Daily Times (Primos, PA)

Flowers: Why I’m standing behind Rep. Nick Miccarelli

- Christine Flowers Columnist Christine Flowers is an attorney and Delaware County resident. Her column appears every Sunday. Email her at cflowers19­61@gmail.com.

I didn’t expect to return so soon to the case of Nick Miccarelli, but circumstan­ces and revelation­s convinced me that there is a good deal of the story that has not yet been told, and the narrative must not be shaped only by the people who are dedicated to his personal and profession­al annihilati­on.

Last month, I penned what could be termed a Delaware County “J’accuse,” reminiscen­t of Emile Zola’s letter criticizin­g the French government of bigotry after they arrested Alfred Dreyfus, a general of Jewish descent who had been wrongly convicted of espionage. Zola’s letter pointed out the legal irregulari­ties and lack of evidence in the prosecutio­n of General Dreyfus. For his efforts, he was put on trial for libel, found guilty and fled to England where he lived in self-imposed exile for a decade.

I don’t expect to be sued for libel for my comments, nor do I anticipate fleeing to New Jersey or another unappetizi­ng location for a decade. However, I cannot stay silent as I continue to see the wheels of justice grinding with unpreceden­ted vengeance against Miccarelli’s neck.

I first have to set the record straight. In my last column, I might have suggested that Nick and I have a closer relationsh­ip than we actually do. To be honest, we have never been in the same room together. We have spoken on the phone, exchanged emails, are Facebook friends and I’ve written about him in other columns for this paper. Sometimes I’ve been critical, as I was when I was disappoint­ed in a vote involving the Catholic Church and statutes of limitation­s. Other times I’ve expressed my admiration for him as a legislator who always seems to put the interests of his constituen­ts above all other concerns.

But we are not buddies, and I have no vested interested in defending a “friend” simply because of some misplaced affection that blinds me to uncomforta­ble truths. It’s actually the opposite. I am a fairly objective observer of Nick Miccarelli, and only really know about him what I have read, seen, and heard from people who do know him. And the critical mass of all of those factors has led me to the conclusion that far from being an abuser himself, he is the victim of a rather welloiled conspiracy to manipulate the #Metoo moment for some personal agendas.

So to those who commented online or wrote me emails attacking my lack of neutrality and my desire to help a friend, you are wrong. Nick Miccarelli is exactly the type of person I would like to have as a good and lifelong friend, as well as someone with me in the trenches. But beyond the fact that I have two eyes, a relatively good brain and a half century of judging the character of women (13 years of all girl’s education will do that for you), I have no personal stake in the vindicatio­n of Rep. Miccarelli.

And that ability to judge character was the first thing that made me sense something was wrong in the whole “Nick Miccarelli is an abuser” mythology. The two women accusing Nick of wrongdoing have both admitted to relationsh­ips with him. One of those women has continued to ask that her identity be concealed, while the other, state Rep. Tara Toohill, R-Luzerne, has come out publicly and done everything she can to place her ex-boyfriend in an extremely damaging light. Years after having allegedly suffered abuse, she decided to seek an order of protection against Nick because, she claims, she’s afraid that he carries a gun. Her not-so-subtle implicatio­n is that he will use that gun against her and others in the state Capitol, and she is waging a noble campaign to protect the other state legislator­s from this dangerous man. If it were not so offensive, it would be laughable. In the years since they dated, Miccarelli and Toohill have worked side by side in Harrisburg, and to my knowledge she has never before filed a police complaint, sought an order of protection or even attempted to avoid him in the state Capitol. I am a lawyer, and I deal in evidence, as should all of us who care about due process, and let’s just say that prosecutin­g a case in the court of public opinion is a nice option when you would not be able to get a conviction in a court of law.

But it is the other accuser, the one whose identity is being protected by the media, who is more problemati­c. I have been privy to communicat­ions that took place between that individual and Miccarelli over a 10-month period, and the informatio­n contained in those emails and text messages is stunning, striking evidence of a consensual relationsh­ip. Nothing in those communicat­ions support the claim that Miccarelli did anything to force or coerce his second accuser to do something against her will, let alone that he raped her. In fact, a few days after the alleged rape occurred, she chatted amicably with him about political business. If she had been forced, as she alleges, to have sex against her will, it is incomprehe­nsible that she would then willingly engage in jovial banter with her alleged abuser.

As I read these communicat­ions, I felt ill to my stomach. The reason I felt ill is that I knew how this would be spun by the women’s activists, the #Metoo high priestesse­s who will not stop until they claim the heads of as many men as they can reasonably group into the “Harvey Weinstein” basket. These women are doing irreparabl­e damage to true victims of abuse, those who have been physically beaten, emotionall­y destroyed and in many tragic cases, killed. As an immigratio­n attorney who does asylum work, I deal with battered women every day. As someone who loved women who were the targets of abuse, I know what it looks like up close. And what I saw in those communicat­ions do not look or sound like the words of an abused woman.

Of course, the #Metoo storm troopers will spin this a certain way. They will argue that a woman who has been abused doesn’t always act the way we expect her to. She doesn’t always distance herself from the abuser, she may blame herself and therefore try to sublimate her shame, she might not even realize that what just happened to her is abuse. I’ve heard all of these things, and I suppose there could be some truth to the suggestion that a woman who has been raped would still want to be near her alleged rapist.

But that slim possibilit­y should not be the basis for the unilateral destructio­n of a man’s reputation, the deliberate tearing down of his work, his goals, his accomplish­ments, his public and private life. The fact that a woman who is less than credible and another who is exploiting her position as a state official can combine together to pull down a man they both once dated and now despise is tragic.

And the fact that so many people sit by and allow it to happen is repellent. J’accuse.

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 ?? DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA FILE PHOTO ?? State Rep. Nick Miccarelli, R-162 of Ridley Park, reads to pre-schoolers at Changing Lane Learning Center in Collingdal­e in 2015.
DIGITAL FIRST MEDIA FILE PHOTO State Rep. Nick Miccarelli, R-162 of Ridley Park, reads to pre-schoolers at Changing Lane Learning Center in Collingdal­e in 2015.
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