Patterico's Pontifications

11/6/2018

The Kavanaugh Effect: Yes, Women (and Men) Sometimes Lie

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 6:40 am



I’m a few days late to this remarkable story, but on a day when the “Kavanaugh effect” could be motivating voters across the country, I think it’s still worth talking about. So remember how, on the day of Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, we were being told to believe all women? Yeah, about that:

A woman who made graphic allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has admitted to investigators that she fabricated them to “get attention.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has referred Judy Munro-Leighton to the Justice Departement and FBI for investigation into potentially materially false statements and obstruction.

. . . .

On September 25, “Jane Doe” from Oceanside, California sent an anonymous letter to Senator Kamala Harris alleging that the then-nominee for Supreme Court and his friend raped her “several times each” in the back of a car. Details were sparse, such as the time frame and location of the alleged attack. . . .

Later on October 3, Judy Munro-Leighton emailed the committee claiming to be the “Jane Doe” of the letter and said she was “sharing with you the story of the night that Brett Kavanaugh and his friend sexually assaulted and raped me in his car,” calling it a “vicious assault.”

. . . .

Investigators located Munro-Leighton living in Kentucky, not California, and discovered that she is a left-wing activist decades older than Judge Kavanaugh.

She admitted to investigators that her story was a “tactic” and “that was just a ploy.”

“No, no, no. I did that as a way to grab attention,” she told investigators. “I am not Jane Doe . . . but I did read Jane Doe’s letter. I read the transcript of the call to your Committee. . . . I saw it online. It was news.”

“I was angry, and I sent it out,” she said of her email to the committee describing the allegations.

“Oh, Lord no,” she responded on whether she has ever met Kavanaugh.

The #MeToo movement has revealed a lot of terrible and even criminal behavior that was covered up for years. Many women were reluctant to come forward with their stories, for fear that they wouldn’t be believed. That is a real problem and it deserves discussion.

But I heard from a lot of people during the Kavanaugh hearings who said that women could not have an improper motivation to come forward about Kavanaugh. They told me that no amount of #ResistanceBucks, no amount of fame, and no amount of political influence could cause someone to put themselves and their families through the kind of scrutiny to which women like Christine Blasey Ford were subjecting themselves.

That’s … not necessarily true. And stories like this confirm it.

Which is why every case has to be judged on its own merits. Because women (and men) often tell the truth. But, women (and men) sometimes also lie.

A blanket rule that says “believe all victims” is never appropriate.

SEEMINGLY UNRELATED BUT IN THE END VERY RELATED STORY: I enjoy attending outdoor plays at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga. As befits the area, the clientele and the actors are reliably lefty and wear their politics on their sleeves. This past summer, for the second time since I have been attending, the company put on a production of Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible.” Ostensibly about the Salem witch trials, the play was a thinly disguised parable of the Red Scare during the 1950s. The play means something to the company because it is run by the Geer family, and Will Geer (like Arthur Miller) was one of the folks dragged in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

The last showing of the play was happening right in the middle of the Kavanaugh hearings, and I was so tempted to buy a ticket and wear a giant “I BELIEVE VICTIMS” shirt.

P.S. Speaking of the Kavanaugh effect:

Heh.

P.P.S. Totally unrelated, but amusing: Why We Don’t Trust Reporters #4,936:

Story here.

35 Responses to “The Kavanaugh Effect: Yes, Women (and Men) Sometimes Lie”

  1. Happy voting!

    Patterico (115b1f)

  2. these christine ford-style rape hoaxes are a self-limiting reaction i think

    everyone knows she’s a liar but you have people who care that she lied and people who don’t care that she lied

    over time everyone will move into the “don’t care” group cause it’s just not worth worrying about

    it’s like how everybody hates applebees but some people still eat there sometimes

    it’s just not worth getting excited about

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  3. P.P.S. Totally unrelated, but amusing: Why We Don’t Trust Reporters #4,936:

    Patterico (115b1f)

  4. Story here.

    Patterico (115b1f)

  5. brenda battel come across like she’s way more of a virulent hateful racist than roseanne ever seemed to be that’s for sure

    that’s probably why they fired her

    cause this was part of a pattern of hate

    and hate?

    hate has no home here

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  6. Bad Axe, MI – hotbed of liberal bias!

