Posted on 10/18/2017 6:14:31 AM PDT by Kaslin
"#MeToo" is the social media meme of the moment. In a 24-hour period, the phrase was tweeted nearly a half million times and posted on Facebook 12 million times. Spearheaded by actress Alyssa Milano in the wake of Hollyweird's Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment scandal, women have flooded social media with their own long-buried accounts of being pestered, groped or assaulted by rapacious male predators in the workplace.
Count me out.
It's one thing to break down cultural stigmas constructively, but the #MeToo movement is collectivist virtue signaling of a very perilous sort. The New York Times heralded the phenomenon with multiple articles "to show how commonplace sexual assault and harassment are." The Washington Post credited #MeToo with making "the scale of sexual abuse go viral." And actress Emily Ratajkowski declared at a Marie Claire magazine's women's conference on Monday:
"The most important response to #metoo is 'I believe you.'"
No. I do not believe every woman who is now standing up to "share her story" or "tell her truth." I owe no blind allegiance to any other woman simply because we share the same pronoun. Assertions are not truths until they are established as facts and corroborated with evidence. Timing, context, motives and manner all matter.
Because I reserve the right to vet the claims of individual sexual assault complainants instead of championing them all knee-jerk and wholesale as "victims," I've been scolded as insensitive and inhumane.
"TIMING DOES NOT MATTER," a Twitter user named Meg Yarbrough fumed. "What matters is what is best for EACH INDIVIDUAL victim. You should be ashamed of yourself."
CNN anchor Jake Tapper informed me, "People coming forward should be applauded." But applauding people for "coming forward" is not a journalistic tenet. It's an advocacy tenet. Tapper responded that he was expressing the sentiment as a "human being not as a journalist." Last time I checked, humans have brains. The Weinstein scandal is not an excuse to turn them off and abdicate a basic responsibility to assess the credibility of accusers. It's an incontrovertible fact that not all accusers' claims are equal.
Some number of harrowing encounters described by Weinstein's accusers and the #MeToo hashtag activists no doubt occurred. But experience and scientific literature show us that a significant portion of these allegations will turn out to be half-truths, exaggerations or outright fabrications. That's not victim-blaming. It's reality-checking.
It is irresponsible for news outlets to extrapolate how "commonplace" sexual abuse is based on hashtag trends spread by celebrities, anonymous claimants and bots. The role of the press should be verification, not validation. Instead of interviewing activist actresses, reporters should be interviewing bona fide experts.
Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist and criminal profiler who heads the Forensic Criminology Institute, is author or co-author of 16 criminal justice books, including textbooks on rape investigation, crime reconstruction, behavioral evidence analysis and forensic victimology.
Turvey's most recent book, written with retired NYPD special victim squad detective John Savino and Mexico-based forensic psychologist Aurelio Coronado Mares, is "False Allegations: Investigative and Forensic Issues in Fraudulent Reports of Crime."
Based on their review of decades of scientific literature, Turvey and his colleagues explode the "2 percent myth" peddled by politicians, victims' advocates and journalists "claiming that the nationwide false report rape for rape and sexual assault is nonexistent." In fact, the statistic was traced to an unverified citation in a 1975 book by feminist author Susan Brownmiller.
"This figure is not only inaccurate," Turvey and his co-authors conclude, "but also it has no basis in reality."
Published research has documented false rape and sexual assault rates ranging from 8 percent to 41 percent. Savino notes that in his NYPD's Manhattan Special Victim Squad, "our false report rate was in the double digits during all of my years. Sometimes, it was as high as 40 percent." Turvey, Savino, and Mares make clear to students that based on the evidence -- as opposed to Facebook trends:
"False reports happen; they are recurrent; and there are laws in place to deal with them when they do. They are, for lack of a better word, common."
They are common because people lie for all sorts of reasons -- from the need for attention to the lure of profit, out of anger or revenge, to conceal crimes or illicit activity, or because of addictions or mental health issues. Unlike activists or advocates "steeped in bias, denial or self-interest," Turvey and his colleagues teach criminal investigators and students that true professionals "do not seek confirmation of beliefs or ideas: they seek eradication of false theories. All reports of crime must be investigated. Otherwise, they are merely unconfirmed allegations that the ignorant or lazy may pass along as truth."
