A few days ago, Alva Johnson, a staffer in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, filed a lawsuit complaining that the candidate, now the President, once tried to kiss her at a campaign rally in August 2016. She says she turned her head, and the kiss landed on the side of her mouth. That was that. But now she has decided to sue him.
Nine months after the alleged event, Johnson, now said to be an event planner in Florida, gushed about Trump on an Alabama TV program, saying “He’s more incredible in person than I would think you’d even think … he’s just the nicest guy.”
According to the Washington Post, she added that she expected to be named the “second in command” of the U.S. Embassy in Portugal. This never happened, possibly because there are no signs that she had any qualifications for such a position.
But now, belatedly, she is suing him over an attempted unwanted kiss, something other campaign workers say never happened. Now, granted, Trump essentially bragged about his ability to sexually harass women at will on the infamous Access Hollywood videotape.
But does that mean that accusations are automatically to be believed – or even publicized? Does it mean that all forms of unwanted behavior are to be stigmatized in the same way, from an unwanted comment to the behavior of the convicted rapist Bill Cosby?
I have, as some of you may know, painful personal experience with this; last year, I was accused on a scurrilous website of “inappropriate behavior” towards women. Many of the charges were demonstrably untrue, but nobody had any interest in that — or my side of the story.
Within days after the publication of these charges, I was asked to resign from charitable boards and then from speaking engagements.
Wayne State University, which assured me at first that there weren’t even any grounds for an investigation, then suddenly, when the media jumped on the story, launched one that was clearly designed to find me guilty; on the advice of a lawyer, I declined to even participate.
This may have been a mistake, but I had no idea what to do. As a lifelong student of history, I did recognize what was happening; the response was very similar to how people were treated during the Red Scare here, or in the Stalinist purge trials in the Soviet Union.
It was fascinating as well as appalling, to read a collection of half-truths and lies about a person who I did not recognize but who was described as myself. Suddenly I knew how, say, Nikolai Bukharin must have felt.
I have not yet written the full story of what happened to me, in part because those who do attempt to defend themselves invite only more attacks, and because editors who have published articles by those so accused have actually been fired, which is even more frightening.
I mention all this not primarily to discuss my experience; I intend to do that, at a time and place of my own choosing. What matters more is the standard of fairness; after years in which some men’s bad behavior to women was swept under the rug, we are now in a period where every accusation is seen as tantamount to proof of guilt. This is not healthy for anyone.
Nor, as every professional historian knows, is it legitimate to judge language that may have been acceptable in the past by the changed standards of today.
Years ago, I knew a prominent Detroiter, now dead, who had been a secret member of the Communist Party until the collapse of the Soviet Union. “How could you still believe in Moscow after Hungary and Czechoslovakia?” I asked him.
He told me, “well, whenever I saw something in the papers about a labor situation I knew about, it was always full of lies and untruths, so I assumed that what they wrote about the Soviet Union was the same,” he told me after he realized he had been duped.
That’s a pretty damning indictment of the free press in this society. We’d all do well to think about what that means.
