I've mentioned some of these incidents before from my own experiences:
- Part of the time I attended UH as a grad student, I lived in Cougar Place, with duplex studio apartments sharing bathrooms, on the left edge of campus, a few blocks away from satellite parking. One of my former coed students recognized me and flagged me down. She asked me if I would escort her to the parking area, and I agreed. There is not much to this story beyond a minor inconvenience.
- A few years earlier I had just moved to Orlando's naval base, the site of the nuclear power school. The base didn't offer BOQ's, i.e., housing for officers, so I had to find an off-base apartment. In the interim, there were temporary quarters, basically studio apartments with an intermediate shared bathroom. One day I heard female screams and calls for help; she managed to get into the bathroom and started knocking desperately on my locked door. I let her into my apartment to escape while fending off the man who was following her, keeping him back in the bathroom. He was out of control, screaming that she was his wife, I had no business getting involved, and that he was going to kill me. (This is the first time I ever got a direct death threat.) I later reported the incident to the MPs, who literally laughed it off.
- Around 2009 I lived in a basement apartment just west of the Baltimore County line in Howard County. I often heard loud arguments coming from the apartment over mine. One day I heard female screams in the hallway crying for help. I came out of my apartment and noticed a trail of female possessions down the staircase from the apartment in question. They had gone out of the apartment building, and I stood outside the entrance. I think she was going to a parked white car at the curb and he intercepted her at the car. She was a petite young lady, maybe 5 feet tall, her boyfriend maybe my height, a head taller. I recall she was wearing jeans too long for her: her feet were covered with jean leg. She saw me and ran up to me, asking me to call the police. One of her eyes was purplish, swollen shut; I knew instantly what must have happened, and I had to exercise self-control from going after the bastard boyfriend. The boyfriend came up to us, echoing his girlfriend's pleas to call the police, claiming that she had assaulted him with her fingernails, scratching the outside of an eye. It was a very surreal experience; the girl was at one moment screaming that the police were going to lock his ass in jail and then, the next moment, crying that she didn't want to see him go to jail. I didn't have my cellphone with me, but I was determined to stay her as long as it took--he was not going to hit her again on my watch again. I mostly stood there listening to the both of them, keeping the situation calm under the circumstances. A neighbor must have called because the police showed up maybe 10 minutes later, immediately putting the guy in cuffs. I listened to the girl plead with the accompanying lady cop, pleading her not to put her boyfriend in jail; it was the drugs that were responsible to this, that all he needed was a stern talking to. She mentioned while under the influence he was paranoid, thinking the people in the apartment above and below him (that's me) were trying to gas his apartment, that he was under government surveillance. At some point, the lady cop turned to me and said, "I've got this; you can leave." (I didn't know if they needed me as a witness.) I don't know what happened afterwards; the police never contacted me if they needed me as a witness.
Chivalry is not dead. One of my nephews got punched out protecting the honor of a young woman.
Now I'm not sure what may/may not have happened 36 years ago. Let me start by saying that I think that Judge Kavanaugh was not my preferred nominee, given a weak record on the fourth amendment. I certainly am not a Trump supporter nor a Republican.
But any familiar reader knows that the Democratic assault on Judge Bork during the Reagan Administration was the final straw in my leaving the party as a conservative Democrat. Only a few years later the Democrats launched a similarly odious personal attack against another superbly qualified Clarence Thomas, in many ways currently my favorite jurist on the court.
Why do I believe Kavanaugh? It's based on a number of inferences. Is it possible Kavanaugh and Ford casually met during high school? Yes; he attended an all-boys school and she an all-girls. If they met, it would likely have been at a party mixer. I'm sure that the upper-class athlete might have attracted her interest. Is it possible he said or did something (non-sexual) which offended her? I know women who have held a grudge against me and have lied about the circumstances. As I recently tweeted, there was a UTEP student who went ballistic after I discovered she had worked together with a male student on an independent assignment. I had a Houston girlfriend who was unhappy with me after I went to an Astros game without her (and she didn't even like baseball)--I found she literally left something like 14 messages on my answering machine during the game; when I later broke up with her, she responded with a "Dear Spawn of Satan" letter typed on Merrill Lynch letterhead. Years later, a work colleague, apparently so embarrassed that a geek like me would dare ask her out to lunch, tried to get me fired. I'm not exactly proud of admitting I tried to date evil women.
