“It was sex without explicit consent,” she said.
This is bullshit, because, want to or not, she has in fact destroyed a man's career. And seems willing to keep the story alive via anonymous interviews. This is starting to look like a sleazy NDP political maneuver. The alleged victim(s) should come clean or clam up.
It was Trudeau who made the Liberal MPs names public.
ReplyDeleteTrudeau pooched, nobody in the NDP was out to get these guys, they just wanted some sensitivety training or something, the Trudeau the one who made this into a big thing.
ReplyDeleteI will say that MP sounds like she's suffering from the trama of the teenage rape and should seek thearpy.
You cannot tell Trudeau that one of his MP's raped you (which is the word for sex without consent) and that you want to ensure there are no more victims and then think it is going to be resolved through sensitivity training.
ReplyDeleteNot only does he have to act to protect other female MP's, he has to act to protect the integrity of the LPC. He could not avoid naming them because he could not avoid suspending them.
I am the last one to say victims should make a formal complaint, but you cannot do this informally. If you want to protect other women you can only do it formally. She was naive in the extreme to think otherwise, but it is just bad faith to now condemn Trudeau for acting on her allegations.
Gayle:
ReplyDeleteYou got it in a nutshell there. Couldn't have said it better myself.
At this point I am starting to wonder if those that thought this was a NDP political smear/hack job might have been on to something after all. I am one of those that takes these sorts of things and complaints very seriously, so I assumed this was serious, and part of my fury with Mulcair was the way he and his party wrecked the efforts Trudeau and the Libs made in not identifying the actual specific nature of the allegations, the party the MPs came from or even their gender, and then after doing so tried to make it out that the Libs were the ones leaking it until the media reporters themselves refused to be a party to such a fraud and outed them. I didn't though initially think this was a hit job, I just thought Mulcair was being overly partisan after the fact when he saw Trudeau looking so decisive and leaderly and couldn't have that because of the potential political threat it posed for him.
Now though, now I have to admit I am starting to wonder despite myself, and to be honest Gayle, I really do not like finding myself in this position. This sort of thing has hard enough credibility issues without creating circumstances that cause a reasonable person to question the motives of any victim coming forward, but it is hard not to at this point, and I resent that. My wife, who is a survivor of multiple rapes in her life is less charitable at this point, and her fury with Mulcair and the way the NDP has played this since the story broke makes mine as nothing compared to hers.
This latest addition to the story is only going to make things much worse, although it does give Trudeau cover because it is showing something much more serious than a minor harassment in nature, this is according to the MP sexual assault, and no leader once told of that could do less than Trudeau did, not ethically, morally, and that I think will be the reaction of people when they hear this, that Trudeau acted properly after all. It will be interesting to see the Mulcair/NDP reaction to this story, did this MP preclear this with her leadership or act alone yet again?
"Explicit consent" - what is that? Does the term seek to distinguish varieties of consent by degrees? Perhaps it takes us back to the old baseball analogy of puberty: 1st base, 2nd base...
ReplyDeleteGayle is right. Consent needs no modifier. It either exists or it doesn't. If it exists it's consensual sex. If it doesn't, it's sexual assault.
Like Scotian, I think Mulcair has been playing this for political advantage and became indignant when Trudeau acted responsibly. Imagine what Mulcair must have had in store for Trudeau if he had kept it quiet.
Gayle is spot-on. It is now clear that Trudeau really did have no other choice than to suspend his two MPs in question, upon reading the Huffpost piece (and now, at TorStar, the details of the allegations against Andrews are out, showing that it was also serious in nature, essentially being an act of attempted rape).
ReplyDeleteI appreciate your ruminations, Scotian, however I hesitate to put such a devious turn on the handling of the matter by Mulcair and his party. It does simply seem like political naivete on the part of the MP who approached Trudeau, at least as far as her expectations of the consequences.
Perhaps our anonymous complainant was a victim of faith in her own party's spin that Trudeau is not a man of conviction (unlike the progressiver-than-thou attitude that seems to have been permeating the NDP ever since Layton took the reigns). Perhaps she didn't expect him to carefully consider the situation and do the tough but honourable thing, respecting the requested privacy of the complainants to the best of his abilities, given the circumstances. He showed class, sensitivity, and forthrightness. Having seen him in action in his Papineau riding back in the Ignatieff days, I can say that I am not surprised.
That is not to say Mulcair is lacking in these departments, but his (or his party's machinery's) decision to look the other way, and leave a desperate colleague feeling she needed to approach Trudeau the way she did.
As for the two ex-Liberal MPs, don't expect them to be welcomed back into the LPC fold anytime soon.