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Tag: Immigration

On incivility: “I work for a lying, bigoted aspiring dictator” isn’t a protected class

Recently, White House mouthpiece Sarah Sanders was asked to leave the Red Hen Restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, after committing the unforgivable offense of being White House mouthpiece Sarah Sanders. (Did I make that sound sarcastic? Because I meant it sincerely. What Sanders does is unforgivably offensive.) Since Sanders’s Twitter whine (from her official White House Twitter account), of course, much of the conversation has been focused on the topic of manners and civility. And yes, we still have the responsibility to be civil, we have to rise above it all, and yes, that’s true, but seriously, a person can only go high for so long and honestly just fuck it.

The Trump administration is willfully terrorizing children

The Trump administration is knowingly and intentionally terrorizing defenseless children.

Under their new “zero-tolerance” policy, every undocumented immigrant crossing the border is referred for prosecution, and their children are taken away from them, with no guarantee that they’ll ever see them again. Officials from DHS, the Justice Department, and the White House shift the blame to the courts, the Democrats, the parents, whomever they can, but it’s them, the administration, that’s doing it, and they’re doing it on purpose.

Posted in Law

Thoughts on nail salons

Thinking about the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike got me thinking about immigrant women workers today. You may have read these NYT articles about the exploitation and abuse of undocumented immigrant women working in nail salons in New York City. What these exposes have to say is appalling, but not unexpected, to my mind–how did we think all those salons were surviving charging twenty-five bucks for a manicure and pedicure? Pixie dust? Of course they’re getting by through the time-honored method of screwing over women with few options.

I have not seen anything written by the women who work in these salons themselves. Well, that’s not too surprising. As the articles note, most of them are in the country illegally–they don’t want to draw attention to themselves, lose their jobs, and have INS Homeland Security called on them. So I don’t know how the workers themselves would like the rest of us to approach this situation.

I do know that this is a women’s issue, and therefore a feminist issue. The workers are women. The people who go to these salons? Mostly women. And not particularly rich women. So what is a feminist approach to the situation?

I’ve seen many people, sometimes men with an air of superiority to those frivolous women who insist on pretty nails say, well, don’t get manicures or pedicures then, do your own nails. Leaving aside the feasibility of this for any given woman (when I was in my final trimester, after a month of not being able to cut my own toenails, I asked my mother to do it for me because I couldn’t stand it any longer), this is an example what I think of as “purity politics.” It doesn’t actually effect change. It just keeps your own hands clean. If that’s what you want, that’s fine–you are not tainted by being part of the immediate exploitation of immigrant women workers in nail salons. But it’s not sustainable in the long run (try eating food in the US without being part of a chain of exploitation and abuse), which is why purity politics always turns into one-upmanship, and more importantly, it doesn’t actually help the people being exploited. Your personal decision not to get your nails done changes nothing, and even an organized boycott would probably only kill business to the point that these women would lose their jobs. Well, that doesn’t help them. They’d still be an inherently exploitable population due to their undocumented status, and they’d just end up being exploited in another industry.

I return to the Shirtwaist Strike. What about unionization? It’s not as though nail salons are inherently more exploitative environments than, say, coal mines.

And here we see how anti-immigrant, xenophobic policies work hand-in-hand with capitalist exploitation, by creating an underclass of people who have no legal recourse to exploitation. And the established unions have gotten very comfortable working within a legal framework, to the point that if an established union helps these workers organize, they will end up jobless and/or deported again, because established unions require legally registered workers.

So I started thinking about legality. The employers have dived into illegality, of course, by employing undocumented immigrants. Why must the solution be a legal one? What if the workers organized themselves with or without the covert help of the established unions and struck for contracts? How could such a contract be enforced extra-legally? Well…gangs and organized crime seem to do it. Employers who broke a contract could find their windows smashed, for instance. Employers who called Homeland Security on striking employees could find their places of business destroyed (I don’t mean fire, I mean more smashing). Of course, this brings us back to the association between organized labor and organized crime, and I realize there’s a reason for that association. When you are fighting capitalist exploitation backed by the force of the state, as you are in this situation, you need lawyers, guns, and money at the ready. You need to be backed up by force yourself. And who has lawyers, guns, and money to bring to the table? Organized crime does.

Anyway, this is all so much a flight of fancy. I’m not there. I’m not doing the work. I don’t know how the culture and experiences and background of the workers affects what they do or the solutions available to them. I just know that unless, say, amnesty and residency is offered to nail salon workers involved in organizing a union, which is unlikely, those workers are caught in a terrible bind and I don’t see a good way out. At this point, all I can really suggest is that if you are someone who goes to nail salons regularly, tip really really well, tip in cash, tip directly to the person doing your nails.

