Sure, if you ask me if I have ever any witnessed anything inappropriate from my coworker, I would tell you the truth. Even under oath. But I wouldn’t feel comfortable signing a letter of support. In my opinion, doing so would only make sense if I knew everything about colleague’s private life and I knew the accuser to be a liar. People have their public-facing persona and they have their private persona. They can easily act one way around people they aren’t attracted to versus another way around people they are attracted to. A person who is sober asks totally different when they are intoxicated. Unless I’ve seen how a person acts under all environmental conditions and scenarios, how can I act like I know what someone is capable of doing, especially when it comes to their sexual behavior? Maybe they are a person dignity and integrity from 8:00 to 5:00, but become someone else when no one is watching.
Imagine if Harvey Weinstein had tried to use a letter of support to clear his name. Or Bill Cosby. Are we supposed to think all those accusers are lying extortionist bitches just because Keisha Knight Pulliam says he’s a great guy? OK, but Bill Cosby was accused of raping women in the privacy of his home, not on the set of the Cosby Show in front of his fellow actors and a live studio audience. So why should Keisha’s opinion be given any weight?
A letter of support in the context of sexual harassment just seems tone-deaf to me. What do you think?
I’d like to think I wouldn’t, but if i were young and desperate for my job and good references from my bosses, and my continued good standing …? Maybe? Maybe i’d hope that people would realize it’s a meaningless pile of signatures and rationalize that it won’t change anything?
This happened a few years ago in my town. A guy on the school board got caught red-handed with child pornography on his home computer and went to prison, after an armed standoff (thank goodness, as far as I know, he never did anything improper, physically, with children). Another guy on the school board, who is a guy I’ve known most of my life, wrote a letter of support for the bad dude. It wasn’t so much a “Joe’s a great guy, you’ve got him all wrong” letter more of a “I never saw him do anything bad” letter. But it was to the judge, and it was regarding his sentencing.
It was a bad, bad, bad move on my acquaintence’s part. Like you said, it’s one thing to tell the cops “no, I never saw anything” but to write a letter to a judge, AS A SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER? Naw, dude. People over-reacted a bit, calling him an enabler of child molestation and harassing him and his family online. He never apologized (he’s a super stubborn dude) and resigned.
I would personally write such a letter myself. Not for child porn, child molestation or “only” sexual harassment. Probably not even for my brother.
To be honest, Lasciel, I’m just like you. I would like to think I wouldn’t, but I’m suddenly imagining what I would do if everyone I work with signed the letter–including people who could make or break my career. It definitely would not be so easy in that situation to not succumb to the pressure.
Very believable people would feel pressure. Which is what I don’t get about OP question. Would I sign the letter if my general sense was you were ‘supposed to’ sign it, or just would I want to sign it if completely free not to?
Both answers are ‘it depends’ of course. The Brokaw case is pretty far from giving a character reference in sentencing to somebody convicted of having child porno. AFAIK two women made accusations of poor but not horrific behavior by him, one is willing to be named. Many other female colleagues have said Brokaw always acted honorably toward them. Which IMO is worthy of consideration, not that it makes the accusers liars. So likewise if I were a colleague with extensive knowledge of honorable behavior by the accused, and no knowledge of bad behavior, I wouldn’t have a problem signing a letter to that effect, as long as it didn’t cast any aspersions on accusers the truth of whose stories was unknown to me.
If the letter was less than satisfactory in that respect but I was a junior staffer feeling pressure to sign it, I might. I wonder who honestly can say they never would. But if signing the letter made me an outright liar, I hope I’d refuse even as junior person. As a more senior and powerful person I’d have more leeway, obviously. If in charge I’d sit the people composing the letter down and try to figure out some way to allow people to express their support without it becoming quasi-mandatory. One idea might be to only accept the signatures of well established people in the company.
OK, but what if the accused’s skeletons are hidden amongst the employees that aren’t the well-established uppity-ups? The interns, the new hires, the temps, the cleaning ladies. Would you feel comfortable levying an accusation against someone when your boss, her boss, and her boss’s boss are publicly declaring their support for him before any of the facts have come out? I wouldn’t.
Also, if a person is real well-established (i.e., old), they may have an outdated mindset, one that confuses “well, he didn’t rape anyone” with “decent guy full of integrity”. A woman who rose through the ranks before the era of HR-mandated sexual harassment training might think someone complaining about a forced kiss is just a hysterical crybaby. Frankly, a letter of support signed only by women of a certain age and certain amount of stature would give me MORE pause, not less. Many such women were the first to come out in support of Harvey Weinstein. But they weren’t the ones he was raping, so what the fuck did they know about anything?
