No, you\u2019re not \u201casking questions,\u201d you\u2019re using rape apologist arguments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
filed 04 May 2020 in<\/em> 2020 ELECTION<\/a> (currentaffairs.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much ink has been spilled over the concept of \u201cgaslighting\u201d to the point of nearly rendering the term meaningless. Mitch McConnell is gaslighting the Democrats<\/a> on the stimulus bill; Donald Trump is gaslighting America<\/a>. We are all gaslit now, all the time. Last year, Lauren Theisen wrote an excellent piece<\/a> in Deadspin<\/em> (RIP beloved Deadspin) <\/em>explaining why most usages of the term \u201cgaslight\u201d in political discourse don\u2019t make sense (the word \u201clie,\u201d Theisen points out, is usually more accurate). To overuse \u201cgaslight\u201d is to cheapen its meaning, and its hideous, long-lasting effects. Gaslighting, in psychological terms, is when someone tries to convince you that your experience of reality is incorrect. You are told that an event which occurred, which you know<\/em> occurred, which you remember vividly and horribly occurring\u2026didn\u2019t actually happen at all. The fragmented details that you remember\u2014some sharp as broken glass, some blurry as a bad photograph\u2014are wrong. Your memory is wrong. You <\/em>are wrong. Acts of gaslighting can seem, on their own, relatively minor, but the cumulative psychological damage is often horrific. After all, if you\u2019re wrong about this event that you know <\/em>occurred, then maybe you\u2019re wrong about a lot, maybe everything. What else do you misremember? Who else have you falsely accused? Can you even trust your perceptions at all? Maybe the horrible event in your memory is sort of real, but exaggerated. Maybe it did<\/em> happen, but it was really your fault. Maybe you made it all up, you stupid bitch.<\/em> Very often, gaslighting follows after incidents of assault and harassment like an infection in a wound. Sometimes, it can arguably be worse than the event itself; it helps keep the injury open, unable to heal. This is the point in the essay where I am supposed to tell you all about my own experiences of harassment, abuse, and gaslighting. As a woman writer, I am required to spill my guts so you can do haruspicy on them and discover if I\u2019ve had the appropriately titillating experiences, and the acceptably tragic credentials. But I don\u2019t feel like talking about myself today. And in none of the situations can I prove what happened, for any of the discrete events I have endured. I can offer no witnesses except myself. Tara Reade has witnesses\u2014multiple people she told, contemporaneously, about her experiences of being sexually harassed and assaulted by Joe Biden in 1993. As many people have pointed out ad nauseam, Reade has more corroboration than Christine Blasey Ford ever did, when she accused federal appellate judge Brett Kavanaugh of attempting to rape her when they were both teenagers in 1982. (In her testimony before Congress, Blasey Ford said<\/a>, \u201cI had never told the details to anyone, the specific details, until May 2012 during a Couple\u2019s Counseling session.\u201d) But frankly, it doesn\u2019t fucking matter. It didn\u2019t matter for Blasey Ford; people didn\u2019t believe her, and Kavanaugh was nominated to the highest court in the land. There could be live video evidence of Joe Biden assaulting Tara Reade, taken by some 1990s CCTV camera, and many critics would simply peruse it like the Zapruder film. What was she wearing? What was her body language? Heels, but no stockings? Uh-huh, you know what THAT means. Meeting him alone like that, a powerful man? I mean, what did she think<\/em> would happen? What\u2019s at issue here isn\u2019t Truth, or Facts. It\u2019s the old feminist question of whether women are people. My colleague Nathan J. Robinson has done a heroic job of trying to support Tara Reade<\/a> and make sure her story gets heard<\/a>. Nathan\u2019s a nice man, but he\u2019s still a man, and he\u2019s naively convinced that if people just hear the truth they will understand that Joe Biden may in fact be a rapist, and then justice will somehow be done. (In 2016, Nathan also thought<\/a> the release of the \u201cpussy tape\u201d would be enough to sink Trump\u2019s campaign. Oh well.) I have told Nathan on multiple occasions that while his efforts to help Tara Reade are certainly chivalrous, they\u2019re ultimately going to be useless, because too few people fucking give a shit. Everybody already knows that Joe Biden is a notorious creep. It\u2019s a punchline. The Daily Show <\/em>joked about his gropery in 2015<\/a>. Former Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores<\/a> has written that Biden planted a \u201clong slow kiss\u201d on her against her will. Female Secret Service agents complained that he swam naked<\/a> in front of them even though it made them uncomfortable. Many people have known about Biden\u2019s behavior for years, and they don\u2019t care, because this country doesn\u2019t care about women. It pretends to, sometimes, for political convenience, or for the occasional photo op. In photo ops, on multiple occasions, Joe Biden has sniffed the hair of women and little girls. There\u2019s plenty of photographic<\/a> and video<\/a> evidence of this. At least seven<\/a> women beside Tara Reade have accused Biden of inappropriate behavior. The problem isn\u2019t that people aren\u2019t AWARE. Most people are well aware. It\u2019s just not important to them. Most of the time, there\u2019s no reward for telling the truth. It\u2019s much safer to lie. It\u2019s much easier to equivocate, and tease apart actions until they are entirely free of context, and say \u201cwell-why-didn\u2019t-she-just\u201d\u2014as if we all do, at all times, everything that we just should<\/em>. Incidentally, this is a common thread you may find both in news articles and in arts criticism; a certain distaste for people acting like people<\/em>, rather than how they should<\/em>. Many of us do not want people to be people. And in particular, we do not want women<\/em> to be people. Men in both art and life can be \u201cflawed\u201d\u2014and their flaws are admirable, they make men \u201ccomplex.\u201d Women do not get to be complex, although our bodies, lives, happiness, careers, and psychological integrity are considered reasonable sacrifices for the maintenance of this supposed masculine \u201ccomplexity,\u201d which as far as I can tell is something like a machine that turns men into a sheet of behavioral quirks that can be stamped \u201cforgiven.