Media Trials and Corporate#MeToo: Who speaks for the accused?
The half-truths, repeated, authenticated themselves.
Joan Didion, from The Women’s Movement 1972.
An article in The Hindu by Vaishna Roy titled Negotiating the Faultlines undertakes something like a self-critique of #MeTooIndia. Roy admits that “not all women had been entirely honest when jumping on the #MeToo bandwagon;” that “at least one had played a leading role in the “amplifying” of complaints; amplifiers being those “who call for accusations, collect, and broadcast them.” By admitting to opportunist allegations, lies, and false accusations within #MeToo, Roy introduced a conversation within, if not, about #MeToo.
The dishonesty in many, many of the MeToo stories is not new; nor is it news. One-sided narratives, that screen out context and shared vulnerabilities and dilemmas and affection, have been heard over and over again in #MeToo narratives. Most shocking is the role played by gossip. Gossip, mingled with slander, a mode of throwing maximum blame in the most exaggerated mode in the hope that something will stick, allowed accusers to come up with a rhetorically-savvy and political form of blame — that of “calling out the abuser.” And, social media became the new broker of prosecution, with unaccountably vast powers. This form of blaming made room for individual opportunist allegations as well as planned-smear-campaigns by young women in urban MNCs, as a career gimmick.
Who speaks for the falsely accused? Wearesaath.in, a social advocacy group, whose motto is solidarity and legal-education and guidance, introduced the much-needed conversation about #MeToo by organizing a Memorial Lecture for Mr. Swaroop Raj, and by inviting Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court, Geeta Luthra to provide a legal perspective on defamation as injury to reputation. What are the options available for the average #MeTooed man?
In a recent lecture held on Dec 18th, 2020 titled “Malicious Prosecution: Victims and Safeguards-Searching for a Balance in the Light of #MeToo,” Advocate Luthra said that media trials are a problem because they are irresponsible in relation to upholding the basic elements of a person’s social and legal status and dignity. She explained that defamation is defined as that which injures reputation, and that while defamation claim is an incomplete remedy to injury of reputation and loss of life, in India, criminal defamation claim is still upheld. Quoting Justice Deepak Mishra, Advocate Luthra said that criminal defamation is an available civil and criminal remedy for injury to reputation. “Damage to reputation,” she explained, “was a defamation claim,” and a consistent thread in all cases for reputational injury in the past few years was that the courts acknowledged that “for a person, his/her reputation may be as important as life itself.” “No one, she said, “should have to lose their life, livelihood, and their family to false accusations that sully their reputation.” Advocate Luthra also emphasized that reputational injury is not a recoverable item of damage, so an inimical person’s false accusation can be seen as “destroying one’s reputation beyond repair,” and the “the mandate of law is that no one can be condemned unheard.”
The tragic suicide of Mr. Swaroop Raj from the injury to his reputation and the plight of his grieving family is only one story of the monumental damage caused by media trials of #MeToo. Mr. Swaroop Raj, an Executive at Genpact, who worked for the company for 11 years, found himself suddenly dismissed from work one afternoon in 2018. Two of his female colleagues had charged him with sexual harassment, and he was terminated from employment with no option to defend himself, or explain, or even process what had happened. Completely , stunned, shamed, worried for his wife and family, he must have felt that suicide was the only option. Swaroop Raj’s father, while grieving his son’s loss, is also fighting a courageous battle for accountability, an accountability that only the truth-honoring institutions of law can make possible.
#MeToo denies the most basic tenet of the rule of law: the right of the accused to get a fair hearing. For corporations in urban India, #MeToo has been a real boon, giving them an easy, no-cost Woke Politics sheen, a zero-cost way of showing “we are doing better” and “creating a safe work-place” by the simple expedient of getting rid of the accused with no due-process. Hence, the rush to prosecute under the media-mandated time-space of #MeToo! Instead of verification, the media validated MeToo accusers, praising women, on the one hand for their courage in coming forward with their stories, and on the other hand, representing them as helpless “victims.” The “accused” are de-platformed, cancelled, defamed. The ease with which the cancellation can be achieved must give us pause. When we defend free-speech on the one hand, and look at our phones for who to cancel next, this is more than a travesty. It has now become an easy habit. Difficult and demanding employers-editors and poets, bosses have had their livelihoods and reputations, their lives destroyed. There is something voyeuristic to this social-media shaming, a rejection of responsibility.
