How “he said, she said” always benefits “him:” What does it mean to “believe women”

I have very little faith in the mainstream media. However, I have to say that after watching the recent interview between Mika Brzezinski and Joe Biden, Mika comes off quite well and Joe quite poorly. I’d encourage you all to watch it.

If you do watch it, I think it's clear why Mika comes off so well: she basically hammers Biden for 20 minutes about Tara Reade. Biden offers what seems to be definitive denials time and again, but Mika doesn't accept them, and she continually reformulates her questions in order to keep the pressure on Biden. She only relents when the interview time us up.

The brunt of Mika's questions revolve around two points, and the reason she is so unrelenting is because Biden is evasive about both of them. In the case of the first set of questions, his evasiveness is quite obvious, and he comes off poorly. However, in the case of the second set of questions, the evasiveness is less obvious, but I think it helps reveal a larger and unfortunate truth: despite the recent calls to "believe women," we still believe men. And Joe Biden is counting on it.

As for the first set of questions, they relate to documents that might pertain to the case of Tara Reade. Biden has, in fact, called on the Senate to release any documents related to Tara Reade. As he insists, if there was ever a complaint, it would reside with the Senate, because that's where all personnel documents are kept. However, Mika keeps pressing Biden. And the reason she keeps pressing him is because she also wants him to release any documents that pertain to Tara Reade from his confidential archive of documents at the University of Delaware (and she notes that Tara Reade herself thinks these documents might reside there).

Biden's response to these questions is terrible, and it only gets worse under pressure. His response is to continually reiterate his talking point, which is that if there were a complaint, it would be in the Senate and not at the University of Delaware, so that asking the University to release such a document is pointless. And Mika is right to continually pressure Biden about the inadequacy of his response – after all, if there aren't any documents about Tara Reade at the University of Delaware, why not have this confirmed by asking them to release any? It seems a simple matter, and one that Biden maintains would be exculpatory. But Biden's evasiveness - his refusal to ask the University a question he maintains would be exculpatory - does not make him look good. Maybe there's nothing there, maybe there is, but taking the position that you're not even going to ask because you're sure there is nothing is a terrible answer. Joe is basically saying we should take his word for it.

Even if his word is true, this is not the answer that a national politician should ever offer, especially when allegations of sexual assault have been raised. Essentially, he's saying that this is a "he said, she said," and that we should take his word that what "he" said is true. However, this isn’t actually a “he said, she said,” or it’s not one in the way that Biden makes it seem. A “he said, she said” would exist in the absence of corroborating evidence, where we have no evidentiary basis on which to verify the story of the victim or the accused. More simply, a “he said, she said” exists when we have no evidence on which to determine if the alleged victim of sexual assault is telling the truth or if the accused is.

However, Biden’s refusal to ask the University of Delaware to search for any documents related to Tara Reade is not a “he said, she said” that pertains to the allegation of sexual assault, it’s a “he said, she said” that pertains to the existence of supporting evidence. In other words, not only is there a “he said, she said” that pertains to the actual allegations of sexual assault, but by refusing to ask the University of Delaware to search for the existence of relevant documents, he is turning the existence of evidence into a “he said, she said” too. Tare Reade says the evidence might be there (as does Mika), he insists it isn’t, and what should be a simple matter of verifying if there is evidence is instead transformed into a question of who you believe.

I could go on at length about how Biden is employing the standard defense used by perpetrators of sexual assault—it’s my word against hers. And in such a case, Biden clearly thinks that we should believe “him.” And not only is he using this defense against the charges from the original allegations, but he’s also using it to deny the existence of documents at the University of Delaware. This doesn’t mean that he’s guilty of the assault, nor does it mean that any documents exist at the University of Delaware (I actually suspect that Biden is telling the truth that no such documents exist there). But his evasiveness, his insistence that we take his word for it, is I think evidence of a certain kind of male privilege that is extremely common and totally unacceptable. And Mika does a great job exposing it: Joe thinks we should believe him because he’s a man, and he’s surprised and frustrated that Mika isn’t buying it.

