The Handmaid’s Tale
It was one of those moments in life where everything changes. I was standing at the corner of 30th and University in North Park, at the epicenter of San Diego’s liberal community. A few blocks down University, you enter Hillcrest, San Diego’s gay community. Joe Biden had just been declared the winner of the election, and cars were streaming through the busy intersection, all honking their horns. People were flying American flags, rainbow flags and “Biden/Harris” posters from the windows of their cars. It was a celebratory atmosphere as if they had just announced a cure for cancer or the return of Jesus Christ.
From Day One, I’d had major issues with the 2020 Democratic presidential ticket. Look, I’ve never liked Joe Biden. Despite being from the northeast, he always reminded me of an old school Southern Democrat, back when Democrats were the racists before Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” flipped the parties’ (public) positions on race. This is a guy who opposed busing and said that it was going to create a “racial jungle”. I myself credit busing with the fact that I received an outstanding education growing up in Wichita, Kansas.
To me, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have more in common than Trump and Mike Pence. Biden’s core constituency has always been working class White men, just like the old Southern Democrats and Donald Trump. Let’s do a tale of the tape...
Both Trump and Biden are White men from the Northeast in their mid-70s. Both men have a documented history of making racist statements. Both men stand accused of sexual assault. Both men have a documented history of inappropriate behavior toward women. Trump has been accused of having shady dealings in Russia. Biden has been accused of having shady dealings in the Ukraine. Historically, Trump has actually been MORE PROGRESSIVE than Biden on LGBTQ issues. Before his transparent politically-motivated shift a few years ago, Biden voted for the Republican “Defense of Marriage” act and voted to take away federal funding from schools that taught acceptance of homosexuality! But yet, the gays were honking their horns and flying rainbow flags in celebration of his election. It’s bizarro-world.
Of course, all accusations are not equal. Biden’s one accusation of serious sexual assault and weird touchy behavior is not equal to Trump’s dozens of sexual assault allegations that come in light of his taped confession that he likes sexually assaulting girls. Biden’s entanglements in the Ukraine certainly are not as extensive as Trump’s entanglements in Russia. But yet, Biden’s history merits scrutiny.
I never agreed with the conservative narrative that the media is liberal. I think it’s rather centrist and establishment. Corporate. But it is definitely anti-Trump, and if Biden were running against anyone else, these various potential scandals would not have been dismissed by the non-Fox media as casually as they have been. Indeed, in his past runs at the presidency, the media has unmasked him for his questionable history.
You add to Biden an appallingly tone-deaf Vice Presidential selection, a Black woman who, as a prosecutor in the San Francisco Bay Area and Attorney General of California, has spent her entire adult life locking up primarily Black and Latino men and defending the incarceration of Black and Latino men, the 2020 Democratic ticket is a big FUCK YOU to women, Blacks, Latinos and the LGBTQ community. It amounts to an admission that the Trump strategy was correct: Despite America’s changing demographics, pander to working class Whites in American elections and you win. And they did.
Despite Kamala Harris having a vagina and brown skin, it was the most anti-diversity Democratic ticket in decades. An accused sexual predator, the author of the 1994 crime bill, with a history of racist remarks and an anti-gay voting record, and a prosecutor who despite her claims of being “progressive” spent her career putting minorities behind bars, went to court to try to prevent the federally-ordered reduction of California’s prison population, and refused to allow DNA testing that would have freed an apparently innocent man from death row. She tried to prosecute poor parents for the truancy of their children. She refused to prosecute corrupt bankers. Congressional voting records be damned. Her life’s work is right-wing. Sounds like a ticket Republicans should love!
As I stood there on that corner waiting for the bus, I couldn’t believe that the liberal community was celebrating the election of this ticket. It’s all well and good to be happy to be rid of Trump, but replacing one 70 year old accused rapist with another should be no cause for celebration, but rather for cautious optimism AT BEST. This was the moment in my life when certain problems that I’ve always had with liberals and liberalism came to a head.
I’ve never fit perfectly into the polarized American political spectrum and to me the fact that most people seem to have no problem picking a side shows that they aren’t really thinking for themselves. I have progressive liberal views on most issues, but yet, there are many issues where I believe conservatives are right and that liberals can be just as closed-minded and intolerant in their own way. I’ve always felt that from an organizational standpoint and a philosophical standpoint, post-60s liberals were often ridiculous and that was why America has been moving steadily rightward for the last 50 years, with three of the four Democratic presidents we’ve had being what would be called conservatives in Western Europe. I now believe we effectively have two fascist-lite parties in America.
