This Was Never About Finding Out the Truth

Let us fully dispense with the polite fiction that last week’s Senate hearings on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh were intended to bring us closer to a common understanding of the truth. This entire affair is not about truth, but power—who will wield it, and at whose expense.

The spectacle of these hearings called to mind an allegation of sexual assault from years ago, and its aftermath. One evening in February in 1999, a young woman was hired to perform exotic dancing at a fraternity party at the University of Florida. The next morning, she fled to a neighboring fraternity, calling the campus police to report that she had been raped. When the police came to investigate, they discovered that the evening’s proceedings had been documented in their entirety on videotape. Nearly every moment of the alleged sexual assault was captured on those tapes in excruciating and intimate detail. When the police saw the tapes, they declined to arrest the two young men who had been accused of sexual assault. Instead, they charged the woman with falsely reporting a crime.

Because these events transpired in Florida, where public records laws, interlacing the raw footage of how the evening progressed with interviews with several of the individuals involved, as well as experts on sexual assault.