Brett Kavanaugh, Jian Ghomeshi, and the Unending Apologia for Bad Men

If you came of age when I did, you might have had the inkling that the patriarchy was more of an academic concept, to be debated in the realms of theory, like transcendental idealism or possible worlds. That the major fights for women's equality, like suffrage, the right to choose, Title IX, and equal opportunity in academia and the workplace, were mostly behind us. You might have thought, or hoped, that sexism was mostly broken in jagged pieces now, soon to be swept out and brought to the trash. That the unhinged viciousness directed towards Anita Hill shortly after you turned 11 was long behind us and that progress rolled ever forward. The pink "I Believe Anita Hill" pin, after all, is in a museum now.

But you would have been wrong.

This past weekend, The Washington Post published an article naming the woman alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attacked her when they were high school students. Shortly after it went up, the sexual assault apologia was already surging, building power and momentum, cresting and then dipping only, sure as ocean is blue, to roll up again with even more force.

Following speculation about leaks of an anonymous accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, a 51-year-old psychology professor at Palo Alto University, had come forward, after initially deciding it better not to upend her life. "Why suffer through the annihilation if it's not going to matter?" she said. In the early 1980s at a house party in Maryland, Ford, then 15, alleges that Kavanaugh and his friend, now right-wing writer Mark Judge, both 17 and drunk, trapped her in a bedroom, where Kavanaugh pinned her down, grinding on her, and attempted to tear off her clothes. When she attempted to scream, he put his hand over her mouth to muffle any cries for help. She escaped to the bathroom when Judge jumped on them, toppling them over. "I thought he might inadvertently kill me," said Ford. "He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing."

Ford knew what would ensue in going public: annihilation. She provided The Washington Post with testimony from her husband, notes from her therapist from 2012 and 2013, which identified her attacker as someone who went to "an elitist boys' school" and was now among "highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington," and taken a polygraph administered by a former FBI agent. The Daily Wire dug up donations Ford had made to various Democratic causes; they came to a grand total of $72. Within hours of her coming forward, online trolls posted her address, spread made-up conspiracies about her, impersonated her online, and hacked her email. Nonsensical accusations and false equivalencies abounded. Good Christian conservative Erick Erickson—who once wrote an article called "I Stand With Clarence Thomas. To Heck With Hill"—resurrected the false accusation made by an anonymous college student at UVA in Rolling Stone. And right-wing commentator Tomi Lahren called her an "opportunist." After receiving death threats, Ford and her family were forced to move out of their home.

Kavanaugh unequivocally denied the accusations while his friend, Judge, deleted his social media accounts and claimed he has "no memory" of the incident, but refused to testify under oath. (Perhaps coincidentally, Judge's 1997 memoir was called Wasted: Takes of a Gen X Drunk and in one article he extolled "the wonderful beauty, of uncontrollable male passion.") Kavanaugh's confirmation has been riddled with credibility issues that would have drowned a female accuser, from a debt of $60,000–$200,000 that mysteriously disappeared earlier this year to the revelation of multiple false statements he made under oath, and his nomination announcement was kicked off with his making a ludicrous, obsequious statement: "No president has ever consulted more widely, or talked with more people from more backgrounds, to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination."

But many of his defenders didn't contend whether the allegations were true, but whether attempting to sexually assault a girl and muffling her screams even mattered or if it was run-of-the-mill teenage misbehavior, like binge drinking cheap beer underage or stuffing someone in a locker. "Man, I hope all the people who are making this case had spotless lives at 17, because I sure as hell didn't,"wrote Tom Nicols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, in a now-deleted tweet. "I do not understand why the loutish drunken behavior of a 17 year old high school boy has anything to tell us about the character of a 53 year old judge,"tweeted Rod Dreher, a blogger for The American Conservative. "It was drunk teenagers playing seven minutes of heaven,"tweeted Stephen Miller, a freelance writer for National Review Online. On Fox News, Ari Fleischer asked if, "high school behavior…should that deny us chances later in life?" And a spokeswoman for Judicial Crisis Network, the extremist dark money organization that paid for primetime television advertisements featuring women praising Kavanaugh, called it "rough horseplay."

This kind of sleazy whitewashing was hardly contained to conservatives revved up on a Supreme Court nomination. It had already been quite the week for sexual abuse apologia. Harper's published a 7,000-word essay by John Hockenbury, who exited NPR after accusations of sexual harassment and abuse by several female colleagues came to light, and who characterized himself as a "misguided romantic." And after the New Yorker reported that a total of 12 women had come forward alleging that CBS chairman and chief executive Les Moonves subjected them to sexual harassment, assault, and abuse, including oral rape and slamming a woman against a wall, the CBS board of directors met. "I don't care if 30 more women come forward and allege this kind of stuff," Arnold Kopelson, the 83-year-old producer of Platoon and Outbreak, told other board members, according to The New York Times. "Les is our leader and it wouldn't change my opinion of him."

As part of a cover package called "The Fall of Man," The New York Review of Books published a self-indulgent personal essay called "Reflections From a Hashtag" by Jian Ghomeshi, a once popular Canadian radio host, who was forced out after 24 women came forward with allegations of sexual assault, including nonconsensual choking and one instance in which he reportedly punched a woman in the head repeatedly until her vision blurred. In an excruciating, enraging interview with Slate's Isaac Chotiner, NYRB editor Ian Buruma defended the decision to publish Ghomeshi's 3,400-word essay, claiming "I'm no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation…The exact nature of his behavior—how much consent was involved—I have no idea, nor is it really my concern." The essay was so riddled with inaccuracies, including the nature of Ghomeshi's dismissal and the criminal charges he faced, that the site CanadaLand published a 12-point fact check on it.