\u201d Biden\u2019s family died. He likes ice cream. He\u2019s Obama\u2019s friend! He\u2019s forgiven. Women are not only un<\/em>complex and un<\/em>forgiven; we are in fact automatically presumed guilty. We are permanent potential sites of other people\u2019s guilt, and the ruination of their (<\/em>but not our) <\/em>lives. Working women, from hotel maids to factory workers to nannies to actresses to Senate staffers, are expected to conduct themselves as if they might, at any moment, be harassed and assaulted. If they fail in their sacred duty to protect their honor from harassment and assault, then they might have to flay themselves open and display their wounds for an audience (whether a manager or HR or the public) who will examine every detail with a microscope for imperfections, greeting every painful peeling back of tissue with the \u201cwell-why-didn\u2019t-you-justs\u201d of the comfortably righteous. The reluctance to report that so many women experience tells you a lot about the horror of reporting. Assault and harassment generally happen in private, or in a closed environment where any eyewitnesses that might exist would be complicit or afraid to come forward. This is not an accident. Harassers and abusers generally do what they can get away with. According to Reade, Biden escalated his behavior from \u201cbasically put[ting] his hands on me, put[ting] his hands on my shoulder, run[ning] his fingers on my neck\u201d to full-on digital penetration. This is a common behavior known as \u201cgrooming<\/a>.\u201d It\u2019s a way of pushing boundaries, seeing what can be allowed, what the victim\u2014this nonperson without agency\u2014can be forced to accept. In some ways, the escalation from touching to penetration resembles a seduction. This too is deliberate, and is done for the sake of plausible deniability. She didn\u2019t stop me when I did x, or y; that means she wanted it, or rather that means she\u2019ll never be able to prove she DIDN\u2019T<\/em> want it.<\/em> Tara Reade is a human being, not a perfect victim, or a perfect person. Her typing style is classic boomer cringe. She kept a silly blog in which she praised Putin. Sometimes, she gets into Twitter arguments with disingenuous people whom she\u2019d be better off ignoring. She wants to be believed, despite all the people who have a lot<\/em> of money and potential career advancement riding on her not being believed. She\u2019s received death threats<\/a>, as Blasey Ford did, as women who accuse powerful men almost invariably do. Tara Reade is a hell of a lot braver than most of us. The people who are not brave, who are cowardly gaslighting assholes, are people like former prosecutor Michael J. Stern. In a widely circulated op-ed<\/a> for USA Today <\/em>(I know, they have content besides ads and easy crosswords, I was shocked too), Stern insists he was reluctant to write the column, claiming \u201cI do not want it to be used as a guidebook to dismantling legitimate allegations of sexual assault.\u201d It\u2019s really a shame that USA Today<\/em> put a gun to Stern\u2019s head and forced him to write this column, because many of his arguments\u2014written in the kind of dispassionate \u201cI\u2019m just doing Upholding The Law\u201d prose that has ruined countless lives\u2014make it essentially impossible for other sexual assault and harassment survivors to be taken seriously. Ah, but Stern casts himself as a heroic defender of #MeToo. The subhead of his op-ed reads, \u201cIf we must blindly accept every allegation of sexual assault, the #MeToo movement is just a hit squad. And it\u2019s too important to be no more than that.\u201d Interestingly enough, just last year Stern produced a different column in defense of Biden called \u201cLiving with other people means accepting some unwanted touching\u2014and Joe Biden<\/a>.\u201d In the column, he suggested that the #MeToo movement was going too far (he\u2019s for <\/em>it, he insists, just not too much<\/em>) when assault allegations \u201cdemand we assess the propriety of every physical contact by the feelings of the person touched.\u201d I\u2019m not saying that if you saw Michael J. Stern on the street that you should flick him on the back of the head, and then tell him that his feelings about the propriety of the action are invalid; I\u2019m just saying it would be an interesting experiment, in theory. As a defender of #MeToo who really believes in the importance of the movement, but also believes that living with other people requires some unwanted touching, I\u2019m sure he\u2019d understand you testing the boundaries. Without further ado, let\u2019s run through Stern\u2019s terrible, gaslighting arguments one by one, and if there\u2019s anything left of him and his career by the end of it, we\u2019ll launch it into the sun. Stern cites the fact that \u201cReade waited 27 years to publicly report her allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her.\u201d Others have also criticized the \u201ctiming,\u201d wondering why Reade is coming out \u201cnow.\u201d The most concise way to answer this would be in the form of an Onion <\/em>headline: \u201cPeople Who Consistently Tear Women Apart When They Report Sexual Assault Surprised That Women Delay Reporting Sexual Assault.\u201d Extensive delays in publicly reporting serious cases of abuse are very common, especially when the abuser is a prominent person. Blasey Ford waited 36 years to accuse Kavanaugh. Leigh Corfman, who accused former judge and politician Roy Moore of assaulting her when she was 14 years old, waited 38 years to come forward. According to the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape<\/a>, \u201cit is important to remember why victims of sexual assault, especially when victimized by celebrities, wait to report, if they choose to report at all\u2026 Victims often struggle with fears that other people will judge, blame and disbelieve them.\u201d Reade has come forward, and people don\u2019t believe her<\/em>. She has, as I mentioned above, received death threats. The same thing happens to most<\/a> women<\/a> who accuse powerful men<\/a> of sexual assault. In his op-ed, Stern himself admits that survivors often keep their stories secret for years. \u201cI understand that victims of sexual assault often do not come forward immediately because recounting the most violent and degrading experience of their lives, to a bunch of strangers, is the proverbial insult to injury,\u201d he writes. But Reade did not keep it \u201csecret\u201d for 27 years. She didn\u2019t tell strangers, because telling strangers can be awful, as Stern says. Instead, she told multiple friends and family members. Reade told the full story to her mother, who called the Larry King <\/em>show in 1993 to ask for advice (more on this in a bit.) She told part of the story to her younger brother, Colin. He confirms that their mother knew the whole thing, and that he\u2019d simply been told about the \u201cincident with the gym bag.