How a hashtag and journalism opened sexual misconduct floodgates
As many as a dozen Diet Cokes, the New York Times has learned, fuel the elephant in the room through four to eight hours of cable news each day. Such is the twitchy, tweet-strewn life of America’s Tone-Setterin-Chief.
But even with the TV remote only he is allowed to touch, U.S. President Donald Trump cannot find a button to delete his #MeToo nemeses — 19 sexualmisconduct accusers whose unchanging accounts of harassment just keep coming back to haunt him, in spite of his ever-changing denials.
Trump can’t grab women by the anything anymore. All that’s left for the president to grasp is the straw man of Fake News.
And on that front, the president’s grip is slipping. If there is anything worth taking away from the backside of this norm-shattering farce of a year, let it be the triumph of investigative journalism as the essential tool in seizing truth from haystacks of fiction.
The #MeToo movement, a justice effort dating back to 2006, entered 2017 on courage alone. And it took more courage still, from thousands of women, to carry it forward.
But it wasn’t until #MeToo intersected with investigative journalism — the separate but simultaneous bombshells of October that saw the New York Times and New Yorker detonate Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s abusive modus operandi — that the teardrops exploded, spilling everywhere. Washing away predatory titans, day after day.
Courage and journalism begat more courage and journalism in a virtuous cycle of consequence. Case in point: reporter Irin Carmon attempted seven years ago to investigate allegations of unwanted sexual advances against TV journalist Charlie Rose and got nowhere.
The women she reached were unwilling to share what they feared would be career-ending accounts against so powerful a man.
In the wake of the Weinstein revelations, Carmon reopened her dormant files on Rose, in partnership with Washington Post investigative reporter Amy Brittain. The consequential reckoning came Nov. 20, as the accounts of eight women toppled Rose from his multiple perches at PBS, CBS, Bloomberg TV and the difference in Alabama, when the Washington Post turned what began as a tip into a fact-checked juggernaut, with 30 corroborating sources exposing GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore’s predilection for teenage girls when he was a 30something district attorney.
Barely a week before election day in Alabama, the Washington Post proved its investigative mettle all over again in delicious form, exposing a ham-fisted attempt to weaponize its reporting against itself with a false claim that Moore had impregnated a women as a teenager.
Rather than swallow the too-convenient bait whole, WaPo applied the same fact-checking rigour it did to its earlier Moore stories — a process that revealed a sting operation by Project Veritas, a group that routinely targets mainstream media.
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe operates with help from a variety of sources, including a gift of $20,000 from the Trump Foundation.
Moore, though seemingly unable to concede, will not be riding his horse into U.S. Senate in this election cycle, if ever. It is difficult to envision the same outcome, had the Washington Post not gone about the deeply methodical, painstaking — and frankly, often boring and sometimes fruitless — work of investigative reporting.
That said, Moore posed no real threat to the Post, which lives a world away from Alabama, enriched by the seemingly bottomless pockets of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Kudos of a different kind are due to the Alabama Media Group — AL.com — which took up the Moore story in his own backyard, withstood threats of lawsuit, and ultimately learned enough to declare the candidate unfit for office.
Alabama isn’t the only place seeing the spillover of journalism’s intersection with #MeToo. The most recent example came earlier this week in Auburn, N.Y., when the Citizen published a stunning investigation into a high school bandleader who preyed on teenage girls with impunity, despite the knowledge of school administrators.
The decades-old crimes alleged in the piece fall outside of the scope of New York’s statute of limitations. But the powerful investigation also happens to coincide with a legislative effort to enshrine a new state law, the Child Victims Act, to make child predators culpable indefinitely. With the next New York legislative session schedule to begin Jan. 3, the Child Victims Act now is expected to gain traction — a consequence of the fallout from Weinstein and the cascading scandals that followed. Courage, investigative journalism and now, perhaps, actual law, in New York at least, may be about to change in favour of #MeToo victims.
“National events have propelled this issue forward and serve as a rallying point,” the bill’s sponsor, Democrat Brad Hoylman, told The Associated Press.
“I’m more optimistic that ever that this session will be the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for.”
The #MeToo movement, a justice effort dating back to 2006, entered 2017 on courage alone. And it took more courage still, from thousands of women, to carry it forward