Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who wrote a book about sexual assault accusations made against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and defended Dr. Christine Blasey Ford in the pages of her newspaper, now says the “#BelieveAllWomen” and “#MeToo” movement are “dumb” — because a similar, but credible sexual assault allegation has been leveled against the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden.
In a shocking editorial for The Washington Post, Marcus lashes out not just at Biden’s alleged accuser, Tara Reade — who has now filed a criminal complaint against Biden and who has a record of contemporaneous claims made against the then-federal legislator — but at the anti-sexual assault movement altogether.
“Reflexive acceptance of any and all allegations of sexual misconduct against any man is not staunch feminism,” Marcus writes. “[I]t is dangerous credulity that risks doing terrible injustice to the accused. #BelieveAllWomen was a dumb hashtag and a dumber approach.”
Reade, she says, is not telling the truth.
“This column represents a good-faith effort to grapple with the seriousness of, and flaws in, the Reade allegations,” Meade writes. “My conclusion is that while Ford’s allegations are on balance stronger, those who took Ford’s complaints seriously cannot simply dismiss Reade’s claims out of hand. I don’t think what Reade claimed happened, yet the evidence is murky.”
Although both Reade’s and Dr. Ford’s claims are thinly sourced, Reade’s story has a couple of important elements that Dr. Ford’s doesn’t: friends who remember Reade speaking about the assault around the time it allegedly happened and a willingness on Reade’s part to approach law enforcement with the claims.
The first element is particularly important, but Marcus dismisses it out of hand: “Bottom line: the contemporaneous evidence is inconclusive but stronger than that in the Kavanaugh case. That comes as no surprise; in fact, Ford said she took pains not to let family and friends know about the alleged assault.”
She also goes after Reade personally, bringing up a number of questions Kavanaugh’s defenders asked of Dr. Ford, which Marcus seems to have dismissed out of hand just a year ago: “If Biden did what she now alleges, why did she not say this a year ago? Reade says she did not feel comfortable telling her full story then, but she seems to have offered no clue that there was more to her story.”
Marcus would know: she wrote a book called “Supreme Ambition,” largely defending Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Kavanaugh and arguing that they were credible enough to derail Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court.
Eagle-eyed social media fans also noted that Marcus was an avid defender of Dr. Ford during the Kavanaugh hearings, even going so far as to suggest that Kavanaugh did not deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Ultimately, Marcus decides that the #BelieveAllWomen movement is now problematic because the movement’s primary target is, of course, an ally and not an opponent.
Marcus’ efforts echo those of The New York Times which, over the weekend, produced a startling defense of Biden’s notorious habit of touching female colleagues and guests, in which they claimed Biden had no concerning pattern of behavior — aside from the several instances where women have complained about his handsiness.
The NYT’s editors defended the piece in their own interview earlier in the week, also claiming that accusations against Kavanaugh were more “serious” than those now being made against Biden, according to National Review.
“Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh’s status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And, when I say in a public way, I don’t mean in the public way of Tara Reade’s. If you ask the average person in America, they didn’t know about the Tara Reade case,” the NYT’s Dean Baquet explained. “So I thought, in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation.”