us outside the entertainment industry had trouble distinguishing legend from fact. Because I had spent decades in academia, I knew of cases in which professors and students had entered into intimate relationships, and I supported rules that prohibited such relationships in a wide range of circumstances, even when they could reasonably be described as consensual.
But taking advantage of a hierarchical professional relationship to obtain sex is different. So is taking advantage of another’s inebriation. So is pressuring a woman to drink too much, or to ingest drugs that make resistance impossible. So is scheduling an ostensibly professional meeting in a hotel room and creating an atmosphere of intimidation and fear. So, of course, is rape, and the attempt to commit it, whether or not it is successful.
No doubt others knew what was going on and chose to overlook or suppress it. Men like me were ignorant not because we stopped our ears or averted our gaze. We were clueless because fear and the dynamics of unequal power created a zone of silence and a cone of darkness.
Several young women with whom I have discussed this column find it hard to believe that people like me were so unaware of what was going on around us. All I can say is, we were. There may well be a duty of care—which begins with active, willed awareness of our surroundings—that we failed to discharge. That we needed to be told may be an indicator of failure.
Still, had any woman ever come to my office with a story of harassment, abuse or assault, I’d like to believe that I would have reacted strongly. It never happened. Only now I can begin to understand why it did not.
But now that people like me do know, we cannot remain on the sidelines. We have a responsibility to act. What can we do? How can we become part of the solution?
First, we can help bring about a situation in which the survivors of harassment and abuse feel safer and freer to tell their stories. (I cannot say “completely” safe or free because the malefactors and their sympathizers will always find a way to harass those who come forward.) When serious allegations emerge, independent fact-finding inquiries should be standard, not optional, whether the venue is business, academia or the Senate.
Second, we can step back and allow those whose voices have been diminished to take the lead. Women constitute a growing share of the House of Representatives and many other institutions, including my own. We should support their efforts to transform these institutions.
Third and most important, we can help crystallize the current moment into new norms of conduct. For example, schools are critical norm-forming institutions, and they should instruct children and young people about appropriate conduct in classrooms, on playgrounds and at parties.
When I get to my office every morning, I look at the pictures of my grandchildren that adorn my bookshelves. In one of them, two of my little grandsons are wearing matching shirts that read “Boys will be boys: kind, caring, respectful.” This is more than a wish: It’s a prayer—my prayer. I’ll do what I can to make it a reality.
The Patriarchy Will Always Have Its Revenge
I want to burn the frat house of America to the ground.
.. I was riveted by the hearings, and Professor Hill’s testimony about how her old boss, the Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, behaved — the references to pornographic movies, to his own sexual prowess, the way he would ask her out, again and again, and not take no for an answer... It’s one thing to say #MeToo, but if I find out it’s them, too, I can picture myself hunting down the man who hurt them and dismembering him with my fingernails and burning the whole world down... When Clarence Thomas won his seat, I felt like someone had taken an eraser to the core of my being, and had rubbed a bit of me away. I felt diminished, a little less real, and, certainly, a lot less likely to be believed if I had anything to say about male colleagues... Bill Cosby was found guilty. Harvey Weinstein is going to trial. Les Moonves lost his job as chief executive of CBS, even if a CBS board member, Arnold Kopelson, said, “I don’t care if 30 more women come forward and allege this kind of stuff.”.. One by one, like bad dreams, the #MeToo men have come back from the allegations against them, having suffered — if that’s even the right word — the equivalent of a misbehaving child’s timeout... Matt Lauer is swanning around Upper East Side steakhouses, reportedly assuring fans that soon he’ll be “back on TV.” Louis C.K. returned to the stage. John Hockenberry is telling his story in Harper’s Magazine, and Jian Ghomeshi is telling his in The New York Review of Books.
.. Women aren’t supposed to want revenge any more than we’re supposed to be angry. It’s not socially approved, not attractive, not ladylike. We swallow our pain and keep our own behavior exemplary while excusing the bad behavior of others, knowing, from examples like Professor Hill’s, what could happen if we speak up, and what we stand to lose.
.. There are famous novels, canonical plays, entire genres of movies centered around men seeking revenge (the “Iliad,” “Hamlet,” every western ever). There aren’t many stories about men righting their wrongs; even fewer about women making men sorry.