Sexual Witch-Hunts Strike Again
By: Cathy Young
Tags: Borat, Metoo, Politics, Sexual Harassment, Society

The news that legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended by The New Yorker and CNN for (apparently) masturbating in a Zoom conference has been received with the hilarity one might expect. But when some commentators expressed the view that Toobin was being treated too harshly, the story quickly turned into an outrage moment that brought together feminists (who felt that Toobin was the recipient of unwarranted “himpathy,” to use Kate Manne’s coinage) and conservatives (who felt he was the recipient of partisan wagon-circling by the liberal media).

Toobin’s suspension was entirely appropriate. But the outrage is a reminder that our post-#MeToo age is not only the age of accountability but also the age of the sexual witch-hunt — and the Toobin outrage is not the only one going on at the moment.

The original account of the Toobin incident in Vice, if read in its entirety, makes it quite clear that the exposure, during an election simulation by New Yorker staff, was an accident.

The two sources described a juncture in the election simulation when there was a strategy session, and the Democrats and Republicans went into their respective break out rooms for about 10 minutes. At this point, they said, it seemed like Toobin was on a second video call. The sources said that when the groups returned from their break out rooms, Toobin lowered the camera. The people on the call said they could see Toobin touching his penis. Toobin then left the call. Moments later, he called back in, seemingly unaware of what his colleagues had been able to see, and the simulation continued.

In other words, there was a break, during which Toobin apparently got on a sex-chat video call, unaware that he was still visible in the Zoom session. Of course it wasn’t very smart of him to do that. But it also seems clear that he had no intention of exposing himself to, or sexually harassing, his colleagues. He’d have to be insane to do this intentionally.

And yet many insisted otherwise. “If Toobin was on mute he was listening/watching the other participants and that’s still disgusting & violating. If the urge is so great end the call. He knew that,” progressive OB/GYN Jen Gunter, who has over 320,000 followers, wrote on Twitter, oblivious to the evidence.

Later, Gunter tweeted:

She went on to add that even if Toobin believed he had left the call, that was no better: “Like what about that meeting triggered the urge? So violating.”

In other words, Gunter seems to believe that if someone masturbates immediately after getting off a video call, it somehow violates the people in the call.

Some in Gunter’s thread suggested that Toobin’s behavior was intentional; others called it “predatory” or “vile and indefensible,” or expressed disgust with people, especially women, who sympathized with him. A “Resistance” and Women’s March activist with over 8,000 followers branded him a “vile, predatory pig.” “Mr. Toobin deserves no quarter,” wrote a male activist. “His excuses [are] pathetic and his record appalling.”

Meanwhile, a #MeToobin hashtag made an appearance, and attorney and television host Adrienne Lawrence insisted that Toobin’s conduct was nothing less than sexual harassment. (Not a single woman who was in the Zoom call has complained, but never mind.)

A number of people likened Toobin’s actions to Harvey Weinstein’s reported self-pleasuring in front of unwilling and shocked women — as if there was any similarity between a brief, almost certainly accidental glimpse of the act on your screen and being coerced into watching it, as it were, in the flesh.

Some also tried to suggest that Toobin had a history of predatory behavior, sharing a 2010 article from The New York Daily News alleging that he pursued a “well-known media figure” in a rather disturbing way — whispering a graphic proposition into the woman’s ear at a party when they first met, then following her to her hotel room and trying to invite himself in, and then calling her at the office and leaving “several sick messages.”

If this happened as described, it’s certainly quite bad. But we’re talking about an anonymous accuser (the woman in the picture illustrating the article is Casey Greenfield, then embroiled in a legal fight with Toobin over paternity and child support) and behavior that allegedly happened some 15 years earlier, circa 1995. We have no way of verifying any of the details or knowing if there is another side to the story such as a mutual flirtation. Notably, so far — despite the scandal — not a single other woman has come forward, anonymously or not, with a complaint of misconduct by Toobin.

Some also suggested that the Toobin/Greenfield scandal itself pointed to a pattern of abuse. It’s certainly not a nice story: Toobin, a married father of two, had an on-and-off affair with Greenfield for years, got her pregnant, and initially tried to deny paternity and offered to pay for an abortion.

But you have to really stretch the facts to fit this into a #MeToo framework. While Toobin’s detractors suggested that he tried to “pressure” Greenfield into an abortion, she herself has made no such claim. And while numerous tweets described her as “a co-worker’s daughter,” with a not-so-subtle hint of a very young woman being exploited by an older man, Greenfield — daughter of CBS legal analyst Jeff Greenfield— was a 35-year-old attorney when she got pregnant. The “baby mama drama,” as Daily News called it back then, may certainly make Toobin look like a jerk (though if you’re a Trump supporter, at least, you should probably keep quiet on that subject). It hardly makes him a sexual predator.

No less disturbing than the vindictiveness toward Toobin has been the vilification of people defending him — sometimes with overt threats of reprisals. After Atlantic writer Conor Friedersdorf argued that Toobin deserved some empathy and forgiveness for what was in overwhelming likelihood a stupid mistake, some people tried to go after Friedersdorf himself by tagging The Atlantic in comments which suggested that he too might be a sexual predator.

