Published on Portside (https://portside.org/)
In Patriarchy No
One Can Hear You Scream: Rebecca Solnit on Jeffrey Epstein and the Silencing
Machine
Rebecca
Solnit
July
10, 2019
Literary
Hub
One of my favorite
books when I was young was T. H. White’s The Once and Future King,
and one of its central themes is the attempt of King Arthur to replace an ethos
of “might is right” with something closer to justice. Justice means everyone is
equal under the law—and equality means both that everyone has equal value under
the law and that everyone is subject to the law. That’s been a foundational
concept for the United States, but might is right has never ceased to be how
things actually work at least some of the time. In White’s novel, might means
in part the capacity for physical violence on the part of individual warriors,
armies, tribes, and kingdoms, but the ability of individuals (and corporations
and nations) to commit that violence with impunity is another kind of might
that matters now.
The great work of
investigative journalists in recent years has let us see might, naked and
corrupt, doing its best to trample, silence, discredit the less powerful and
their rights and with it the idea of right as an ethic independent of power.
That these men actually run the media, the government, the financial system
says everything about what kind of systems they are. Those systems have toiled
to protect them, over and over. Indeed, power is not vested in them but in the
individuals and institutions all around them. This makes it essential to look
past individual perpetrators to the systems that allow them to commit crimes
with impunity.
Maybe one of the
reasons rape has so often been portrayed as “a stranger leaps out of the
bushes” is so we’ll imagine rapists acting alone. But in so many cases rapists
have help in the moment and forever after, and the help is often so powerful,
broad, and deep—well, that’s why we call it rape culture, and that’s why
changing it means changing the whole culture. Sometimes it’s the family,
community, church, campus looking the other way; sometimes it’s the criminal
justice system. If Jeffrey Epstein goes to jail for the new round of
indictments—which only came about because one investigative journalist, Julie
K. Brown of the Miami Herald, did an extraordinary job of digging
up what had been buried in his case—a host of people who knew, laughed, looked
the other way, allegedly helped him sexually abuse children for years will
still be at large, and the circumstances that allow other Epsteins to attack
other children will still exist.
Epstein gambled on
the differential between his power and voice in the world and theirs and for
the most part he won, because the game was rigged by dozens of people around
him, even by the legal system that sealed the records, kept the victims and
their lawyers from knowing what his plea deal was, and gave him an obscenely
inconsequential sentence. What was the punishment for softballing child rape?
Well, Alex Acosta, who was the US attorney in charge of the softballed Florida
case against Epstein, is now our secretary of labor. US Attorney General
William Barr worked for the law firm that defended Epstein.
And one of
Epstein’s buddies, who’s been accused of raping a child under Epstein’s control
and then threatening her if she spoke up, is president. The plaintiff in the
civil suit about that alleged assault dropped the case just before
the 2016 election, reportedly because of threats; 60 million Americans chose to
vote for a man accused of raping a child in a case that has yet to be
thoroughly investigated. Both Trump and Epstein have been furiously defended by
former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who has also been accused of
abusing girls under Epstein’s control. Earlier this year, the Miami
Herald’s Julie K. Brown reported, “An attorney for lawyer Alan
Dershowitz wrote a letter to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
on Tuesday, asking whether the media should be excluded from the proceeding
because his oral arguments on behalf of his client could contain sensitive
information that has been under seal.” Money buys silence.
In so many cases
rapists have help in the moment and forever after, and the help is often so
powerful, broad, and deep—well, that’s why we call it rape culture.
Dershowitz, along
with Clinton independent counsel Kenneth Starr (he who made Monica Lewinsky a
household name), defended Epstein in the Florida case. Starr was later fired
from a plush job as president at Baylor University, where one
victim’s lawsuit alleged that during his reign little was done about
fifty-two rapes, including five gang rapes, by thirty-one of the university’s
football players. The Chicago Tribune later reported,
“Former Baylor University President Ken Starr said Tuesday that he raised money
on behalf of a former Baylor football player who was recently acquitted of
sexual assault.” That’s what we mean by rape culture; when campus leadership
rallies around the high-status males accused of rape, rather than letting the
legal system pursue something resembling justice, or standing up for victims.