\u201d Colin said<\/a>,<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cFirst my mom told me about it. She was up in arms. And I was like I don\u2019t know what happened. I think my sister was trying to spare me\u2026. I remember my sister being specifically asked to handle a gym bag\u2026 And there was a moment he had her up against the wall and made a hand move under her clothes.\u201d<\/em>*<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Colin says he discouraged Tara from going to the police at the time (in part, he now says, because he didn\u2019t understand how serious it was). It\u2019s difficult for a victim to talk about this kind of assault with anyone, and very common to not tell the full story even to family, and especially not to male family members. Reade also told a friend, a woman who has asked for her name not to be disclosed because she doesn\u2019t want to have her career ruined (but why don\u2019t women report assault, it\u2019s just like, so weird!) This friend\u2014<\/em>a fellow Senate staffer at the time, working in Ted Kennedy\u2019s office\u2014<\/em>says that Reade called her immediately after the assault happened in 1993 and told her about it exactly <\/em>as she\u2019s telling it today. On The Katie Halper Show<\/em>, you can listen to a full interview<\/a> with Reade\u2019s anonymous friend. Current Affairs <\/em>has interviewed the friend as well. She claims she remembers what happened very clearly, and that she and Reade have talked about it over the years. She even says that she discouraged Reade from coming forward, because she was worried about Reade\u2019s safety, and given the death threats she was clearly right. (But why don\u2019t women report assault???) The friend told Current Affairs:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have not enjoyed knowing this about someone [Biden] who for eight years was in the news as VP. Even in this campaign\u2026 every time I see him\u2026 I can\u2019t\u2026 I mean I wasn\u2019t in the hallway, but I still can\u2019t look at him without thinking of that\u2026 She should have been safe. She should never have had anything close to this even happen.<\/em>\u201d But wait, there\u2019s more. Reade also told her neighbor, Lynda LaCasse, in either 1995 or 1996. LaCasse, who happens to be a Biden supporter despite this, told<\/a> Business Insider <\/em>that the claims Reade is making now are totally consistent with what she has been saying for 25 years. LaCasse described<\/a> the conversation to Democracy Now:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI was having a moment\u2014I was outside, and I had just received some papers, and I was upset about them. And she came over. And we were talking about violence, because I had experienced violence myself. And she started telling me about Joe Biden and what he had done. And basically, she told me that he put his\u2014he put her up against a wall, and he put his hand up her skirt, and he put his fingers inside her. And she was very distraught, and she was very upset, and she was crying. And that\u2019s how that conversation happened. We were just sitting on my front stoop in front of my apartment.\u201d <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Asked whether Reade should be believed, LaCasse replied, \u201cAbsolutely. I believe her 100%.\u201d There\u2019s more corroboration: Lorraine Sanchez, who worked with Reade in the office of a California state senator in the 1990s, \u201crecalls Reade complaining at the time that her former boss in Washington, DC, had sexually harassed her, and that she had been fired after raising concerns.\u201d Yet another friend<\/a> \u201cconfirmed that Reade had a conversation with them in 2007 or 2008 about allegedly experiencing sexual harassment from Biden while working in his Senate office.\u201d And the New York Times <\/em>spoke to two interns who worked under Tara and confirmed that her supervisory duties were abruptly stopped. Tara alleges that when she complained about harassment she was retaliated against, stripped of her duties, and pushed out of the job. Biden and his surrogates have not offered an alternate explanation for why these interns would remember Tara being removed. So Reade told multiple people at the time, and another person a few years later, and former coworkers who didn\u2019t know her that well confirm other details\u2026but there\u2019s one person Reade clearly didn\u2019t tell, and that\u2019s USA Today<\/em> op-ed columnist Michael J. Stern. Ah, well. Why-didn\u2019t-she-just\u2026<\/em> Okay fine, but why come forward publicly now? Reade says she didn\u2019t speak up in 2008 because she liked Obama and didn\u2019t want to hurt him. According to her friend, Reade said \u201cvice presidents never get to do anything anyway,\u201d and Reade herself said<\/a> she\u2019s okay coming forward now that her \u201cdaughter\u2019s grown.\u201d In April 2019<\/a>, she spoke to a local California newspaper in order to corroborate Lucy Flores\u2019 allegation of inappropriate touching (Flores was of course also attacked as a liar.) For that April 2019 interview, Reade only said that Biden harassed her, not that he had harassed AND assaulted her. She claims that the reporter made her feel \u201cshut down\u201d and she didn\u2019t want to tell him the full story. (But why don\u2019t women report assault???? I ask because I am an android from Mars, and this is my first contact with human behavior.) Since the time she first came forward, Reade has indicated several times that there was more than she told in her initial interview. In October 2019, she tweeted<\/a> that the harassment was \u201cnot even the full story. In January, she wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have not told the whole story of what occurred between Joe Biden and myself.<\/em><\/strong> After the threats last time, I will not tell it here either. I was told back then that if I continued to speak out, I would be \u201cfucking destroyed.