My mom was a sensible daughter of Pennsylvania, as well as one of the first female assistant district attorneys in San Mateo County, a criminal defense lawyer, and a Superior Court judge, and after she swore me into the California Bar, she gave me this advice: “Everybody lies.” I think about that a lot, especially when I consider something like the Cornell Seven controversy. Since it appears that Jane Doe is telling two different stories — one apparently under oath to the authorities and one in a civil complaint a couple of years later — that pretty clearly establishes Judge Mom’s maxim. One of her stories has to be a lie, if not both.
We’re told that we are supposed to believe all victims, but why? First of all, how do we know they are victims? When you declare someone a victim, you’ve already accepted the claim without hearing the evidence. The technical term in a criminal matter, when there is no dead body or stolen property and the existence of the alleged crime is itself disputed, should be accuser. In a civil lawsuit, which she has filed, it is plaintiff. Here, the issue is whether there was a crime, or, in the lawsuit, whether there was a tort. She says yes, and the men presumably say no. So we don’t know if there even is a victim yet. Assuming there is assumes the truth of the charge. But then, apparently you don’t get a presumption of innocence if you have a penis.
We don’t owe accusers anything except to treat the accusation seriously, to investigate both sides’ claims, and to test the admissible evidence against clear laws. But that’s not what the leftists and feminists want to do here. That’s not what New York Gov. Kathy Hochul wanted done by appointing New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. Hochul had already framed the young woman as a victim who was “literally gang raped,” and said she deserves to have “justice pursued.” Her catspaw James is supposed to run an objective criminal investigation? That’s a travesty. She has her marching orders, and she will march accordingly.
To the left, this is a feature and not a bug. The nightmare of leftist justice is that rules don’t matter, nor does evidence. Only the outcome matters, and that outcome is predetermined by what is most convenient to the left. That’s why Derek Chauvin is in prison when George Floyd overdosed on fentanyl. Chauvin was a symbol. That’s why they would like to put the seven young men in jail. They are a symbol, too.
I will agree with one thing the leftists and feminists say. When a society is governed by clear rules to which you apply admissible evidence, you have a patriarchy. It’s a distinctly male way of looking at things: dispassionately, without emotion, an objective process where the outcome of the analysis is not predetermined. In fact, they get mad at having to comply with procedures, where the men have a chance to test the evidence, to contradict the woman, to cross-examine her. Why? Because if you can actually defend yourself, you have the capacity to disprove the claim. That can’t happen. The objective truth is irrelevant. There’s a higher truth, which is whatever outcome maximizes their power at any given moment. Being able to defend yourself gets in the way of the preferred outcome.
The system under the patriarchy, where guilt must be proven by evidence in proceedings that ensure fairness, and where you can be found not guilty if the evidence doesn’t show your guilt, is a foundational component of Western civilization. It is the exact opposite of the feminine construct that the leftist feminists seek to impose, one in which you can be convicted by consensus. In their model, there are no clear rules by which men can govern themselves to avoid retroactive liability. Six months later, if a woman who had a sexual encounter with a man decides she regrets it, the act changes from something lawful and acceptable to something illegal and punishable. Think of the power you would have if you could just declare those who are your opponents guilty by decree.
This makes a mockery of the idea of justice, but they’re not interested in justice. You saw that with Lindsay Clancy. Justice demands accountability for the three children she strangled. The feminists demand accountability from everyone else for failing to satisfy the needs and emotions of a woman.
Explains a lot about their abortion fanaticism, doesn’t it?
That’s unacceptable, and we should not accept it. Women are no more important than men. They have no special right to be validated, or to have others comply with their demands or wishes. They’re not special. They get treated like men. They have to prove their claims with actual proof. You don’t get to skip to the end by skipping over the rights of the accused, even if they are accused penis people of pallor. Just wait until the left realizes that several of the Cornell Seven are not even the WASPy white boys the left is drooling to make the villains here.
But just because these young men are facing a legal injustice does not make all of them innocent. Those of us on the conservative side have been outspoken in demanding that women take responsibility for their own actions and for exposing themselves to risks, particularly grody, sexually charged ones. It doesn’t relieve a true rapist of guilt to point out that a woman shouldn’t drink a lot, go into an alley with a guy, and not expect bad things to happen. There’s no justification for the bad things on the part of the rapist, but you’ve got to look out for yourself, and conservatives (and those who advocate treating women like adults, such as Camille Paglia) have been outspoken in demanding that women be expected to do that. When you don’t use reasonable care to look out for yourself, you are negligent. The law already recognizes that more than one person can be responsible for a bad outcome. Someone can be fully responsible for something, and yet somebody else can also be responsible. That recognizes the fact that women have agency and the ability to influence the outcomes they experience.
