–OpEd–
TURIN — In an article about the trial of French actor Gérard Depardieu, who stands accused of sexual assault against two women, my La Stampa colleague Assia Neumann Dayan wrote “The #MeToo movement was built — I speak of it in the past tense — on a foolish principle: believe women, believe your sister, believe the victim.”
She declared #MeToo dead because, as she put it, women are not angels, they are not saints; there are liars and fantasists, murderers and predators among them.
Therefore, she implies, believing women simply because they are women is not only absurd but also unfounded. She argued that if Depardieu is convicted, it must be on the basis of established facts, “not because a movement claims that all men are guilty and that we might as well jail them and throw away the key.”
I find it intriguing how often people feel the need to pronounce #MeToo dead. It has happened repeatedly over the movement’s eight-year history, especially when a trial involving a man accused of sexual violence ends in acquittal. The reverse, however, does not hold true: when an accused rapist is found guilty, no one takes it as proof that the movement is thriving. The Pelicot case is a testament to this asymmetry.
Not a result of woke culture
This fascinates me because it suggests that #MeToo has been fundamentally misunderstood — and thus crudely judged — in part because it was crude itself, at least in its early days. It was brash, punitive, chaotic, frenzied and poorly represented.
Not only do people feel they can rebel against it, but that they must.
Over time, however, it evolved into something far more nuanced, or at the very least, it gave rise to something much more complex than the caricature people now seem eager to reduce it to. (And I write this as someone who — in the early days, when Italian actor Asia Argento was shouting that the presumption of innocence was a medieval relic to be discarded — was at the front of the line helping to craft that caricature. I regret it — not because there weren’t reasons to act like that, but because those reasons weren’t sufficient to justify such an approach.)
Now, it feels as though #MeToo itself is on trial, set to be condemned and dismissed as nothing more than a collective hallucination — one of the many supposedly spawned by the so-called dictatorship of political correctness, a dictatorship that never actually existed.
And not only do people feel they can rebel against it, but that they must (just look at U.S. corporations backtracking on diversity initiatives and ethical codes). But that would be a mistake.
The messy origins of #MeToo
It is simply untrue that #MeToo claims all men are guilty, just as it is untrue that all women are innocent.
“It happened to me too,” that is what #MeToo means. The movement was created to tell women: you are not alone, it was not your fault, there are millions of others like you who have suffered the same thing, and if you speak up, so will they.
The goal of #MeToo was never to do away with due process.
The original goal was to instill in survivors the confidence needed to report their abusers and pursue justice. The principle of “I believe you, sister” was never meant to imply that trials should be abolished; rather, it served (and still serves, and must continue to serve) as a reminder that sexual violence is difficult to prove, often invisible.
The #MeToo movement underscored the need for law enforcement, courts and institutions to be more willing to listen to victims, to look beyond surface evidence. “I believe you, sister” is the principle that safeguards alleged victims, just as the presumption of innocence safeguards the accused. The latter is constitutionally protected; the former is not. And the mature iteration of #MeToo has asked: are we sure this doesn’t create an imbalance?
Challenging the status quo
We could simply write off #MeToo as a “foolish movement.” We would never come across as unreasonable, and there will always be anecdotes and real life examples to support that view.
But in doing so, all we accomplish is keeping the world as it is, resigned to accept the status quo with its power imbalances, navigable only by those with cunning and strong character.
Or, we could begin to acknowledge everything #MeToo has revealed to us, pleading with us to listen, to act. Trials take place because women come forward, and women come forward thanks to an awareness fostered by a movement that was chaotic, inelegant, infuriating, and contradictory — but also necessary.
It gave them the courage to speak out, and we — we, in this supposedly enlightened world — had the civic wisdom to refine it. We cannot, must not, stop now.
The goal of #MeToo was never to do away with due process. It was to help make justice better — to ensure that the system remains infallible only by embracing doubt, even when that doubt corrodes its very foundations.
