The Last #MeToo, Part II
Christine Blasey Ford, Felicia Sonmez, and the weaponization of victimhood
The Last #MeToo, Part I, can be found here
On a recent episode of the podcast I do with Sarah Hepola, “Squee, Boof, and the Devil's Triangle: Kavanaugh Trial Returns to Haunt Us,” we discussed the newly-released memoir by Christine Blasey Ford, who in September 2018 accused then-Supreme Court nominee Bret Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982, when they were in high school. The main question Sarah and I had about the book - why this story now? - might have been self-evident: Macmillan Publishers paid Blasey Ford an advance some time between 2018 and the release of One Way Back in March 2024. (They announced its release in September 2023.) I don’t know what the advance was but an industry source said he did not think it was six-figures.
I’d expected to learn of a massive payout either during the spectacle that was Blasey Ford testifying before the Senate, or just after; thought there might be faith in making her an avatar of the #MeToo movement. Then again, her four decade-old allegation failed to dissuade the Senate from confirming Kavanaugh, which might have been a harbinger of what would and would not captivate readers into the future.
One Way Back has not captivated. BookScan recently clocked it selling 4,105 copies, a not unrespectable first month showing but not, as a friend said, “so much the second coming of Saint MeToo.” (From the self-publishing outfit Scribe Media: “The average traditionally published [nonfiction] book sells 3,000 copies, but… only about 250-300 of those sales happen in the first year.” Self-published books sell half that.)
I read One Way Back hoping for surprise. What had we not seen within the circus that was the Kavanaugh hearings? Trump animus was high and hot during in 2018. If the crowbars that were pussy-grabbing and Stormy Daniels and Russia-gate and “shit-hole countries” had not pried him from office, maybe lashing him to the cudgel of #MeToo would do it. The coverage of Blasey Ford/Kavanaugh was non-stop. CNN entered its 20th month as #1 digital news source. Media and right-thinking people would shoulder the burden of exposing the dangers to us all and we would thank them eventually, or else. As Jacob Siegel wrote (“The New Truth: When the moral imperative trumps the rational evidence”) for Tablet back in June 2020:
The arguer-commander is animated by a vision of secular hell—unremitting racial oppression that never improves despite myths about progress; society as a ceaseless subjection to rape and sexual assault; Trump himself, arriving to inaugurate a Luciferean reign of torture. Those in possession of this vision do not offer the possibility of redemption or transcendence, they come to deliver justice. In possession of justice, the arguer-commander is free at any moment to throw off the cloak of reason and proclaim you a bigot—racist, sexist, transphobe—who must be fired from your job and socially shunned.
I was optimistic that whatever Blasey Ford wanted to tell us in her memoir, it would at least provide a narrative in a single voice, uninterrupted by partisan noise. Instead, I found a shallow story that slipped around the page, and an author who seemed to think we were there to learn about her love of surfing and what he friends drank at the beach club. I almost put it down when she came to the alleged assault itself and told the reader she was not going to go into that; that details could easily be found by googling. This struck me as being promised a fried chicken dinner and then being told there’s a KFC down the road, if we still felt like chicken, which many of us hadn’t wanted in the first place.
It’s not so much that Blasey Ford is unreflective, though she is. It’s that she comes off as blinkered, disingenuous or both, claiming to have had no idea - like, none - that accusing Kavanaugh of sexual assault at the height of the #MeToo movement would cause any sort of blip. I left the book upstate so the quote is not exact, but after Blasey Ford “confides” what happened in 1982 to several friends (“confides” in quotes because she notes several times that she only told a few people over the years, and then mentions a few more, and a few more), she says something like, “It won’t be any big deal, I’ll just call him and let him know that this happened.”
In summation: She will contact a man she has not seen in 36 years, and whom she hardly knew then, and tell him he drunkenly threw her on a bed at a party when they were teenagers and that the time to make this public is on the eve of his confirmation for the Supreme Court, with the further expectation that he will be totally chill.
I find it extremely hard to believe that a woman with a PhD, a woman living in 2018 America, would have zero sense of how explosive an accusation of this kind would be, and how it would be politicized by actors on all sides. Alas, the rest of us — as my pod-partner Sarah Hepola notes in the below clip — were neither inclined toward nor permitted such benightedness.
#MeToo has been fading in the rearview for the last four years, the energy sapped by the killing of George Floyd, the fights over trans rights, COVID, and the wars in Ukraine and especially Israel. Trump being out of office (such as he is) is no doubt a contributing decelerant, and while the embers of #MeToo anger are still there, we have some recent evidence they are harder to reignite than people might expect. Let’s look at two recent cases that, to extend the metaphor, did not so much blow up as fizzle out.
The first began for me on January 26, 2020, as I was trying on lingerie at Agent Provocateur….