My predictions for this election were dead wrong. I thought Trump would win easily. I expected that millions of liberals would be too disappointed in a Biden/Harris ticket to vote, and that turnout would be low, which always favors Republicans. I knew the polls that showed an easy Biden victory were bullshit and they proved out to be as he barely won states where polls predicted easy victories. When will we learn that polls of all kinds are useless? But to my surprise, Democrats flocked to the polls to vote for “Trump in a Democrat suit” and a prosecutor. So much for #metoo. So much Black Lives Matter. Old White men run America and don’t you forget it!
As I stood there watching this disgusting celebration, it occurred to me how much Joe Biden and Kobe Bryant have in common. It’s more than just that they both escaped sexual assault allegations. Kobe Bryant was a fucking scumbag. He mistreated nearly every person in his life. He was pathologically selfish. According to Ronald Lazenby’s biography “Showboat”, a well-sourced, well-documented book which paints a very damning image of Kobe, in high school he attempted to physically attack a smaller, weaker teammate...for celebrating after scoring a basket against him in practice. I don’t know what really happened in that Eagle, Colorado hotel room, but I know that Kobe’s own self-reported behavior as recounted by the leaked police report is the behavior of a scumbag. So even if Kobe was telling the truth that he didn’t actually rape that girl, he was at the bare minimum being an asshole, which was par for the course for his life, and its no surprise that she FELT raped after he treated her like a cheap whore.
But yet, Lakers fans cheered Kobe Bryant and loved him. Why? Because he was great at basketball and he helped their team win championships. I see Kobe Bryant jerseys everywhere in Southern California. Like forty or fifty a day if I’m out for a while. I’m especially intrigued by how often I see girls wearing them. I always want to go up to them and ask, “How can you wear that guy’s jersey?”. But I already know the answer. Our society has devolved into such a level of tribalism, it doesn’t matter what kind of person Kobe Bryant was. All that matters is that he helped “our side” WIN.
And so it is with Joe Biden. Our political discourse in this country has become just another pro sport. People pick a team and root for them. They even have team colors, red vs. blue, and team mascots, donkeys vs. elephants. Voters no longer really care about the substance of a candidate’s character, nor even their political record. They just care that their team wins, and all other principles go out the window. Suddenly, “Believe All Women” becomes “Believe All Women Except Tara Reade”. Suddenly, while one 70+ White male racist is Hitler, another one is totally acceptable. And for the record, Biden’s been saying racist stuff a lot longer than Trump has. This is why in 30+ years of trying, he couldn’t win the Democratic nomination because he was always saying something offensive...just like Trump.
It occurred to me standing on that corner that American politics have devolved to the point that the Democrats could nominate Ronald Reagan and Democrat loyalists would vote for him. Republicans loved their rapist, and the Democrats love theirs.
Strangely, unlike 2016 when Jill Stein and Gary Johnson got lots of press, I never heard the names of Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins or Libertarian nominee Jo Jorgensen until I looked them up just now. You would think that with the Democrats and Republicans presenting embarrassingly awful tickets, there would have been some attention given to third parties, although admittedly neither Hawkins nor Jorgensen appear to be qualified to be president. But the Democratic Party actually went to court in several states to get the Green Party kicked off the ballot! Do you see the massive hypocrisy there? Democrats have been screaming about Republican voter suppression tactics, but yet went to court to prevent voters from having the Green Party choice on their ballot. Why? Because only VICTORY and POWER matter to them, just like the Republicans. Despite their pretenses, they have no more integrity than the Republicans. There are few, very few, politicians actually motivated by ethics rather than power.
It has been almost eight years since my life was destroyed by a sexual assault allegation. It suddenly occurred to me that while my incarceration and subsequent punishment were ostensibly intended to protect women, in these eight years, nearly every woman in America (every woman who votes anyway) has voted for one accused sexual predator or another. Christine Blasey Ford, E. Jean Carroll and Tara Reade are all far more credible than my accuser, and Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Brett Kavanaugh all have far worse records in their treatment of women than I do. Yet, I got five years in prison and am now living on the streets, while they are living in mansions and occupying the highest offices in the land. It is an injustice that justifies burning America to the ground.
It was another of those perspective-changing moments when around half of the White women in America voted for Trump after hearing that Access Hollywood tape. Even worse, they voted for him over a woman who, like her or not, having been a Senator, Secretary of State, and an active and engaged first spouse to an excellent two-term President, was one of the most qualified people, male or female, ever to run for president. Maybe my evil step-sisters were right: a lot of girls apparently love a pussy-grabber as long as he’s a billionaire. But I thought, there’s no way liberal women will turn out to vote for Biden after everything they said about Trump. But once again, our society’s capacity for hypocrisy exceeds what I thought possible.
