Roy Moore, the ick factor and the evidence (3 of 3)

This is the last of three posts on the Roy Moore scandal material. My purpose has been to look at what the public knew before the election and what was a reasonable way to process it.

I'm personally was and am "tribally" inclined to think Roy Moore is a scumbag. And I've thought so ever since his Ten Commandments monument sideshow in the early 2000s. But the Washington Post  story that initially reported his alleged molestation of a 14-year-old was well-sourced, with at least two people the complainant/accuser had talked to at the time backing up her story that she had told them she was dating an older man, one of them remembering Roy Moore as his name. And the three women who he dated when they were 16-18 added some kind of a pattern.

It seemed to me that, at a minimum, a man in his thirties who had been a Army officer in combat in Vietnam who sought out 16-year-olds to date was weirdly immature. Although according to the Post story, none of the three reported having sex with him. All four of the women were on the record with their names in making the statements. And Moore's responses weren less than convincing to anyone not drinking the special Breitbart-Limbaugh Kool-Aid concoction. Plus, one of the 14-year-old's later boyfriends said on camera a bit later that she told him about the molestation part of the story when they were together.

But our Pod Pundits couldn't even keep a well-sourced story like this straight. This Morning Joe segment treated the story of the other three women as essentially just like the story of the 14-year-old, The Choice Dems And GOP Must Make On GOP Alabama Senate Nominee Roy Moore MSNBC 11/13/2017:

One of the panel said that all four women had experienced what had to have been "the worst horrific moments of their lives, being fondled and touched by Roy Moore when they were teenaged girls." Another said "these women have been playing this on auto-repeat every day of their lives." When the real story is well-sourced and, for marketing purposes, sensational enough on its own, careless embellishments like that are unnecessary. (Is there a phrase for gilding an ugly lily?) Especially since it won't surprise anybody if more damning stories come out in the next couple of weeks. In fact, AL.com the famous attorney Goria Allred is having a news conference at 2:30 EST with another accuser reporting that Moore "assaulted her when she was a minor."

A few days after the initial report, another accuser came forward on the record in a press conference claiming that Moore had sexually assaulted her when she was 16: Dylan Stableford, New woman accuses Roy Moore of sexual assault when she was a minor Yahoo News 11/13/2017. This case described a very similar scenario to that of the 14-year-old and she showed what she said was something that Roy Moore wrote in her school yearbook.

The same day, Charles Bethea reported on people who remembered Moore's reputation as a mall crawler during that period, Locals Were Troubled by Roy Moore’s Interactions with Teen Girls at the Gadsden Mall New Yorker 11/13/2017.

By November 15, the stories of Roy Moore's fondness for actions toward women and girls that fit consistently with the patterns others had described were coming out faster than revelations about Trump associates with dubious involvements with Russians: Stephanie McCrummen et al, Two more women describe unwanted overtures by Roy Moore at Alabama mall Washington Post 11/15/2017; Anna Claire Vollers, New Roy Moore accuser: 'He didn't pinch it; he grabbed it' AL.com 11/15/2017.

November 16, one week from the original molestation story, it had reached the point where Matt Bai - also tribally inclined to be unsympathetic to Moore - was writing the following which by then had come to seem like the cautious and sensible conventional wisdom on the topic (Roy Moore fights his inner demons. It's not pretty. Yahoo News 11/16/2017):

I’m not a fan of media stampedes, generally. And I suppose it’s possible that the ever-growing list of women who have accused Moore, in highly detailed accounts, of general creepiness and outright assault on teenage girls have all been put up to it by nefarious Democratic operatives.

But I’m guessing the only ones who really believe that now are longtime, willfully blind supporters and Breitbart editors who profit from their insistence that reality is the opposite of whatever the coastal, elite media say it is.

(Related: Apparently someone operating on Moore’s behalf has been calling people in Alabama posing as a sleazy Washington Post reporter named “Bernie Bernstein” who is trying to dig up more gossip about Moore. I mean, you can’t do better than that? There are plenty of names that sound more realistic. Like “Philip Roth,” or maybe “Hank Greenberg.” Use some creativity.)

This Velshi & Ruhle segment addresseds how to evaluate claims like the ones being made against Moore, Roy Moore's Friend Mat Staver: “This Is Not The Roy Moore I Know” 11/16/2017:

There was certainly a lot of credibility in the reports against Moore. Maybe not enough to satisfy a court in a legal proceeding, I don't know about that.

Josh Marshall had a good point in this post about accountability on the larger issue of sexual harassment and abuse. (Trump Skates. But It’s Not the Press’s Fault. TPM 11/29/2017) High-profile cases can prompt action by management or employers. But in places like, say, the Republican Party, where neither shame nor fear of losing voters currently seem to be factors when Rep politicians are credibly accused of genuine bad acts, there is no accountability.

In the larger scheme of things, high-profile scandals of the Moore, Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer types may not do a lot in themselves to address the much wider problem. Large organizations of all kinds as well as small businesses have a strong incentive for self-protection on these things, and sweeping them under the rug is usually the prescription. That's why non-disclosure agreements on settlements are so popular. I don't know what psychological studies may say about it. But I'm reasonably sure that the Moores and Weinsteins and Lauers aren't going to be deterred from genuinely predatory behavior by obligatory annual HR presentations or by seeing other employees warned or disciplined for telling lewd jokes at work.

The decline of unions, employment-at-will laws, business deregulation generally, the increase of "precarious" jobs with more and more "independent contracting," those all make systemic solutions more challenging. I saw one report recently suggesting that the restaurant business may be the one with the largest number of sexual harassment reports. And despite the large number of chains, that's a notoriously decentralized and high-turnover business. Also in agriculture, construction, and service industries like restaurants, there are large percentages of undocumented workers who don't find it easy to use what recourses are available to citizens and legal residents. E.g., "You tell anybody about me showing you my dick in the back office and I'll call ICE to arrest your children at their school."

One thing that could be mandated legislatively with some reasonable chance of enforcement would be to somehow legally obligate personnel/human resource departments to have a responsibility to defend employees in some meaningful way. Because right now, HR departments in practice think their only job is to defend employers to the extent they can get away with it. That would probably involve some kind of more extensive auditing requirements along the lines of compliance audits in medical facilities. But that's heresy to the gospel of deregulation and "free-market" competition.