The goal – at least the stated goal – of #MeToo was to make life easier for victims of sexual crimes to come forward. It seemed like it was working great when it put genuine bad guys behind bars, like lifelong Democrat Harvey Weinstein.
But since the movement has evolved into #believevictims, it has in fact just created a different kind of victim. Indeed – by design – #believevictims has replaced hundreds of years of legal protections with an assumption of guilt in the face of social media mobs and drive-by litigation.
This has been particularly bad on so-called progressive college campuses. Starting well before #MeToo, the Obama Administration’s “zero tolerance” manipulation of Title IX made mere accusation a guilty verdict. Critics said that Washington compelled campuses to enforce broad and frequently ambiguous definitions of what constituted assault or even just harassment. To many of us it seemed like the goal was less to create a safer environment and more to provide work for an expanding army of woke Title IX inquisitors.
Both women and men ended up exploiting this to get revenge after a breakup. People started to make the grim joke that the assault victim was whoever ran the slowest to the Title IX office.
When Betsy DeVos became President Trump’s secretary of education, she overturned this awful policy, returning a little sanity to our college campuses.
“Every survivor of sexual misconduct must be taken seriously. Every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined,” she said in 2017. “The truth is that the system established by the prior administration has failed too many students. Survivors, victims of a lack of due process and campus administrators have all told me that the current approach does a disservice to everyone involved.”
But with Democrats back in office, it’s open season again.
An infuriating example of this right now is Chad Readey, a dual-sport athlete in baseball and basketball from Illinois. Also the valedictorian of his class, Readey could have gone to any college he wanted. But when he announced he’d be attending Northwestern University in his home state, Ready became the victim of a letter-writing campaign organized by jealous classmates who wanted to smear him out of going to his dream college.
All the claims were reviewed and dismissed by Readey’s high school and Northwestern. And if you do a casual search of his name you’ll come up with damning links that I won’t dignify by citing, but if you actually read the lawsuit you’ll see that the leader of the smear campaign retracted all of her claims (it’s on page 11).
Despite Readey’s name being cleared in a court of law, the libelous charges remain. Like Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend says to him in The Social Network – telegraphing the damage social media would unleash on the world – “The Internet isn’t written in pencil, Mark, it’s written in ink.”
The latest development is that media-hungry lawyer Tamara Holder has jumped on the claims – despite the fact they have been debunked and retracted – to sue Northwestern not Readey. Holder has jumped on the debunked lies as a women’s “rights” attorney, but in her unbridled enthusiasm to exploit traditional and social media for leverage, she has herself made false accusations against Readey.
So now Readey is suing her for defamation of character.
The he said/she said dynamic of sexual assault claims has always been complicated. Because most human intimacy happens behind closed doors, there are rarely any other witnesses. Was it assault or consensual? Did it even happen?
This fact has been routinely exploited by both sex criminals and false accusers for centuries. So then the side society has always believed was whoever had the most social status – To Kill A Mockingbird’s Tom Robinson was black, whereas his accuser was white; the biblical Joseph had a technicolor dream-coat, but not as much clout as Potiphar’s wife.
We all want a society with as few victims as possible, either from false accusations or actual assault. With every step, we are moving forward on behalf of some while stomping on others. A hashtag is not enough to trump the presumption of innocence – or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s time that the wrongly accused clear their name by using the same tactics by which they were defamed.