Supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, U.S., September 27, 2018. Melina Mara/Pool via REUTERS
Brett Kavanaugh lied about sexual assaults, according to an investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, published in the New York Times.
In addition to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez, there is now an additional account, given by a man whose account was ignored by the FBI during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings:
We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)
It matters that this account is by a male witness, because our media – which is a reflection of our culture – only believes men when it comes to sexual assault.
Women who are claiming to have been sexually assaulted are seen as “biased.” Only men, we are told via the silencing of victims, can be objective when it comes to crimes perpetrated their own. (This isn’t aimed at the women investigators, who much like the two women detectives in “Unbelievable,” got to a truth the dominant culture seemed happy to ignore at the expense of the self-esteem of the victims; it’s most predominant on TV news and of course all right wing “news.”)
So now that a man has witnessed Brett Kavanaugh being a sexual predator, we can finally have this discussion. Hurdle one, check.
This might seem like just another Trump scandal, another horrible person he’s put into power, but it’s so much more than that.
A nation of women watched as a known rapist and aggressive sexual predator was put into the highest judicial position possible. Republicans put him into power while covering up his sexual assault history, but they also had help from our media.
It was obvious to many of us who have been there that many of these women’s stories were truthful. This isn’t “bias,” it’s actually called expertise. An expert is someone who has authoritative knowledge. A sexual assault victim has this knowledge, and if she or he was not brainwashed to believe this is all their own fault, they won’t hate and disbelieve other victims automatically – unlike the public, the media, and our lawmakers.
Actual victims, aka experts, were silenced.
Not just by Republicans, who rammed Brett Kavanaugh down this country’s throat like they apparently proudly get off doing to women in their spare time (the people who defend rapists identify with the rapists, and people should begin asking WHY they do so and of course it’s not just Republicans or conservatives, it’s just that they have no shame about elevating predators), but by our media.
Our media pushed themselves into the role of moral arbiter, lecturing rape victims that it was inappropriate to try to be heard by Republican lawmakers who had already decided that all of these women coming forward, these brave women whose lives would be forever changed for the worse for it, were lying.
The media diminished the importance of these women, silencing them like the original detectives in the Netflix series “Unbelievable,” about Marie Adler’s real-life case, originally covered by Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller and published with ProPublica and The Marshall Project.
The media’s job is supposed to be to speak for those who don’t have a voice, and given that, sexual assault victims qualify.
From RAINN:
Only 230 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are reported to police. That means about 3 out of 4 go unreported.1
• Individuals of college-age2
o Female Students: 20% report
o Female Non-Students: 32% report
• The elderly: 28% report3
• Members of the military: 43% of female victims and 10% of male victims reported.
Our media continues its moral siding with corporate power rather than its moral duty to speak for the disenfranchised and vulnerable.
It took two women to investigate the Kavanaugh accusations and find that they had merit. And this is exactly why it matters that women have a seat at the table.
Brett Kavanaugh should be impeached, as should the people who directed the FBI to severely limit the investigation into the accusations against him. This wrong can’t be allowed to pass like the other sexual predator on the Supreme Court.
There will be no justice for women when the top court in the nation is comprised of two men who hate women and see us as objects to be hurt and then tossed away like garbage.
Our media needs to be better. It needs to do better. They brought us Donald Trump and his Court of Predators, and they continue to enable them with their false equivocations and smarmy conflations.
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