Someone in the press has finally come to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s defense.
That it comes from a woman who cheered the attempted destruction of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 is a detail that can’t go ignored.
Cuomo stands accused of multiple accounts of sexual misconduct, including harassing several women with sexually suggestive remarks, unwanted touching, and even an unwanted kiss.
But let’s not string the poor man up over allegations alone, says Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick. After all, she says, due process is a sacred right.
Indeed it is. But where was she in 2018, back when the Senate descended into pandemonium over the confirmation of Kavanaugh? Ah, that’s right. She was in full support of the effort to railroad him over dubious allegations of sexual misconduct.
“I am a journalist myself, and I am wholly in favor of a sober and serious probe into Cuomo’s alleged conduct,” writes Lithwick. “It’s not a terrible thing to allow an independent investigator to gather all the facts and arrive at a formal conclusion before calling for his immediate ouster.”
She adds, “To allow a formal fact-finding process to play out is neither a disparagement of his accusers — whose accounts should be taken absolutely seriously — nor a get-out-of-jail-free card for the governor. It is merely an acknowledgment of something that should have been clear from the vitally important beginnings of the #MeToo era: There is a difference between having the media surface and report predation and having something akin to a formal process investigate and determine what occurred and what should be done about it. The press has never pretended to be experts at that latter function.”
Well, that is certainly an interesting perspective from the same woman who fully supported the effort to destroy Kavanaugh.
“Fear a Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” read the headline to an article Lithwick wrote in 2018. Its subhead adds, “As his confirmation steamrolls ahead, Americans should be terrified.”
“Anita Hill once told me that, in 1991, Clarence Thomas had race and she had only gender,” Lithwick wrote at the time. “But now, in 2018, Brett Kavanaugh had rage and Christine Blasey Ford had only gender. With the Senate Judiciary Committee moving on Friday to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate without any further inquiry around Blasey Ford’s damning and plainly credible testimony that Kavanaugh had gleefully and drunkenly sexually assaulted her at a 1982 house party as his buddy Mark Judge watched, it appears as though his rage alone will have been enough to earn him life tenure on the highest court in the land.”
She adds, “As GOP rage gathered steam, we were told that this needed to be treated as a criminal proceeding — innocent until proven guilty — and the Republicans contended that there was no evidence of criminal conduct. But, of course there was evidence: compelling firsthand testimony and numerous supporting accounts.”
For the record, no one, including the people Blasey Ford claimed could corroborate her story, corroborated her story. Also, for the record, there is photographic evidence proving at least one of the allegations leveled against Cuomo.
Compare what Lithwick wrote in 2018 about Kavanaugh to what she wrote this week about Cuomo.
What an amazing transformation! What changed?