Girls, you must understand the message you’ve just sent! Young boys aren’t totally stupid. They do lift their heads from their video games now and then to see what’s happening. They saw the #metoo movement and I’m sure it made a lot of young boys take note and think about their behavior. But now the women of America have elected two accused predators back-to-back to the highest office in the land, perhaps the most powerful office in the world. Boys will look at this and think, “Maybe that jackass on the football team who keeps telling me ‘no means yes’ is right. Maybe women do like being raped. They just voted for rapists.”. Whatever progress may have been made in changing the attitudes of young men was unraveled by the election of two accused rapists and the installation of an accused rapist on the Supreme Court. The message to young White men is, “If I have power, I’ll get away with ANYTHING I do to a girl, and I can still be president if I want.”
Are we living in the Handmaid’s Tale? Well, our just-contested presidential election featured one accused rapist against another. One vice presidential candidate wants to force women to have funerals for their fetuses, and the other is a scion of mass incarceration, which leaves women and children alone and vulnerable. The accused rapist won.
Here’s the thing: Tara Reade seems like a problematic character to me. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t raped. One thing I learned in my five years incarcerated primarily with rapists and child molesters is that they target women and children who have issues. They target people who are less likely to be believed.
Men often cite delayed reporting as a challenge to the credibility of a woman. I want to debunk this. I would actually bet that immediately reported allegations (those without substantiating physical evidence) have a higher percentage of being false than delayed ones.
There are a number of good reasons why a woman might delay reporting a sexual assault for years or even decades. Let’s take the Brett Kavanaugh accusation for example. I don’t know the truth, but if I had to bet in Vegas, I believe Christine Blasey-Ford, though as is often the case is such situations, a person’s memory may not match EXACTLY what happened. Kavanaugh comes off as defensive, aggressive and pathologically dishonest. Doesn’t mean he is, but that is my impression of him. I didn’t watch the hearings or read too many interviews with her, but it would be very logical for Christine Blasey-Ford to think, “I have to live with this event regardless, and if this guy is just an ordinary judge, so be it, but people need to know he did this before he ascends to an office with THAT much power.”.
Men often act like a woman doesn’t have the right to decide to keep silent for her own reasons, when obviously she does, and most rape victims do choose to keep silent for a variety of reasons. But choosing not to report an assault at the time it happens is not an obligation to never report it, especially if circumstances change in an important way, such as the man who assaulted you being nominated to one of the most powerful positions in the world.
But there is something else that often keeps women silent that I haven’t seen mentioned in debates on the subject, and because I have unique insight into it, I want to discuss it. During my five years in jail and prison, I was mostly incarcerated with others accused of sex crimes, the majority crimes far more heinous than even the worse of the accusations against me or any of these public figures. During this time, I had the opportunity to read a lot of case files. Part of the modus operandi of many sexual predators is to levy threats too grotesque to repeat at their victims in order to keep them from reporting the crime. Some of these things I saw are so devious and perverse that I wouldn’t even repeat them for fear of spreading the dangerous idea to more predators. But I will give a hypothetical example of the general kind of thing I mean. A sexual predator finds out that a co-worker, father of an adolescent daughter, is embezzling money. He approaches the daughter and tells her, “Let me do (whatever) and don’t tell anyone or I’m going to tell on your dad and he will go to jail.”. The girl, either knowing that her father is an embezzler or not being sure, complies. The girl keeps silent for twenty years until her father dies, and then she reports the rape. Her father may be out of the range of criminal penalties, but she still doesn’t want to posthumously ruin his reputation, so she doesn’t tell the reason for her silence, and of course the predator won’t confess the threat he used because that would be an admission of guilt. People will ask, “Why did she wait?” and the answer is something she has good reason not to tell.
Another similar scenario would be that where a woman works for a friend of the predator or an organization to which the predator has close ties. She might keep silent for years due to fear of the predator being able to cause her problems at work even if she doesn’t work with or for him. Later on, if she changes jobs, or if the predator’s relationship to her employer is severed for one reason or another, she may choose to report the assault.
The point is, it is naive to think predators just rape women and walk away. They USUALLY try to concoct some threat to keep the woman silent, and these threats often work forever. But sometimes, the threat will eventually disappear or expire, and that’s when you get the delayed report. Except in instances where the motivation is political, a woman who plans a false accusation is far more likely to make that accusation immediately after she has been in the man’s presence, knowing that seems more credible. But in any case, with Kavanaugh and Biden and many other cases, it makes total sense that a woman might choose to keep silent until the point where that individual is about to be invested with powers far greater than they have had in the past.