\u201d <\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n (BUT WHY DON\u2019T WOMEN REPORT ASSAULT????) Stern brings up the \u201ctiming\u201d issue again later in his piece, and I will have more to say on it then. Reade has been accused<\/a> by Stern\u2014<\/em>and journalist Amanda Marcotte, and others\u2014<\/em>of \u201cchanging her story.\u201d This is because, as I mentioned above, when Reade first went public she told the press only that she was harassed, not that she was harassed AND assaulted. Again, she claims that the (male) reporter she originally talked to made her feel uncomfortable and \u201cshut down.\u201d Stern, however, finds it \u201chard to believe a reporter would discourage this kind of scoop.\u201d He\u2019s got a point: I mean, can you imagine that a man <\/em>spoke to a woman<\/em> and made her feel dismissed and uncomfortable? Can you believe that a woman then held back because she was worried she wouldn\u2019t be believed, when women in her particular situation are rarely believed?? Has ANY man EVER spoken to a woman this way??? Has it maybe happened literally every other goddamn day in the life of every woman in the entire goddamn United States of America??????? But this wasn\u2019t just any man. This was a reporter<\/em>. Why would a reporter <\/em>turn down a scoop<\/em>? This makes sense, if you think reporters are like, hardboiled gumshoes who smoke cigars and type on typewriters. But reporters are not movie characters; they\u2019re human beings like everybody else. A woman told this reporter a story; he probably thought she was nuts, and making it up, and made her feel that way. I cannot emphasize just how often this sort of thing happens to women, in approximately every context. To name just one example, there\u2019s a long, documented history<\/a> of women going to doctors with reports of significant pain and being ignored, because women are held to be inaccurate reporters of their own experiences. \u201cBut doctors are professionals,\u201d Stern would probably insist. \u201cThey would NEVER discourage a patient from describing their symptoms. They would WANT to make an accurate diagnosis.\u201d Well okay my dude, tell that to anyone who\u2019s ever had endometriosis. Or try talking to a woman who\u2019s had to go to a car mechanic. \u201cGetting taken seriously by professionals\u201d is not a luxury that women are often afforded. Interviewing people about sexual assault isn\u2019t easy. It takes a sensitive inquisitor to get a survivor to tell their story. So it doesn\u2019t seem at all <\/em>implausible that someone with a difficult, upsetting story wouldn\u2019t open up immediately, especially to a reporter who came across as dismissive. As abuse expert Professor Anthony Zenkus of the Columbia School of Social Work wrote<\/a> in an op-ed about the case, this is a very common pattern: Victims disclose what happened to them slowly, not all at once. One would think that Stern, as a former prosecutor, would know this. As for why Stern\u2019s disbelief that Reade struggled for a year afterward to find a journalist who would take her seriously\u2014I don\u2019t know man, it\u2019s like, people always <\/em>take women so seriously when they report assault, especially when it\u2019s politically inconvenient<\/a>???? I can\u2019t believe more news outlets and victims\u2019 rights organizations, especially those with ties<\/a> to the Democratic party and\/or major donors to the Democratic party, wouldn\u2019t take a claim against Joe Biden seriously. Again, I am<\/em> an android from Mars, and this is my first time dealing with human beings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Reade claims that at the time, she reported the harassment to several of Biden\u2019s top lieutenants including \u201cMarianne Baker, Biden\u2019s executive assistant, as well as to top aides Dennis Toner and Ted Kaufman. All three Biden staffers recently,\u201d says Stern, \u201ctold The New York Times<\/em> that she made no complaint to them<\/a>.\u201d They deny it \u201cfirmly,\u201d which Stern insists is significant. Now of course, if Reade is telling the truth, then these three former managers would be implicated in the situation. After all, they would have failed to take her claims seriously at the time, and are therefore complicit in covering up sexual harassment. Gee whiz, I wonder if they might have some incentive to say that Reade is lying! This doesn\u2019t prove on its own, of course, that Reade is telling the truth<\/em>; it just means we can hardly take Biden\u2019s old lieutenants\u2019 claims seriously, given that confirming her story would mean significant reputational damage to themselves. Now, I managed to figure this all out, even though I don\u2019t have a law degree. Stern used to be a prosecutor. I have some concerns about his cases. Actually, I have concerns about many prosecutors\u2019 cases. The fact that Stern would take the word of Biden\u2019s managerial staff, without the slightest hint of skepticism, is unfortunately on par with the standard in his former profession. It\u2019s well<\/a> documented that criminal prosecutors are notoriously bad<\/a> at keeping track of which police officers are chronic liars<\/a>, and to the extent prosecutors become aware that officers are lying to them, this information is often purposely ignored or even buried<\/a> to the detriment of the innocent. While there may be such a thing as a \u201cgood\u201d prosecutor\u2014the jury remains out on this one\u2014the truth is that a worrying number of them seem unable to imagine, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, that the \u201cgood guys\u201d might make statements in service of covering either their own asses or that of their bosses. It turns out that cops\u2014and prosecutors\u2014are human beings too, not heroes in an allegorical movie about good and evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stern is suspicious that Reade doesn\u2019t have a copy of the written complaint she made against Biden. On The Katie Halper<\/em> show, Reade described filing the complaint:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cit was this little tiny office and you go up and there was literally a clipboard and I filled out a form and someone kind of was just out[side] the window, but it was weird and it wasn\u2019t very confidential and it was just odd. So I filled out the form and I know it existed. They took it and then I don\u2019t know what happened to it. I\u2019ve tried to track that form down and I was told it was probably returned to Biden\u2019s office. So it\u2019s an archival material<\/em>.