Is Ford an evil woman? I don't know yet. But let me point out that anyone who has studied psychology--and I've read literally thousands of applied psychology papers, knows that human memories are not like copy machines. I'll give a minor example. I remember trying to convince my Mom to vote third-party in 1972. She later told me (in a letter) the person I was backing was not on the ballot, that she voted for Nixon instead. Some time later, I raised the topic of her 1972 vote. She called me a liar, saying that she never discusses who she votes for with anybody. I let it go, thinking it was a stupid argument: I still had the letter in question in my trunk.
The MeToo industrial complex wants you to believe a traumatic experience gives you super-memory powers, but that is a disprovable myth. It may be other unpleasant memories of Kavanaugh (maybe he rejected her interest in him) got fused with an unrelated event. There is a whole area of psychology based on false memories. The anti-science ideologues went after Sen. Hatch when he suggested mistaken identity. In fact, Hatch is likely correct, as I'll discuss.
So I know what it's like not to be believed? Yes. Not a sexual incident. But I had an unexpected event in my last year of academia as a visiting professor at Illinois State. I had had a contract dispute with UTEP; Professor JC from Arizona State was a leading scholar in my segment of MIS dealing with human factors/ergonomics in information systems. BB at ISU was taking a year's leave to start up a research center at ISU; this opened up a temporary position, and I was offered the appointment.
Now the Applied Computer Science at ISU was not an MIS program in a business school, like my past positions; it was more of a fusion program. Among other things, they wanted their students to program in PL/1 vs. COBOL (like you might have seen at the time in an undergraduate MIS program). Chairman LE was well-aware that I didn't teach or write in PL/1, but he wasn't bothered by that; he assigned me to teach a data structures course and assigned a PL/1 grader for me. Now what got me on the senior professors' shitlist from the get-go was that I made the programming language OPTIONAL. As far as they were concerned, I was supposed to require PL/1. And I heard rumors on the grapevine that certain idiot troublemaking students in my class were spreading rumors that I was teaching COBOL (gasp!) in my class. (Nope. I was using pseudocode, but students didn't seem to recognize the difference.) Around mid-semester, without warning, the class was taken away from me. There was not even an interim discussion with LE. I suspected that LE acted under pressure from the senior faculty, but there wasn't even the pretense of due process.
This put my academic career in jeopardy; another college hearing what happened might infer it was misconduct or incompetence in the classroom. LE and I had a frank discussion about PL/1 before I stepped into the classroom. I had his full support--until I didn't.
Now I was between the rock and a hard place: I needed to land a new academic appointment soon, and a positive recommendation from LE was almost expected if I were to be successful.
So there was no doubt that I was internally fuming over the injustice that had happened. But I didn't go around talking about it, even with junior professors I had befriended during my stay. My focus was to get my next job offer (little did I realize in academia that wouldn't happen for another 3 years) I had made no attempt in the weeks that followed the class decision to file a grievance; I had not discussed it with others. LE never discussed it.
To this day, I cannot explain what happened next--if LE was being paranoid, if someone was spreading false rumors about me, etc. Maybe he thought he could intimidate me into silence, an insurance policy. If I had known what he was up to, I would have taped it.
