The New York Times, much to its credit, broke the story of Asia Argento’s payoff of Jimmy Bennett. They name the “victim,” something they don’t do except when they do. They speak of his financial woes, suggesting he was in it more for the money than the mental anguish and suffering of a person sexually abused. Blaming the victim isn’t usually part of the narrative either. But still, they told the story, which meant that an icon of #MeToo was knocked off her pedestal.

The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight.

But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.

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When I started SJ, it was on a whim, with neither much of an idea why, where it would go nor whether it would be something that I would stick with for any length of time. That was in February, 2007, when the internet was still young, blogs were still a relatively new thing and no one quite knew what would become of them.

Much has happened since then. My original host and blogging program decided to “end of life” itself, meaning that I had to find a new host and program, and somehow manage to get the content out of there and onto here, even though the programs were very different and my original program had no mechanism to move content from one platform to another. It never occurred to GoDaddy back then that it would be needed. Continue reading →

The Chronicle of Higher Education has always had a decidedly progressive tilt, which is hardly surprising. After all, it’s about higher ed, and what could be more higher ed than social justice? But in the case of Avital Ronell and her sexual abuse of her student, it was harder to figure out on which side of your social justice toast to put the butter.*

On the one hand, you had a victim of sexual harassment, even if NYU managed by bury the more serious claim of sexual assault pretending that it wasn’t sufficiently proven even though the evidence was overwhelming compared to the evidence in cases involving lesser scholars. The victim was gay, so that was an extra point, but then, the abuser claimed to be a lesbian (not that it should matter, but Ronell raises it at every turn), even if Salon recounted when she wasn’t so lesbian and had an affair at 27 with the 16-year-old son of her mentor, Jacques Derrida.

On the other hand, you had a philosophy “superstar,” renowned throughout a certain segment of academia for whom coherence and logic were foreign concepts.** Backing Ronell means they get the appreciation of a wealth of “renowned” scholars. Reitman brings nothing other than the ugliness of what Ronell did. There are no friends to be made, no debts to be paid, by treating a star like Ronell poorly. Continue reading →

This has nothing to do with Sarah Jeong. Don’t tell me what you think of her, or her twits. Don’t bother to mention her name. It’s not about her. It’s about the issue that bubbled to the top during the discussion about her. It’s about the issue. Not her. The issue. Focus instead on what Cathy Young had to say about it.

The recent blowup over New York Times editorial board hire Sarah Jeong and her racially charged Twitter trail turned into a brawl over a key question in today’s cultural polemics: Whether derogatory speech about whites should be considered racist and, more generally, whether there is such a thing as anti-white racism.

Most of Jeong’s defenders on the left not only argued that she shouldn’t lose her job but insisted that there was nothing particularly wrong with her white-bashing tweets, whether they were meant to mock racist trolls or criticize “white privilege.” “To equate ‘being mean to white people’ with the actual systemic oppression and marginalization of minority groups is a false equivalency,” wrote Vox reporter Aja Romano in a supposedly objective “explainer.”

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It was only a brief stay, and the time of it couldn’t have been better. You see, I go to sleep at exactly the right time for me, but probably somewhat earlier than a lot of other people. I also tend to shut down the computer after dinner and not turn it back on until the following morning, when I awake at around 5 a.m.

That means that there is a period of time during which others are busy defending their feelings idiocy honor on twitter while I’m dreaming of world peace and other happy things. When I finally checked my email, I learned that I had been in twitter jail.

What twits did the twitter gods demand I delete? Continue reading →

The New York University “response” from spokesman John Beckman was issued last Tuesday, which is fascinating since he had nothing to respond to until early evening yesterday when the complaint was filed in New York Supreme Court.* Not that NYU needs to actually see something, know what it says, before issuing a statement about why it’s wrong.

In a written statement on Tuesday, John Beckman, an NYU spokesman, defended the university’s handling of the matter.

“We have tried to work with Mr. Reitman to help him put this unfortunate chapter behind him, and we are sympathetic to what he has been through. However, given the promptness, seriousness, and thoroughness with which we responded to his charges, we do not believe that his filing a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the university would be warranted or just.”

Despite this deeply moving expression of advance empathy, Reitman sued NYU, although the ad damnum is left to the court and includes no “multi-million dollars” demand. Good try, though, NYU, even if it might have been wiser to wait until you knew what you were talking about before issuing a statement next time. Consciousness of guilt is a terrible thing. Continue reading →

When Attorney General Dick Thornburgh issued his notorious memo in 1989, he put into writing what everyone took for granted. Federal prosecutors weren’t like mere lawyers, subject to the constraints of state ethical rules for lawyers. Not that it changed much about the way prosecutors went about their job, but it proclaimed they were untouchable. It wasn’t that AUSAs didn’t engage in misconduct, but that their misconduct wasn’t subject to the ethical rules that constrained the rest of us.

Thornburgh’s successor, Janet Reno, reversed course, issuing rules that federal prosecutors were subject to the same ethical rules as every other lawyer. This ended up being codified in 28 U.S.C. § 530(b). Not that it had much actual impact, as AUSAs remained unmolested, but at least it created the appearance of applicability.

The Volunteer State, Tennessee, has figured out that this gap provides a means to exert some control over prosecutors, and has joined other states in trying to exploit it. The DoJ is not pleased. Continue reading →

It’s a sad commentary on the state of policing that a video of cops beating an unarmed guy, then mocking him as he lay in a pool of his own blood, isn’t huge news in itself. It’s not as if they gunned him down, murdered him, like a dog in the street. And even that might not be enough to catch people’s attention anymore. It’s been done, and we’re so inured to police violence, to the constant din of misconduct and excessive force, that it’s hard for even a graphic video to have legs these days.

Sad.

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As a law student, the predominant theory of constitutional interpretation was the “living Constitution.” That’s what we were taught. That’s what we believed to be right. It made sense, as the document ratified in 1789 couldn’t possibly account for all that would follow, and the only way it could survive was to evolve to address the needs of a nation over time. Frankly, I never thought all that hard about it at the time. All the prawfs said so, and so it was.

As the word “originalism” began to emerge as an alternative to interpretation, I was forced to give it some thought. I didn’t want to, as thinking was hard and could lead to unpleasant things, like headaches. Who needed that? But then, emanations and penumbras never really made a lot of sense, even when the outcome was something with which I agreed. As a principled approach, it was essentially, “we want to get there and, well, we got nothing, so emanations and penumbras, baby.” Sure, I would take it when it worked in my favor, but that nagging idea that it would eventually turn on me, bite me in the butt, was disturbing. Continue reading →

That prosecutorial misconduct is a problem isn’t exactly news, even as prosecutors vehemently deny that it’s widespread, that there are already ways to deal with it and that it will hamper their effectiveness by making prosecutors fearful of doing their job without fear of repercussions.

Of course they hate being denigrated. Who doesn’t? But that doesn’t change the facts.

The problem is obvious: Prosecutors don’t like to admit it, but even though most are honest and law-abiding, misconduct in prosecutorial ranks remains all too common. A review of 250 exonerations in New York since 1989 found that one-third involved prosecutorial misconduct, like tampering with key evidence, withholding evidence from the defendant or coercing a witness to give false testimony.

Then again, the fact that a problem exists does not lead inexorably to the conclusion that any solution will fix the problem. The syllogism is well worn. Continue reading →