\u201d Yes, Reade doesn\u2019t have a copy because she didn\u2019t make a copy. (Why-didn\u2019t-she-just\u2026)<\/em> The Associated Press<\/em> has made a great deal of hay about the missing complaint, saying that it\u2019s a \u201ckey part\u201d of the accusation, and Biden was questioned about it extensively on Morning Joe<\/em>. Biden has refused to let his papers be searched for the complaint, and has said it should be searched for in the National Archives. On May 1, the National Archives actually<\/a> came out and said this record would not be with them. But the next day, Politico<\/em> reported<\/a> that \u201cSenate rules<\/a> governing the preservation of documents suggested they\u2019re held by the General Services Administration \u2026 which said the documents are located at the National Archives.\u201d On the other hand, Donald Ritchie, a respected former official Senate historian who worked in the Senate in the 1990s, said<\/a> the documents would likely have been returned to Biden\u2019s Senate office, in which case\u2014if the complaint still exists and hasn\u2019t been destroyed\u2014it\u2019s in the Delaware papers. For what it\u2019s worth, this game of archives seems to be a lose-lose for Biden. If the records are at the University of Delaware, then Biden may have intentionally directed people to search a place he knew the file couldn\u2019t be found, which sure suggests that he has something to hide. But if the records are <\/em>at the National Archives, and he simply wasn\u2019t aware, then he has given the media permission to dig into the records to corroborate Reade\u2019s allegations. Incidentally, if the document is found, it\u2019s proof that Kaufman was lying when he told the New York Times<\/em>, \u201cI did not know [Reade]. She did not come to me. If she had, I would have remembered her.\u201d Or, maybe, he really just doesn\u2019t remember. Human memory is fungible, after all! A number of people have made further hay over the fact that Reade has said the complaint only details the harassment, not the assault. This is not remotely surprising to anyone who read or listened to Reade\u2019s interview on the Katie Halper Show<\/em>, because Reade said the complaint was specifically and ONLY about the sexual harassment, not the assault. \u201cI did not complain formally about the other piece of what happened\u2026But I talked about what was witnessed, and the general atmosphere of the office, the way I was treated. Because I would see him at meetings and he would basically put his hands on me, put his hands on my shoulder, run his fingers on my neck\u2026 He was very handsy with a lot of people. But like I have said in the press before, it made me feel like an inanimate object. I didn\u2019t feel like a person. He didn\u2019t make conversation with me or talk with me or ask me anything relevant. It was just definitely that kind of vibe. So it was uncomfortable.\u201d<\/em> Incidentally, I don\u2019t quite know how to explain to people that sexual harassment is also bad and unacceptable and should be disqualifying<\/em>. I think I might start by saying that sexual harassment is also<\/em> bad and unacceptable and should be disqualifying.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Stern faults Reade for not being able to remember the exact date and location of the assault. You might recall that Christine Blasey Ford couldn\u2019t remember the exact date and location of her alleged attempted rape either. You might also recall that, while defending Kavanaugh at a campaign rally, Donald Trump similarly blamed Blasey Ford for not remembering every detail of her traumatic experience. He mimicked<\/a> her: \u201cI don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t know\u2026 What neighborhood was it? I don\u2019t know. Where\u2019s the house? I don\u2019t know. Upstairs? Downstairs? Where was it\u2014I don\u2019t know. But I had one beer, that\u2019s the only thing I remember.\u201d But contrary to what Stern and Trump imply, it\u2019s typical for victims of traumatic situations to forget certain kinds of details. As Richard McNally, a Harvard psychologist and author of the book Remembering Trauma,<\/em> told NPR<\/a> in September 2018, the part of the brain that encodes memories goes in heightened mode in moments of high stress\u2014creating vivid memories of the event. At the same time, \u201cattention is focused on the most central features of the experience.\u201d This explains why Blasey Ford could not pinpoint the exact date or location of the assault. McNally goes on to explain, \u201c[The details] were forgotten because they were never encoded \u2026 When somebody has an experience such as this, they\u2019re not necessarily saying, \u2018I better get down the address.\u2019 They\u2019re preoccupied with trying to escape this terrifying experience.\u201d When you listen to Reade\u2019s interview with Katie Halper, one of the things that makes the accusation plausible is that Reade forgets the kinds of things people often forget in these situations and remembers the things people often remember. Human memory is not perfect; human beings, I may have mentioned earlier, are not perfect. It absolutely tracks that Reade would remember details like the gym bag but not the date. The fact that Stern used to be a prosecutor, yet seems unaware that it\u2019s super common for victims to forget specific dates like this, even (and especially) the dates of horrific assaults, is really kind of disturbing!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stern suggests there is an inconsistency between Reade initially saying she felt \u201cpushed out\u201d of her job in retaliation, and later saying she was \u201cfired.\u201d But let\u2019s look at what Reade is actually saying. She claims that after she made her complaint, she steadily had her duties taken away from her, and was moved to a windowless office. Her supervisors found fault with her for no good reason, and eventually she was told she should look for other jobs. This sounds a lot like being retaliated against\u2014which is illegal\u2014and \u201cpushed out\u201d in a way that isn\u2019t very different from being fired. (Also, getting fired can be embarrassing, so using softer language early on to describe retaliation and firing is neither unreasonable nor contradictory.) Incidentally, this is the exact same controversy that erupted over Elizabeth Warren\u2019s claim<\/a> that she was fired for being pregnant, when it seems like maybe she was technically only \u201cpushed out\u201d and quit. Yet again, Stern is baffled by something that happens to women\u2014and other working people\u2014literally all the fucking time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2017, Reade \u201cliked\u201d tweets praising Biden\u2019s work on women\u2019s issues, such as the Violence Against Women Act, and even issued a few tweets of her own praising him. Stern says \u201cIt is bizarre that Reade would publicly laud Biden for combating the very thing she would later accuse him of doing to her.