    🙂

    Dave (9664fc)

  7. She probably kicked it with Bonior back in the day, though, Dave.

    urbanleftbehind (22b95a)

  8. I really did want Kid Rock vs. Eminem for that seat’s contest though.

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  9. Kavanaugh effect? It’s always been the Scottsboro Boys Effect for me. Although I say “Emmett Till” to younger people, because they know that one better.

    nk (dbc370)

  10. Most of the people dragged before HUAC needed to be dragged before HUAC. Stalin’s organizing of the Hollywood community in the 30’s and 40’s was extremely effective. People like Trumbo were transparent stooges, anti-war during the Hitler-Stalin pact, pro-war the moment the pact failed.

    ]It wasn’t a Red Scare at all, but we continue to this day with the Red Cover-up.

    Kevin M (a57144)

  11. Although I say “Emmett Till” to younger people, because they know that one better.

    Most young people don’t know who we were fighting in WW2 and probably couldn’t name 5 US Presidents.

    Kevin M (a57144)

  12. Emmett Till is resonant up here because he was from the South Side and like many of his peers had family sourced from Mississippi.

    urbanleftbehind (5eecdb)

  13. In Cook County, the Presiding Judge of the Chancery Division is also the one who approves name changes. So while I would wait to have my case assigned to a trial calendar, I would see people stepping up on a name change which was really a name correction. Some of them, he would just say “Mississippi? Say no more. Approved.” Because Mississippi birth registrars deliberately messed up the names of black babies so they could not be found on the public records.

    nk (dbc370)

  14. It doesn’t help when scumbags, such as Burkman, go around trying to bribe women into making false accusations. (Only politicians can take bribes legally like that!)

    A company that appears to be run by a pro-Trump conspiracy theorist offered to pay women to make false claims against Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the days leading up to the midterm elections—and the special counsel’s office has asked the FBI to weigh in.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/special-counsel-refers-scheme-targeting-mueller-to-fbi/574411/

    Tillman (61f3c8)

  15. Well, the Washington Post has an unfair advantage. Its owner is also the owner of Amazon, and its reporters have access to a database of women who have sex with inanimate objects when they want to find five to “credibly accuse” a Republican of “sexual misconduct”.

    nk (dbc370)

  16. Frog march these lying bimbos to a jail cell.

    mg (9e54f8)

  17. What’s interesting about these sex outrages is that both sides clearly have an element that would happily use these smears to win an edge on completely unrelated political issues. The real difference is that the left’s zealous fringe is often able to pretend to be in the mainstream, and the right’s fringe is not, but if we’re just going on guilt by association, both sides are associated with it.

    Kavanaugh was horrible, and really reflected a shameful attempt to pit Americans against eachother, basically from the very top of the democratic party, and it made a big difference in my personal ballot. Without that episode, I probably would have voted for Cruz, but definitely not straight Team R. Of course plenty of democrats were also polarized by the same sort of thing.

    I don’t think Republicans really get the chance to fix this. Trump isn’t trying, but W tried quite a bit. The real opportunity to spend some political capital to heal our country was Obama’s. I hope he realizes that. His legacy is particularly weak, and he had the opportunity to be a Mt Rushmore grade president.

    I do not think more hearings about Trump from democratic House committees will heal or help. We saw what somelike like that did a month ago. It was short on actual information, extremely high on sleaze, and made everyone angrier at their fellow Americans. Trump knows how to highlight this scandal over that one… he wouldn’t be more ethical in a fog of constant accusations. He’s good at showing that the other side is as likely to lie as he is.

