When I was a college student, I worked one summer with another girl my age and several young men on a door-to-door encyclopedia sales crew out of Terre Haute. In order to pitch our product to both husband and wife, we did most of our sales calls after 5p.m. and usually worked until 10 at night. One weekend our boss took our crew of five young people to Indianapolis to meet up with our Regional Manager, whose name I don’t remember. We went to his hotel room, where after conducting his business meeting, he suddenly felt the need to take a shower. My boss and the rest of our team waited in his room as we were all going out to eat together after he dressed. But to our shocked dismay, he exited the bathroom draped in a towel which he then dropped, exposing himself to the other young girl and me. The young man sitting next to me quickly slapped his hand across my eyes, too late, of course, and the pervert returned to the bathroom, laughing, to dress.
That experience, as we are finding out now, is not an unique one among women. Some supposedly upright men with no morals and no respect for women have routinely made unwanted sexual advances; told dirty jokes; intimately touched breasts, butts, and even crotches; and in extreme cases, raped women who were in their employ. At last, women have realized that the shame is not theirs but the man’s and have come forward to expose these predators for what they are.
Yet I have a fear that the pendulum has swung, as it is wont to do, too far in the other direction. The mantra of the Democratic Party has become, in the last couple of years, “The women must be believed!” — a far different cry from the “Deny, deny, deny!” that they had espoused from the time of former president Bill Clinton. This party had denigrated Clinton’s accusers as “trailer trash,” suggesting that they were nothing but whores and liars. They celebrated Senator Ted Kennedy as the “Lion of the Senate” after he had allowed a young campaign worker with whom he had intended to have sex to drown, trapped in a car from which he had managed to escape, while he debated with his lawyer how to mitigate the damage. They even did a tribute to him as the advocate of women’s rights at the 2012 DNC convention even though he had continued his abusive and callous treatment of women in well-documented incidents throughout the remainder of his life. This same party has now decided that the woman who accuses a man of sexual misconduct must be believed, must be taken at her word, and the man hounded out of college or his job, even if it be the Senate of the United States without further ado. Exploited women have not had a voice, they cry! Now they must be given one!
Yes, women must be listened to. But the very laws of this great country of ours demand that the accused be given a fair hearing. Innocent until proven guilty is the law of this land, and a law that sets the United States apart from most other nations of the world. In most countries, if there is a trial at all, it is up to the accused to prove his innocence. In the United States, it is up to the prosecution to prove that the accused is guilty. But the Democrats have led us, in the last couple of years, in the direction of the world. “If she says he did it, he did it!” And where has that led us?
In 2012 Max Nicastro, a hockey player at Boston University, was accused of rape. Luckily for him, the District Attorney’s office did an extensive investigation which resulted in the dropping of the charges when no proof of his guilt was found. Many other examples of wrongfully accused students and professors can be found on a blog site entitled “Community of the Wrongly Accused.” Most of these cases did not make national news, but some did.
Three members of the Duke Lacrosse team were charged with rape by a stripper, Crystal Mangum, in 2006, who accused them of having raped her at a party at which she and another stripper had been hired to perform. The other stripper claimed she had been with Crystal all night and that she had seemed fine, calling the rape allegations “a crock.” None-the-less, the three young men were indicted. The incident developed quickly into a full-fledged scandal which resulted ultimately in all charges being dropped against the players and the District Attorney, Mike Nifong, being disbarred for prosecutorial misconduct and ethics violations including withholding evidence from the defense which pointed to the innocence of the accused players. Crystal Mangum was later convicted of child abuse and in 2013 went on trial for the 2011 murder of her boyfriend (Montaldo, Charles. “Duke University Lacrosse Team Rape Scandal”).
In 2015, a woman accused Phi Kappa Psi fraternity on the University of Virginia campus of gang raping her. “Jackie,” an undergraduate, reportedly told her story to several individuals and eventually to Rolling Stone Magazine, who broke the salacious story without any investigation as to its authenticity. Gangs of thugs massed outside the fraternity house, shouting “rapists” at the young men inside, throwing bricks through the windows and sending them threatening letters. The young men quickly moved out and found other places to live, but were still accosted on campus by shouts of “rapist!” as they tried to finish up their semester. Ultimately, the Charlottesville police found that although “Jackie” may have been raped that night, it did not happen at the frat party at the Phi Kappa Psi house. The fraternity men had been wrongfully accused. Rolling Stone lost credibility as a valid news source and was excoriated on national television for its slipshod reporting and lack of investigation. The University’s own newspaper summed up the situation best when it wrote: “There is no justice in a case which accuses a party that did not commit the crime in question. Phi Kappa Psi was undeservingly condemned and threatened by a community which did not wait until the facts of the case were investigated to issue judgment. But due process must work for both parties—accused and complainant. The community is only made safer if the correct offender is apprehended” (Friedersdorf, Connor. The Atlantic, 13 January 2015).
