What is Left of "Believe Women"?

from Rolling Stone's Jackie to Sam Altman's sister, the rules shift and definitions strain

You’ve heard my frustrations before about the selective nature of public morality, in general and specifically when it comes to accusations of sexual misconduct. Some prominent people seem to skate right past such allegations, while others have their careers destroyed. I’ve mentioned this in regards to Mike Tyson before. Tyson was convicted of raping an 18-year-old and accused of raping another woman; the latter allegation perhaps gains more credence given that Tyson once said in an interview “I am not above violating a woman.” He has also casually discussed his long-term and horrific physical abuse of his ex-wife, including saying in his memoir that one of his many beatings of Robin Givens resulted in “the best punch I've ever thrown in my entire life.” Sexual assault and intimate partner violence are widely seen as two of the most inexcusable of all crimes, obviously, and such allegations have ended many careers.

And yet, as I said in that earlier piece, Tyson has spent several decades now serving as a kind of kitschy, beloved mascot figure, someone who alternates between a comic figure and a sporting icon. He makes appearances on talk shows where the hosts treat him with jocularity and warmth; he’s invoked in sports documentaries as a hallowed champion and a symbol of better days. He most certainly is not treated as a monster. Just look at his IMDB.

Meanwhile, you could contrast him with all manner of other figures who have been hit with accusations that are less broad, less intense, or less certain. You might name Woody Allen. The accusation against him is horrific, but it comes from a single person who was very young at the time; came in the most crucial and intense moments of a brutal divorce and custody battle; was not affirmed by either the Yale-New Haven Hospital Child Sexual Abuse Clinic or New York Social Services after months-long investigations from both; has been consistently rejected by Dylan Farrow’s sibling Moses Farrow, who was in the house at the time of the alleged incident; and which Allen has vehemently denied. There is simply no objective way to suggest that the allegations against Allen are remotely as convincing as those against Tyson. And yet the latter gets to serve as a cuddly symbol of 1980s athletic excellence and 21st-century comedy, while the former lost his Amazon deal, saw his films removed from several streaming services, was denounced by dozens or hundreds of eminent Hollywood figures, and in general was made persona non grata in polite society. The contrast, to me, does not compute in basic moral or procedural terms.

I am most certainly not saying that Allen is innocent or otherwise defending him. I am saying that the allegations against him are far less corroborated than those against Tyson, who has more or less admitted to much of his impropriety and who was convicted of sexual assault, though he never was punished for domestic violence. And yet who invites visceral disgust when you name him in liberal company? Allen or Tyson? I thought about all this when I read the latest New Yorker piece from celebrity reporter Ronan Farrow, stalwart supporter of his sister’s accusations and son of Allen. (Although he is widely rumored to actually be the son of Frank Sinatra, another man whose anger and impulsivity around women was well known.) Farrow’s piece is a very long, oppo-gathering take on Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Farrow and his coauthor are deeply critical, painting Altman as inconsistent, imperious, resistant to external criticism or review, and morally unmoored. The one place where they seem in a rush to defend Altman concerns the sexual assault allegations that have been made against him, again and again, by his younger sister, who alleges that he engaged in long-term sexual abuse of her starting when she was five years old.

Here is the hearing she receives:

Altman’s sister, Annie, claimed in a lawsuit, and in interviews with us, that he sexually abused her for years, beginning when she was three and he was twelve. (We could not substantiate Annie’s account, which Altman has denied and his brothers and mother have called “utterly untrue” and a source of “immense pain to our entire family.” In interviews that the journalist Karen Hao conducted for her book, “Empire of AI,” Annie suggested that memories of abuse were recovered during flashbacks in adulthood.)

That investigative journalists might look into accusations of sexual misconduct and find them not to be credible isn’t a problem, in and of itself; indeed, the only way to effectively respond to sexual assault allegations that are true is to sort them from allegations that are false. But that this reporter, Ronan Farrow, Mr. MeToo, the sexual assault guy, dismissed the allegations in a paragraph…. Where is the outrage? Where is the liberal anger on social media? Where are the calls for Farrow to be fired, for the story to be retracted? Because that’s what happened, for years, with any perceived skepticism about allegations of sexual misconduct: widespread anger and calls for consequences. For years, Farrow served as one of MeToo’s most prominent and respected faces, celebrated by feminists in media who also insisted that believing victims was a holy commandment. And now, less than a decade after the explosion of interest in MeToo, one of its champions is in the pages of our most celebrated magazine, very much not believing a woman. Based on what principles? According to which playbook? When did things change so much in this arena, and who got that memo?

This is what bothers me so much about this and the other crumbling vestiges of the social justice movement’s period of institutional dominance in American life: not so much that the rules are bad rules, or that they are the wrong rules, or that they apply to the wrong people, but that there appear to be no rules at all.