Feministe Book Review 2: The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker

If you are a leftist, a feminist, or an enthusiastic lover of NYC history, the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike is or should be an event of major importance on your historical radar. If, like me, you’re all three, it’s practically one of the most important events of the twentieth century.

In 1909, the mostly immigrant, mostly Jewish and partly Italian, almost entirely female workers in the shirtwaist manufacturing industry went on strike. They were a group that had to fight and advocate for themselves. Established Americans didn’t much care how these immigrant workers were treated, and the labor unions weren’t interested in organizing women–girls, they thought, didn’t have the grit it took to go out on strike and hang tough in the face of deprivation. The exploitation and sexual harassment in the industry was appalling, and after a workers’ meeting at Cooper Union on November 22, 1909, 15,000 women walked off their jobs. Within hours the number had grown to 25,000 (depending on whose numbers you read, the strike has also been known as the “Uprising of the 20,000”). It also spread outside of NYC, as women walked off the job in Chicago, Cleveland, and Rochester. The strike did not end until February 15, 1910. In the meantime, dozens of employers settled, and their employees were able to return to work victorious (the Triangle company held out and never settled; their name was destined to be written in NYC and labor history in letters of fire and blackened bone). The workers put out and sold a special edition of the New York Call, a local newspaper, to spread the word about their situation and demands. They picketed ceaselessly, despite the fact that they were regularly brutalized by cops and antagonized and set on by gangsters and sex workers paid by the shirtwaist bosses. They were sent to the workhouse and came back and picketed again. Amazingly, wealthy women became interested in their cause and came downtown to walk the picket-line alongside of the shirtwaist workers, where they were also attacked and arrested. Of course, this alliance did not last, as the workers did not appreciate the condescending attitudes and stingy contributions to the strike fund of the “mink brigade,” as they were called, and the wealthy women were alarmed and horrified by the heavy socialist bent of many if not most of the workers. Still, there was a brief moment when gender solidarity crossed class lines.

Theresa S. Malkiel, who wrote The Diary of a Shirtwaist Striker was one of the socialists. She was a Jewish immigrant who had been one of the workers in this industry before she married out of it (she married a lawyer who also bought and sold real estate). She wrote a pretend diary of a striker who is radicalized by the strike and converts to the socialist cause (at the time it was originally published, I don’t believe that it was known to be fake), and in turn is able to convert her previously unsympathetic boyfriend. If you’re me, which I am, it was practically required reading once I found it.

The edition I read was published by Cornell University Press and has an extensive introduction by Francoise Basch (please forgive me; I don’t know how to do the cedilla under the “c” in Francoise here). It’s a pretty good introduction to the strike, the different streams of history that come together in it, and Malkiel herself. Basch does make some questionable choices, in my view, as when she portrays the strike as largely a failure–dozens of employers settled! Every other source I’ve read portrays it as a success if not a triumph! It demonstrated to the established labor unions that women were indeed tough enough to take on a huge industry and stay true to the cause! What more does Basch want? What strike would she consider successful? But OK, she makes a case. It’s not one I agree with, but it’s a reasonable case. In another place, she goes on and on about why Malkiel made her narrator a “native-born” American rather than a more representative Jewish worker, blathering about how this enables the reader to learn about radicalism along with Mary (the narrator) (Jews were more likely to have already been radicalized prior to immigration), allows her to have her narrator talk about how “noble” the Jewish women were, and tells labor leaders not to give up on the established American workers before finally admitting, in one sentence, that hey, Malkiel just might have been trying to garner sympathy for the strike by circumventing the anti-Semitism of the non-Jewish reader. Y’think?

