Why rape allegations don’t derail political careers

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Hey Rulers! I’m Sydney Gold and I’ll be joining as your guest host this week. Yesterday, both sides rested their cases in the lawsuit between Donald Trump and E. Jean Carroll.

In 2019, journalist E. Jean Carroll published an article in New York Magazine describing the time she says former President Donald Trump allegedly raped her in the fitting room at Bergdorf Goodman in the 1990s. This week, as she sues the former president on charges of defamation and battery, she’s telling the same story in a courtroom. Trump denies the allegations and says “it never happened.”

Carroll isn’t the only woman who has accused Trump of sexual assault or harassment. During the course of the trial, two other women, Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff, have testified as witnesses for the prosecution, telling similar stories. And over the years, more than a dozen other women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct.

Trump vehemently refutes these allegations. He is also on the record bragging about grabbing women by their privates.

Heading into the third consecutive presidential cycle where Trump has been a candidate, these allegations have yet to slow the former president’s momentum. He’s far from the only powerful politician to face allegations of sexual misconduct. Two sitting Supreme Court justices – Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas – have been accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment respectively, accusations which they denied. President Joe Biden, who announced last week he will seek a second term, was also accused of sexual misconduct during the 2020 presidential campaign. He has denied that allegation.

While some male politicians, like former New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo, have their careers derailed by allegations, many don’t. Accusations of sexual assault and misconduct, no matter how credible, don’t seem to preclude male politicians from reaching the highest annals of power.

Bonnie Stabile, author of “Women, Power and Rape Culture: The Politics and Policy of Underrepresentation,” argues that societal concepts of gender simultaneously discredit women, who are seen as untrustworthy and hysterical, and protect men, whose brash, “rule-breaking” behavior is read as masculine and powerful.

“We believe certain people and not other people,” said Stabile, who directs the Gender and Policy Center at George Mason University. “We believe and consider authoritative the word of men more than we do that of women.”

“[Trump’s] supporters assume those accusations are likely to be false or trumped up, no pun intended. They just don’t give them any credence. That accords with this vaster narrative, and this is historic, even through biblical times, that women lie about sexual assaults,” said Stabile.

The percentage of sexual assaults that are falsely reported is somewhere between two and 10, and the majority of sexual assaults are never reported to the police at all, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center (NSVRC). Yet the belief that women do, frequently, falsely accuse men of assault, misconduct or violence is pervasive, often tilting the scales in favor of men when the only evidence is competing, she-said/he-said testimony.

These cultural barriers often collide with structural ones, like in the cases of Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas. In 2018, Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were in high school, while in 1991, Anita Hill testified that Thomas sexually harassed her when he was chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and she served as his advisor.

Both Blasey Ford and Hill were willing to testify, knowing the scrutiny that would come with speaking out, but still had to navigate the bureaucracy of the confirmation process. Ford faced intensive back and forth with the judiciary committee over who would question her, with Republicans successfully pushing for her to be interviewed by an outside prosecutor, while Hill was grilled by an all white, all male committee, led by then Democratic Sen. Joe Biden. Both women received death threats.

Ultimately, “in both cases,” Stabile said, Kavanaugh and Thomas were “believed over the women who spoke back against them.”

There are some ways the government has taken steps toward supporting women who speak out against male politicians, like the Congressional Accountability Act, which was passed in 1995 and amended in 2018. The legislation, which requires Congress to adhere to the same employment laws as the private sector and the federal government, also prohibits Congress members from using public funds to pay for their defense in sexual harassment cases.

That “gave women who work in congressional staff the ability to report in a way that they hadn’t been able to before,” Stabile said.

Still, she notes the current procedure is onerous and requires strict adherence to a lengthy process.

“It’s definitely like a labyrinth that you have to go through to even attempt to get justice.”

While there’s no one solution to the larger public perception of these claims, Stabile believes that the more women in positions of power, the more they’ll be able to make changes to these institutions that silence accusers. It will also help us see women as powerful, trustworthy and authoritative, combating the stereotypes that help perpetuate so-called rape culture.

“A lot of times it comes down to women being seen as less trustworthy, less competent and having less value,” said Stabile.

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“The new analysis, covering 2009 to 2015, found that a growing majority of women said their pregnancies came at the right time. It uncovered a decline in the share of pregnancies that women didn’t want or that happened too soon, a shift driven by young women.”

“The weight bias against women in the workforce is real — and it’s only getting worse,” by Pallavi Gogoi for NPR.

“Attorneys General to Investigate the N.F.L.’s Treatment of Female Employees,” by Katherine Rosman and Ken Belson for The New York Times: “The attorneys general of New York and California opened a joint investigation into allegations of workplace discrimination and pay inequities at the N.F.L. offices in both states in response to a report in The New York Times in February 2022 on the treatment of women who work for the league.”

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Transitions

Erika Poethig has now joined the advisory committee of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s J. Ronald Terwilliger Center for Housing Policy. She previously was special assistant to the president for housing and urban policy.

Becca Salter is now director of operations at Convergence Media. She previously was director of operations for Rep. Adrian Smith (R-Neb.).

Stephanie Epner is now global senior director of the Climate Imperative Foundation. She previously was a special advisor and acting senior director for climate and energy at the National Security Council and is a former longtime aide to John Kerry.