Did he or didn’t he?
Little coherence in Trudeau’s response to allegations
When it first surfaced that, 18 years ago, a young reporter had accused Justin Trudeau of groping her, it seemed the prime minister was caught in a trap of his own making.
Deny the accusation, published in an unsigned article in the newspaper she worked for, the Creston Valley Advance, and he would be contradicting his own admonition to believe all women. Admit it, and he would be confessing to an offence that, if it did not expose him to criminal charges, would certainly expose him to accusations of hypocrisy, given the swift justice he has meted out to others in similar circumstances.
And so he froze. For two months after the article and its incendiary accusation came to light, the prime minister said nothing. For weeks, after it was given new life last month on social media, his office issued the same lawyerly statement: that Trudeau remembered being in Creston but “doesn’t think he had any negative interactions” there.
When at last Trudeau himself addressed the matter, after the National Post published a story in which the newspaper’s former editor and publisher confirmed the reporter came to them with the same accusation, it was on precisely the same line. He told reporters Sunday that he remembered “that day in Creston well,” that he had “a good day that day,” and that “I don’t remember any negative interactions that day at all."
All of which succeeded only in raising more questions. But then, as many asked, what else could he say?
Ah, but that was to reckon without the prime minister’s cunning. Knowing the question was coming, Trudeau took the occasion of a press conference Thursday to give an answer that managed neither to deny the charge nor to admit to it. Or rather it seemed at times both to deny it and to admit it. It was in short a masterpiece of calculated ambiguity — and an unmitigated disaster.
It started out as a fairly straightforward denial. “I’ve been reflecting very carefully on what I remember from that incident almost 20 years ago,” he began. “I do not feel that I acted inappropriately in any way.”
Fair enough. But then he went on. “But I respect the fact that someone else might have experienced that differently.” After all, as he later elaborated: “the same interactions can be experienced very differently from one person to the next.”
This is of course true. Criminal trials often turn on the differences in people’s recollections and indeed their experiences of the same events. And yet the judge is required to return a verdict all the same. People’s perceptions of the facts may differ, but the facts exist independent of them. It is the business of a trial to decide whose version of the facts is closer to the truth — not to conclude that each is true to them.
So he does not feel he acted “in any way” inappropriately, but he respects that she, er “someone else,” might have “experienced” his behaviour differently. Stripped of the pseudo-subjectivist cant, there would seem two possibilities. Either he did in fact grope her, and his statement is untrue. Or he did not grope her, and it is her repeated contemporaneous accusations that he did that are untrue.
At one point Trudeau seemed to suggest the former. “I’ll be blunt about it,” he said. “Often a man experiences an interaction as being benign or not inappropriate and a woman, particularly in a professional context, can experience it differently.”
The “blunt” part would suggest it is not the woman’s “experience” that is at odds with reality, but the man’s. So was that the case with this man? Is that his explanation? No: he didn’t just believe at the time that he had done nothing inappropriate. That’s his belief now.
In subsequent remarks, Trudeau has hinted at the latter possibility. “Who knows where her mind was?” he asked, rhetorically, in a television interview Friday. Then, as if conscious of the unpleasant implication: “And I fully respect her ability to experience something differently.”
Beautiful. In two sentences Trudeau manages both to slyly suggest his accuser was delusional, and to honour her, in impeccably feminist terms, for her subjective experience.
But for the most part he seems to want to consign the whole affair to an ambiguous parallel universe in which things neither happen nor do not happen, in which he did not grope her but she might have “experienced” it as such, and in which he can accuse her of making it up without having to take responsibility for doing so.
Except … in addition to admitting something he had hitherto denied, that there was an “incident” of some kind and that he remembered it, Trudeau has also belatedly admitted to certain other salient facts: that he did indeed apologize to the reporter, as she had claimed in her published accusation (why apologize, if he did nothing wrong? “I saw that she was uncomfortable,” he told CBC Radio); and that he was aware of and read the article at the time (he remembers thinking “I did not know to what she was referring”).
There is simply no way to reconcile these statements with his earlier story. An apology does not prove he did anything wrong, of course: he may have just been being polite. But the accusation, the apology, the article, and his now confessed memory of all three, explicitly contradict the “I don’t remember any negative interactions” line.
And here we get to the nub of the matter. This isn’t about a stray hand 18 years ago, any more than the Lewinsky affair was about oral sex. It isn’t even about the famously feminist prime minister’s apparent hypocrisy, on the very issue he has made the centrepiece of his appeal to voters. It’s about his inability, weeks later, months later, years later, to give a straight answer to a simple question.
An accusation, even a credible and contemporaneous one, is not sufficient for conviction. It is enough, however, to demand an explanation. A coherent one would be nice.
HE APOLOGIZED AFTER HE SAW SHE WAS ‘UNCOMFORTABLE.’