Nonetheless, Basch establishes the context of the strike and the major players in it, and doesn’t forget to include my favorite piece of the strike lore. When, at the Cooper Union meeting, Clara Lemlich leapt to the stage and called for a strike (depending on the source, she either said “I’m tired of all this talk! Strike, strike, strike!” or “I am tired of listening to speakers….What we are here for is to decide whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike shall be declared–now.” I prefer the first version, but I am given to understand she was speaking in Yiddish, so it might just be a matter of translation.):

The Souvenir History of the Strike tells us that “the chairman then cried, ‘Do you mean faith? Will you take the old Jewish oath?’ and up came two thousand right hands, with the prayer, ‘If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither away from the arm I now raise.'” (31)

Anyway, the “diary” itself is fascinating, in my opinion, as Mary learns about the living conditions of her worse-paid immigrant co-workers, becomes a socialist, is arrested, goes to the workhouse, falls out with her family and her boyfriend, and reunites with her boyfriend as he is inspired to become a better socialist sort of person. It’s particularly touching if you have a soft spot for traditional leftist rhetoric, which I do. Mary comes to the realization that the socialist fervor must cross all lines in the interest of class unity, “man, woman, Jew, Gentile, dark and white alike” (137). She also experiences a feminist awakening, rebelling against her father telling her that unions were a good thing but never meant for the ladies, and noting that she and other women were carried under a mother’s heart, just as men were, and “What’s the difference between men and women when it comes to work? I walk under the same sky and tread the same earth as men do” (68).

This awakening to commonality makes the two instances of flat-out racism all the more jarring when they occur; they don’t come until late in the book, after more than one proclamation of the sort I describe above. The first concerns lynching, when the newly converted Jim is deeply upset at the way Mary and the other workers are being treated and says “In the South they put a noose around a man’s neck for insulting a woman. Here we’ve grown so callous and cold-blooded that we take it as a joke” (164). One could argue that this is mere ignorance on Malkiel’s part of what lynching really was, but why should she have been ignorant? Ida B. Wells had been active and on the lecture circuit in NYC, though it’s true she was first speaking in the years just active Malkiel’s immigration to the US, when Malkiel was working in the factories and unionizing her workplace in her spare time, but Wells’s activism continued for decades. Malkiel seems to be making the white feminist move of gesturing toward inclusion without actually paying attention to what black women are saying (though Malkiel would not have qualified as white at the time, of course, which is no excuse for that sort of behavior, anyway).

The next incident occurs just a few pages later and has even less relevance to the plot or the issues of the strike. Mary is on a train to somewhere-or-other for Reasons, and she goes to use the ladies’ room but gets lost:

…[I] landed in the porters’ quarters instead. It gives me a chill even now when I think of the half a dozen dark grinning faces. In anger I rushed back to my seat. (171)

Why is she angry? Why is she chilled? Because black working men have the temerity to smile in their own rooms? It’s a bizarre interlude: it make no difference to the action or plot, and if anything should have been an opportunity for Mary to expand on her previous realization that dark and white makes no difference in the eyes of socialism (obviously, this is untrue, but this is the ideology of the book). Instead, it’s a gratuitous insult. Why is it there? Well, I think it’s there specifically because of those earlier musings on socialist brotherhood. Don’t worry, it’s saying to its white readers. Mary and her Jewish and Italian sistren, they’re good white girls. They’re disgusted by black people. In other words, I think it’s an unconscious move to make sure no white readers are put off by the putative racial equality the book suggests.

Other choices Malkiel makes are interesting as well: Jim, Mary’s beau, becomes a socialist and devoted to the strike despite utter intransigence for the first half of the book. Basch convincingly argues that this is because Malkiel is ultimately a traditionalist when it comes to relations between men and women and doesn’t want readers to think that becoming a socialist means losing the opportunity to wed. I buy that, but I’m still unsure why she chose to have Jim come around rather than to have Mary meet some other nice young socialist man, maybe while she was canvassing the established unions for donations to the strike fund. It’s as though Malkiel is playing out a form of “the divine feminine urging man ever upward” vis-a-vis socialism. Mary’s pure example and steadfastness changes Jim’s heart. The transformation is quasi-divine–she doesn’t give him anything to read and think about, they don’t have a reasoned debate about it. He just one night randomly sees that it’s wrong for children to have to beg in the street (NYC was full of homeless children at the time).

Mary is dismissive of the mink brigade and listens for a while to suffragist speeches before concluding that the class war is more important than the ballot, and the latter will have to wait. Heartwarming, if you’re into it, which I am.

All in all, I’m very glad I read this book; it’s been on my list for a while. If you’re interested in labor history, women’s history, Jewish history, NYC history, it’s work getting a hold of. If you are interested in reading more about the strike, I recommend Triangle, by David von Drehle, which uses it as context for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire.

On Being A Good Lebanese Girl

Or a good Greek girl. Or a good Indian girl. Or a good Mexican girl. Or a good any-ethnicity-that-has-ever-been-shoved-down-your-throat-ever girl.

