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[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-whatever-else-kavanaugh-was-right-that-due-process-is-down-the-drain
Whatever Else, Kavanaugh Was Right That Due Process Is Down The Drain
Christie Blatchford
September 27, 2018 8:38 PM EDT
Whatever else, Brett Kavanaugh got two things right. The first is that the hearing he attended Thursday before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee was a circus and a disgrace.
How elevating it was to watch a nominee for the United States Supreme Court be grilled about the number of beer he drank as a Grade 9 student and the contents of his high school yearbook.
What was narrowly at the heart of the dreadful proceeding was whether Kavanaugh has the character and right stuff required of a Supreme Court judge.
But what it was more broadly about was, as Kavanaugh once furiously put it - and this is the second thing - “We live in a country devoted to due process and the rule of law.
“If the mere assertion of an allegation is enough to destroy a person’s life and career, we’ve all abandoned” that.
On the narrow question, it’s tough to know where to land, on the side of Kavanaugh or on the side of California psychology professor Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
They were equally adamant and unequivocal, she that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her 36 years ago at an unknown house and time when they were both teenagers (specifically that it was he who had ground his pelvis against her on a bed, put a hand over her mouth when she tried to yell and tried to remove her clothes), he that he absolutely didn’t sexually assault, in that fashion or any other, Blasey Ford or any other woman, ever.
They were even equally emotional, which in the modern world is deemed a signal of credibility (which it may or may not be; liars quiver with emotion as often as truth-tellers), he with rage coursing through his veins, she with fear and anxiety.
But on the broader issue, it’s Kavanaugh who is absolutely correct, albeit late to the realization.
It is now enough to make an assertion of an allegation of sexual assault, and boom, a man, even one of such an impeccable record that he survived no fewer than six FBI background checks and an equal number of American Bar Association investigations, may be brought down as easily as a kitten.
Due process is long down the drain, the presumption of innocence, which before this era was not confined to the criminal courts but was rather a guiding principle of the culture, is dead, and the rule of law is at risk.
The evidence is all around us, not just in the United States but in Canada and throughout the first world. Their names are not quite legion, but we’re getting there.
In this case, because it’s a Senate committee doing the questioning and a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court at stake, the damage to the institutions is also considerable.
When even someone with the credentials of Kavanaugh can be destroyed (as I believe he has been, permanently) by allegations made first in a newspaper and which would never pass the “reasonable grounds” charge test used by most police forces (in that those Blasey Ford named as potential witnesses either don’t remember or have refuted her claim they were present at the time of the alleged assault and in that there is no corroborating evidence), it’s all over but the weeping.
There is something else that troubles me.
Blasey Ford is 51, a married mother, an accomplished psychologist. I’m about a decade older.
Something somewhat similar to the incident she recounts happened to me when I was about 14. At a party at a camp (as we called cottages in the north), a boy followed me into the woods as I headed to the outhouse. He tackled me with the intention, I presume, of sexually assaulting me somehow. In my fall, I tore the knee out of a pair of new jeans I was wearing, and I kicked at him furiously, got to my feet and ran back to where the rest of the group was.
I was not haunted by the experience, though I was highly annoyed about the jeans. I didn’t tell anyone. To this day I am not traumatized in any way, shape or form.
That guy in the woods remains just about the only bad experience with men - friends, colleagues, interview subjects and contacts - I really ever had.
I’m not saying what I found to be Blasey Ford’s lasting delicacy (she installed two front doors at her home because of her claustrophobia/anxiety, which she attributes in some significant part to the alleged assault) is either wrong or unwarranted.
What I am saying is that either I am a total freak - and this may be - or that there are other grown women, like me, who have not suffered the #MeToo tide of unwanted sexual attention, who overwhelmingly have good feelings and memories of our encounters with men, and who are made of different stuff.
Email: cblatchford@postmedia.com | Twitter: blatchkiki
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