Yes to due process
Already the knives are out for President Trump’s tweet on Saturday after two of his aides lost their jobs over allegations of spousal abuse.
“Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation ,” Trump wrote .“Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone false ly accused—life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”
“GOP squirms,” claimed The New York Times, because of Trump’s habit of making “inflammatory and insensitive remarks.”
Inflammatory and insensitive? You mean like the remarks of Times editor and columnist Bari Weiss, who on “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday night echoed the president’s discomfort over aspects of the #MeToo movement?
“The hard left is basically saying it’s OK if a few innocent men go down with the ship if that’s what it takes to bring down the patriarchy,” Weiss said. “They hate zero tolerance on the right when it comes to drug policy but they love zero tolerance when it comes to sexual misconduct.”
There’s nothing inflammatory or insensitive, or even conservative or liberal, about fearing a modern-day Salem.
Consider, of all people, Lena Dunham. After she defended a “Girls” writer accused of sexually assaulting an actress, Dunham was excoriated. It didn’t matter that he was her friend, how could she believe him? Dunham was forced to apologize for the sin of thinking there might be two sides to a story.
There are plenty of predators, like Harvey Weinstein, for whom the evidence is compelling, contemptible and overwhelming. But there are also those like Harold Ford Jr. who adamantly denies sexually harassing anyone — yet he was still fired from his job at Morgan Stanley. Even if he’s vindicated, where does he go to get his reputation back?
Aziz Ansari was accused publicly not of rape but of a bad sexual encounter. When he was told to stop he did, but he should have — according to the writer — known to stop before that because of nonverbal cues. “I have yet to read an article that accounts for the violation of his dignity,” writes Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine last week.
Sullivan also argues that due process has vanished; it’s easy enough to accuse on Instagram. “We are living in another age of the Scarlet Letter.”
You don’t have to think Trump’s former staff secretary, Rob Porter, is a good man. The testimony of his ex-wives is convincing, and horrific. And it’s unclear why it should be considered at all exculpatory that convincing allegations are “old.” Credible allegations from 2010 are reportedly the reason Porter couldn’t get a full security clearance. TheWhite House should not have hired him, and mishandled his firing.
That doesn’t make Trump’s larger point invalid. #MeToo should be applauded for bringing down monsters. But that doesn’t mean the accused shouldn’t be able to defend themselves.