    Dustin (6d7686)

  18. The Washington Post knew that the woman working for O’Keefe was a sting because she was not one of their own actresses.

    nk (dbc370)

  19. Paging China Di Fi = please report to the crow bar hotel.

    mg (9e54f8)

  20. I’ve always despised the way THE CRUCIBLE is used as a metaphor for the Anti-Communist movement. I don’t much CARE if the author felt he had been unjustly accused, the parallel is seriously flawed. We now believe that there are no such things as witches (as defined by the Witch Trials, anyway). There damn well were Soviet Agents in the US. Large numbers of people may well have been members of the Communist Party while having no idea that it was bankrolled by Soviet Intelligence, but it was and they recruited through it.

    Yes, Joe McCarthy was a bully and a fraud. He was also an opportunist. If he had thought advocating Cannibalism was a path to power, he would have come out foe roasting children. That doesn’t mean that there were no Communist agents in the United States; it just means that any inconvenience McCarthy caused them was coincidental.

    C. S. P. Schofield (043293)

  21. No more “let bygones be bygones”, hard lessons are often lessons learned.

    Colonel Haiku (f2bc98)

  22. yes they were objectively pro Hitler from 39-41, trumbo might have been even earlier, I’ve outlined how the isolationist move arose out the nye committee and his chief staffer alger hiss.

    Nixon was more cautious in noting left wing affiliations, Douglas was like one of these woke actresses

    narciso (d1f714)

  23. Thank you for this post. It’s useful as a rebuttal to those who previous claiming that no woman would’ve had a reason to lie about Kavanaugh no matter how many reasons we supplied.

    NJRob (1d7532)

  24. they lie cause they want everybody to think they were raped or assaulted in some way when actually in real life that never happened

    plus sometimes they get paid for it

    happyfeet (28a91b)

  25. Douglas was like one of these woke actresses

    Douglas would have been appalled by things like “hate speech” — he was a free speech fundamentalist.

    Kevin M (a57144)

  26. #27

    I think narc means Helen Gahagan Douglas, the person Nixon defeated for Senate in 1950. “Woke” actress isn’t an unreasonable description of her.

    Appalled (96665e)

  27. Hugh Hewitt uses, as a screening question to separate the novices from the politically well-educated, “Do you think Alger Hiss was guilty or innocent?”

    He mostly gets blank stares in response.

    (Hiss was guilty as sin, but an entire generation of liberals insisted and pretended otherwise.)

    Beldar (fa637a)

  28. Bernie almost surely believes Hiss was innocent, and not 0.001% of his supporters would be able to tell us the difference between Alger Hiss and snake p!ss.

    Beldar (fa637a)

  29. well sanders probably thinks that hiss was right to be a soviet spy,

    narciso (d1f714)

  30. Some people use Alger Hiss as their litmus test. Some people use Albert Parsons.

    Leviticus (1e8028)

  31. “So every Dem Senator in a competitive race who voted against Kavanaugh lost (Donnelly, Heitkamp, McCaskill, and almost certainly Nelson), and the one who voted for Kavanaugh survived (Manchin). Coincidence?”

    Tom Bevan
    ‏Verified account @TomBevanRCP

    AZ Bob (885937)

  32. I don’t know Trump tells simple lies when the truth could be used to say somwthing almost as good. (i/e/ that CBF had contradicted herself)

    At his late campaign rallies, Trump kept on saying that “the” accuser against Kavanaugh had recanted, making it sound like maybe Christine Blasey Ford had. Now I don’t know how long his fans would continue to believe that.

    Actually, iit was Judy Munro-Leighton who had recanted, both as to being “Jane Doe” and as to the substance of what “Jane Doe” said , but I don’t her stated reason, which involved no other people.

    Judy Munro-Leighton was not one of the major accusers.

    Sammy Finkelman (102c75)

  33. 33. Especially the ones who pretended to be giving their vote careful consideration. Heller (R-Nevada) also lost because he’s been all over the map on a number of things.

    Sammy Finkelman (102c75)


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