Is it possible that Tara Reade’s claims are false and politically motivated? Absolutely! Just as it is possible that Trump’s accusers’ claims are false and politically motivated. Absent physical evidence of some kind, ANY sexual assault allegation COULD be false. We act like it is difficult to find multiple people (women or men) willing to lie for ideological reasons, for attention or for money. Humans (male and female) are such profligate liars, that’s why we have standards of evidence. But Trump’s got the Access Hollywood tape and Biden’s got his history of non-consensually nuzzling women’s necks and other grabby behavior, so to me that means their accusers deserve the benefit of the doubt. It would be totally different if someone accused Barack Obama of sexual assault. He’s been absolutely impeccable in his conduct toward others and thus I would say he deserved the benefit of the doubt if credible evidence could not be produced.
Biden may be innocent of the rape, but to me, if he had integrity (which I don’t believe he does), considering the climate of the times, he would have stepped aside given his Trump-like record on the treatment of women, and let the Democratic party put forth Hillary Clinton (or practically anyone else), who I believe would have learned from her 2016 campaign mistakes and easily beaten Trump in a second go-around.
The problem with the approach women have taken is that the American criminal justice system and the media are still firmly controlled by White male money and power. And furthermore, OLD White male money and power. Why is age significant? Because older men tend to have more reactionary attitudes toward gender equality.
Women turned the power to decide these issues over to the courts and the media, and in so doing, ceded their own voice to the old White male establishment. It is this old White male criminal justice establishment that then conducts the investigations and decides which men to prosecute. They employ some women to give the appearance that it isn’t a male enterprise, but as people like Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter teach us, not all women are on the side of women. And, surprise surprise, the sex offender registry has disproportionate representation of poor, Black and brown men, while EVERY SINGLE ONE of the rich powerful WASPACs (I use this term because Catholicism is now mainstream) got away with it. Trump got away with it. Biden got away with it. Kavanaugh got away with it. And I guess Kobe was the first White Black man because he got away with it too.
Who didn’t get away with it? Harvey Weinstein, Jewish. Bill Cosby, Black. Jeffrey Epstein, Jewish. Al Franken (who didn’t really do anything), Jewish. R. Kelly, Black. Eliot Spitzer, Jewish. Anthony Weiner, Jewish. Mike Tyson, Black.
Now, some of those guys might be monsters, but the racial disparity in who goes to prison or has their career destroyed for sex crimes and who gets away with it clean is obvious. In effect, given the circumstance that has been created, what women are doing when they make a sexual assault allegation to the courts or the media is giving over to old White men with money and power the right to make a decision on the accused man’s life. And naturally, these powerful White men exonerate their own and excoriate men of color.
It should be clear to all women by now that the current path is a failure after three years of #metoo yielded a Rapist Vs. Rapist presidential election. But all you girls voted for one of these guys or the other and I just don’t know how to feel about that.
How is it that entering the third decade of the TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY we are at this pass after a more than century-long fight for women’s rights beginning with the suffrage movement? I believe it is the same reason that we’ve seen a similar backslide in race relations. It is because we’ve made the mistake of prosecuting the fight for equality as a war rather than a collaborative endeavor. And in a war, the more powerful side, i.e. the entrenched institutional side, usually wins. We have to choose a new direction.
It’s funny. The traditional misogynist stereotype of women was that they are manipulative, scheming, overly emotional liars, all but a precious few of whom cannot be trusted. We’ve now turned that stereotype completely around to where women are angelically pure, and none ever lie, scheme or manipulate, and are always perfectly rational. Both extremes are equally dangerous and wrong. Women are human. There are good girls and bad girls. Bad girls lie.
Women must stop being dismissive of the reality of false sexual assault accusations. And in particular, liberal women, while talking out of one side of their mouth about racial justice, should be embarrassed by their refusal to acknowledge our nation’s long and ugly history of White women making false rape allegations against Black men, a problem that even a recent article on the American Bar Association website admits still exists. Liberal women should be confronting this problem directly just as they confront this unfair treatment of Black men in other areas of the criminal justice system.
