Now that Alyssa Milano’s self-described friend and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has been credibly accused of sexual assault, the actress and #MeToo activist finds herself in a “gray area” that she must navigate.
In a lengthy op-ed for Deadline, Milano, who forcefully denounced Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh based on an allegation with no corroborating evidence, explained why she still supports Joe Biden despite Tara Reade’s allegation of sexual assault against him.
Starting out, Alyssa Milano portrays a world of black and whites, rights and wrongs – a world run by patriarchal men in power who abuse women and create “the system” for women like her to navigate.
“Harvey Weinstein’s decades of rape were clearly wrong,” says Milano. “Donald Trump’s alleged sexual assaults were clearly wrong. Brett Kavanaugh’s actions, told consistently over decades by his victim (and supported by her polygraph results), were clearly wrong. So were Matt Lauer’s, Bill Cosby’s and so many others. As we started holding politicians and business leaders and celebrities around the world accountable for their actions, it was easy to sort things into their respective buckets: this is wrong, this is right. Holding people accountable for their actions was not only right, it was just.”
Of course, now that one of those politicians may just happen to be one of the men on her team, Alyssa Milano cannot quite bring herself to distinguish between “right” and “wrong” in the same way she did for men like Brett Kavanaugh, who, by the way, had far less evidence against him than Joe Biden currently does.
“The world is gray. And as uncomfortable as that makes people, gray is where the real change happens,” argues Milano. “Black and white is easy. Gray is the place women can come together out of the glare of the election and speak our truths, our doubts, our hopes, our convictions and test them against the light and the dark.”
“Gray is where the conversations which continue to swirl around powerful men get started. And it’s really almost always men, isn’t it?” she continues. “As women, we’ve been gaslit, we’ve been blamed. We’re too shrill or too quiet. We’re weak or we’re insufferable. We’re whores or ice queens. We’re baby killers or welfare queens. Women are not afforded the gray. We are not allowed anything but the binary extremes. And then, we are pressured to turn on one another for making impossible choices.”
And then, in an apparent attempt to absolve herself from any wrongdoing, Milano then argues that women should not be “regarded as complicit” when they fail to denounce a powerful sexual predator, because, according to her, “it’s an impossible choice” created by a system designed to empower men.
As to why she still continues to support Joe Biden, Milano essentially says in so many words that he may well just the lesser of two evils – a possible sexual predator who will at least guarantee women abortion rights and all the other causes feminists cherish so much.
“It falls upon women to navigate within the system of men’s design to make pragmatic choices that we hope will lead us to a more equal future,” she says. “I still support Joe Biden because I believe that’s the best choice for that future, and again it is not up to women to absolve perpetrators. How do progressive women choose between the p*ssy grabber in chief who has done so much damage to our country and a man who has allegations made against him? In any black and white world, we’d have a woman to rally behind to replace Trump instead of an electoral college which says white men are the people driving the charge yet again this year.”
After that admission, Milano then says that she does take the accusation against Biden seriously while stressing that his accuser should be given space to tell her story.
Last month, Tara Reade claimed that then-Senator Joe Biden sexually assaulted her while she served as an aide in his Senate offices during the Clinton administration. She has since detailed her account in multiple interviews and filed a criminal complaint against the former vice president with the Washington, D.C., police department. A former neighbor of Reade and her brother have publicly stated that Reade told them of the assault in the 1990s. Recently surfaced evidence also revealed that Reade’s mother allegedly called into CNN’s Larry King in the 1990s to complain about a prominent senator with whom her daughter had “problems.”
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