I want you to meet Charlie. Charlie and I met each other just a little over a year ago—but I can’t believe it’s only been that short. He was holding an appletini and talking about fashion. I was drinking a Brooklyn Lager and talking about politics.

“I mostly write about the Middle East—it’s a little bit personal because my family is from there”

“Oh my god, me too. Where from?”

“Lebanon”

“Me too!”

That night, we talked about everything. We talked about fashion in Beirut. We talked about drag queen names—he said he would be, “Anya Knees.” We talked about Lebanon. I made him tell me stories about living there. We talked about our music. We talked about our culture. We talked about our families. We talked about our mothers. We talked about our traditions. We talked about that we were both Greek Orthodox. We talked about our recipes and our food—we talked a lot about food.

Our first date, just the two of us was a Middle Eastern restaurant in the East Village called Moustache. We only fell more in love.

Charlie is a self-proclaimed “Good Lebanese Girl.” He was born in Beirut—and came to the United States in 2006, when the country was rocked with instability as the Israeli Defense Force bombed the southern part of the country. His family went to California, where they opened a Lebanese restaurant that he worked at—later, he moved to New York City to study fashion design.

Once a month, Charlie drags me out to “Habibi Night”—a night of music and dancing for gay Arabs—or as he calls them, “gayrabs”—living in New York City. We dance. We celebrate. We get in conversations about our backgrounds with strangers and exchange stories.

On other nights, we’ve stayed in—cooking food and talking about our opinions on religion, traditionalism and how it’s affected our families and everyone else around us. We’ve talked about the differences of being Lebanese-American and being American, and how when we meet another one of our bretheren we feel more at home. Some of these conversations have taken place in his tiny studio apartment, underneath his gigantic Lebanese flag. Other times they have happened at other friends’ apartments, typically while wearing blonde wigs.

Recently, Charlie decided to move back to Lebanon—his parents had moved back there, and Charlie was both looking for a change and responding to a longing that he had felt since he left. I was nervous about him—he isn’t out to his family, and he was moving home to a country where homosexuality is illegal. Last time he was in Lebanon, he was younger and hadn’t come out yet—and despite the fact that it is painted as the progressive country of the Middle East because women can wear mini skirts, there are still many arcane laws and customs.

For our last dinner before his departure, we met at Moustache for old times sake. He looked stylish and fabulous as always—reading the Arabic written on the walls out loud to me. Equal parts gay and Lebanese, embracing and never compromising all elements of his identity. I couldn’t help worrying about him—as the country of our origins once again flirts with instability, all I wanted to do was hold him close.

But the time came to say goodbye. As I walked home, missing him since the moment we parted ways, I thought about our friendship, our heritage and our identities. Neither of us are exactly the ideal good Lebanese girl. I moved far away from my family, am twenty-one years old and don’t have a child with another one on the way and no intention of making this happen for a while. I am outspoken on a variety of topics, curse like a sailor and am most likely inadvertently offensive. I have no embroidery skills. Charlie is gay, a connoisseur of fine drag queens and fashion, is not and will never date a woman. However, when we are together, we talk about our heritage. We talk about our families, we talk about how politics shaped our lives—and brought us together to New York City, only to discuss the layers of history of another place that we identify with. We talk about how our identity has changed how we articulate our passions—fashion and politics. We dance. We celebrate our culture. We imagine meeting again in Lebanon.

We call our families everyday. We discuss and obsess over our heritage. We piece together our stories. We are proud. Our heritage and culture matters to us.

We are the perfect good Lebanese girls.

Immigration Good + Bad

The good news is that Obama announced an initiative that would stop the deportation of immigrants who came here as children and have either completed high school or served in the military. The bad news is that by many measures, children in immigrant families — 9 out of 10 of whom are U.S. citizens — aren’t doing as well as children of U.S.-born parents. Children of immigrant parents are less likely to complete high school, more likely to live in poverty, less likely to have health insurance and significantly less likely to become proficient in English by the 4th grade (and if a child isn’t proficient in English by the 4th grade, it’s unlikely they’ll ever catch up).

Filming Against Odds: Undocumented Youth “Come Out” With Their Dreams

By Anne Galisky, cross-posted at On The Issues Magazine.

“Papers”is the story of undocumented youth and the challenges they face as they turn 18 without legal status. More than two million undocumented children live in the U.S. today, most with no path to obtain citizenship. These are youth who were born outside the U.S. and yet know only the U.S. as home. The film highlights five undocumented youth who are “American” in every sense but their legal paperwork.