But so do men. We need to apply that standard to the frat brothers as well. While they may not be legally liable for sexual assault under a fair legal process — which Letitia James will in no way provide them — that does not mean they are all blameless. Understanding that there is some lack of clarity about the behavior of some of these young men, it is clear from the allegations that others decided they would take a girl who was drinking and taking drugs and join her in drinking and taking drugs in a frat-house room. At least one allegedly texted his buddies to come join them in a most grotesque fashion. A number of them apparently did.
That’s disgusting, and we need to say so forthrightly. This isn’t a romantic hookup between two horny young people. When you add a third party to the equation, it becomes gross. They were wrong to do it, and when you do wrong things, there are consequences. The consequences may not be fair. I don’t think the legal proceedings here are fair, because what happened does not appear, on the basis of the evidence I’ve seen, to violate the applicable law. But we, as a society, should not limit our determination of what is wrong to what is expressly illegal. You can act legally and still be in the wrong. Adultery is not illegal, but it’s wrong. What at least the more active participants did with this girl was wrong, whether she was into it or not, and her own wrongness to illegally consent to it is not an excuse. Just because someone consents to degradation doesn’t mean you have to degrade yourself by degrading them.
Don’t be surprised that when you do something bad, bad things happen. And they won’t necessarily be fair bad things. Young men, if you’re not going to do the right thing simply because you don’t want to be a sleeve perv, do better because you don’t want to be exposed to this kind of risk. You can’t be responsible for the actions of others, but you need to be responsible for your own.
And no, this is not picking on young men like that ridiculous Sarah Huckabee Sanders ad, which did unfairly pick on young men. She made young white guys on a beanbag the face of welfare cheats, and they aren’t. No, this is real talk. They are men. They should be able to hear hard truths, accept them, and govern themselves accordingly.
Let me sum it up. If some drunken hussy decides she wants to take you and several of your buddies into a room for a ketamine-fueled orgy, you shouldn’t do that, and you shouldn’t let your turgid skank buddies do that either.
Yeah, you might think you’re covered because she was into it at the time, but you’re not. Again, if the moral bankruptcy of it isn’t enough, there’s the utilitarian aspect. Even if the true facts do not constitute a crime, understand that she may still tell a different story before some tribunal. And understand that the members of that tribunal may think that you are lying when you deny it. After all, in criminal cases, your future is going to be determined by 12 people who got picked for a jury. And let me tell you a little secret about jury picking. Lawyers very rarely pick people they think are smart. They don’t want smart people on juries. They want people on juries who are going to come to the verdict their client wants, whether their client is a frat boy plucked out of his adult life to answer for something he did after some party a few years before at the University of College, or whether it’s politicized representatives of the state fixated on getting a conviction of a designated villain above all else. Remember, the court doesn’t find the truth. The court renders judgments.
And here’s the scary thing. This woman may not even think she’s lying. When you’re told that your feelings are valid regardless, the line between objective fact and vibe becomes utterly and irrevocably blurred. It’s very possible she believes that she was wronged and, in fact, she was. The guys were disgusting; they shouldn’t have taken advantage of her no matter how much she wanted to be taken advantage of. Whether that constitutes criminal or civil liability is a different question, but that’s the critical question.
So, what are the lessons here? The first is that we need to reject the leftist feminist Calvinball model of jurisprudence and insist on clear laws applied to admissible facts within regulated proceedings that ensure fairness for all parties. The second is that we should not believe all victims, or even assume that anyone is a victim before all the facts are in. What we should do is believe the admissible evidence, not hearsay, not speculation, not innuendo. And third, we should demand that people take responsibility for their own actions. This would never have happened if the girl had not gotten drunk and drugged up, then decided to act out sexually for whatever reason possessed her to do so. And this would not have happened if at least some of these repellent men had not decided to take advantage of her self-destructive behavior.
There’s plenty of blame to go around here, and we shouldn’t be ashamed to assign it. One of the big problems with modern society is its lack of judgment. We’re told that we shouldn’t slut-shame. That’s wrong. Sluts should be ashamed. We don’t owe them validation, and we’re not doing them any favors by pretending their self-destructive indulgences are anything but humiliating and degrading. Nor should we excuse the men who take advantage of the opportunity. Participating in such sordid mass sex acts likewise degrades them. They should also be ashamed — man-slut-shamed. That it exposes all of them to the potential destruction of their futures is yet another reason why we should demand more.
But if we’re called upon to sort out these sordid disputes, we should do it with a jaundiced eye. And we should remember what Judge Mom learned from years of experience in the criminal courts: “Everybody lies.”
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