What Happened When <em>Murphy Brown </em>Tried to Tackle Sexual Assault
“The #MeToo movement is real. It matters. It is needed, and is long overdue.”
That was Susan Collins announcing last Friday that she would vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination—effectively ensuring that he would become the Court’s newest associate justice. The senator explained her logic this way: Collins believed that Christine Blasey Ford had been sexually assaulted when she was 15 years old. Collins simply didn’t believe, she said, that Kavanaugh had been the perpetrator. Collins #believedwomen; the matter was just that, after Ford had said she was “100 percent” certain her assailant had been Kavanaugh, the senator did not believe this particular woman.
It was a familiar kind of doubling, this attempt, from this powerful woman, to have things both ways: the declaration that manages to represent, which aired on Thursday evening. In it, Murphy, after attending a mandatory sexual-harassment seminar at her CNN-style cable network, makes a revelation: She, too, can say “Me, too.” When the powerful broadcast journalist was a 19-year-old college student, she discloses to her son over the course of the episode, a professor who had been a mentor to her—who had championed her early forays into journalism, helping her win a prestigious reporting award—had taken her back to his home to “celebrate” the victory, plied her with champagne, and tried to kiss her. When she resisted, he pinned her down on a couch. She finally fought him off, and fled. She left the award trophy at his house. She’d never told anyone.