If you feel like you have to sign a petition or write a letter vouching for a sexual harasser at your job is another kind of harassment. IMO. Nope, I don’t think I could do it.
The question is frankly stupid. Why is it restricted to just sexual crimes? Would you sign it if a co-worker was accused of murder? Of grand larceny?
The answer is that it depends on the person and the peculiar facts.
When famous skateboarder Mark “Gator” Rogowski in the 90’s was accused of raping and murdering his female friend he was adamant that he was innocent to the point he got a bunch of fellow skaters to sign a letter saying that they all believed he was innocent and incapable of committing the crimes involved.
Then during the trial he immediately admitted he was guilty much to the anger of all of his previous friends who had supported him when he told them he was innocent.
There was a time when the acquittal of an innocent person was included in the broad category of Justice. I guess it isn’t anymore, justice is limited to revenge and closure. Attitudes about sex crimes were instrumental in changing that paradigm. Those are just about the only crimes the media has any interest in bringing to our attention.
This is my take on it. Just like the non-disclosure agreements that we read about, it is the continuation of exerting power over others in order to deflect from the original deed.
But this seems to say support shouldn’t be expressed for any accused on account of discouraging other accusers. I don’t agree. People who have direct, relevant*, experience of a person acting admirably have as much right to express it as people with direct experience the opposite.
People are entitled to their own interpretation of their own experiences, and to express them. They have no obligation to muzzle themselves because of their age. Although you are free to discount their statements to any degree on account of their age or other reasons. And an account of good behavior does not prove other allegations false, that’s a straw man. But it is relevant.
Both your points seem to mainly say that people who have a high opinion, based on direct experience, of an accused person shouldn’t express that but instead just leave the floor entirely to accusers. I don’t agree with that starting point.
My suggestion was to try to address the problem of people pressured into supporting an accused person. If they are really not being pressured, then their opinion and experience is theirs to express as they wish. Although as a matter of fact it does not render accusers liars if the supporting people have no direct knowledge of the specific incidents in the accusations. And anyone is free as a mater of their opinion to discount or ignore the statements of support.
*if it’s irrelevant (‘the person was nice when I invited him to a barbecue’) it’s irrelevant. Assuming it’s relevant (‘the person acting completely properly toward me, when a young staffer, a person of the sex he or she is attracted to’)
What is the point of such a letter? How is it of any relevance to any processes to determine whether any given allegation is true or not, or to any decision as to what follows if it is true?
I wouldn’t sign on the grounds that due process requires that people whose job it is to determine such issues should be allowed to get on with the job without being subjected to a running commentary or PR offensive from anyone else.
My signature would have nothing to do with my feelings about the person (and as a man, my guesses about whether a dude that allegedly assaults women actually did so are completely uninformed). It would have everything to do with specific facts.
For example, if Bernice accused Xavier of copping a feel at the 2017 office Christmas party, and I knew that Bernice hadn’t been at that party, I might sign a statement to that effect. If Bernice accused Xavier of making off-color comments in the workplace, but I had heard Bernice making exactly the same sort of off-color comments both in and out of Xavier’s earshot at the workplace, I would sign to that effect.
But signing something about his general character? How on earth would that be relevant or helpful?
Well, the story in the news right now is about sexual harassment. Why is the OP required to generalize?
And I think some folks are missing what the OP is saying. A letter of support is saying “I don’t believe the accuser”. But how would one really know? Yeah, sure, maybe all of my interactions with the guy were on the up-and-up, but unless I was absolutely sure the accuser was lying, I wouldn’t know if he treated everyone the same way.
I would not sign except under very unusual circumstances.
I see Brokaw’s situation much like Ansari’s situation: They were lots of mixed signals and they made some assumption and advances which seemed reasonable in the moment. So in cases like that, I might say that his personal character was upstanding and that I generally knew him to try to do the right thing. That could help view the incident as making mistake from a misunderstanding rather than he’s a predator who is a danger to women. But I would have to really know the person well and for a very long time to be able to say something like that.
Let me quote something from that news article that I think you are brushing over.
So yeah, I’m signing that letter. I’ve been homeless, and I like eating regularly and having a roof over my head. If not signing that letter meant you were going to get fired and that your career is is now over, I’d put good money up that all those people claiming they wouldn’t sign would change their minds pretty fast.