As for the second set of questions, Joe’s evasiveness is a little less obvious, and Mika might have done a slightly better job providing context. These set of questions pertain to Biden’s claim, during the Kavanaugh hearings, that we should “believe women.” As Mika reminds him, during those hearing Biden could be heard forcefully asserting that we should “believe women,” in this case, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford (and the way we’ve erased Deborah Ramirez from this story is something I’ll save for another time). And as Mika asks, does this not mean that we should believe Tara Reade too?

Here, Biden’s response seems a bit better, at least in the sense that he doesn’t “appear” as evasive as he did with the other set of questions. Biden’s response is to clarify what he meant when he said we should “believe women.” For Biden, it should mean that we take their allegations seriously and that we investigate them. And, at first glance, this seems a somewhat reasonable position to take. After all, we follow a legal system founded on the principle of “innocent until proven” guilty. Therefore, Biden is suggesting that the proper way to deal with sexual assault is not to believe that every allegation of sexual assault is true, but to believe them “enough” that they lead to serious investigations that can then corroborate them. And when they’re corroborated, then we can “fully” believe the allegations. After all, when it comes to other crimes, we would never convict someone based solely on the testimony of the victim. However, there are a few problems with this claim.

The first problem pertains to the reality of sexual assault. Depending on where you get your statistics, roughly 2% to 6% of sexual assault allegations are ever proven to be false. This doesn’t mean that all the rest are true, as it is sometimes impossible to determine one way or other, but this is still a staggeringly low figure. So, the real reason we should “believe women” is that because in cases of sexual assault women are almost always telling the truth. In fact, you’d probably be hard pressed to find any other aspect of life where a group of people tell the truth with this degree of honesty.

To this, we should also add the staggeringly low rate at which we prosecute such cases.  As one example, the Washington Post recently reported that only 0.7% of rape accusations ever lead to felony prosecution. This number should embarrass us all, and it should embarrass us even more so when it is coupled to the rate at which such allegations are true. That is, taken together, allegations of sexual assault are almost always true and yet they almost never lead to conviction.

In this context, I think we get at the truth of what it means to “believe women.” It means that we should recognize that they are almost always telling the truth but that the legal system almost always fails them. So, we need to believe women not so that the legal system can properly act on their allegations, because without significant changes to the legal system, the political system, and American culture, this is not going to happen anytime soon. Instead, we need to believe women because absent a legal system that properly acknowledges these crimes, it is important that the rest of us do. We need to believe women because, unfortunately, the legal system does not. And hopefully this would constitute a start to those other broad changes in American legal and political culture.

Back when Biden originally championed the claim that we should “believe women,” it was in the context of a similar situation. That is, we weren’t discussing whether or not Kavanaugh should go to jail, we were discussing whether or not Kavanaugh should be appointed to the highest court in the land. The legal failure was already behind us, when it failed to prosecute Kavanaugh in the first place. And while some might say that the legal system couldn’t have worked before because Dr. Ford didn’t come forward when it happened, I think we’ve already found the response above. In the context of a society that doesn’t believe women, and where 0.7% of rapes lead to conviction, the failure of our legal system is precisely why so few women do come forward. And none of this is to mention the consequences that exist for coming forward in a society that doesn’t believe women, and which Dr. Ford had to experience in the very public attacks through which she lived. And none of this is to mention that Tara Reade claims that she did, in fact, come forward—with the documents proving this potentially sealed at the University of Delaware.

Returning to Biden, he has a terrible track record when it comes to women’s issues, with the most notable example being his treatment of Anita Hill. In that case, not only did he not believe women, he attacked a women who bravely came forward. So, when Mika hammered Biden about believing women, she was partially doing so against this backdrop. It’s a backdrop in which Biden has so often been on the wrong side of the issue, a backdrop in which he seemed to indicate a change for the better, and a backdrop in which he know seems to be reversing his earlier progressive change. As Mika noted, believing women wasn’t supposed to mean that we believe them “enough” to warrant an investigation, but that we believe them regardless of what that investigation reveals, because such investigation so often fail women. But that’s not Biden’s position anymore. As he maintains, we should believe Tara Reade enough to look into the matter, but when we supposedly find no corroborating evidence, we should then believe him.

