Women speaking courageously about sexual harassment is highly rewarded in media circles right now. Roy Moore's accusers in The Washington Post have been hailed as brave and credible....especially by The Washington Post. Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote another Team Player column on Tuesday about how her newspaper's sources should be honored.
Somehow, Sullivan can't remember that last year, she smeared Bill Clinton's accusers when Donald Trump brought them to an event before the second presidential debate. She called them participants in a "truth-averse" Steve Bannon exercise, a "surreal gathering," a "twisted version of the Last Supper."
The Sullivan column carried the headline "For Moore's accusers, a new kind of harassment." (It reminds us of Bryant Gumbel saying of Paula Jones in 1994 "it’s a little tough to figure out who’s really being harassed.”) Online, the Sullivan column was headlined "The ugly echo chamber of Hannity and Breitbart is why women wait so long to report abuse." Earth to Margaret: You were the "ugly echo chamber" last October. Here's this week's version of Sullivan:
Their reward for this public-spirited bravery?
To be smeared as liars.
To be the objects of vicious criticism about their private lives — their marriages, divorces, and bankruptcies.
And to be described as political tools of the Democratic Party. (Corfman, now a 53-year-old customer service representative, says she voted for Republican candidates in the last three presidential elections.)
This incident happened almost 40 years ago, goes the outraged refrain. Why are these women only coming forward now?
Here’s a better question: Why would any other woman, seeing what’s happened in the past week, ever come forward again?
“This is exactly why women wait 40 years,” said Gretchen Carlson, the former Fox News host who sued her longtime boss, Roger Ailes, for sexual harassment.
Carlson was responding not just to what Moore himself had said — that the Post story was full of scurrilous lies — but to what Breitbart News had done: Send reporters to Alabama to discredit The Post’s story.
“It’s weaponizing the fear and shame of sexual-assault victims against themselves,” wrote Seth Mandel, an opinion editor at the conservative New York Post. Even for Breitbart, he said, “this is some low stuff.”
Seth Mandel also tweets about Clinton's accusers, so he has less of a double standard than Sullivan.
Now back to "some low stuff" from Sullivan when it came to Bill Clinton's accusers. Donald Trump brought to the second presidential debate the Clinton accusers Paula Jones (he dropped his pants and asked me to kiss it), Kathleen Willey (he put my hand on his crotch in the Oval Office), and Juanita Broaddrick (he raped me while biting my lip until it bled), Sullivan -- to use her words, "smeared them as liars," made them "objects of vicious criticism," and suggested they were "political tools."
In evaluating the scene, Sullivan wrote:
Breitbart News’s tone (and its millions of devoted followers) have come to define the tone and discourse of the Trump campaign: nasty, truth-averse and no-holds-barred. There’s Bannon to thank for much of that.
His approach certainly was on display Sunday night, particularly in the surreal gathering of women who have accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct, going back to the 1970s.
That pre-debate tableau in a hotel meeting room might as well have carried Bannon’s signature at the bottom. With Trump flanked at a long, narrow table by the Clinton accusers, it looked like a twisted version of “The Last Supper.”'
Back then, Sullivan made one brief attempt at empathy for all women who accuse men of harassment or worse...and then denounced the event again as "nothing but hate-theater."
It goes without saying that women who have suffered sex crimes deserve justice and dignity. Each of these cases has been investigated, sometimes repeatedly, and settled, in one way or another. Bringing the accusers into a presidential-debate town hall was nothing but hate-theater: a counterpunch to deflect criticism of Trump’s own shameful history with women.
Does anyone think Sullivan feels these women deserve an apology, at least under the standards she's demonstrating this week? Otherwise, she looks like the newspaper's Queen of Double Standards.