He made a first-time, unexpected visit to my office. He shut the door so we could speak privately. He then threatened explicitly to reassign my classes if I decided to file a complaint over what he did last semester. I couldn't believe what I was hearing; it was a blatant abuse of power--and completely counter-productive from his point of view. I could easily see why people might question why I didn't file a complaint immediately in the fall; in part, academic hiring in my discipline at the time started at DSI and ICIS conferences late fall semester. So I was going to be leaving ISU come May, no matter what. Plus, as a visiting professor, I frankly doubted that the good old boy network would back me up: I would be gone in a year no matter what, while they had to live with my tenured adversaries.
But LE's threat to relieve me of classes just for filing a legitimate grievance was an inexcusable breach of professional ethics. I went straight to the administration. They had to craft a decision that provided for my due process while acknowledging LE's legitimate authority; they made it clear, however, they would scrutinize decisions like relieving me from my classes.
LE squealed like a stuck pig that the Administration was basically eviscerating his meaningful authority. I had lost whatever professional respect I had for LE; whatever he was going to say to other colleges was beyond my control.
Before I left ISU, I hit LE and his cronies with what they feared the most, a complaint of what they had done as a blatant abuse of academic freedom, plus a complaint of LE's personal threat and other things. I didn't get an offer in the middle of a recession. Did LE blackball me? I don't know. I was facing an uncertain future, with the IT profession skeptical of my skills after 8 years in academia and wary of my using them as a refuge until the academic job market recovered.
So what did I have to gain? In part, I wanted to make things better for other professors that followed me.
The results: the investigating subcommittee (I got their decision long after I left ISU; they didn't contact me during deliberations) agreed that LE had violated my academic freedom and couldn't explain why I had not been counseled during the fall semester incident. I am grateful they did the right thing. Of course, I never got a follow up. For all I know, the college quashed their finding.
However, and this is the main point for telling the story, the committee cleared LE from my charge about his threatening to strip me from my classroom duties in the spring, noting that he denied the charge and I had failed to prove my charge. What the hell? Of course, LE had manipulated the situation so there were no witnesses. But why did I go to the Administration when I did? Why did the Administration explicitly assert its rights to review LE's personnel decisions? Why did LE protest the Administration's letter? These details were on the record; of course, LE would make a self-serving denial. But you would think that a department chair who actually stripped me of a course in the fall might credibly threaten to do it again. What exactly did they want: a videotape of an unexpected meeting?
So yeah, I can understand why a victim of sexual crimes is incensed when people don't believe me (and no, I'm not trying to compare my experience as a professor to a victim of sexual aggression).
So why don't I believe Ms. Ford? It's based on a number of inferences, including but not restricted to these:
- Ms. Ford did not raise Kavanaugh's name for over 30 years and even then, did not go to law enforcement, but to politicians, wanting her identity to be hidden. Yes, Ms. Ford eventually went public, but I believe this had more to do with a news leak. There's a reason why there's often in law a statute of limitations. It's all but impossible for a defendant to mount a defense as potential witnesses die off or their memories fade with age.
- There's the problem of Ms. Ford not coming forward during his nomination to the bench in 2003 through approval in 2006. Recall Kavanaugh had been involved in the Clinton impeachment effort and so, when Bush nominated him, resentful Democrats blocked his nomination until a bipartisan agreement years later. Yet more than 20 years after the alleged attack, she didn't come forward then or at any point before or during the 6 federal background checks Is it that an alleged sexual predator is acceptable for lower federal judge positions?
- There's the problem of Ms. Ford's description of Kavanaugh and the preponderance of the evidence. We simply don't see anything like a pattern of behavior, multiple victims. Kavanaugh did not seem to have a playboy reputation; women are not coming out of the woodwork claiming to have been victimized
- Ms. Ford's allegations lack sufficient specificity for any prosecution . Time, location, witnesses for parties. She never apparently kept a personal journal, discussed the allegation with contemporaries, including her parents and friends. I'm not even sure if she can establish even meeting Kavanaugh. The WSJ reports that Ford desperately contacted her college roommate on Facebook, seeking corroboration that she had disclosed the allegation (nope).