And herein lies the way that a “he said, she said” always benefits “him.” There is absolutely no reason why we should believe him over her if no evidence exists. After all, we have two people offering conflicting testimony about the same event, so it seems that even mathematical probability would indicate that there’s a 50/50 chance that she’s telling the truth. But because we’re so accustomed to making these judgments based on the legal principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” if we adopt this standard for our private judgments, the only way that she can “win” is by providing the evidence that supports her claim. But he doesn’t need to support his claim at all. Instead, he just need to hope that no corroborating evidence emerges to support her claim, in which case we de facto believe him.

Perhaps, innocent until proven guilty is a good standard of judgment for determining who should go to jail. Obviously, sending innocent people to jail is a tragedy, so we should want to avoid that at all costs. But we’re not talking about a legal trial in which the consequences for Biden (or Kavanaugh) are jail time. In both cases, we’re talking about what is essentially a job interview. And there’s absolutely no reason why our private judgment should cohere to the legal standard of a court room. In fact, there is no other situation where we apply this standard, so why here? That is, we make judgments all the time, about all sorts of issues, and in those other situations we never refuse to believe something until it’s been proven “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Instead, using this legal standard is all too often a way of dismissing allegations such as these. Clearly, if sexual assault is prevalent but prosecution for assault is negligible, the legal standard for judgment is leading us astray. That is, we know that most sexual assault allegations are true, and we know that they rarely lead to conviction, so we clearly have a legal system that frequently (in fact, most of the time) comes to the exact wrong conclusion when it comes to sexual assault. Part of the rationale for that might be that we want to be “certain” about an allegation before we send someone to jail, but given that this standard of judgment will so often lead us to declare that someone who is guilty is judged “not guilty,” it seems foolish to adopt this standard of judgment outside of the courtroom.

Which brings me back to “he said, she said.” In such a case, as I mentioned, even the dispassionate discipline of mathematical probably would indicate that this doesn’t mean that he is right, but that there is an equal probability that she is right too. So, applied to Biden, absent any evidence, it’s unclear why we should believe him. But beyond that, we have abundant statistical evidence that in cases such as these women are telling the truth. So, mathematical probably would actually indicate that we should “believe women,” as Biden ever briefly declared. If we want to be right in such cases, believing women will lead us to be right in the vast majority of cases, while refusing to believe women will lead us to be wrong by the same measure.

And this is why Mika hammered Biden on this point. “Believing women” isn’t supposed to mean that we believe them enough that we investigate their allegations, it means that we believe them in spite of what such an investigation (or absence of one) might reveal. The FBI investigated Dr. Ford’s allegation (albeit within the confines of strict limits set by the White House), and their investigation didn’t lead to any charges. But it’s hard for me to imagine Biden saying that we should disbelieve Dr. Ford because of the lack of corroboration. Instead, I suspect he continues to maintain that we should believe her. But now, when he’s in Kavanaugh’s position, “believing women” doesn’t seem so good, so he’s trying to backtrack, but in a way that doesn’t seem like a backtrack. As Biden tries to assert, believing women never meant believing them absent evidence, it meant believing them enough to warrant an investigation.

But even here, Biden is being dishonest, because he’s trying to imply that an investigation has already taken place, that no corroborating evidence has been found, so that the case of Tara Reade is truly a “he said, she said.” So, not only is the unspoken subtext for this discussion the claim that without corroborating evidence Biden believes that we should “believe men.” But Biden is also implying that an investigation has taken place when this isn’t actually true. In fact, as Mika hammered him about the University of Delaware, Biden is actively trying to impede an investigation by refusing to release any possible documents that might exist there.

So, Biden’s position amounts to this: when it comes to the University of Delaware, we should believe him (not her) about the existence or non-existence of evidence, and also, when it comes to the allegations themselves, allegations which he implies have been investigated but in which he’s actively impeding an investigation, he wants us to believe him too. And the sad reality is that many people will believe him.

The reason that it is important to “believe women” is because we so often do not—as individuals and as a society. And while Biden continues to insist that it is important to “believe women,” in both his words and his deeds he’s demonstrating that the truth is the exact opposite. When it comes to sexual assault, our de facto position is to believe men. And Biden is counting on it.