In 2011, when a
refugee worker in a New York City luxury hotel accused International Monetary
Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexually assaulting her, it
seemed fresh and meaningful to connect the private abuse of power to the public
abuse of power, or rather to show how the implicit might-is-right ethos in the
latter was explicit in the former. Now it seems exhaustingly obvious that
what’s happening to refugees, to the climate and the biosphere, to the poor
under hyper-capitalism, is a vicious disregard for their rights and humanity,
and that some of the men perpetrating public brutality are monstrous in private
is a given.
Monsters rule over
us, on behalf of monsters. Now, when I think about what happened with
Strauss-Kahn, who was subsequently accused of sexual assault by several other
women, and with cases like his, it’s the secondary characters who seem to
matter most. These men could not do what they did without a culture—lawyers,
journalists, judges, friends—that protected them, valued them, devalued their
victims and survivors. They do not act alone, and their might is nothing more
or less than the way a system rewards and protects them, which is another
definition of rape culture. That is, their impunity is not inherent; it’s
something the society grants them and can take away.
The Senate’s Brett
Kavanaugh hearing was a referendum on this aspect of rape culture. Christine
Blasey Ford told us how she was assaulted and that Kavanaugh was not alone in
the room as he attacked her, and then we got to see senators waffle, deny,
excuse and ignore, and we learned about the malevolent machismo of prep-school
culture and how the great fraternity of the northeastern power elite of the USA
operates first and last to protect its own. The law of the land is now handed
down to us by a man whose redfaced, self-pitying, rageful lack of self-control
was displayed to a watching world and who got the job anyway. And as the
American Bar Association put it, “A year after Yale Law professor Amy Chua
wrote an op-ed article praising U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh
as a mentor to women, her daughter is beginning a clerkship with him.”
Meanwhile, Christine Blasey Ford got death threats and had to go into hiding.
Countless women in other cases—including dozens who filed civil suits
against Epstein—signed nondisclosure agreements that rendered them silent for
life, further protecting the perpetrators.
For many serial
predators, an elaborate infrastructure let them continue committing crimes with
impunity. The Weinstein Company was a device for drawing victims into Harvey
Weinstein’s spiderweb, then paying off the victims to silence them, or sending
lawyers after them, or in the case of Rose McGowan, former Mossad spies so no
one would hear her say what he did. As Ronan Farrow reported in 2017,
“Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also
enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort.… In
some cases, the investigative effort was run through Weinstein’s lawyers,
including David Boies, a celebrated attorney who represented Al Gore in the
2000 Presidential-election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the
U.S. Supreme Court. Boies personally signed the contract directing Black Cube
to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a Times story
about Weinstein’s abuses, while his firm was also representing the Times,
including in a libel case.” It takes a village to silence a victim, and there
are a lot of willing villagers.
Like Epstein, the
musician R. Kelly reportedly pursued children to sexually exploit them for
decades, and money and intimidation silenced past victims and set up future
victims. The journalist who spent those decades trying to make someone care
enough to do something to stop the crimes, Jim DeRogatis, wrote in
the New Yorker when Kelly was indicted, “Taken together, the
five-count indictment from the Eastern District of New York and the thirteen-count
indictment from the Northern District of Illinois present a harrowing account
of a nineteen-year criminal enterprise comprised of ‘managers, bodyguards,
drivers, personal assistants and runners’ all designed to ‘promote R. Kelly’s
music and the R. Kelly brand and to recruit women and girls to engage in
illegal sexual activity with Kelly.’ … For years, many journalists, music
critics, radio programmers, concert promoters, and record-company executives
ignored or dismissed the allegations against Kelly, especially when he was
generating income and scoring hits.”
Monsters rule over
us, on behalf of monsters.
Back in 2011,
Cyrus Vance, New York City’s attorney general, dropped the charges against
Strauss-Kahn on the ground that the victim—who had been extensively attacked by
Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers and by journalists eager to discredit an African refugee
woman—was not credible, though she later won a settlement in a civil suit with,
of course, a nondisclosure agreement that silenced her. The Daily News reported
in 2018, “FBI agents are probing the Manhattan district attorney’s office over
its handling of high-profile cases that were dropped once lawyers for the
well-connected subjects made donations, the Daily News has
learned.
