Power, limits of #MeToo
Fate of Supreme Court nominee could be litmus test for movement that has toppled swath of alleged abusers
The fate of the Supreme Court nominee could be a litmus test for the movement.
One of the first stories Gretchen Carlson covered in her career as a television journalist was the 1991 Senate hearing where Anita Hill sat alone at the witness table and testified that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. Then, Carlson said, “I was promptly harassed on the job.”
But it wasn’t for another 25 years that she would file her explosive sexual harassment lawsuit against Roger Ailes, the powerful founding chairman of Fox News. Carlson, too, was largely alone; it was July 2016, more than a year before the #MeToo movement would erupt, and even some female colleagues at her own network questioned her actions. While she won a $20 million settlement, Ailes left the network with a $40 million payout.
As she watched this week as another Supreme Court nominee faced sexual assault allegations — this time from a woman supported by sexual assault survivors and female senators sitting behind her — Carlson could not help seeing the effects of the revolution she helped start, and its limits.
“We’ve made such great strides with regard to the fact that women coming forward now are given a platform to tell their story,” she said. “That would have never happened before. But we are still in the ‘he said, she said.’ ”
‘A lot of work to do’
The next week may not reveal conclusively whether the nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were teenagers, as she claims and he denies. The Judiciary Committee on Friday agreed to a one-week supplemental background check into Kavanaugh by the FBI.
But with all of its emotion and anger — and even the Republicans’ last-minute forced reversal on the background check — the fight over his nomination shows how the dynamics of the #MeToo movement have begun to thread their way into American life.
And depending on what the FBI finds and how the Senate responds, it could serve as the test case for the power of the #MeToo movement.
“Do I think that Christine would have ever been able to have the voice that she did without this movement we are in? No,” Carlson said. “But as a nation, we still have a lot of work to do.”
There is no question the effects of the movement have been uneven. While allegations of sexual misconduct have cut a swath through the upper reaches of industries like the media and entertainment, politics has been more forgiving for some — beginning with President Donald Trump, who remains enormously popular with Republicans despite multiple accusations of sexual assault and his own admission caught on tape.
Still, the emergence of Blasey and the reaction on all sides show how pivotal the movement has become. While Blasey came forward reluctantly with decades-old claims, she was immediately embraced and supported by #MeToo activists and women across the country. The Republican men who run the Senate Judiciary Committee — two of whom remain from the time Hill appeared 27 years ago — were careful to publicly show her deference.
And when Kavanaugh came before the committee to forcefully deny the allegations, one of the themes of his tearful rant was that Blasey’s account threatened to turn him into one of those once-powerful men cut down by an accusation from the past, uncorroborated by eyewitnesses. He lamented that he might lose his ability to coach his daughters’ basketball team and teach at Harvard, not to mention his chance to serve on the Supreme Court.
Who is the victim?
During Kavanaugh’s testimony, he interrupted Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who ran for her office because she was appalled at how Hill was diminished by an all-male judiciary panel. He responded to a question about his drinking habits from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., by defiantly turning it on her: Had she ever blacked out from drinking too much? (He later apologized to her.)
After a year of male leaders talking about the need to listen to the nation’s daughters, sisters and wives, he demanded the senators think of men. “I ask you to judge me by the standard that you would want applied to your father. Your husband. Your brother. Or your son,” he said, his face twisted in pain.
Republicans, aware of the lessons of the Anita Hill hearing, and with the midterm elections just six weeks away, had hired a female sex crimes prosecutor to ask questions for them, producing an unusual image of white men in suits sitting silently behind a woman leading the questioning. But they soon sidelined her in frustration and began to ask their own questions. In essence: Was one woman’s account going to be the knockout blow that ruins a man’s life, an account of a furtive moment so long ago?
Sen. Lindsey Graham, RS.C., pleaded for proportionality of punishment, pointing out that Kavanaugh was not Bill Cosby.
“I know I’m a single white man from South Carolina and I’ve been told to shut up, but I will not shut up,” Graham told his colleagues as they gathered to vote on the nomination Friday morning.
Seeing men claim themselves as victims “is turning #MeToo on its head,” said Nancy Erika Smith, a lawyer who represented Carlson and other women in sexual harassment suits.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, DN.Y., who was the first to call for the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., over accusations of sexual misconduct, called the hearing a “very dark moment” for women.
“They saw men in power who were believing other men in power over women who suffered gravely,” she said in an interview. “They saw that disbelief and dismissiveness of women, and they felt disbelieved and dismissed themselves.”
Kavanaugh, she said, is very much a part of the male power structure that was being challenged. “His defense was, ‘I am powerful, I am successful and I should be allowed to complete my career path by serving on the Supreme Court,’” she said.