J'Accuse: The #MeToo Movement and the Backlash

 

Reading the New Yorker in New Hampshire is a pleasantly surreal experience.  Even out here, in the Provinces, we can live through the issues and conflicts of the day. 

The June 23, 2025 is jam packed with amazing articles but the one which currently has me transfixed and thinking about it even having finished it is "Backlash" by Alexis Okeowo.

Tina Johnson

It tells the tale of Tina Johnson, who told of visiting the office of a lawyer, Judge Roy Moore about a child custody case, with her mother. During the visit Johnson thought it strange that Moore asked her about the color of her daughter's eyes, asking if they were as pretty as hers. He then asked her for a drink after the meeting, which she declined and on the way out the door, with her mother ahead of her she felt Moore's fingers find her vagina, and she just ran out of the door. When Moore ran for the U.S. Senate, women started coming forward with similar stories of his behavior and Johnson joined the chorus, as the #MeToo movement was surging.  Articles documenting that Moore had been banned from a shopping mall "for bothering young girls." Moore lost the election to Doug Jones, who had prosecuted the Ku Klux Klan men who set the 16th Street Baptist Church bomb in Montgomery, Alabama which killed four young Black girls in 1963.  Jones wrote about this in a book called, "Bending Toward Justice," but he was ultimately defeated by football coach Tommy Tuberville, and normalcy was restored to the state of Alabama.

Okeowo's article documents the price paid by Tina Johnson and a spate of other women who came forward with complaints about the sexual depredations of men during the #MeToo movement.

The portrait which emerges of the Alabama towns where these women lived is scaborous: Leigh Corfman was run off the road in a scene right out of "Easy Rider" and wound up paralyzed. Johnson's house was burned down. Moore launched libel suits and neither woman had the financial means to defend themselves from lawsuits.

Okeowo notes that eventually people grew uncomfortable with accusation without due process and when Al Franken was forced to resign his U.S. Senate seat because his Democratic colleagues did not have the moral fortitude to defend his right to an impartial hearing, the backlash. really began.

Trump Endorses Roy Moore for Senate

I read all this through my own personal lens, honed by my own experiences. I had seen the movie "The Assistant" depicting a sexual predator who used his position of power to demand sexual compliance on the casting couch of his office--women actresses who wanted parts he had the power to offer had to consent to sex with him and the assistant was left to sanitize the leather couch.

Looking at the photos of Harvey Weinstein, I thought, "Oh, yeah, he did it. He did all of that," as he looked like a sexual predator from central casting. There was no way a man as repulsive looking as Weinstein could ever claim "consensual sex." Well, maybe he could say he simply struck a bargain: You want the part; I want sex. 

So there was that.

On the other hand, I have been wrongly accused--not of sexual abuse--but I was falsely accused as a child, and that searing experience has never left me and I still get angry to this day thinking about it.

I was about 10 years old and one day my mother got off the phone looking alarmed and disturbed. A woman who lived up the street said I had shouted profanities at her and acted defiant and she was emotionally traumatized.

I had only the vaguest idea who this woman was: the mother of children younger than me who I could not have picked out of a line up.  We lived in a development with eighty homes strung out around two concentric circles and I knew the kids in families whose kids were my age and who got on the school bus with me. I knew maybe a dozen families, maybe a score, but I did not know this woman or her children and I certainly knew I had never had any sort of disputatious interaction with any adult in the neighborhood. 

I denied the accusation categorically. I think my mother believed me, in part because this whole incident as the mother described it simply did not sound like her son, but she was inclined, as most adults would be, to at least consider the possibility the adult was correct.

Fortunately, in my case, I had some rudimentary legal training by age 10. Disputes in our family had always been resolved by convening "family court" and I demanded I be allowed to face my accuser and interrogate her. I was able to say that the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution guaranteed any accused "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." That had come up before in our family court and I quoted it now. My mother was stuck. She had to demand a meeting. 

We met outside her house in the street and looking at her I knew I had not seen her before, or if I had, in so fleeting a manner I did not recognize her. She looked at me with narrowed brows, and though it was apparent at a glance, she was not at all sure who I was, she still stuck to her story. She began to waffle a little about exactly what I said. "You can stuff it. You're not my mother. Go to Hell."

Well, maybe not those exact words. 

"Have you ever seen me before now?" I asked. 

She hesitated just enough to satisfy me, but she said, "Yes. You shouted at me."

When I tried to pin her down on the time and date and circumstances she looked at my mother and said, "I'm not going to continue this."

I spoke to my mother, being careful not to be seen as being rude to an adult. "She doesn't recognize me. She doesn't know who she was talking to."

That ended the confrontation and my mother's report to my father at dinner ended with his asking, "Who is this lady? Do we know her?"

That was a case of eye witness testimony being unreliable, not of sexual abuse when the eyewitness has such a close and extended experience there is not really a question of identify.

But it was a case of bearing false witness, of false accusation. 

It wasn't the first time I'd been falsely accused: A patrol at school accused me of sassing him and I had never seen this kid before. He mistook me for someone else. Another false accusation.

So when it comes to false accusations, I have been conditioned in some ways to doubt the accuser.

During the height of the #MeToo movement at universities, boys accused of date rape were not put on trial by the state: they were tried by college tribunals, star chambers, with no rules of evidence, often without the accused boys present, without being allowed to face their accusers--that would have "re-traumatized and re-victimized--the women and some of these boys were expelled from college.  In my own college, a junior in the engineering program was expelled after a drunken episode of sex with a naked coed who had climbed into his bed. She was too drunk to say no; but he said he was too drunk to know better. To say he was denied due process is to understate the case mightily. That's like saying "The Oxbow Incident" was about cattle rustling. 

In the case of a man who has been banned from a shopping mall and whose accusers independently describe similar approaches, the evidence weighs toward beyond a reasonable doubt.

At one of our Democratic Committee meetings a candidate for Congress, running in the primary spoke at our meeting and I asked her about the problems with #MeToo, with equating an accusation with a conviction and without due process and what did she think about this? She reacted with outrage, "I cannot believe we are even talking about this!" she said, as if these objections did not even merit discussion. 

Needless to say, she did not get my vote.

I had caught her by surprise and she was unprepared because she had never considered the other side of the issue.

I'm not sure Roy Moore has had his day in court to answer the charges against him. 

I do know one thing: The women who accused him have been violently attacked by his fans in Alabama. What I really get out of "The Backlash" is that American carnage does not exist in American cities; that's not where the carnage is. 

 It's alive and thriving in the Old South, and in Trumpworld in general, wherever the MAGA flag waves.