Two years ago the worldwide media furore over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the US Supreme Court was at its height. Every second story in the British press seemed to be about Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh. Some may find it difficult to cast their minds back to the fevered atmosphere of that time. In these enlightened days of 2020 we rest secure in the knowledge that American politicians of all sides respect the principle of the presumption of innocence, which is why a TV report about Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden is only being shown in Australia.
The Times of London is the Times. It has been the voice of the British establishment for over two centuries. It is seen by many, including itself, as the standard bearer for serious journalism on serious issues for serious people. I have been a Times subscriber for many years, as my parents were before me. At several points over that time my faith in the paper wavered, but never enough to make me switch to another paper. Which one would be better? The Guardian? The Telegraph? The Daily Mail? So ingrained is my own habit of regarding the Times as at bottom a responsible newspaper that I had to spend some time checking that its coverage of the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh really was as bad as I remembered.
It was. I have spent the afternoon proving it to myself. A book could be made of the reports and articles I read, but to save myself the trouble of writing and you the trouble of reading such a depressing tome, in this post I will for the most part restrict myself to quoting a few of the Times’s regular opinion columnists, the men and women who give “the Thunderer” its distinctive voice.
Example No. 1:
Kavanaugh v Ford is litmus test of our timesJanice Turner, Friday September 28 2018
Why would she put herself through this if it wasn’t true? This is what women in offices and on school runs across America and far beyond were thinking. Why stand quivering in your blue suit, chosen to look professional but not ball-breaking, feminine but not slutty, to recall the disgusting thing a drunken boy did to you long ago? Why risk your privacy, professional standing, income, dignity, children’s safety, your sanity and — worst of all — not being believed?
Ms Turner asks this with a fine rhetorical flourish as if false memories and false accusations and the general phenomenon of the “October surprise” were things quite unknown in human history.
Dr Ford recalls being pulled into a room by Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, both drunk; pushed on to a bed, the future Supreme Court justice nominee on top of her, grinding, trying to get inside her clothes, covering her mouth when she screamed, making her fear suffocation as well as rape. What do you remember most, the Senate hearing asked? “The laughter between the two,” Ford said. “Them having fun at my expense.”
Is this why Kavanaugh doesn’t remember?
Another rhetorical question. I can think of another reason why Kavanaugh does not remember this event. It is the same reason I don’t remember it myself.
The assault was not about 15-year-old Christine.
In the old days the Times would have inserted the word “alleged” before the word “assault”.
It was the Amazing Adventures of Brett and Mark: the swotty Catholic virgin and his bad-boy, hard-living friend. She was
allegedly
just the girl who happened by the bedroom after they’d hatched their “prank”. She was
alleg… ah, forget it.
a frisbee chucked between them. Would they have remembered her face one year later, let alone 36?
Ms Turner then goes on to discuss memory:
That this ordinary evening is seared into Dr Ford’s memory but not Judge Kavanaugh’s is no surprise. The guy who violently grabbed my crotch on the Tube years ago, the man who assaulted my friend in a lift, the student who committed a 1970s date rape . . . what would they recall? Memory is founded upon what matters. Maybe Judge Kavanaugh did not remember assaulting some girl in a swimsuit. Because it had no possible ill consequences for him. It didn’t matter.
Janice Turner might have asked herself why the searing of this event into Dr Ford’s memory did not extend to the place or even the year in which it happened. Or why the seared-in memory took thirty-six years to surface. My criticism of Ms Turner is not that there are no possible answers to these questions that would support Christine Blasey Ford’s account; it is that she does not even consider the questions.
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Example No.2 was published three days later:
The powerful can’t just whitewash their pasts
Hugo Rifkind, Monday October 01 2018
Youthful misdeeds were irrelevant for a Prince Hal or Churchill but the Kavanaugh saga proves those days are over
Besides the red face, and the shouting, and the hurt indignation, and the mad howls about still liking beer, one thing was very obvious last week about the US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. With a litany of legal achievements behind him, this was not a man who had expected, at 53, to be answering for his behaviour as a teenager.
