The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Email About a ‘Witch Hunt’ (Or LESBIAN TEACHER SEX SCANDAL UPDATE)

Posted on | April 2, 2020 | 3 Comments

The following correspondence is lengthy, but self-explanatory:

Thursday, April 2, 8:41 a.m.

Dear Ms. W_____:
When I received your email requesting that I take down a March 2017 post about your court case, saying that your conviction had been overturned, and asserting that my blog post was “hurting my ability to rebuild my life,” my natural instinct was to answer with two words, the first of which begins with “f,” and the second one being “you.” The implied threat of offering to put me in touch with your “Manhattan attorney” did not intimidate me. Having worked as a journalist since 1986, I am sufficiently acquainted with libel law as to be certain that I had no legal vulnerability in this case, as all I did was to summarize articles published by the Binghamton (N.Y.) Press, which are still extant.
Nevertheless, your email caused me to research further and determine that, indeed, your charges were dismissed in February 2019 by a state appeals court which found procedural flaws in the indictment, which the Binghamton Press described as a “technical error” by prosecutors.
Well, this did not affect the accuracy of my March 2017 post, and if I had failed to notice the appeals court’s ruling, this was simply because I habitually work in “file-it-and-forget-it” mode. I had completely forgotten about your case by the time the appeals court ruled, and thus did not revisit your case to update the story. So your email requesting a takedown put me in a bit of a quandary. I am always averse to “unpublishing” anything I’ve posted, because to do so would invite a tsunami of similar demands by anyone who felt harmed by my coverage and commentary. Almost without exception, such demands get my standard “f– you” response, or no response at all. People who make such threats of legal action, in which I am certain they could never possibly prevail (because truth is the ultimate defense against any claim of libel), are usually just blowhards and bullies who can be ignored.
Nevertheless, in consideration of the circumstances, I have decided to take down that March 2017 post, not because I believe I was in any way vulnerable to litigation, but rather because of my sense of justice and mercy. Permit me to explain my reasons at some length.
In court, the Binghamton Press reported, you “adamantly maintained that [you were] innocent and the subject of a ‘witch hunt,'” and that “the accusations were concocted by [your] ex-husband.”
Revenge? Was your ordeal the result of your ex-husband’s vindictive spite? This reminded me very much of certain cases of alleged sexual assault on university campuses, in which accused students asserted that they were victims of falsehoods inspired by the hurt feelings of an ex-girlfriend. Beginning in 2014, a real “witch-hunt” climate was evident in our nation’s universities, and the political motivations of that vindictive spirit was clearly apparent to me: Seeking to build support for the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, activists had whipped up a climate of feminist fury on campus, with The White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault leading the way. One can trace a straight line of causation from the formation of that task force in February 2014 to the University of Virginia rape hoax in November 2014, the chain of causation involving Emily Renda and Catherine Lhamon.
During the three years when this “witch-hunt” hysteria was at its peak, more than 100 lawsuits were filed by university students who claimed to have been falsely accused of sexual assault, but were denied due process in campus tribunals where these accusations were adjudicated.
In regard to those lawsuits, it must be asked, can we ever know whether any particular plaintiff was truly innocent or guilty? I don’t think so. The problem in such cases is that they are almost always “he said, she said” situations, where corroborating evidence is lacking. This makes the lack of due process in campus disciplinary tribunals very problematic, because accused students were being expelled on the basis of accusations unsupported by evidence, in cases that never would have stood a chance in any court of law. The most vile criminal in our prison system at least had the right to cross-examine his accusers during trial and to be represented by an attorney, rights denied to students at some of our nation’s most prestigious universities!
You see, then, why your claim of being the target of a “witch hunt” inspired by a vindictive ex-husband struck a chord with me. It would be wrong of me to, on the one hand, extend sympathy to these accused college students and to deny such sympathy toward you.
“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” (Matthew 7:1-2 KJV). This scripture, I think, is too often misconstrued, even by sincere Christians. Of course, all people must form judgments about human behavior, to admire virtuous behavior and deplore wrongdoing. What Jesus was telling His disciples was that they should be merciful, to avoid the hypocritical legalism of the Pharisees: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27 KJV). The Christian should strive for an attitude of moral humility, being conscious of his own sinfulness, and thus being hesitant to suppose himself in any way superior to others.
If we have faith in God, we must eschew any pursuit of revenge. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19 KJV). Thus, it is a mark of Christian character that, when we suffer unjustly from the wrongdoing of others, we do not contemplate reprisal. We do not brood over the wrongs we have suffered, harboring grievances and seeking to repay our injuries eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth.
Well, “judge not,” eh? Certainly I have fallen short of that mark on occasion and, in condemning the spirit of vengeance, I condemn my own sin when I have succumbed to such temptation, repenting and striving to avoid such sin in the future. At least I am aware of my sinful nature, and being conscious of my own sins gives me pause when, in such a case as yours, I am called on to be merciful toward a fellow sinner.