Bronze Bikinis for Beneficence

Well, Labor Day weekend is coming up, and if you live in Atlanta and don’t have room to fart in Midtown with the addition of 40,000 tourists dressed like stormtroopers, you know what that means: DragonCon. And if you’ve ever been one of those 40,000 tourists, pressed tit-to-bare-back with a chick in a bronze bikini top and a big, plastic neck chain, you know what that means: Slave Leia Watch 2011.

It’s always a good time. Unfortunately, Slave Leia Watch 2010 ended without an official tally, as the then-new release of Prince of Persia made it difficult to distinguish Slave Leia from Princess Tamina at a quick glance. (Hint: If she’s accompanied by an embarrassed-looking guy in a leather breastplate and Keith Urban’s castoff hairpiece, it’s Tamina.) But seeing as how this year’s sci-fi hottie of choice wears a black leather glow-in-the-dark bodysuit, 2011 should be an easier time.

And for 2011, it’s going to mean something. This year, the traditional count of the traditional (objectifying, not terribly imaginative) go-to sexy cosplay classic will turn into a donation to a deserving charity. I’m having trouble, though, deciding on a charity–I’m really lousy at that part–so I thought I’d put it to the brilliant crowd at Feministe for advice.

Option 1: Planned Parenthood. Obviously a solid call, and certainly they could use the help as the government decides that men’s health care is health care, but women’s health care is something extra that isn’t worthy of federal support.

Option 2: Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres. I really respect the work they do anyway, but staggering situations like the current one in Somalia make the need for donations that much more urgent.

Option 3: Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC is challenging the shameful new “papers, please” immigration law in Alabama. I figure they need all the help they can get.

The pledge: I’ll donate $5US for every woman I see dressed as Slave Leia at this year’s DragonCon, and $10US for every Rebel Leia (or dude Slave Leia), to the charity of your collective choice. Vote for your favorite organization or suggest one of your own in comments, and I’ll provide a final count next Monday night-ish after the dust has settled.

There Are No Perfect Accusers.

The big story in the news today is the release on Dominique Strauss-Kahn as the sexual assault case against him teeters. The New York Times features a breathtakingly victim-blamey article about the accuser’s credibility, detailing the ways in which she is not a perfect human being:

The sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is on the verge of collapse as investigators have uncovered major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her in his Manhattan hotel suite in May, according to two well-placed law enforcement officials.

Although forensic tests found unambiguous evidence of a sexual encounter between Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a French politician, and the woman, prosecutors now do not believe much of what the accuser has told them about the circumstances or about herself.

Since her initial allegation on May 14, the accuser has repeatedly lied, one of the law enforcement officials said.

There’s no indication that she actually lied about being raped; instead, it turns out that she has lied about other things in the course of her adult life (shocking stuff, I know), and her actions immediately following the alleged assault. Here’s what she lied about:

According to the two officials, the woman had a phone conversation with an incarcerated man within a day of her encounter with Mr. Strauss-Kahn in which she discussed the possible benefits of pursuing the charges against him. The conversation was recorded.

That man, the investigators learned, had been arrested on charges of possessing 400 pounds of marijuana. He is among a number of individuals who made multiple cash deposits, totaling around $100,000, into the woman’s bank account over the last two years. The deposits were made in Arizona, Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania.

The investigators also learned that she was paying hundreds of dollars every month in phone charges to five companies. The woman had insisted she had only one phone and said she knew nothing about the deposits except that they were made by a man she described as her fiancé and his friends.

In addition, one of the officials said, she told investigators that her application for asylum included mention of a previous rape, but there was no such account in the application. She also told them that she had been subjected to genital mutilation, but her account to the investigators differed from what was contained in the asylum application.

Also:

The housekeeper admitted to prosecutors that she lied about what happened after the episode on the 28th floor of the hotel. She had initially said that after being attacked, she had waited in a hallway until Mr. Strauss-Kahn left the room; she now admits that after the episode, she cleaned a nearby room, then returned to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s suite to clean there. Only after that did she report to her supervisor that she had been attacked.

Many people are focusing on the fact that her story about the immediate aftermath of the rape has changed. But that’s not uncommon — many rape victims continue to go about their business after being assaulted, and in a state of shock do things that many people don’t believe seem to sufficiently reflect trauma. And rape victims, of course, are also aware that a showing of “not-traumatized-enough” behavior damages their credibility. It’s not totally out there to think that this woman wanted to be believed, and so she omitted the parts of story that she knew would make her less believable. Now that it’s all on the table, though, it looks even worse.

