Campaign leader just wants equality
‘None of this is about me,’ Stanford law professor Dauber says
When Michele Dauber launched her controversial campaign to recall Judge Aaron Persky, she never anticipated the intense personal attacks that have come her way: The stalkers, the trolls, the white-powder envelope.
But as she looked back late last week on the surreal two-year journey that propelled her into the national spotlight, ignited a conversation about sexual assault across the country and brought down an elected California judge for the first time in nearly a century, the outspoken Stanford law professor said she has a new understanding of the deeply impassioned response her successful campaign provoked, and where it may lead next.
“I welcome their hate,” Dauber said of her most ardent critics during a nearly three-hour-long, at-times tense wide-ranging interview in a Palo Alto coffee shop. “I read it as a sign we’re being effective.”
In the days after Santa Clara County voters resoundingly booted Persky from the bench, the debate about Dauber’s motives has only intensified. To some, Dauber was simply an agitator who waged an over-the-top war against the Santa Clara County Superior Court judge to avenge a soft sentence in the Brock Turner case. To others, she’s a hero who fought against a sexist establishment and won.
“She had an agenda,” Gary Goodman, a public defender who opposed the recall and supported the judge, said days after the recall vote passed by a margin of 60-40 percent. “It didn’t matter who she was going to run over
and, unfortunately, it was a very kind man.”
But Katherine Spillar, the executive director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and executive editor of Ms. Magazine, who has become an ally of Dauber’s over the course of the campaign, said Dauber acted out of a deep-seated need to do what’s right.
“I think Michele is one of those rare individuals who sees a wrong and sets out to try to right it,” Spillar said. “It’s coming from a very deep belief in equality and women and girls being able to exercise their rights.”
Dauber insists she wasn’t setting out to break rules, but to call attention to those who sidestep them, particularly when women and girls are disadvantaged in the process.
“Anybody who knows me will tell you that I’m a compulsive rule follower,” Dauber said.
The way Dauber tells it, Persky made an objectively bad call two years ago in sentencing Turner to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, who would come to be known as Emily Doe, next to a trash dumpster outside a fraternity party. The judge needed to be held accountable, Dauber said, the same way she thinks her employer, Stanford, has not followed the rules of Title IX in its handling of campus sexual assault cases and needs to be called out.
“The way you change things in this country is to vote,” Dauber said emphatically.
Elections are the source of legitimacy in society, said the self-identified “democrat, small d” and opposition to the recall vote is really “anti-democratic.”
But the notion that she launched the recall with a bigger agenda in mind, she insisted, is flat wrong.
“This campaign was narrowly, tightly focused,” she said. “I think there were a lot of people who wanted to make a statement and I wanted to win.”
When Dauber first settled on the idea of a recall, she planned to focus on raising money, she said. She had raised funds for the Hillary Clinton campaign and became pretty good at it. She tapped into a number of local and national women’s networks and knew where to go.
Becoming the public face of a movement? Not so much.
“I have tremendous anxiety about public speaking and always have,” Dauber said.
But even her critics acknowledge Dauber is smart, and it soon became clear to her, she said, that the campaign needed a face, a foil to Persky.
The 53-year-old mother of five has largely refused to discuss her personal life publicly. She rarely addresses the suicide of her oldest daughter, Amanda, a decade ago. But she and her husband, Ken, a member of the Palo Alto school board, have spoken about the tragedy in the past in pushing local schools to do more to address the mental health of students.
And she’s had at least two stalkers, including one man who came to her house, an experience she called frightening. The FBI arrested a man who sent her an envelope filled with what turned out to be harmless white powder.
“I’m not going to talk about anything about my personal life,” she reiterated this week.
Asked point blank about who she is, Dauber looked perplexed.
“I’m a law professor at Stanford,” Dauber said matter-of-factly.
She likes to ski, hike and garden, she continued. She has chickens and a cat that her son named Chow Mein.
After a little more thought, Dauber tweaked her response.
“I’m an unapologetic feminist ... and a cat owner,” she decided, smiling for the first time.
Ultimately, she insisted, “I’m a full three-dimensional person, just like everybody else.”
Dauber’s opponents, however, often speculate that the recall was an act of revenge because of her friendship with Emily Doe’s family. After Doe penned a searing 12-page letter to Turner that quickly went viral, critics suggested Dauber had been the author.
Dauber flatly rejected that accusation, and dismissed the notion that she’s out for personal revenge as “so ridiculous it doesn’t even deserve a response.”
Was the campaign personal for New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, she asked pointedly, or any of the other women from across the country who backed the recall?
Spillar rejects the revenge argument, too.
“Revenge only gets you so far,” Spillar said. “It’s the belief in ideals and the rightness of this cause and the urgency of this cause that fuel Michele.”
Dauber refuses to directly answer whether she has any personal experience with sexual assault. She insists the topic isn’t even “interesting” and is an attempt to discredit the campaign.
Dauber launched the recall push, she said, because “I care about women’s equality.”
Her detractors are not as convinced. Goodman, the public defender, said he thought Dauber was “a bad and evil person for doing this.”
Told about his remarks, Dauber’s face twisted momentarily into a shocked expression and several beats passed before she acknowledged she was “stunned.”
She rejected, however, the idea that Goodman’s comments signal that she engenders impassioned responses on both sides.
The remarks, she suggested instead, mean that the legal profession refuses to engage in a thoughtful way. As a result, she continued, it gives victims the impression that the lawyers and judges who are supposed to offer protection and justice don’t support them.
“To say that they have not lost gracefully would
be an understatement,” she said of the opposing campaign. “I think that they’ve lost perspective in many ways.”
Opponents of the recall worry that it will prompt judges to consider public opinion when hearing cases and result in harsher sentences for people of color, who are disproportionately likely to end up in the criminal justice system. At least one study supports that theory, suggesting that judges issue harsher sentences in the run up to elections.
Dauber, again, doesn’t buy it.
“I don’t share that incredibly dim view of judicial integrity,” she said.
She also refuses to accept any personal responsibility over the fact that California lawmakers passed new mandatory minimum sentences in sexual assault cases just months after the Turner case.
Mandatory minimums are a “really bad idea,” Dauber said, blaming their passage instead on Persky for making a bad call that spurred legislators to react.
As the force behind the recall campaign who now has an impressive roster of volunteers and willing donors at her fingertips, Dauber is still deciding where to go from here. And while she insists the recall launched as a local election issue, it happened as the #MeToo movement and the Women’s March and opposition to Donald Trump gained steam.
Dauber is well aware
of how it resonates in the broader society.
The recall, she said, is proof that women will vote on the issue of sexual violence. The same way that a politician’s stance on abortion has become a litmus test, Dauber would like to force politicians to address violence against women.
In the future, Dauber’s network — she repeatedly insisted the campaign was not “hers” and that “none of this is about me” — might advocate and raise money for candidates who supported the recall, perhaps beyond the borders of California. Locally, she’d also like to push for more domestic violence shelters and more places where women who have been assaulted can go to have rape kits performed.
“All of this is about sex equality,” she said. “We’re looking to end gender inequality.”
That goal has earned Dauber praise for inspiring young activists.
“She’s a firebrand,” said Jennie Richardson, a board member of Women’s March Bay Area who helped Dauber run the recall campaign’s field operations. “We now have a community of seasoned activists that know they can make a difference and are absolutely ready and excited to continue on with this work and it’s all because of Michele’s leadership.”
“All of this is about sex equality. We’re looking to end gender inequality.”
— Stanford law professor Michele Dauber, leader of the successful effort to recall judge Aaron Persky