Granted, these were random Twitter users whose comments (and about a dozen more like them) got no traction. Even so, the impulse to punish someone for daring to suggest that perhaps we should go easy on Toobin is troubling.

Others, like Gunter, limited themselves to collective bashing of Toobin’s male “apologists.”

A USA Today op-ed by veteran journalist Michelle Weldon, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, argued that the sympathy for Toobin, and CNN’s failure to fire rather than merely suspend him, indicate “white male privilege.”

Meanwhile, in touching agreement, a conservative chorus rushed in to depict the pro-Toobin sentiment — expressed, besides Friedersdorf, by CNN’s Brian Stelter, Vox’s German Lopez (in a later-deleted tweet) and BuzzFeed culture writer Scaachi Koul — as liberal journalists defending unacceptable behavior by one of their own. The “liberal privilege” arguments are amusingly similar to the “white male privilege” ones: it’s either “a conservative journalist would have been destroyed for doing the same thing,” or “a journalist who is not a white male would have been destroyed for doing the same thing.”

Were some of the pro-Toobin takes ridiculous? Sure; a few of his defenders seemed to suggest that he shouldn’t have been disciplined at all, because everybody does it. (Not in a video call!) Stelter claimed that it was practically a national tragedy for Toobin to be sidelined as a commentator during a critical election. (If that turns out to be our worst election problem, we’re very lucky.) Was there political bias in some of these defenses? Well, I’m pretty sure Stelter and Koul would have taken a very different view if it had been a Fox News journalist in Toobin’s place. (Then again, so would many of Toobin’s conservative detractors.) Friedersdorf almost certainly would not.

And gender bias? My guess is that if a woman was two-timing between a Zoom meeting and a video sex chat and accidentally flashed her breasts to her colleagues on Zoom, her suspension would have set off loud cries of “slut-shaming” from the usual suspects.

The story doesn’t end here, though. The crazy writers of the “2020 Show” have added a plot twist in which the politics of being caught with one’s pants down actually do get flipped.

While the Toobin scandal was still unfolding, the news came that Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and currently Donald Trump’s attorney and zealous champion, can be seen in Sacha Baron Cohen’s new Borat film in a compromising position with a young woman who poses as a reporter. As The Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon sums up:

The Trump toad agrees to be interviewed by an attractive, blonde foreign journalist. He giddily flirts with her, accompanies her into a hotel bedroom after the interview for a drink, lies on the bed, and starts to reach for his penis (one can only imagine what he had in mind) when star Sacha Baron Cohen bursts in to stop the escalating situation. “Rudy, Trump would be disappoint, you are leaving hotel without golden shower!” Borat shouts after him as Giuliani retreats, his hand literally caught in his pants.

In the film, the woman is supposed to be Borat’s 15-year-old daughter Tutar. (When Borat ambushes Giuliani, he shouts, “She fifteen! Too old for you!”) In reality, she’s 24-year-old Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova.

The widely seen full clip is certainly embarrassing for Giuliani, though Fallon’s description is not quite accurate; it’s Bakalova/Tutar who blatantly flirts with Giuliani — among other things, putting her hand on his knee. He does, however, look comically pleased. Before he lies back on the bed, the flirtatious “reporter” removes the microphone he was wearing for the interview, untucking his shirt and groping around his midsection in the process.

Does the clip show Giuliani is “reaching for his penis”? It actually looks quite plausible to me that, as he claims, he’s tucking his shirt back in. Cohen’s claim that he was concerned about Bakalova’s safety during the scene sounds extremely far-fetched: the only physical contact initiated by Giuliani is to pat her on the back.

Of course the situation is entirely inappropriate. Of course Giuliani looks like an idiot, and as Indiewire’s Chris O’Falt argues, he displays a stunning lack of judgment. (A man close to the president of the United States falls for a setup that could be a classic “honeytrap.” The KGB used to do that a lot; its successor agency, the FSB, still does.)

But you know what? In this particular situation, I find Cohen and his antics far more distasteful than Giuliani’s conduct. In fact, Borat actually succeeded in making me feel bad for Giuliani, which I didn’t think was possible in 2020.

I don’t especially like Cohen’s schtick in general. I don’t really see how it’s better than James O’Keefe’s antics on the “other side.” I generally don’t like sting operations in which the target’s bad behavior is strenuously elicited and encouraged. This is especially repulsive when the intent is sexual humiliation. A honeytrap operation is still bad if its goal is to ridicule someone you find loathsome. And the liberals and leftists chortling over Borat’s “exposé” of Rudy really should ask themselves how they would feel if this had been a Project Veritas operation targeting a progressive figure — especially one who was black, or gay, or female.

Giuliani and Toobin both showed bad judgment and behaved stupidly and unprofessionally. Neither did anything “predatory,” misogynistic, or abusive. Both deserve to be the butt, as it were, of some jokes. But neither deserves to be “canceled” — not over these incidents, anyway.

There was a time when women’s sexual lapses were judged far more harshly than men’s. The Toobin and Giuliani incidents show that the pendulum has swung dramatically the other way. Himpathy? Right now, we could use some more of that.