Never have so-called progressives been more manifestly regressive than in the way the #MeToo movement undermines fundamental legal rights. To prove the point, the case of John Jarratt deserves a special mention as the contrast between the cool reason found in a courtroom and the conflation and outrage that drives #MeToo.
Last Friday, after two hours of deliberations, a jury found the Australian actor not guilty of raping a woman almost 40 years ago. The woman cannot be named for legal reasons, while Jarratt’s name has been plastered across the media. All along, Jarratt said it was consensual sex. It has been reported that the woman was contacted by journalist Tracey Spicer, who has led the #MeToo movement in Australia.
It was inevitable that this social media movement would spiral out of control. It is premised on one fatal flaw. We were told that women must be believed, a claim that heaves with bogus morality and defies reality. This is not even a debate about who lies more either, men or women. The fact some women lie too dismantles the claim that all women must be believed.
In January, Canberra woman Sarah Jane Parkinson was jailed for three years after staging a fake rape that sent her boyfriend to prison for four months until charges against him were dropped. Last week, Cherie Renee Bolton from Arkansas pleaded guilty to trying to frame her husband as a pedophile by downloading child porn in his phone. Women lie.
This central flaw at the heart of #MeToo presumes to wave away legal rights and a legal system premised on the presumption of innocence. If #MeToo’s vocal advocates had warned of this inherent danger, counselled caution and called for due process, the movement may not have become a train wreck.
In a stark contrast to the wild courts of social media that tainted men across the world with unproven allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault, defined so loosely as to include bad jokes or even bad sex, the NSW District Court delivered a cool-headed, legally grounded response last Friday. The evidence was presented to court, tested by lawyers, and 12 objective people from the community decided the claim of rape was not proved beyond reasonable doubt.
Our legal system is not perfect. Innocent people have gone to prison; guilty people can escape punishment. But courts of law are a damn sight fairer than the social media hunting seasons kicked off by #MeToo.
While the Jarratt case is a win for reason, the #MeToo movement has settled in for more emotive trench warfare. Earlier this year, a Harvard law professor was hounded from his campus role after he joined Harvey Weinstein’s legal team. Some students protested, claiming “discomfort” that Ronald Sullivan was part of the legal team representing Weinstein, who faces charges of rape and other sexual misconduct.
Sullivan, along with his wife, Stephanie Robinson, were faculty deans at Harvard’s Winthrop House. Some demanded his resignation. The Association of Black Harvard Women put out a statement that said: “You failed us.” Sullivan and his wife are the first African-Americans to lead one of Harvard’s 12 residential colleges. They have done so for 10 years.
Sullivan, who has acted for victims of sexual assault and for those accused of murder, wrote to students, explaining that lawyers are not an extension of their clients. It is the duty of defence lawyers to represent those accused of crimes, no matter how reviled the defendant, he wrote. If society denies unpopular defendants basic rights of legal representation, it won’t be long before basic rights for all of us are lost.
In a portent of what was to come, Harvard administrators ordered a “climate review” into Winthrop. Then, in early May, university bosses told Sullivan and his wife their appointments would not be renewed. Writing about this debacle, Sullivan said “feelings alone should not drive university policy”. He noted that “administrators must help students distinguish between feelings that have a rational basis and those that do not. In my case, Harvard missed an opportunity to help students do that.”
One female student, Danu AK Mudannayake, who led protests against Sullivan, described his removal as a “win” that would resonate beyond Harvard. Sadly, it is a win for emotion. As Evan Gerstmann wrote in Forbes, the basic tenets of justice mean “John Adams was no less patriotic because he defended the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre. James Donovan, famously portrayed in the film Bridge of Spies, was not a communist sympathiser just because he represented an accused Soviet spy.”
Another young woman, Phoebe H. Suh, wrote in The Crimson, Harvard’s newspaper, that “the violent impact” of Sullivan acting for Weinstein is silence for her, as a survivor of sexual assault. Conjuring up violent impacts is not just irrational, it is dangerous to victims. A court of law is the place where victims are given a voice.
In a damning assessment of our age, it is bad enough that discomfort is used to stifle ideas that challenge young minds, to no-platform speakers who veer from the orthodoxy, to inhibit students from learning and thriving from free and robust discussions, to infantilise them, too, with safe spaces and trigger warnings. As Alan Dershowitz wrote recently, “feeling unsafe is the new mantra for McCarthyism”.
In a case of how culture seeps from one arena to another, discomfort is being used to dislodge fundamental legal principles. Harvard’s actions are not just a betrayal of liberal education, allowing feelings to trump inquiry and learning. Harvard, of all places, has also allowed feelings unshackled from reason to trump fundamental legal principles.
Where has reason gone? All men, sexual predators and murderers alike, are entitled to legal representation. We defend the guilty so that the innocent are defended too, because we cannot always know who is guilty and who is innocent. A court will test allegations, using evidence and cross-examination, and law that has developed over centuries, including a jury of our peers that decides guilt beyond reasonable doubt. All this because, as English jurist William Blackstone, said: “It is better that 10 guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
The #MeToo movement inverts these fundamental legal principles. If all women must be believed, and some lie, it follows that innocent men will suffer.
Jarratt was more than entitled to say on Friday that no man should ever go through what he has endured. But at this point in the #MeToo cycle, it is worth praising a court system that settled this matter. What #MeToo promotes — public damnation minus basic legal principles and process — is far worse. To its eternal shame, Harvard has endorsed this travesty of justice.