Look, if I’m going to Vegas to bet on the ratio between rapes and false allegations of rape, and there is a God-like authority behind the window who knows the absolute true answer, there is NO WAY I’d go less than 1000 rapes to every false allegation. I feel like 10,000 is still a safe bet. It’s probably higher than that. Consider some numbers: 100,000 rapes were reported in 2019. I would not hesitate to argue that if 100,000 were reported, AT LEAST one million happened. That sounds high until you think, there are about 150 million women and girls in America. You don’t think 1 in 150 girls get raped each year? It’s way more than that. But let’s stick with the low number. Thus, even if 10% of the reported rapes were false, that would be one false report for every thousand actual rapes. And I’m guessing that of those 100,000 reported rapes, the vast majority are not “he said, she said” cases, but rather incidents with injuries and physical evidence where there is little doubt that a rape occurred, though the perpetrator may be uncertain.
So it is true that the problem of rape, sexual assault and sexual violence against women is an infinitely larger problem than the problem of false accusations against men. But if we take the low number generally quoted for false accusations, 2%, that would have been around two thousand men last year who were victims of false accusations. Advocates for women are being positively disingenuous when they pretend that a sexual assault allegation is ever consequence-free for any man other than Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh and the like. For the average man, an allegation of sexual assault is a CRIPPLING life event, whether they have to stand trial or not. It has a permanent negative impact on a person’s professional, financial and social life. Should we forget about these two thousand men each year, and sacrifice them to the cause of making women and girls safer by giving every woman a “Get Believed For Free” card such that every man knows he’d better be careful? I might say yes if it actually worked that way. But it doesn’t.
What false accusations and bad prosecutions actually do is make it HARDER for real victims to be heard, as well as contributing to misogynistic attitudes amongst men, many of whom actually believe that the majority of rape allegations are false. But it wouldn’t be possible for men to believe this if not for all the high-profile cases of false accusations that women don’t want to talk about (Duke lacrosse, Rolling Stone University of Virginia case, and many others). Add to that the fact that the Innocence Project is getting innocent men convicted of rape exonerated almost daily, and these are all DNA cases. What about the innocent men in cases where there was no DNA?
We cannot continue to ignore this problem, in particular because the problem of wrongful allegations and convictions contributes to making the problem of sexual violence against women WORSE, particularly when so many powerful men get away with it whether the allegations are credible or not. We can’t be fair to women by being unfair to men.
In examining the failure of multiculturalism and how it has pushed global society to the right, I believe a key issue is the global “angelification” of groups that were previously demonized and oppressed. Just as it is now taboo to call a woman a liar, it is taboo to talk about real problems that exist in the Black community, or the LGBTQ community. Everything is the fault of the White male hegemony. And this obvious hypocrisy is a big part of what makes the White male hegemony continue to refuse to take real responsibility for any of its wrongs.
There is a natural tendency for the once-dominated to crave the privilege of dominating their past oppressor. But this only leads to a pendulum-like cycle where the power to oppress changes hands like the conch shell in Lord of the Flies. To achieve true equity, we must move past vengeance and retribution and establish a new order based on MUTUAL respect. The forces that guard the gates of the old ways are fortifying their positions against change because they feel that the advocates for change want respect, but do not give it in return. Women cannot expect respect from men if women do not give respect TO men. And there is no greater disrespect to men than to say, “No matter what your history, if the most disreputable woman in the world claims you wronged her, I will BELIEVE her.”
In that sense, there is a silver lining to the Democrats’ appallingly hypocritical dismissal of Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden. At least liberal women have established a watermark where they are willing to NOT believe a woman. I sense that if the political affiliations were reversed, Democrats would support Reade. But I trust that the GOP, always being better strategically, will hold their feet to the fire in not allowing liberals to push any allegation LESS credible than Reade’s in the future. That’s the bed you made, liberal women, in your desperation to avoid four more years of Trump. I predict you will find it was not worth it. We had eight years of Obama and then we got Trump after that. The Republican that comes after Biden will be even worse than Trump. Wait’ll you get a load of President Mike Pence and his ultra-right Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade. Fetus graveyards will be popping up all over America.
I believe that it is counter-productive to rail against problems without at least proposing a solution. So what solutions do I propose, to create a world that is safe for women and girls, without burning innocent men in the crucible?
Sexuality is amongst the most intimate, complex and personal of human interactions, steeped in powerful emotions. It is absolutely absurd to have disputes arising out of behavior that is so intimate, complex, personal and emotional adjudicated in a legal system that is dispassionate, simplistic, impersonal and designed to disregard emotion. Our legal system is not designed to handle complex situations period, and as a result, most of the people who work in it, district attorneys, prosecutors, judges and police officers, have a reductionist mindset that seeks to brush aside complexities. This is the worst possible approach to sexual assault cases.
