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#MeToo stuff
Mar. 15th, 2022 07:58 amI just read this NY Times article, about a Swedish actress and writer, Cissi Wallin, who (she says) was sexually assaulted by a newspaper columnist. Like many sexual-assault victims, she didn't go to the police immediately; she reported the assault to police five years later, the police investigated and decided there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute. And six years after that, she posted on Instagram, naming her attacker. Reporters investigated her account and those of many other women who had complained about the same guy, and the stories were consistent and apparently substantiated.
But naming the guy was apparently a serious breach of the Swedish Way. Wallin was charged with criminal defamation, in a public trial where she couldn't go into detail about what he allegedly did, nor use testimony from her therapist, her boyfriend, or the assailant's other victims to substantiate her claims. Under Swedish law, a defamatory statement against a non-public figure is a crime regardless of whether it's true. So the court confined its attention to whether the columnist was a sufficiently "public figure" to justify naming him publicly: it decided he wasn't, so she was a criminal, and the question of whether her story was true never came up.
The alleged assailant published a book about what he had gone through since the accusation. Wallin too wrote a book about the experience, agreeing not to name the assailant lest she be charged with defamation again. But at the last minute, her publisher refused to publish the book unless "everything that might be considered libel" was removed from it, which meant most of the book. So she self-published, and is now on trial for defamation again; if convicted, she'll have to destroy all existing copies of her book and face possible jail time.
The author of the Times article herself had received some unwanted sexual comments and insults from the same guy, years before. She describes these interactions briefly, pointing out that the Times has fact-checked and substantiated them and that she can publish her account in the US, but (if I read it right) that same paragraph could make her a criminal if she goes back to Sweden.
Another Swedish woman, Julia Lindh, got into what she says was a sexually abusive relationship with an older, well-known comedian. Before going to the police, she wanted to find out whether he had behaved this way with other women, so she posted a query on a Facebook community for sexual-assault survivors. She found two others with similar complaints about the same guy. All three went to the police, but he was never prosecuted. Instead, for naming him in that Facebook community, Lindh was prosecuted and convicted. The article goes on "I have found no instance so far in which a woman charged in Sweden with defamation in a #MeToo-related case has been found not guilty."
There's no good answer to this, in Sweden, the US, or anywhere else. There really are such things as false accusations -- "believe all women" is both sexist and logically unsound -- and in a society that claims to follow the rule of law, we don't want innuendo to destroy the life of somebody who's actually done nothing wrong. (I've been a college professor, and my brother a high school teacher, both jobs with lots of opportunities for sexual harassment both real and imagined; if I knew that such accusations would always be believed, I would never meet a student one-on-one in my office, nor give a grade lower than A-.) On the other hand, we don't want powerful men to get away with abusing one woman after another for decades, none of the victims willing to speak up or talk to one another for fear of having their own lives destroyed. Ideally, such abusers would be punished by the legal system, but if the abuse in question is in private, with no witnesses, and comes down to "he said/she said", or if the abuser is powerful enough to influence the legal system, that doesn't work.
But naming the guy was apparently a serious breach of the Swedish Way. Wallin was charged with criminal defamation, in a public trial where she couldn't go into detail about what he allegedly did, nor use testimony from her therapist, her boyfriend, or the assailant's other victims to substantiate her claims. Under Swedish law, a defamatory statement against a non-public figure is a crime regardless of whether it's true. So the court confined its attention to whether the columnist was a sufficiently "public figure" to justify naming him publicly: it decided he wasn't, so she was a criminal, and the question of whether her story was true never came up.
The alleged assailant published a book about what he had gone through since the accusation. Wallin too wrote a book about the experience, agreeing not to name the assailant lest she be charged with defamation again. But at the last minute, her publisher refused to publish the book unless "everything that might be considered libel" was removed from it, which meant most of the book. So she self-published, and is now on trial for defamation again; if convicted, she'll have to destroy all existing copies of her book and face possible jail time.
The author of the Times article herself had received some unwanted sexual comments and insults from the same guy, years before. She describes these interactions briefly, pointing out that the Times has fact-checked and substantiated them and that she can publish her account in the US, but (if I read it right) that same paragraph could make her a criminal if she goes back to Sweden.
Another Swedish woman, Julia Lindh, got into what she says was a sexually abusive relationship with an older, well-known comedian. Before going to the police, she wanted to find out whether he had behaved this way with other women, so she posted a query on a Facebook community for sexual-assault survivors. She found two others with similar complaints about the same guy. All three went to the police, but he was never prosecuted. Instead, for naming him in that Facebook community, Lindh was prosecuted and convicted. The article goes on "I have found no instance so far in which a woman charged in Sweden with defamation in a #MeToo-related case has been found not guilty."
There's no good answer to this, in Sweden, the US, or anywhere else. There really are such things as false accusations -- "believe all women" is both sexist and logically unsound -- and in a society that claims to follow the rule of law, we don't want innuendo to destroy the life of somebody who's actually done nothing wrong. (I've been a college professor, and my brother a high school teacher, both jobs with lots of opportunities for sexual harassment both real and imagined; if I knew that such accusations would always be believed, I would never meet a student one-on-one in my office, nor give a grade lower than A-.) On the other hand, we don't want powerful men to get away with abusing one woman after another for decades, none of the victims willing to speak up or talk to one another for fear of having their own lives destroyed. Ideally, such abusers would be punished by the legal system, but if the abuse in question is in private, with no witnesses, and comes down to "he said/she said", or if the abuser is powerful enough to influence the legal system, that doesn't work.