Another circumstance in your case that reminds me of the campus sexual assault “witch hunt” is the years which elapsed between the alleged crime and the time when charges were brought against you. This was one of the most frustrating aspects of so many cases that led to lawsuits against universities: The accused student hooked-up with his accuser (typically, after a party) and several months later — in some cases, more than two years later — he found himself accused of sexual assault. Bad enough to try to defend yourself in such a “he said, she said” situation, but how could anyone be expected to prove his innocence in the case of a drunken hook-up two years earlier? The obvious question must be asked: If the accuser actually was raped, why didn’t she go to police when it happened? If you were raped your freshman year, why wait until your alleged rapist was just a few months away from graduation to file a complaint?
That scenario of belated accusation played out over and over in cases of false accusation claims that led to lawsuits during the 2014-2016 peak of the campus sexual assault hysteria, and was also evident during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings in 2018. Kavanaugh, whose reputation was previously untainted by any accusation of sexual impropriety, found himself accused of having participated in gang rape more than 30 years earlier, when he was a high school senior. How can anyone so accused be expected to defend himself? This is why we have statutes of limitation, because it is so difficult to determine the facts when years elapse between the alleged wrongdoing and a criminal proceeding. At least, if someone said they were raped in a certain location last Wednesday night, the accused might be able to provide an alibi, proving that he was not there at the time. But when someone claims in 2018 that they were raped at a party in the summer of 1982, well, how could Judge Kavanaugh alibi himself? Fortunately, he had kept a calendar of his activities that summer, and this made it possible to narrow down the possibilities in such a way as to cast doubt on Kavanaugh’s accuser’s story, but this was a harrowing lesson in why we don’t customarily give credit to accusations of wrongdoing that emerge so long after the alleged events.
This has relevance to your case. According to the Binghamton Press, your accuser claimed to have been molested at age 6, and was 18 when the trial reached its conclusion in 2017. While I would not presume to know the truth of the matter, one way or another, I am reminded of the McMartin Preschool case and other such cases where theories of “repressed memory” were part of a witch-hunt hysteria, with suggestive questioning: “Show me on the doll where he touched you.” To this day, there are some people who believe that child molestation may have occurred in some of those cases, and I can’t rule out the possibility, but during the height of the witch-hunt hysteria, certainly the criminal justice system was hijacked in ways that violated the rights of the accused.
A couple of years ago, I read Spectral Evidence, an account of the ordeal suffered by Gary Ramona, a successful California businessman who found himself caught up in the “repressed memory” trap. His teenage daughter developed an eating disorder, and her therapist (following a theory that was then much in vogue) evidently decided that this emotional problem was proof that the girl had been a victim of incest. This ultimately led to a landmark trial in which Gary Ramona was exonerated, but this did not undo the damage done by the discredited accusation. He lost his family, lost his business and spent a fortune on attorneys all because a professional “expert” believed she was “helping” his teenage daughter with an eating disorder! If every teenager who thinks her thighs are too fat were deemed a victim of child abuse — for such was the theory this therapist seemed to embrace — our court system would be swamped with prosecutions. As Gary Ramona learned, even if the accused is exonerated in such a case, the criminal-justice process itself is a sort of punishment.
The same, I suppose, could be said in your case. While having your conviction overturned because of a flaw in the indictment is not necessarily an exoneration, even if one were to presume your guilt, it cannot be denied that you have suffered punishment. Two trials, the loss of your employment, the destruction of your reputation, however much jail time you served, attorneys’ fees, etc. — yes, this has been going on since 2011, and no one could say that you have not paid a high price already. Considering all this, then, I have removed my March 2017 post about your case, but I have not yet explained why your case came to my attention in the first place.
One of the basic purposes of my blog — the raison d’être of what I do — is to provide some small measure of balance to the obvious biases of our national news media, by calling attention to stories that contradict the prevailing narrative. Beginning in 2014, when it became obvious that the media were engaged in battlespace preparation for Hillary Clinton’s expected presidential campaign, feminism became a special focus on my blog. It’s a long story of how that happened, but as I have sometimes had to explain, I don’t call myself a “men’s rights activist” because I think that the concept of group rights is a fundamental error which divides society into hostile factions. Identity politics is a scam devised to enhance the power of self-appointed leaders of “social justice” movements, and I want no part of it. I’m not an “activist,” I’m just a guy trying to make a living writing stories, and the story I saw emerging in 2014 was how a campaign of feminist rage was being fomented in hopes that this would carry Hillary Clinton to the White House. Well, it failed in its ultimate object, but this campaign inflicted deep harm on our culture, and the news media were complicit in that harm.
At a time when feminists were staging “Slut Walk” protests proclaiming that every man on the planet was a potential rapist, and that all women were victims of male sexual evil — and when this “rape culture” theme was being echoed and amplified by major media outlets — it seemed to me that something should be done to counter-balance this message. Thus began my habit of collecting accounts of lesbian teacher sex scandals:

That is a partial sample of maybe two dozen such cases I featured on the blog, and this was, as I say, intended to counter-balance the bias of the mainstream media which, at that time, was promoting the idea that women everywhere were being victimized by rape culture — oppressed by the patriarchy! — and LESBIAN TEACHER SEX SCANDAL was one obvious means of putting some weight on the other side of the scale.
Considering your own particular circumstances, you can see how your case came to my attention in March 2017. And at risk of belaboring the obvious, I must explain how difficult it can be to find these LESBIAN TEACHER SEX SCANDAL stories. The prevailing bias of the media is such that, if someone within the LGBT community is ever accused of a sex crime, it is apparently forbidden to specify their sexual orientation in news accounts. There is no such thing as a “gay pedophile” in the liberal journalism lexicon, and when a female teacher is accused of molesting a female student, the word “lesbian” will never appear in newspaper stories about the case. So a certain skill in selecting Google search terms is required to find LESBIAN TEACHER SEX SCANDAL stories, and I could probably teach a seminar on the subject by now. However, once President Trump was inaugurated, other controversies emerged to capture my attention, and it’s been a while since I’ve done any of those stories.
My point, ma’am, is that I never bore any personal malice against you, nor do I hate lesbians generally. What I was doing was an effort to provide balance to the media’s one-sided treatment of these issues, and I doubt that being mentioned on my blog was the worst of your problems. Nevertheless, as your conviction has been overturned on appeal, I have decided to remove that March 2017 post from the blog, because this seems what justice and mercy would require.
We live in evil times, and I am often reminded of what the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, when he spoke of the pagans being “filled with all unrighteousness,” so that they became “implacable” and “unmerciful” (Romans 1:29, 31 KJV). The spirit of cruelty we see everywhere now is unmistakable evidence of the sinfulness that pervades our society. Lately I have been quite busy writing about the coronavirus pandemic, which some might interpret as evidence of “the wrath of God . . . against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Romans 1:18 KJV). Far be it from me to claim any special prophetic insight, but I should hope that you will seriously contemplate your experience, and consider what lesson might be learned.
My apologies for all my faults and failures, as it is my wish ever to remain

Your most humble and obedient servant,

Robert Stacy McCain

+ + + + +

One of my rules is, I write for money, so if I’m going to expend the time it takes to write more than 2,500 words in an email, you better doggone believe I’ll publish that correspondence for the edification of my readers.

Let me just briefly amplify the point I was making to this lady: Court proceedings are a matter of public record, and no journalist can be accused of libel or defamation for accurately reporting an arrest or a trial. Print publications like the Binghamton Press cannot “unpublish” a news article, nor do I have any obligation to unpublish a story about an arrest if the suspect is subsequently acquitted. The arrest itself is a matter of public record, whatever the outcome of subsequent prosecution.

So if anyone else involved in a LESBIAN TEACHER SEX SCANDAL thinks I’m going to make a habit of removing posts from the blog, they’ve got another think coming. If any lesbian teachers were to ask my advice in this regard, I’d tell them they’d better avoid any behavior that might put them in jeopardy of such an accusation, because who knows when I might decide it’s time to do another Google search for some more LESBIAN TEACHER SEX SCANDAL headlines?

It’s a thankless job, but somebody’s got to do it, and I remind readers that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!




 

Category: Crime, Education, Gays, Media Bias

Comments

3 Responses to “Email About a ‘Witch Hunt’ (Or LESBIAN TEACHER SEX SCANDAL UPDATE)”

  1. Institutionalized DARVO - Dark Brightness
    April 2nd, 2020 @ 5:18 pm

    […] One of my rules is, I write for money, so if I’m going to expend the time it takes to write more than 2,500 words in an email, you better doggone believe I’ll publish that correspondence for the edification of my readers. […]

  2. Friday hawt chicks & links – The working from home sucks edition. – Adam Piggott
    April 4th, 2020 @ 4:01 am

    […] The Other McCain gets an email from a stupid lesbian that he profiled a few years ago and had forgotten about. She demanded that he take down the article and he complied, with a public letter. […]

  3. MONDAY LINKAGE « Bacon Time !!!!!!
    April 6th, 2020 @ 4:13 am

    […] Email About a ‘Witch Hunt’ (Or LESBIAN TEACHER SEX SCANDAL UPDATE) […]