I believe that we need a new social institution, completely separate from the existing legal system, designed from the ground up specifically to handle crimes and disputes that are sexual in nature. This system should have its own detectives, its own prosecutors, its own judges. It should have some kind of confidentiality mechanism so that neither accused nor accuser is publicly damaged until a thorough investigation is completed.
We need to dispense with trying to lump events into categories. The spectrum of actions that can result in the charge “rape” is absurdly broad. The term “sexual assault” is so broad as to be practically meaningless as we use it to refer to everything from an over-the-clothes grope to forcible anal penetration. We have to look at every situation individually and ask, first, “Did something happen here?”, and second, “What was it that happened?” and finally, “How serious is it?”. And finally, if we do determine that there was a transgression, we have to make reasonable decisions about what action should be taken, whether it is incarceration or something else. And we must stop using the uselessly broad pejorative term “sex offender” that lumps public urinators in with violent serial rapists.
This new institution must also have gender balance. Detectives and investigators should be partnered in male-female teams. If we do maintain jury trials for these cases (and I’m not sure we should), they should be held before a mixed-gender panel of judges rather than a single judge, and the jury should require gender balance. I’m not smart enough to design this system all by myself, but we need to gather bright minds from the relevant disciplines to figure out how to best construct this system.
But changing the legal system is far from enough. While I strongly believe in using the law as an instrument to try to promote justice, I recognize the fact that too few people understand: No social problem can be solved in the legal realm. The passage of the Civil Rights Act clearly did not solve our nation’s racial divisions. The decriminalization of homosexuality did not eliminate the injustices suffered by the LGBTQ community. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment did not end patriarchy. Court actions, whether in the present system or, as I propose, in a new one will never solve the sexual violence problem we have in our society. It will require us to take a hard look at ourselves and it will require BOTH men and women to make significant changes to the ways we view and interact with each other.
I believe we need to convene a symposium on sexual relations. I’m not talking about a one-weekend affair. I’m talking about a long-term project that brings together men and women from every background and every strata of society to work out an actual set of social standards for how we will relate to one another in dating and sexual situations. As I’ve stated several times here, my first proposal is that a great many of these problems would be solved if the social convention of men approaching women was reversed.
I submit to the female world that what the feminist movement has failed to do which it now MUST do is make real alliances with the good men. There are...I want to say “many”, but sadly I can only confidently say “some”. Women need to start actively recruiting men to the feminist movement, but this recruitment will only be genuine and effective if girls publicly certify who the good men are. Right now, most men are simply afraid of ending up on the “bad list” because there is no “good list”. There are plenty of dangers to being bad (unless you are a powerful White man), but women have given men no incentive to be GOOD during this time. This results in outcomes destructive to female ambitions, like the fact that many male executives now avoid hiring and mentoring women for fear of being wrongly accused of bad behavior. Women need to put out the “Good Men List” and say, “And here’s what you get for being a good man...”. I’m planting my flag: I should be on it.
After what I’ve been through in the last eight years, it would be easy for me to become a raging misogynist. But I’ll never turn my back on girls. But I have to remember it's not EVERY girl I’m fighting for. There are girls on the right side and girls in the wrong side. I’m with girls when girls are right, and they usually are. But nobody’s perfect.
I have been fighting for girls long before I started this blog. I’ve spent my life arguing to my male peers that we need to treat women better. I’ve supported women personally and professionally. I’ve never (knowingly) participated in the conspiracy of men to exploit women. There have been times where I’ve said of written things that may have sounded misogynistic, an emotional reaction to the fact that I never felt women returned the support that I offered them. Thus, I cannot help but feel betrayed that things have come to this pass.
Since I was fifteen years old, after the 1991 rape trials of Mike Tyson and William Kennedy Smith, I was keenly aware of being careful about the situations I put myself in with women. And given the difference in race, attitude and social status of Tyson and Smith, and the relative lack of physical evidence in both cases, I told myself, “This can happen to ANYBODY, so I have to be VERY careful.”. These seminal events are a big part of how I managed to make it into my twenties still a virgin.
I always knew that being accused of misconduct was a risk of being a sexually active man. Although it wasn’t my reason for always trying to treat women with respect, I believed that if I ever were accused, the dozens of women who had seen my level of respectfulness up close would come to my defense. How wrong I was.
I think about all the women that I’ve worked with, or that I’ve been in potentially intimate situations with, and none of them rose their voice to say, “Based on my experience with him, I don’t believe Michael did that.”. I wonder now, what went through their minds. I probably shouldn’t do it, but I’m going to name names. Does Aubrey Haddach, a lawyer, think I’m a rapist? Does Shavondalyn Givens, a lawyer, think I’m a rapist? Does Madeline Johnston, a lawyer, think I’m a rapist? Does Dr. Tobey Tam think I’m a rapist? Does Dr. Kara Waltz think I’m a rapist?