In response to allegations of sexual assault on college campuses, the Obama administration’s Secretary of Education sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter to all colleges accepting federal funding. This directive acquired the weight of law since universities which did not abide by it risked the loss of federal funding. Universities were directed not to apply the long-held rule of having “clear and convincing evidence” before condemning an accused and students, many of them innocent of wrongdoing, were finding themselves kicked off of campuses, convicted of rape by the colleges even though no charges were ever brought by police departments against them. If a woman accused them of rape, the woman was believed. Period. No woman could ever be angry or hold a grudge against a former boyfriend. No woman could ever lie! Unthinkable!
Luckily, on college campuses, sanity may be returning and with it the constitutionally right of the accused to face his accuser and to have his day in court when Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos rescinded the Obama era directive. Innocent until proven guilty may once again be the rule of law for college students, but can the same be said for the general population? Apparently not.
In the last few weeks we have seen senatorial candidate, Roy Moore, lose an election that he, as a Republican should have won, because of unproven sexual accusations from 40 years ago. He would not have been my pick for the Republican candidate in Alabama, but consider the accusations. He was basically accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old (whose brother he had condemned to prison when he was a judge) and a 17-year-old whose “proof” was his signature and note in her high school yearbook, written in two different inks and which she later admitted she had added to. The signature was identical to the signature on her divorce decree signed by Judge Moore some years later, identical down to the initials of his assistant, who did not work for him at the time he supposedly signed the yearbook. Oh, and the divorce degree went against his accuser. Seriously, a pedophile doesn’t stop offending. They can not be cured. That is why they are not allowed within so many feet of a school. So where were all the victims that he, if he were in fact the pedophile he was accused of being, had assaulted in the intervening 40 years?
Television personalities, movie directors, actors, reporters, and members of Congress have all been fired or forced to resign in the last few weeks because of accusations of sexual harassment and in some cases, rape. Were they all guilty? We have no doubt that Senator Al Franken fondled the breasts of a sleeping woman since he was dumb enough to have a picture of himself taken doing it. And many of the others paid out large sums of money (in the case of congress-men, it was large sums of taxpayer money) to make the allegations go away. Did some of these men pay out in order to avoid the publicity even though they were innocent? Or do we accept that to pay the money is a sign of guilt? It certainly looks bad. In the case of former presidential candidate Herman Cain, we know that supporters of President Obama, concerned that a bright, well-spoken black Republican might damage Obama’s chances of re-election, brought false allegations of sexual impropriety against him which disappeared the moment he withdrew from the primary race in order to protect his family. And of the accusers of President Trump, we know that at least one described his sexual harassment of her as looking at all of the beauty contestants as if they “were meat”. And another complained that he and Melania went back stage when they were all in robes. Yup. Sexual harassment. With his wife at his side. Really?
And a recent survey of millennials found that they have no idea what sexual harassment really is. A certain percentage of them would find what our generation called good manners – opening a door for a woman, buying her a drink, paying for her meal, telling her she looked nice – sexual harassment. A significant number believed that asking a woman for a date was sexual harassment! How crazy has this become?
So we know that accusations of sexual impropriety are easy to make and become lethal tools for use by one political party against the candidates of the other political party. We also know that young women, just like young men, can and do lie. Women need to be listened to when they make accusations of sexual harassment, but likewise, men need to be listened to when they protest their innocence. Everyone, accused and accuser, must be given equal voice and due process. Accusations must be investigated before we pillory the accused. We must remember that we are a nation of laws and that here, unlike many places in the world, someone is innocent until proven guilty! If we deny due process to those accused of sexual crimes, do we not run the danger of changing our law in all cases to “guilty until proven innocent?” Let us not become like the countries that our forefathers left for a brighter shore. Let us not give up the protections and the freedoms that they worked so hard to obtain for us. Let us not give up the Rule of Law.