None of this is good, but it also doesn’t mean that she wasn’t assaulted. We’re also talking about a woman who is an immigrant, who is of color, who is poor, who comes from a country where authority figures (including police officers) have slaughtered and tortured citizens and are widely distrusted, and who currently lives in an area with large immigrant and poor populations who are targeted by local police. I’d be pretty surprised if she felt totally comfortable around the NYPD and if she trusted the American justice system. Hell, she has friends and loved ones in jail — she’s not new to this circus, and I doubt she’s under the impression that law enforcement officers are routinely on the side of people like her. While I’m sure the prosecutors told her to be totally honest with them — and that’s what prosecutors do in these kinds of cases, because it’s much better to have all of the bad information out there so you can deal with it on the front end instead of being surprised by it at trial — I can understand why she might not have disclosed that she was involved with drug traffickers (if that’s even the case). It also looks like she might have lied on her application for asylum, at the instruction of an unethical attorney, when she was desperate for legal status. That doesn’t justify lying, but it does provide some necessary context.

All of this leads prosecutors to believe that she’s probably not a credible witness, and that DSK’s attorneys will destroy her on the witness stand. They’re probably right. Rape accusers seem to be treated with different expectations of perfection than people who report other crimes. Granted, this case is particularly high-profile, which means that prosecutors no doubt want it to be open-and-shut, making the accuser’s imperfections all the more troublesome. But I have a hard time believing that a woman with the exact same past would be considered too lacking in credibility had she accused someone of robbing her apartment or mugging her or beating her up. I have a hard time believing that if a man was punched in the face by a stranger on the street that prosecutors would drop the case if it came to light that the victim had cheated on his taxes seven years ago.

Even though these aren’t the typical “she’s a slut” attacks (although I’m counting down the minutes until someone suggests she’s a prostitute who had sex with DSK for money), there’s still an unreasonable level of virtue that we demand from any woman who says she was raped. This woman, like a lot of folks, has lied to save her own ass under dire circumstances. She called someone in jail to discuss the pros and cons of going forward with the rape accusations — something that sounds questionable unless you consider that the incarcerated person may have been her closest confidante, and I would certainly have that exact same conversation with my best friend if I were thinking of getting embroiled in a criminal case. There’s still physical evidence of sex, and physical evidence of assault. But it doesn’t matter, since she owns five cell phones (DSK owns seven) and lied about an unrelated issue and has some shady friends. Nothing that has come out about her indicates that she wasn’t raped. It just indicates that she’s no longer our ideal victim, and that’s enough to prevent the case from going forward.

My issue actually isn’t with the prosecutor’s office (although it is a little bit) so much as the media response. Even progressive media outlets are making egregious logical leaps, suggesting that she’s probably lying because, well, she just probably is. The reason it’s nearly impossible for the prosecution to pursue these charges, even though there’s no evidence that she lied about anything related to the actual events surrounding the alleged crime, is because we live in a culture where rape victims need to be flawless in order to be believed. We live in a culture where it’s damn near impossible for any woman, when her life is held up to the light, to be considered innocent. We live in a culture where we think it’s even reasonable to question a rape victim’s “innocence” in the first place. We live in a culture where accusers of high-profile men undergo even more scrutiny than usual from a media hungry for a story and playing by an old rule book. And we live in a culture where the public destruction of every woman who makes a rape accusation is used as fodder in subsequent rape cases, establishing a cycle where we believe that women must be lying because the women before her were lying, so we feel justified in going out of our way to find any scrap of evidence that might indicate she has ever done anything ever in her life that we might find unsavory even if it has nothing to do with the case at hand, and then we use that to determine that she’s not credible, and then we use has as another example of how women lie about rape. And then powerful men are even more emboldened and feel more justified in treating women like garbage.

Under the kind of scrutiny this woman has endured, I would surely be deemed a bad victim. I wonder how many of you would be “good enough” to be credible in a high-profile case against a powerful man.

This woman’s life is going to be irrevocably changed after this. I’m not clear on what her immigration status is, but given that her asylum application was from 2004, it sounds like it was granted and she’s here with asyluee status. It’s not a stretch to think that this could mean deportation proceedings for her, and that the entire life she’s built here could be gone.

She’s going to pay an awfully large price for this. Women who report assault in the future are going to suffer the consequences of being human beings with spotty histories and personal imperfections and character flaws and terrible past decisions. And we’re going to collectively wonder why men feel like they can assault women without repercussion, and why so few women report being raped.