\u201d For one, nobody likes the \u201clike\u201d police. For another, human beings (again, I think I might have mentioned this previously) are complicated and imperfect. Reade had once admired Biden; she told Katie Halper that initially she \u201clooked up to [Biden], he was like my father\u2019s age. He was this champion of women\u2019s rights in my eyes.\u201d) When someone is violated by a person they admire their feelings and reactions can be very mixed. Reade has spoken movingly of the contradictory feelings she has about Biden: On the one hand, she admires a lot of his work, on the other, she can\u2019t forget what he did to her. One thing Reade\u2019s friend told Current Affairs<\/em> is that the friend has been frustrated by Reade\u2019s persistent attempts to find the good in the worst people. Reade, said the friend, is a forgiving sort of person. My colleague Vanessa A. Bee recently made an excellent point about how complicated victims\u2019 relationships to their abusers can be. She wrote<\/a>, \u201cas we speak, people are sheltering in place with romantic partners who physically hurt them on a daily basis!\u201d And people often maintain contact with abusers who are not romantic partners. When Anita Hill came forward to accuse Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991, Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming said during her hearing, \u201cWell, it just seems so incredible to me that you would not only have visited with him twice after that period and after he was no longer able to manipulate you or to destroy you, that you then not only visited with him but took him to the airport, and then 11 times contacted him.\u201d That\u2019s right, Anita Hill had significant contact with Clarence Thomas after<\/em> he allegedly harassed her. If you think that\u2019s abnormal, then you\u2019re in for a rude awakening. (By the way, it was Joe Biden, as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman, who presided over Hill\u2019s hearing in 1991. Hill has since claimed<\/a> that Biden \u201cinappropriately weighted Thomas\u2019s presumed innocence and forced [Hill] to go into details that \u2018disgusted\u2019 her.\u201d In early 2019, as Biden was preparing his presidential run, he called Anita Hill to \u201cexpress regret.\u201d Hill did not accept his apology. She told<\/a> the New York Times<\/em>, \u201cI cannot be satisfied by simply saying \u2018I\u2019m sorry for what happened to you\u2026 I will be satisfied when I know there is real change and real accountability and real purpose.\u201d) Most people who experience sexual violence know<\/a> the perpetrator personally, whether as a boyfriend or a boss or a friend. What this can often mean, in practical terms, is that people will continue to interact with people who have severely hurt them. But, as Stern should know, the law understands that relationships can be both intimate and <\/em>violent. This is precisely<\/em> why several states\u2014including California<\/a>, where Stern currently practices law\u2014recognize spousal rape as a separate criminal offense. Maybe, since liking those tweets in 2017, Reade suddenly developed a severe, irrational dislike of Biden, and made this wild false accusation, first of harassment and then assault. It\u2019s plausible\u2026but unless she has a time machine she couldn\u2019t have gone back to 1993 to tell her mother, brother, and multiple other witnesses. Does Reade have a time machine??? Stern doesn\u2019t say. What\u2019s perhaps more plausible is that Reade disliked that Biden digitally penetrated her, but \u201cliked\u201d that he made one non-objectionable post. And who knows, maybe she wouldn\u2019t have clicked on the little button, had she known that ghouls like Stern would use this to discredit her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stern says that \u201cby this January, Reade was all in<\/a> for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders,\u201d and \u201cdespite her effusive 2017 praise for Biden\u2019s efforts on behalf of women, after pledging her support to Sanders, Reade turned on Biden and contradicted all she said before.\u201d But it\u2019s inaccurate to say that she turned on Biden \u201cafter\u201d she began supporting Sanders. (So inaccurate that USA Today <\/em>should issue a correction; they can squeeze it in between the crosswords for children and the ads for toe creams.) Reade initially supported Elizabeth Warren, and only switched to Sanders this winter when Warren\u2019s candidacy was on life support. She first accused Biden publicly in April 2019\u2014and of course, she\u2019s been telling people about it privately since 1993. Clearly, a disgruntled Bernie Bro playing the long con\u2014a very long con, as once again, in order to tell people about the harassment and assault back in 1993 she would need a time machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, I\u2019m not playing \u201cThe Russians Are Coming\u201d\u2014it\u2019s 2020, not 1980. It seems like Reade had a phase where she got really into Russian history and culture, and wrote some stupid things about Putin before she really knew much about him. It\u2019s cool that when women come forward to report assault, every detail of their lives, including dumb blog posts, become worthy of dissection. I REMAIN VERY CONFUSED AS TO WHY WOMEN DON\u2019T REPORT ASSAULT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why make the whole story public NOW, when Biden is poised to become the Democratic nominee? It\u2019s precisely because h<\/em>e\u2019s about to be the nominee. As Anita Hill has since confirmed<\/a>, the urgency of the nomination had everything to do with the timing of her allegation. When Senator Alan Simpson asked why she hadn\u2019t come forward earlier, Hill answered<\/a>, \u201cThat is a very good question, and I am sure that I cannot answer that to your satisfaction \u2026 I was afraid of retaliation. I was afraid of damage to my professional life.