Why Do You Need for Tara Reade to be a Liar, and What Happens If She Isn't One?

Part 2 of a three-part series

I ended the first article in this series with the bold statement:

It is time to throw out the true/false binary when we analyze sexual harassment cases.

It’s not meaningful, it’s not helpful, and it harms survivors.

Throw out true and false? That’s absurd, you say. Doesn’t that mean people will just make many more false claims, knowing that those claims could ruin their political or personal enemies, or will be even more susceptible to malicious influences when coming forward? How will we be able to tell who was really harassed and who wasn’t? 

That’s not what will happen, and here is why:

So much of what we consider “truth” in sexual harassment and assault cases is viewed through the criminal law lens of the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. We have set up a system that sets the bar so high for “true acts” that signals to those deciding whether to come forward that most reporting is futile (which explains why so many people don’t report).

It rewards those who report quickly, even though the trauma of the situation may make it impossible to immediately report what happened, especially to a stranger such as a law enforcement officer or company HR representative. Since harassment and assault almost always involve a power differential, the person who harmed them may be someone upon whom they are financially dependent (such as their boss or a powerful person in their industry). So if the harasser retaliates based upon their refusal to consent to unwanted conduct or to stay silent, they will be financially vulnerable. Many are just not immediately ready or able to take that risk.

It favors those with picture perfect lives, forgetting that abusers carefully choose their targets among the most vulnerable. Let’s get real: how many people do you know who are continually complaining about the “crazy women” that they date? Have you ever thought: “maybe who you date is not the problem?” Those selected for abuse because they were perceived as wild and crazy enough to consent to whatever happened then find no one prepared to believe them, and everyone lining up to tell their salacious decades-old stories about what a mess the survivor was then.

In politics, one’s reputation is everything. You must be willing to have every aspect of your life open to public scrutiny to climb the political ladder, which means there are a lot of people walking around with fear that what they did in their 20s and 30s will be shared with the world. Even if you worked hard to overcome poor decisions or address untreated mental health conditions, or just matured and employed better judgment (as humans do), those who come forward to report wrongdoing will inevitably find themselves under the intense scrutiny that should be reserved for the person who harmed them.

It favors those who tell a complete story all at once, disregarding that trauma impairs memory and that some details are too painful to recount to others, especially immediately after a traumatic event. Our standard of truth equates an incomplete story or one lacking sufficient details with a propensity to lie. It conflates the absence of corroborating documents or witnesses with the absence of evidence period, as the reporting party’s word is not considered sufficient corroboration that the sexual violence happened. When it comes to telling your story, it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If it’s too polished, it looks contrived, and if it’s not polished enough, then it probably never happened.

It requires there to be multiple victims to believe any single one. Many have said that the absence of other reports of sexual assault makes it more difficult for them to believe Tara Reade. While it is true that many abusers have a history or pattern with multiple victims, what does that mean for the first person to come forward? Think about that: it means the actions of the most courageous person, the first to come forward to report the most serious misconduct, receives the least validation.

There was a famous 9th Circuit legal opinion, penned by Circuit Judge Alex Kosinski (himself a harasser) that was known as the “one free grope rule,” where Kosinski opined that a woman who had her breasts groped at work couldn’t bring her legal claim for sexual harassment, because that one grope was neither serious nor pervasive (the legal standard for workplace harassment). Do we really want a “one rape rule?” That’s what we are telling the person who sticks her neck out, that unless you identify someone else who was attacked like you were, we’re not going to believe that it actually happened.

It forces people to trust ineffective, biased systems. In Reade’s situation, the focus is currently on whether she reported Biden’s assault to the Senate Personnel Office, so there would be a corroboration that she at the time believed that her boss assaulted her. And even if that form is found, Reade has said that she didn’t reveal that she was sexually assaulted. While some on either side may be waiting for a “gotcha” moment when and if this form is located, everyone is likely to be disappointed.

When you are compelled to report harassment to your employer who abused you, the fox is literally in charge of the henhouse. Historically, these in-house reporting processes were created for the express purpose of being able to bury misconduct reports and limit legal liability. It is far too easy for someone in an HR capacity to require “magic words” in order to move forward and consider it a “formal complaint,” exalting process over substance. It’s too easy for documents to be lost or buried over time. How many of your employment records from 1993 are available to you now? Most employers purge this information over time, especially relating to complaints that didn’t go anywhere or didn’t have legal implications requiring preservation.

We know the Senate process for retaining and acting upon sexual harassment complaints was considered completely ineffective as recently as 2018, when it was revamped. Why would we think the process in 1993 wouldn’t have been flawed enough to discourage someone with great trepidation about challenging her employer from coming forward?

It disfavors those who ever say anything good about the abusive person, disregarding the psychology of abuse and the history between the parties. We condition women to think that any unwanted conduct is their fault. Reade says Biden told her “I thought you liked me.” That, at best, would cause Reade to question whether she had been too flirtatious with her boss, and at worst, foreshadows that Biden would defend his conduct as consensual. As the sexual violence is replayed over and over in the survivor’s memory, frequently they search for some meaning for why they were targeted. They may actually retain some positive feelings from their work together. Or the necessity of moving forward in their professional world may compel them to say positive things about a former boss in order to keep the retaliation or reputational harm flowing from the incident from following them for the rest of their career.

Typically, all of these factors are individually and collectively considered as a lack of credibility. But to those who work with survivors — or survivors themselves — they are understood as examples of how women who have experienced trauma behave.

To many survivors, the tell-tale signs of trauma reinforce the truth of the account rather than detract from it.

(Be sure you’ve signed up as a Substack newsletter subscriber to get part three delivered to your inbox tomorrow. The series will also be available on Medium.)