Further along, #MeToo social media trials also allowed corporations to create new work-place rules and codes of conduct that discourage solidarity, collaboration, and friendship between men and women. This way, everyone can be separated, made nervous that he or she could possibly be the next-in-line to be complained against, and hence more effectively controlled by Managers and Supervisors. Most importantly, it allowed companies to terminate their cadre of well-paid, question-asking, no-saying, individualistic, talented professionals with no hazard of lawsuits.
Social media has been the Grand Jury in relation to #MeToo with the power to turn an assertion into truth, and an accusation into an indictment. This is exactly what Pooja Bedi emphasizes when she speaks of the intentional misuse of #MeToo for revenge within #MeTooIndia. One of the stories she tells is of an actress being told by her agent that she might consider MeTooing someone to gain media attention and boost her flagging career. Within MeTooIndia, we also heard oxymoronic phrases like the “heinous crimes of sexual misconduct” while sexual assault and sexual crimes were waved away in an off-hand way, signalling the irresponsibility of these defamatory statements.
Further, #MeToo accusations lumped different levels and scales of sexual harassment in one big net: rape, criminal sexual assault, sexual violence, sexual misconduct, groping, kissing, misdirected provocations, inappropriate comments, unsober behavior at a party, wounded feelings, and regret over bad sex. There was no discernible principle on which sexual harassment charges were distinguished from one another. It was not clear how #MeToo distinguishing or defining sexual harassment vs sexual assault vs sexual misconduct. This may have something to do with the grounding assumption of #MeToo that the fixed reality of sexual violence supercedes the substance of the accusation so that all allegations are jointly true, hence #BelieveWoman is the rallying cry of #MeToo.
When we look at the history of #MeToo, it was quickly mobilized in the wake of the Hollywood Moghul Harvey Weinstein scandal, the most-open secret in Hollywood for decades, with the articulated goal of creating a space where women could “call out” their harassers publicly and expose them to public shaming. The idea was to bring “the conversation about sexual harassment to the front and center.”
The Olympic event, as it were, for #MeToo was the display at the Golden Globe Awards from December 2018:
He said. She said . . . . He said. She said. . . . She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said.
The truth has power.The truth will not be threatened. The truth has a voice.
— The New York Times.
The message here is that your story of harassment is mixed together with the million other hashtags so that every victim’s story is equally important and audible as that of the celebrities who have authorized the movement. It is a general amnesty for accusation with no burden of proof. No need to worry anymore about “he said, she said” of the judicial process, it’s contested or complex truth. The linguistic activism of #MeToo has had no grounding other than inclusion and repetition. Every #MeToo accusation multiplied tens of million times is jointly “true.” Time has no bearing in the sense there is no date limiting when an accusation can be registered.
The post # MeToo conversation has to begin by rejecting slogans and hashtags in favor of evidence and context.No more extrajudicial media-led shaming. Pooja Bedi’s MenToo movement and Legal voices like that of Advocate Geetha Luthra show that recovery of damage to reputations can become the concern of the courthouse.
As early as in 2018, Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen predicted in that #MeToo, will eventually have to reckon with the issue of “due process”: “I don’t think we can accomplish those social justice goals, including justice for women and equality for women, through a path that undermines due process, fair hearing, fair consideration of evidence, and fair decision-making.”
The corporations have taken to #MeToo with gusto because it is productive for the workplace, and this is what can we expect to find in the PostMeToo workplace. As Libby Emmons puts it: “The #MeToo movement throws up daily illustrations of the consequences of trust abused. In response, the call goes out for tighter regulation of relationships between men and women in the workplace, and on the street. There is no longer an assumption that men and women, as equals, can freely and spontaneously negotiate relationships on their own terms. People are told that they need to defer to these rules, frameworks, and codes of conduct for their own safety. Those who refuse are re-educated in consent workshops.”
In the long run, public shaming via media cannot work. Shame and shaming only destroy human relationships and the very possibility of civil society.
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