\u201d (But why don\u2019t women just report\u2026sigh.) Christine Blasey Ford also came forward when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated to the Supreme Court. She was asked why she had waited until that moment, and many liberal publications admired her \u201cperfect explanation.\u201d<\/a> Blasey Ford said she \u201chad a sense of urgency to relay the information [of the assault] to the Senate and the president.\u201d In other words, it was information they needed to know before they chose to give Kavanaugh a hell of a lot of power. (The Senate and the president of course chose to confirm Kavanaugh regardless, even though<\/a> his story was full of holes and even outright lies. As I might have mentioned, this country hates women.) The time you would run the terrible risk of publicizing what a powerful man did to you is exactly and only <\/em>before he is about to have life-or-death control over an entire country. It\u2019s the only time the risk is worthwhile. Coming forward in a situation like this takes an almost unfathomable amount of courage. It\u2019s no wonder Stern has trouble understanding it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1993, the month Reade left Biden\u2019s office, her mother called Larry King Live<\/em> to say that her daughter had \u201cproblems\u201d with a prominent senator that were worthy of going to the press. The call is on tape, and you can watch it<\/a>. But, as Stern points out, Reade\u2019s mother didn\u2019t go into any details. \u201cGiven that the call was anonymous,\u201d Stern writes, \u201cReade\u2019s mother should have felt comfortable relaying the worst version of events.\u201d Oh really, my dude? On TV? To Larry fucking King? Because that\u2019s something people do: call up Larry King and divulge the most intimate horrific details of a family member\u2019s life, rather than speak euphemistically when describing an assault by a powerful politician. Obviously, if you want to be believed, you wouldn\u2019t use words like \u201cproblems\u201d; you would describe the attack in graphic detail until Larry\u2019s producer cuts you off. That\u2019s the way to be taken seriously. That\u2019s the way for a mother to defend her daughter. Just completely normal human stuff. Again, since I\u2019m an android, I might be a little confused here. Stern also cites the fact that on the call, Tara\u2019s mother says they did not go public in part out of \u201crespect\u201d for Biden. \u201cI\u2019ve never met a woman who stayed silent out of \u2018respect\u2019 for the man who sexually assaulted her,\u201d Stern comments. I am unclear at this point whether Stern has ever met a single woman. Also, any confusion here is easily resolved by listening to Reade\u2019s heartbreaking interview. She told Halper about how difficult it was to even admit that someone she respected this much had done something terrible to her. Real human beings (again, pretty sure I said this) are complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Stern dismisses the various people who corroborate Reade\u2019s story\u2014her brother didn\u2019t know or didn\u2019t tell the whole story, Reade did inform several people, but maybe she made it up and told the same story consistently for decades just for funsies idk. Reade only told her neighbor in 1995 or 1996. Of the neighbor, Stern says: \u201cBut Reade alleged she was assaulted in 1993. Telling a friend two or three years later is not contemporaneous. Legal references to a contemporaneous recounting typically refer to hours or days\u2014the point being that facts are still fresh in a person\u2019s mind and the statement is more likely to be accurate.\u201d Ok fine, so Reade jumped the time machine back to 1996, not 1993. How does the time machine work? Does it have a flux capacitor?<\/p>\n\n\n\n GEE WHIZ I DON\u2019T KNOW WHY MORE WOMEN DON\u2019T COME FORWARD. IT SEEMS LIKE A JOLLY GOOD FUCKING TIME. Biden has been accused of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior by a number of women. Stern acknowledges this, but points out that Reade\u2019s is the only allegation of outright assault. This is fine, because women love to come forward and report powerful men who have assaulted them, because they get taken so seriously. And besides, everyone knows that a serial harasser, groper, and line-stepper can never ALSO be a rapist. We know this because [404 EVIDENCE NOT FOUND]. Relatedly, only one person, the writer E. Jean Carroll, is on the record having accused<\/a> Trump of rape. (His ex-wife Ivana Trump has now retracted<\/a> her allegation of spousal rape.) I suppose that by Stern\u2019s standard, this means Trump is also presumably innocent. And may I remind you that EVEN IF TARA READE WAS ONLY SEXUALLY HARASSED AND NOT ASSAULTED IT WOULDN\u2019T MATTER BECAUSE SEXUAL HARASSMENT IS A DEAL-BREAKER ANYWAY. There is one good reason to disbelieve Tara Reade, and that is if you believe women\u2019s narratives should conform to the political needs of men, and if they don\u2019t, those offending women should be gaslit out of existence. Tara Reade is inconvenient. She was gauche enough to accuse a Democrat and not a Republican. She keeps a weird blog and forgives people too much. She didn\u2019t report everything all at once. She liked Biden\u2019s tweets, which is complicated; she supported Bernie Sanders for a bit, which is unforgivable. She\u2019s a bad victim, which is to say an imperfect one, which is to say a human being. But she\u2019s either telling the truth or has a time machine, and at this point someone\u2019s gonna have to produce a fucking flux capacitor before I feel comfortable disbelieving her. You know who\u2019s not <\/em>a very credible narrator? Joe Biden. His 1988 presidential campaign fell apart when it was revealed that he had plagiarized speeches<\/a> by a British MP (including a line about being the first college graduate in his family \u201cin a thousand generations\u201d which wasn\u2019t just plagiarism but a lie, since Biden \u201cin fact did have relatives who attended college.\u201d) His 1988 campaign was also damaged by the revelation that he had invented a number of fake academic accomplishments<\/a>, such as graduating at the top of his class at Syracuse University College of Law (he finished 76th out of 85, and also plagiarized a law review paper when he was a student.) Since then, Biden has said on several occasions<\/a> that he used to be a civil rights activist: \u201cI was one of those guys that sat in and marched and all that stuff,\u201d he said at a campaign event in 1987. But in the same year he also said, \u201cI was not an activist. I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. I was involved, but I was not out marching.