I think about all the highly educated, successful women that I’ve worked with or known socially, that I’ve spent time with in all kinds of situations such that they should know what I’ve been accused of could never happen. Yet, none of them came to my aid or defense. In part, I think it is the “sisterhood of women” to never challenge another woman’s sexual assault allegation. But I would look all those highly educated and successful women I know in the eye and explain to them that by not defending me, they are negating all their education and success and lowering themselves in the “sisterhood of women” to the same level as a part-time massage therapist who has used five names and has a criminal record. You went to law school, medical school, grad school, and worked your ass off to build a successful career in a male-dominated world in order to be in the same pool with HER?
I know what all of these girls would say if you stuck a microphone in their face and asked them about any of this: “Michael went to jail?!? I had no idea!”. But of course everybody knows. I’ll never believe anyone who was a part of my social or professional circle who claims they didn’t hear about it. I had my sister post it on Facebook asking for help when I got arrested. Everybody knows. But why the silence? It’s obvious.
I look at our ridiculous media now, and there is this misguided trend to try to blame every person who ever had any contact with high-profile predators. It’s like you’re a bad person automatically if you ever took a picture with Jeffrey Epstein or had dinner with Harvey Weinstein, as if being associated with them in any way makes you partially responsible for their crimes. What this does is make people reluctant to defend people they know who have been accused of a sex crime, because they fear you may be revealed to be a repeat offender like those guys, and they don’t want to have to explain their association with you, let alone have to explain that they defended you when the first allegation arose. This is a deeply deeply unhealthy social phenomenon, and it is a big part of why innocent until proven guilty has now been totally reversed in America, and particularly when it comes to sex crimes, you are now guilty until proven innocent.
For all our rabid anti-Communism in America, it’s funny how we do so many things exactly the way Soviet Russia did. This was a key technique for suppressing dissent in the USSR—make anyone closely or even loosely associated with a dissident into a criminal also, and thus isolate the dissidents. We’ve been practicing social distancing long before the coronavirus. Except in the political realm, we’ve made it socially unacceptable to defend a man accused of sexual misconduct. All of the people who may have contrary positive reports about his behavior distance themselves, leaving the accuser as the only voice, and thus making accusation tantamount to guilt. What I’ve wanted all along in my case is the same kind of investigation and scrutiny that the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump have received. While they run from investigations, I run toward it because I know I would be exonerated and I would finally be able to move on with my life...what’s left of it.
During my time in prison, I had countless hours to reflect on all of my decisions and mistakes in life. The term “gaslighting” has come into vogue, and the apparent universal belief in my guilt gaslighted me into questioning my own perception of reality. Maybe I really was a bad guy. And herein lies another problem with our approach to dealing with allegations of sexual assault. Does it seem that there will be no end to men being accused? In part, this does go to show how widespread misogyny and sexual abuse are. But there is another side to this story...
As our media has shown us, you can spin ANYTHING. Sexuality is intense and complex and emotional. I don’t believe there is any man who has been sexually and/or romantically active who has not made mistakes in certain situations that left a woman feeling upset. I have and I’ll talk about that. But in the case of any man, you can collect a few isolated incidents and spin them into an appearance of a pattern of bad behavior that doesn’t actually exist.
I’m a writer and thus it shouldn’t be any surprise that most of my mistakes have been things I wrote. I’ve sent a few ill-advised letters and emails to girls. I would argue and stand by the argument that there is a BIG difference between anything written and things done in person. Nonetheless, words matter.
About nine years ago, I sent a girl a sexually oriented email that I regret sending. Indeed, within 24 hours, I wrote her asking her NOT to read it if she hadn’t already. It was either too late or she was too curious not to look at it. Her response was to ask me to never contact her again, and I haven’t. I could give the entire background and context of our relationship and try to justify myself, but the bottom line is that the email WAS inappropriate, even though I still feel she overreacted given our personal history before that. But I did what I did and won’t hide from it.
There was also an incident involving the girl I call June when I was in Africa. I won’t detail what happened because it’s private, but if I had the chance to sit down with her today, I could explain why I did what I did and I believe she would understand. But, if she came forward and just stated what happened without any context, it sounds bad, even though it actually wasn’t what it may have seemed to her to be. And again, like with the girl I sent the email to, we had a deeply involved personal relationship where there was a lot going on, emotionally and practically. But still, I did what I did.
