Responding to an Accusation

I'd put the responses I've seen to the accusation that Judge Kavanaugh attempted to rape someone in high school into one of three categories:

1. It was more than 30 years ago; who cares?

2. There's no way to be certain whether this is even true or not; therefore we should ignore it.

3. What a convenient time for these allegations! This is obviously fake.

I don't find any of them convincing. It's interesting, in fact, how neatly this captures many of the problems the #MeToo movement has been trying to highlight.

The first is probably the one I have the most sympathy with, since I can readily see how someone would change over the decades into someone who would never do such things again, if not actually help and support victims. The problem, though, is that I don't give all that much credit to someone that changes that way because they're lucky. If the person in question can talk about how they've changed and what caused it, then I'd be much more inclined to extend forgiveness... but even then I don't believe it's required for anyone else to do the same.

Basically, redemption is not something one can claim simply because it's been long enough since they last did something wrong.

The second is an extremely common error as far as dealing with these allegations are concerned: the idea that something that is not legally actionable cannot be dealt with at all. There are limits to what can be done outside of our legal system, and that's as it should be; we've set things up so that (in theory, at least) the most severe punishments we hand out only get used when a high standard is met. However, that doesn't mean I'm going to look at a case where we're only barely more than 50% certain the accusation is true in the same way as a case where we're 90% certain it's true.

Basically, we should be willing to take some actions to support and defend victims and interfere with accused people, depending on how credible the accusations are.

Then the third is just flat-out ridiculous. The fact that many people who absolutely insist on not destroying other people's reputations without very good evidence are willing to throw around accusations of malicious false reports without any better evidence than a possible motive is amusing and kind of depressing. Believing that we can't prove the accusations true is one thing, but that doesn't necessarily imply that making them in the first place was a crime.