Manhattan’s top
prosecutor came under fire last year after questions surfaced about his
office’s 2015 decision not to go after ex-Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein
after model Ambra Battilana accused him of groping her breasts in his Tribeca
office. A lawyer hired by Weinstein at the time had given Vance $24,000 and
another attorney sent him $10,000 after the decision to spare the powerful
producer an arrest.” We read back then that a woman had tried to
report on Weinstein’s sexual crimes in the New York Times in
2004, only to have her male editor dismiss the story; we learned this time
around that another woman journalist tried to report in 2003 on
Epstein’s sexual abuse of a 16-year-old, only to have her Vanity Fair editor,
under direction of Graydon Carter, delete that part of her story. In
patriarchy, no one can hear you scream.
These stories
about the famously rich and powerful are illustrative of how it works, but the
system of patriarchy doesn’t only work for them. A perfect specimen of how it
used to work and often still does for any privileged male emerged this month in
reports about a rape case in New Jersey, one in which an incapacitated
16-year-old girl was allegedly assaulted by a boy who filmed himself raping her
and shared the video with the text “when your first time having sex is rape.”
The New York Times reported of the judge in the case,
“But a family court judge said it wasn’t rape. Instead, he wondered aloud if it
was sexual assault, defining rape as something reserved for an attack at
gunpoint by strangers. He also said the young man came from a good family,
attended an excellent school, had terrific grades and was an Eagle scout.
Prosecutors, the judge said, should have explained to the girl and her family
that pressing charges would destroy the boy’s life.”
Judge James
Troiano said, “He is clearly a candidate for not just college but probably for
a good college.” In other words, because he was a privileged boy on the path to
being a privileged man, he mattered so much that the victim did not matter at
all, and the fact that he’d committed a crime did not matter either, which lays
the groundwork for him and others like him to keep committing crimes and
victims of those crimes to be told their rights don’t matter.
Truth is whatever
the powerful want it to be, which is one of the fundamentals of
authoritarianism.
Might is right.
Might is right.
You see it all over again in the rape charges that columnist E. Jean Carroll
made against Trump last month: Senator Lindsay Graham said, “He’s denied
it. That’s all I need to hear.” Earlier this year the Washington Post noted,
“President Trump’s pitter-patter of exaggerated numbers, unwarranted boasting
and outright falsehoods has continued at a remarkable pace. As of June 7, his
869th day in office, the president has made 10,796 false or misleading claims,”
and Lindsay Graham knows it, but as with his furious defense of Kavanaugh, he’s
chosen an ethic in which anything a powerful man says goes and nothing a woman
says matters. Truth is whatever the powerful want it to be, which is one of the
fundamentals of authoritarianism. Might is right.
The underlying
error in The Once and Future King, as I look back at it, was the
assumption that you could have unequal power in the land—knights in armor with
weapons and weapons training, versus unarmed women and serfs and servants—and
somehow use it to institute equality. Chivalry is dead; it was always rotten.
Arthurian romance was never going to be about the redistribution of power and
wealth, but democracy is supposed to be, and we understand now in our new age
of plutocrats (and the old age of patriarchy) how unlikely it is that people
will be equal under the law while they are so unequal in might.
Some of that might
is monetary, some of it is the corrupt power structures in the financial,
political, and entertainment sectors that gave us Fox’s Roger Ailes and CBS’s
Les Moonves and New York state’s Eric Schneiderman and Baylor’s football team
so many more monsters who seemed to see the abuse of women as part of their
puissance. Some of it—quite a lot of it—is gender. There are lots of good
reasons for the courts to prosecute individual cases, but justice will not be
done until might is no longer right, and power that includes the power of being
heard and valued is distributed equally.
Rebecca Solnit
San Francisco
writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of
twenty-something books about geography, community, art, politics, hope, and
feminism and the author, most recently of Call Them By Their True
Names: American Crises (and Essays) and Drowned River: The
Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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