What was of Buruma's concern was the "social opprobrium" for someone not convicted of a crime—in other words the victimhood of the male perpetrator, not of the 24 women who claimed he assaulted them. It had echoes of the judge who gave Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was caught sexually assaulting an unconscious woman by two graduate students, six months in prison because a harsher punishment would have "a severe impact" on his life. And of the victim's? Who cares.

Every day, it seems that the landfill mountain of abuses grows higher, with toxic monsters like Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Roy Moore, Mario Batali, Ken Friedman, Charlie Rose, Eric Schneiderman, Eric Greitens, Kevin Spacey, Mark Halperin, James Toback, Russell Simmons, Terry Richardson, and Matt Lauer finally revealed to the public what they terrified women with in private. Just as sickening is the network of the apologists surrounding and protecting them, both enforced by abusers or appearing unsolicited like haggard-faced fairy godfathers of sexual abuse. It wasn't just the Weinsteins and Moonves of the world who enforced their abuses from the heights of power in their industry. On smaller stages, too, there were the men who abused and the men who defended them.

I am reminded of when I witnessed the sexual abuse apologia in my own place of work. A few years ago, I joined a lifestyle magazine, where, a few years prior, an editor high up on the masthead had been dismissed for sexual harassment. This editor—let's call him John, since his accuser is not public—was a friend of mine. In the course of his time there, John took to drinking on the job and coming on to both staffers and interns, sometimes in ways that terrified them. I was told that interns would cry to junior editors that they didn't want to be left alone in the same room with him. It went on until finally one intern complained to her aunt, who was well connected in the industry, and she called the editor-in-chief. HR got involved, and he was gone.

John didn't tell me about any of this. And so when a different editor at a different outlet called me about hiring him, I did what John had always done for me and gave him a recommendation. That same editor also called another reference for John who worked at this lifestyle magazine during the time of his dismissal; she gave him a full appraisal, acknowledging John's talents while giving a considered account of his sexual harassment, and the circumstances of his dismissal. In the end, John got the job.

Now, you would think that that was a settled matter. That once a man is dismissed from an institution for the sexual harassment of interns with the involvement of HR, it is the end of things between him and that place. But we live in an infinite loop of sexual harassment claims, in which the same ones must be litigated over and over again, regardless of the preponderance of claims or seriousness of the charges. Eventually, the man who hired John was appointed as editor-in-chief of the lifestyle magazine where I was then working and invited him to shoot a video, to the entire staff's shock and bewilderment. Why, you might ask, would John want to appear in the very office from which he had been dismissed? Where was his shame? I suppose the same could be asked of Mario Batali, Louis CK, and Matt Lauer, who within months of being ousted attempted to make their own comebacks, placing the rest of us in a game of pervert whack-a-mole.

John and I had kept in touch over the years, but my new knowledge brought uneasiness. One night, when we ended up at the same event, we got into a heated fight in the street, in which I repeated the allegations I'd heard and he viciously attacked every other person, admitting no fault of his own. I didn't want John to be forever unemployed, to die impoverished unable to support his young daughter. I had the hope that he would own up to what he'd done and beg forgiveness, repentance, and a path to redemption. Instead he called me a cunt. He apologized the next day, but our relationship withered to the occasional text.

It wouldn't be the last of John either. Eventually, he was given a second chance at the lifestyle magazine from which he had been fired, the details of which are too prosaic to get into, and it forced four senior editors to confront our editor-in-chief in his office. He made some equivocations about second chances and a person's capacity for change; he tried to negotiate with us about John using the office space on weekends when no one was in the office. He even claimed—despite the fact that more than one editor spoke with him very specifically about ongoing sexual harassment—that he didn't know the history. The thing that stuck with me was how very little thought our editor-in-chief put into rampant, ongoing, and egregious sexual harassment if anything, at all, and the effort it took, involving at least five senior editors over the course of years, to begrudgingly bring him around to the appearance of propriety. Those interns that John had terrified were invisible to him, as was the staff who were forced to watch his attempted comeback with shock and disgust.

For some men—many more than I ever wanted to believe—their sympathies will always lie with the abusers, never the abused, regardless of the force of evidence or the credibility of the accuser, whether it's 24 women on the record, a 52-year-old university professor with therapist notes from five years ago, or an HR-backed dismissal with multiple witnesses. That holds true if you edit a small lifestyle publication or sit on the board of major media conglomerate.

For all the hand-wringing about #MeToo going too far, our three branches of government are diseased with these grotesque forms of consequence-free misogyny: 16 women accused our grab-em-by-the-pussy president of sexual harassment; Republican senators are refusing to bring in the main witness, Judge, of the alleged attack to testify under oath; and our Supreme Court may very well soon have two out of nine sitting justices with either credible sexual harassment or assault allegations, as well as instances of perjury, to their names. These men, who have lived their lives with defenders squealing that there should never be consequence for their predations and never considered the pain and annihilation they wrought on others along the way, could be deciding votes on whether or not women are sentient beings deserving of autonomy over the course of their lives.

As a lawyer close to the White House told Politico about Ford, "If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried." Well, perhaps they should be.