When law’s not about justice
There are people who sincerely believe justice results from the adversarial court system. It’s unlikely they’ve experienced it. My brother-in-law spent his working life in courtrooms. Nobody gets their day in court, he said. Don’t even think of it. And he was right. There is no avenging angel to save you once you’re on that path, just disillusionment and empty pockets.
Weary experience explains the detachment of police to verdicts that run counter to what they believe but can’t prove to a jury the way TV cop shows do, with dazzling science and impassioned prosecutors. There are no famous actors for either side. You couldn’t afford them anyway.
A trial is not about truth, but winning. Get that straight, and know the system is best avoided. If there’s a consolation it’s that nobody emerges from it covered in glory, as I suspect will be the case with Colin Craig’s ongoing claims against his former press secretary Rachel McGregor, hers against him, and with sexual abuse allegations in America against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Men and women behave in strange ways when no-one’s looking, and a world of hurt can result. You see it in McGregor, once young and bouncy, now visibly exhausted. Anyone can read those signs and pity her.
I pity her all the more because there’s no real solution, least of all in court. That would take winding back the clock to when they first met, and Craig hiring someone else, preferably an elderly woman he wouldn’t feel the need to serenade with awful verse, or buy silver love heart necklaces for.
We know too much about the way they came to blur the boundary between work and flirtation, both of them dangerously naive, by the sound of it. But one of them will walk away with a longsuffering wife and his wealth intact, however things turn out, and the other will walk away with nothing. Financial inequality, in this case and so many others, insults the very idea of justice, and exposes the elaborate pretence of it.
Publicly attacking women on a personal level is never a good look for a man, even in apparently feminist times. That’s why Kavanaugh, too, is in a tricky position this week, with more accusers lending more credibility to the first. He has been careful in denial, unlike Donald Trump, who backs him with the sensitivity of a battering ram. He may be right, that the women’s motive is political, but that doesn’t make them liars.
The court of public opinion is vicious. Christine Blasey Ford and her family are suffering from verbal attacks and character smears, the very reason why – though Trump doesn’t get it – insulted women usually say and do nothing for years, even lifetimes.
Kavanaugh’s family will be suffering too, and they didn’t ask to be dragged into this mess, which will taint his reputation even if, as I expect, his appointment will go ahead regardless.
Kavanaugh painted a picture of his young self as almost saintly in a Fox network interview this week, disclosing that he didn’t have sex until well after his high school and university years. He hardly needed to tell the world that: his behaviour, as the women describe it, was a giveaway, and he’s not accused of rape. In any case, it’s not a defence to be gauche. Or a regular churchgoer for that matter.
‘‘[Such] grotesque and obvious character assassination – if allowed to succeed – will dissuade competent and good people of all persuasions from [public] service,’’ he says of the last-minute challenges to his narrative.
No surprises there. Only that he is surprised.