Like just about everyone else, I’ve been mulling over the allegations (some ancient, some quite new) against Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein, Anthony Weiner, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Al Franken, et alia. It would take a book to analyze the charges against each and their truth or falsehood and the degree of heinousness of the acts of which each is accused. But that’s a book I’m certainly not planning to write. In my mulling, I’ve been reading a bunch of opinions on the subject from the left and right sides of the web, and everything in-between, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I have a rather idiosyncratic and unusual take on this.
Some people are inconsistent—and nakedly political or self-serving—in who they think is guilty and who innocent, and the relative seriousness of their acts. Some are consistent, and I try to be able to count myself among that crew. But the consistent ones often are consistent in saying something like “always believe the women.” I’m consistent in always being skeptical.
My basic position is skepticism, which means that I am aware that people sometimes lie (accusers and accused). It means that I think it’s absurd to say that any class or group of people always tells the truth or always lies, whether that group be women or men or members of some race or class or ethnicity or profession. To me it’s not just wrong to say “group A always tells the truth,” it’s an absurdity and an abomination and against our devotion to judging people as individuals and judging them on actions and evidence.
And by “judging,” I don’t just mean in the legal sense. I don’t mean as though we are a jury needing proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But I think we do need evidence—not “evidence” in the purely legal sense, either, but evidence in the sense of something that backs up a person’s naked unadorned word for it, or something that tells us that there’s a reason to trust the person telling the story. I’ve heard too many false stories told by people who seem for all the world to be sincere and telling the truth.
It used to be that women were automatically distrusted when they told stories about abuse by powerful men. It’s wrong to do that, and it needed to be corrected. But the idea that women are always to be trusted on this is an over-correction. I would think that fact would be obvious, but it’s not obvious to a host of people.
It also used to be that women who told such a story ran a great risk of being blamed for it, or being called liars. That still sometimes happens, of course, but nowadays it is more likely that they will automatically be believed and called heroines. That represents something relatively new, an incentive to make charges of this sort, a phenomenon that could lead to a greater incidence of false charges.
Something similar (although different in its details) used to be true of accusations by children that someone sexually abused them. Long ago, children were uniformly disbelieved when they came out with an accusation like that. But later, it was often thought that children were sexually innocent and oblivious about sexual matters unless they had been abused, so a sexual abuse accusation coming from a child was thought to represent sexual awareness on the part of that child that could only have come from having actually been abused. So the more common belief came to be: “children always tell the truth about sexual allegations.” Sound familiar? Well, that idea was later somewhat corrected when it was acknowledged that children these days are much more sexually aware than they used to be, and that sometimes they have their own reasons for lying and/or are manipulated or forced into lying by some of the adults in their lives.
So I don’t automatically believe or disbelieve anyone. When I hear charges of abuse, I try to evaluate the truth or falsehood of those allegations in a systematic way. I consciously try to apply the same standards to all, and to be consistent.
Here are just some of the elements I think people ought to take into consideration in terms of seriousness and/or truthfulness (most of these relate more to adult victims than to children):
Was the coercion overt? What was the age of the victim? Was “no” communicated by the victim (for adult victims only; for a child it’s irrelevant)? Was it just a verbal proposition by the accused with no behavioral follow-up? Was the offender a therapist or teacher or priest or parent? When did the victim report it—was there an enormous time lag? Does the victim have a separate grudge against the accused that might have motivated a false accusation? Is there any other evidence to back up the victim’s report? If so, how persuasive is that evidence? Was there any violence involved? Is the accused a politician who is currently running for office—and has the revelation come out right before the vote, with very little time to evaluate its truth or falsehood? Does the accuser have a history that indicates she/he is a habitual liar? Does the accused have such a history? Are there other alleged victims, and (this next part is very important and not often taken into account) did all the other victims tell their stories only after the initial accusations got a lot of publicity, or had their stories been told earlier? If the latter, was the story told to the police or other authorities, or to some friend or relative whose word we have to take for it? If we have one or more very credible accusations and then a new accusation comes out, is the new one in the mold of the old ones or does it up the ante dramatically? Has each accuser’s story remained consistent, or has it morphed?
There’s much more, but I think you get the idea. Since we don’t usually have a smoking gun (Anthony Weiner’s emailed photos, for example), we have to rely on this sort of thing.
I hate to see abusers go undetected and unpunished, free to continue their abuse with others. But I also hate to see people empowered to make false accusations that are insufficiently scrutinized and could ruin the life of a possibly innocent person. I’ve described the best way I know to try to figure out how to minimize both of these occurrences. Despite its flaws, I can’t think of a better way.
[NOTE: In Part II, I plan to discuss certain specific cases in light of Part I.]