Please don’t think Mr Rifkind does not acknowledge the possibility that Kavanaugh might be innocent. He acknowledges it right here:
Even if Ford’s accusations remain unproven, Kavanaugh’s mere presence in this gross, fratboy milieu ought to be enough to bar him from spending the rest of his life as a wise elder of America.
And in similar vein:
Clearly Kavanaugh thought he had moved on, too. Ford is a reminder that his version of his past is not the only one that exists, even if he and everybody around him have spent a lifetime behaving as if it were.
What is this, a science fiction story where we can hop between every conceivable timeline? There can be many claimed versions of the past, but they do not have equal status. Only one of them is true.
In a sense the entire MeToo movement has been a fight against the ability of powerful men to do just that: to unilaterally dictate their histories and to ignore the alternate histories of women they have slapped, groped, raped or bought off into silence.
Should you look Hugo Rifkind up on Wikipedia and see no mention of the alternate histories of women he has slapped, groped, raped and bought off, bear in mind that a Cambridge-educated son of a cabinet minister who now writes for the most prestigious newspaper in the world is a powerful person himself. He has power to unilaterally dictate his own history. When you think about it that way, the very absence of these alternate versions of Hugo Rifkind from the public record is suspicious. (While it is theoretically possible that no such women exist, the entire MeToo movement has become a fight against the ability of men, powerful or not, to use outmoded concepts like “truth” as a defence.)
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There was one Times opinion piece that explicitly talked about the presumption of innocence, and which instead of focusing on which of the accuser or the accused had the better demeanour asked how much evidence there was behind the accusation. Example No. 3 had appeared on 26 September and was by Gerard Baker:
Kavanaugh’s accusers are political puppets
Gerard Baker, Wednesday September 26 2018
I’ve never met President Trump’s choice for the Supreme Court, whose nomination has run into serious headwinds. But from what I’ve seen and read of him, he looks just like the kind of privileged, over-entitled rich white kid who was quite capable as a teenager nearly 40 years ago of sexually assaulting a girl while out of his mind on vodka, beer and God knows what else.
Fair? No. But it’s roughly the point we’ve reached in the “debate” on Mr Kavanaugh, which will have its denouement in a Capitol Hill committee room today. In a broader, depressing sense, the Kavanaugh affair is a parable about the depths to which national political debate in the US has fallen. We used to need evidence to make an argument or a case. Now we simply allege, slipping effortlessly down the evidentiary curve, to make a case we want to believe.
I remember being hugely relieved that there was one Times regular opinion writer who saw the question in those terms rather than being as about whether one was “for” or “against” Kavanaugh or Ford or women or something. But there was only one. It is true that Niall Ferguson wrote a powerful piece called “Christine Blasey Ford v Brett Kavanaugh: whoever wins a show trial, the rule of law loses”, but that was for the editorially independent Sunday Times.
Returning to the Times proper, disappointing though the average output of its opinion columnists on the topic of Kavanaugh’s nomination was, at least that was avowedly opinion writing. I expect to disagree with some of it. I want to disagree with some of it. What really got me down was to see a hit-piece masquerading as straight explanatory reportage. Example No. 4:
Supreme Court will suffer from the Brett Kavanaugh affair
Giles Whittell, Friday October 05 2018
To many outsiders it beggars belief that in a nation of 330 million souls the Trump administration has not been able to find a candidate for the Supreme Court who, besides being conservative, is not burdened with a thick file of evidence that he was once a hard-drinking, unthinking, misogynistic jock.
To President Trump the case of Brett Kavanaugh looks rather different. It is about a man who has become a totem of White House executive power, a litmus test of Republican loyalty and a symbol of male vulnerability to women drunk on #MeToo tweets.
That power has been demonstrated in the narrowness of the FBI investigation into allegations of sexual abuse by Mr Kavanaugh. At the administration’s direction, only a handful of people have been interviewed. They do not include his principal accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, or any of the people her lawyers asked to be added to the list. Early reports indicate that nothing new has been turned up. Mr Kavanaugh has not been caught in any lies big enough to derail a process controlled by his allies.
Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, whose wobble triggered the investigation in the first place, is therefore likely to vote to confirm. The party loyalty test is hard to duck and dangerous to fail for a senator still on the upswing of his career. The only Republican who could be relied on to vote with his conscience, John McCain, is dead.