\u201d Biden has also claimed to have been arrested while protesting apartheid in South Africa, but this never, ever happened<\/a>. He recently said he opposed the Iraq war from the start, a lie which CNN called him out on<\/a>; he claimed in March that he opposed the bankruptcy bill, when he in fact wrote it<\/a>! Biden has told more lies than I have the time or the stomach to recount. In Counterpunch, <\/em>Bruce Levinehas an excellent overview<\/a> of Biden\u2019s most egregious falsehoods. The most disturbing might be the one where Biden repeatedly claimed in public that his wife had been killed by a drunk driver who \u201cdrank his lunch instead of eating his lunch.\u201d But this isn\u2019t true at all\u2014the driver, Curtis Dunn, was not at fault, and wasn\u2019t drunk. The whole thing was just a horrible accident. Levine reports: \u201cThis falsehood of course deeply hurt Dunn. His family made many attempts to get Biden to correct it, and finally in 2009, after Curtis Dunn was dead, Biden called Dunn\u2019s daughter to apologize<\/a>.\u201d (Incidentally, Biden is running for President in 2020 on a promise to restore<\/a> \u201cdecency and honesty and character\u201d to the White House.) So let\u2019s look at the facts. Who\u2019s more credible: the man with a documented, decades-long history of telling lies about his life when it comes to matters both petty and extremely critical\u2014or the woman who once blogged about Putin in a weird way? It seems pretty obvious to me: but then again, I tend to think that men and women are equal, and deserve to be taken equally seriously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I still don\u2019t think it matters at all. I still don\u2019t think people give a fuck about women. But go ahead. Prove me wrong, and Nathan right. I would love<\/em> to find that this country in general and the Democratic Party in particular actually cares about women\u2019s rights and bodily autonomy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019m not going to hold my breath. Many of the people dismissing Reade\u2019s claims are women themselves. Former Democratic Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm<\/a> tweeted: \u201cI believe<\/em> @JoeBiden<\/em><\/a>. Anyone who knows him knows this allegation is antithetical to his character, to the culture in his office, to his soul. He has never been that kind of guy. Ever. The story has been heard and vetted. No staffer remembers it. No complaint found. Move on.<\/em>\u201d Alyssa Milano<\/a> has spoken out against Tara Reade, as has Stacey Abrams<\/a>, the presidents of EMILY\u2019s List, NARAL<\/a>, and Planned Parenthood. If this seems unfathomable to you, especially when it comes to the leaders of women\u2019s organizations\u2014well, people are complicated, and there is a lot riding on electing a Democratic president in 2020, especially when it comes to safeguarding reproductive rights. Many people think Biden is the only choice, and there\u2019s no alternative\u2014although, as Elizabeth Bruenig wisely points out<\/a> in the New York Times<\/em>, it\u2019s not too late to consider other options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When a woman accuses a powerful man of sexual assault or harassment, most people will choose to defend the man. It\u2019s easier, and it\u2019s safer politically, especially if the man is perceived to be a member of the \u201cteam.\u201d It\u2019s amazing how many women are willing to be handmaidens of patriarchy, and it\u2019s amazing how many women are even willing to do that while calling themselves feminists, and even heading ostensibly feminist organizations! But words have meanings; events are things that occurred. No truth is incontrovertible but plenty are damned likely. And if, like former prosecutor Michael J. Stern, you don\u2019t have anything sensitive or intelligent or constructive to say about a rape inquiry, you could try just shutting the fuck up. *Incidentally, some people have accused my colleague Nathan of \u201ccoaching\u201d Colin because, during a brief phone call while Nathan was writing his story, he advised Colin to tell the \u201cwhole truth\u201d rather than parts and not talk to people who he felt were untrustworthy. I would say that the people who have accused Nathan of tampering with a witness are garbage, but many items in the garbage can be recycled into something useful, so the comparison doesn\u2019t hold.<\/em> Lyta Gold MORE FROM LYTA GOLD<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No, you\u2019re not \u201casking questions,\u201d you\u2019re using rape apologist arguments. Lyta Gold filed 04 May 2020 in 2020 ELECTION (currentaffairs.org) [Content warning: assault] Much ink has been spilled over the concept of \u201cgaslighting\u201d to the point of nearly rendering the term meaningless. Mitch McConnell is gaslighting the Democrats on the stimulus bill; Donald… Continue reading [Content warning: assault]<\/em>
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nTHE ARGUMENTS
<\/h2>\n\n\n\n1. Reade \u201cdelayed reporting\u2026twice.\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n2. \u201cImplausible explanation for changing story.\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n3. \u201cPeople who contradict Reade\u2019s claim.\u201d <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n4. \u201cMissing formal complaint\u201d <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n5. \u201cMemory lapse\u201d <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n6. \u201cThe lie about losing her job\u201d <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
7. \u201cCompliments for Biden\u201d <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n8. \u201cRejecting Biden, embracing Sanders.\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
9. \u201cLove of Russia and Putin.\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
10. Suspect timing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n11. The Larry King Call <\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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<\/p>\n\n\n\n12. \u201cStatements from others\u201d
<\/h2>\n\n\n\n13. Lack of other sexual assault allegations
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Sincerest thanks to Vanessa A. Bee of <\/em>Current Affairs and to David Oks of the Gravel Institute who contributed reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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