Rape is a devastating crime. So is lying about it. Ignorant advocates and lazy journalists can be as dangerous as derelict detectives and prosecutors driven by political agendas instead of facts.
When #MeToo bandwagons form in the midst of a panic, innocent people get run over.
A guy I worked with was accused of rape at Mardi gra in New Orleans. He was fooling around with this girl in a hotel stairwell and the cops came up. The girl was underage and she panicked and cried rape because she was afraid her parents, etc. My poor coworker spent 2 weeks in jail until the stupid cops looked at the girl’s camera that was loaded with pictures of her slobbering all over him.
Interesting point. is there a certain pride, if you will, that the girls are proud that Harvey found them attractive?
On he other hand, is there distress among some, that Harvey never went after them??
Same story, different villains.
Substitute Mitch McConnell for Harvey Weinstein, the Senate Leadership Fund for deviants, and Matt Bevin, Chris McDaniel, and Mo Brooks, for Rose McGowan , Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie.
-PJ
And it would seem that most of the time, they don't want to be, or are simply incapable of being...
This is why we have Courts.
Real action for real crimes.
Weinstein believes he can go to rehab and get a ‘second chance’. Fat chance, IMHO. But without a conviction, there is a possibility.
Meryl Streep and Roman Polanski comes to mind.
My thoughts on the “me too” phenomenon is that the same people who went along with the casting couch to advance their careers now see the “me too” victim card as another means by which they can advance their career, so they more than willingly play it. No moral compass. Are there true victims? Undoubtedly. My guess is there are significantly more opportunists.
This particular panel included a lieutenant that had been medically invalided out of the service for wounds in Vietnam. Amputation, if I recall correctly. After Rather gave his answer, the LT was asked what he would do if he knew his patrol had come under fire from that attack, but now the American journalists were in danger. Paraphrasing the LT, he said, "We would do our best to rescue the journalists, and a lot of my people would die, but we would do it anyway because that is who WE are."
The series is worth finding if you can.
Michelle Malkin’s the best. I’ve been so bothered by the ‘women victims’ in this. Really? I’m not buying it. Thanks MM for setting the record straight.
I said it before across multiple Weinstein articles, so I apologize for the repetition. However, I feel strongly that this is a golden opportunity to not "let a serious crisis go to waste." Except here, we're not being slimy collectivists, but upright citizens.
Mind you, I really do not like the idea of using the behavior of dirtbags and the tears of actresses/the misfortune of an innocent as a weapon against an enemy (to quote another Freeper). Real men would take these losers out back and beat some sense into them. I am also a free market capitalist and I don't want to regulate anything unless it is in line with the intent of the Founders.
All that said, we're dealing with the lowest of the low. If the Republicans had any sense of testicular fortitude - or a desire to MAGA for ALL individuals - they'd call a press conference and say:
"Democrats are clearly pro-misogyny. Silence equals consent. They said nothing while one of their fundraisers roamed as a sexual predator in Hollywood.
"It is sad that the loudest Democrat since this story broke has been Hillary Clinton, as she acknowledged that the Oval Office has seen a sexual predator - her husband.
"The Republican leadership asks the Democrats to reject their harboring of anti-woman fundraisers, and join us as we announce the start of hearings on this poisonous atmosphere in Hollywood, with an eye toward regulating studios and actors and actresses under the Commerce Clause as so many Democrats have with other parts of the economy."
Others have noted that the Republicans likely have skeletons in their closet and there is a risk in this approach. I agree, but maybe it's time to man-up and clean the Augean Stables. Frankly, I don't care if it's Hollywood or Wall Street or Main Street...this isn't the way real men act.
From Moses to St Joseph to men of fidelity throughout history, now is the time for Deplorables to reclaim the mantle of "compassion" from the statists, and expose their War on Women.
I read elsewhere that upwards of 60 percent of rape allegations are found to be false.
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