This is why I believe that our standard operating procedure in any case of a serious sexual assault allegation should be to interview every single woman who has been a part of that man’s professional and social life in order to paint a complete picture of what his behavior toward women has been. Every single one. I’d be happy to submit a (very long) list and I feel good about what the results would be, if the interviews were conducted in good faith (i.e. seeking positive reports as well as negative ones).
Listen, throughout my life, I have endeavored to practice the utmost respect toward women, and that is what makes being accused of this type of crime hurt so much. I literally NEVER touched girls without permission unless I was in an intimate relationship with them. I never even put my hand on a woman’s arm or shoulder in the office. Even in bars and nightclubs where I was regularly groped by women, I never intentionally touched a girl in even the slightest way without permission. I was the ULTIMATE gentleman.
I’ll be talking about this more in my upcoming piece “Regrets”, but I’ve been in SO many situations with girls that any guy would have assumed to be sexual but yet I did nothing because I was taught never to assume that anything short of a direct declaration meant that a girl wanted to have sex. Some of these situations left women speculating that I was gay. That’s how cautious I was. That’s how deeply I had internalized the feminist message that you can NEVER assume a woman wants to have sex unless she explicitly says so.
But in the end, I don’t really know what women think about me. Maybe it’s easy for these women I knew to believe I would try to rape a woman, because I was often awkward and unsure of myself in intimate situations. All I know is that I’ve been fighting this fight all alone. The irony is, what matters to me more than my own fate is the fact that I believe injustices like the one I have suffered hurt women in the long run, and I desperately want the opportunity to use my case as a catalyst to bring about changes that will make the world a safer place for girls, to stop the backward slide that has characterized the last few years. Lest forty years from now, there will be articles in the paper about how I was innocent, but I’ll be long dead and gone, and the Handmaid’s Tale will reign. We can’t let that happen.
This brings me to a paradoxical aspect of American society that is one of the strongest bulwarks supporting misogyny and sexual violence. We have this perception that men who are quiet, shy and unsure of themselves around women are more likely to be predators, while men like Donald Trump who run around with their cocks hanging out of their pants trying to fuck everything that moves are normalized. We look cross-eyed at the socially awkward guy when the cool frat boys are the worst fucking rapists. Women retreat in fear from men living on the street, while the swaggering cop they call for help is far more likely to rape them.
This is what leads to a lot of men believing that women don’t mind being grabbed by the pussy, as long as it it a man with money, power or social status doing the grabbing. And the back-to-back elections of Donald Trump and Joe Biden reinforces this belief. Women must admit to being collectively inconsistent in what behavior they tolerate from what men, and this inconsistency must be corrected. The #metoo movement has STARTED that process, but the elections of Trump and Biden with tens of millions of female votes shows that more work must be done.
I’ve gone on the record with my position that women are far more intelligent than men, but women suffer from the shortcoming that often afflicts geniuses: hubris. Girls never admit they made a mistake. They never admit when they need to change course. Even though I was serving time on a false sexual assault allegation, I was inspired when the #metoo movement broke. I felt it was critically important for people to hear these stories and to recognize what widespread problems sexual assault and toxic misogyny are, that they touch the lives of almost every woman, usually on multiple occasions. I was still able to be inspired by this movement even despite what happened to me because I practice the very difficult discipline of not allowing my personal anecdotal experiences to overwhelm my greater moral judgment.
But I saw two huge red flags early on. The first was when Al Franken was forced to resign from the Senate over a photograph that is really nothing. And then when Democrats started uncritically accepting the word of every woman who came out of the woodwork to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault. I remember sitting on my prison bunk and thinking, “If the bar is set this low, there will never again be a male Democratic nominee without a sexual assault allegation because the Republicans WILL find a woman to accuse every single one of them.”. So far, with Joe Biden, that prediction is 1-for-1.
So I ask again, are we living in The Handmaid’s Tale? We’ve just had a presidential election that pitted one accused sexual predator against another. There are now more women than men with college degrees, but women are still paid less. We have an ultra-right wing Supreme Court that I believe will move to overturn Roe vs. Wade in the next few years. While dozens of countries including England, Germany, India, Israel, Norway, China and even PAKISTAN have had female leaders, Americans are expected to get excited about the first female VICE president, who will be deputy to a 77 year old man with a documented history of inappropriate behavior toward women, and who has spent her entire adult life working in a male-oriented profession.
Women everywhere are still vulnerable to domestic violence and sexual violence. Women are still blatantly excluded from many key male-dominated fields. Women still get worse healthcare. More women live in poverty. The Handmaid’s Tale is here.
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