#MeToo movement is getting messier by the minute
Just when you think the #MeToo movement can’t get any messier, another high stakes accusation or indeed, heartfelt mea culpa from a once accused man who’s ready for his comeback, comes along to set you straight.
This past weekend saw Jian Ghomeshi back in the spotlight. (Believe me, the four words in your current news feed you don’t want to see are “More on Jian Ghomeshi …”)
Now the disgraced former CBC radio host has surfaced with a lengthy essay, “Reflections from a Hashtag” in the prestigious New York Review of Books.
Part of a package available in print later this month exploring “The Fall of Men,” Ghomeshi’s reflections on his own experience are self-serving, disingenuous and ultimately infuriating.
Let’s look back. Coming just a few years before the current #MeToo movement really took off in 2017 after published allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein, Ghomeshi, the former pop culture darling who promoted himself as a woke feminist dude, sparked a painful national conversation on sexual assault in 2014 with his firing amid allegations of sexually abusive behaviour toward women.
In a 2016 trial, within the rigorous standards of a criminal courtroom, Ghomeshi was acquitted on all four counts of sexual assault and one of overcoming resistance by choking, involving three female complainants.
A charge of sexual assault against Ghomeshi involving former CBC producer Kathryn Borel was withdrawn. Ghomeshi apologized to Borel as part of a peace bond.
A lengthy Star investigation eventually outlined allegations from 15 women.
It is in the courtroom of public opinion that Ghomeshi’s reputation is still in tatters.
For many, this essay won’t change that.
Ghomeshi writes that he realized after much reflection that he had treated women in an “emotionally thoughtless” manner.
This admission is not even as self-aware as the legally crafted apology he had offered coworker Borel in 2016, in which he said that his “conduct in the workplace was sexually inappropriate. I realize that there is no way for me to know the full impact on her personally and professionally.”
Ghomeshi’s essay unwittingly confirms that the greatest love affair of his adult life continues to be the one he has with his own fame, which he leveraged to sexually importune women. Only if you are still consumed by your own status, would you write: “I was the guy that everyone hated first.”
No. The guy that “everyone” hated first was the first guy that ever made any individual woman, which means countless women, feel unsafe, vulnerable, harmed, dirty or shamed because he took advantage of his power and treated their body as if it belonged to him.
Ghomeshi is free to write in any publication that will have him about having suffered “enough humiliation for a lifetime” during his “contemporary mass shaming.”
Anyone acquitted (or convicted) has a right to seek his own redemption. I’d like to see another national conversation on what that redemption might look like for countless men who have fallen from high perches after being levelled with accusations of sexual violence.
My guess is that until Ghomeshi focuses more completely on, as he said in his 2016 apology, “the full impact” of his actions on women “personally and professionally,” he will have difficulty restoring his reputation.
Reputation and restitution are at the heart of the #MeToo movement, which has finally succeeded in making it a political and societal no no to ignore a woman’s accusations of sexual mistreatment, especially against prominent men.
Take the newly explosive case of Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, on track to be confirmed this week after a contentious hearing.
Suddenly, an anonymous accusation dating back to his high school days that he had sexually assaulted a young woman became infinitely more potent when the Washington Post disclosed Sunday that the woman making the charge — who was 15 at the time — was coming forward.
Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of clinical psychology at Palo Alto and Stanford universities, has alleged in a letter to Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein that a very drunk teenage Brett Kavanaugh “physically and sexually assaulted” her during high school in the early 1980s.
In her now public letter, Ford offered many grim details including that “with Kavanaugh’s hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me.”
While she said she managed to get away, she also said the incident “derailed” her for several years. Kavanaugh has categorically denied it ever happened.
Ford has now volunteered to testify in an open hearing, sparking comparisons to the infamous Anita Hill case in 1991, in which Hill, a law professor, testified that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her at work. He was still confirmed, but Hill went on to folk hero status for daring to take him on.
It will be a fierce debate as to whether Kavanaugh’s high school behaviour is relevant years later. Yet if he’s proven to have lied about it, it’s hard to see how he could be confirmed to the Supreme Court.
The value of #MeToo is that Kavanaugh’s accuser just can’t be ignored. Even Trump’s loyal mouthpiece Kellyanne Conway just said as much.
That doesn’t take away from the fact that #MeToo continues to be messy, fraught with moral and legal peril.
Yet if anyone thinks that Ford is being “opportunistic” in bringing up a decades-old incident now, consider that reporters are now circling her house, powerful politicians are preparing to disparage her and her life is about to become public property. Terrifying. Men — and women — have to tell the whole truth about these incidents if they want to make it through #MeToo intact.
A recent comment by a reader in the New York Times struck the most despairing note of all: “Men and women never really understood each other in the first place, but somehow got together often enough to reproduce the species so it could continue this tortured dance. Maybe #MeToo is the end of our kind.”
Maybe. But let’s hope we can all — men and women — do better than that.