OPINION |
By Royal Calkins
It was a solid 50 years ago when I got my first real job in journalism. I became a cub reporter in the wonderful college town of Chico, way up there north of Sacramento. It was a long time ago but, really, not that long ago.
One of my first assignments was the police beat. It was a fairly easy job except during Pioneer Week. That’s when the boys from the farm towns of the Sacramento Valley and the foothill hamlets nearby would come to town to get drunk and hunt coeds. I’m not sure why it happened then. Maybe it was just because there were lots of people in town.
Late one day I told my boss, the city editor, that I needed to add one more sexual assault case to the police log. He told me not to worry about it. I could just add it to the next day’s rape roundup.
I’m serious.
I worked there for three years and never reported or read about a sexual assault arrest.
Most days I would start by walking into police headquarters. The receptionist would buzz me into a little waiting room where they kept the police reports. Most mornings they amounted to a stack about two inches thick. Mostly accounts of shoplifting or loud parties, vandalism, barking dogs. Occasionally, “someone stole my pot” reports. Quite a few domestic violence complaints. My boss didn’t care about those because they never led anywhere.
On the weeks that weren’t Pioneer Week, I could usually tell when there was a rape report because there would be a blue-uniformed cop waiting for me in the little room. I’d thumb through the reports and stop when I saw the rape report. Then the cop would say something like, “Don’t worry about that. Didn’t happen.”
I’d say, “Tell me about it.” And he’d say “they” had already looked into it and determined that “she’s making it up.” And, sometimes, “she was drunk” or “she’s just a tramp.”
Often, the woman had called just the day or night before. And already like magic the police of wonderful Chico had investigated the claim, weighed the evidence, analyzed everything and talked to witnesses. Or not. But they had it solved. Case closed. Didn’t happen.
I’d say something like, “I’m just gonna take some notes here” and the Chico cop would say something like “Oh, Jesussss.”
Like I said, it was a long time ago but I’m guessing this happened 10 or more times in the months I was covering what reporters call “the cop shop.”
Usually I would write a short story about it. My boss, the city editor, would make it shorter. Little was left. He’d take out the name of the street or park where it had occurred and any description that might help people identify the rapist. “Fairness,” he would explain. False accusations could ruin a guy’s life, he would explain. After a while he didn’t actually say that but I could see it in his eyes. In most other ways he seemed to be a decent fellow.
Sometimes the cop in the waiting room would get firmer and would go on a while after the “Oh, Jesussss” part.
Considering how they mostly ignored sexual assault allegations, I never understood why they included the rape reports in the stack I got to see. I don’t think there was a law against simply shredding them. Maybe they had done that and got in trouble. Maybe they figured that rookie reporters of the male persuasion would play along. I never figured it out.
Over time, it seemed that the rank of the blue-uniformed cop waiting for me got higher and his demeanor less friendly. I couldn’t figure out what to do. It was a long time ago. Or not.
Then came the day that one of the cops shot someone in an alley. They put out a little press release about how it was unavoidable because the person needing to be shot had been attacking the officer involved. The report mentioned that there were witnesses. It described them and I recognized a couple. They weren’t hard to find. In my story, I included what they had to say.
The next time I showed up at police headquarters, a cop was waiting for me on the front steps.
“You can’t come in,” he said.
I said something like “Huh?” He just said I was banned from the building.
During my next several rounds of the beat, I would have to push a buzzer and a nice woman would come outside with the papers. Apparently they realized that they had to let me see the reports, or at least some of them.
I don’t remember how long that continued before my boss knew he had to put someone else on the police beat.
The Chico paper never complained about any of it. It was a go-along paper.
Should I have done more? Should I have insisted on doing a story about how the cops in Chico apparently didn’t investigate rape cases?
Of course I should have. Why didn’t I? Because I was young and stupid, a product of mediocre schooling, male chromosomes and, I would learn much later, traces of Neanderthal DNA.
I don’t know how long censorship by cop was the norm in Chico or elsewhere. Eventually, I know, the cops got more subtle about it. When a reporter heard about a rape, or stumbled upon a rape report, one of the nicer cops would tell the reporter something like, “Hey, can you hold off on that one for now? We’re still investigating.” If the reporter remembered to ask later, the nice cop would say it was still under investigation.
While Hegseth was at Princeton, he was publisher of a conservative student newspaper that printed a column proclaiming that having intercourse with an unconscious woman was not rape because an unconscious woman was not under duress.
As you know, things did change along with the times. Partly because better reporters came along and because the women of the 80s and 90s weren’t go-along women. Police departments changed, too, though not nearly as much as they would have us believe.
And then came the #MeToo movement and the presumptions changed. Instead of the nearly automatic opinion that the woman was lying, the presumption changed to “she might be telling the truth” and then to “she probably is telling the truth” and even to “let’s just assume she’s telling the truth and investigate this properly.”
So where do things stand now? Good question. For quite a while it had seemed as though the #MeToo movement had left us with good and solid new rules and a society that had decided that might really doesn’t make right. But now, it seems that we must wonder. It seems as though the calendar has been turned back, maybe not all the way to 1974, but damned near to 1994 or even 1984.
An adjudicated and admitted sexual assaulter has been elected president and onto his cabinet he invited a man who apparently can’t tell a child from a woman and another fellow credibly accused of rape at a Republican women’s convention in Monterey seven years ago. Comedians and others are making a joke out of how being accused of rape is considered a plus in the Trump administration.
In the second case above, we’re talking about Pete Hegseth, the former National Guardsman and Fox News something or other. The gist is that after some serious drinking and loud arguing back in 2017, he invited a married Republican woman to his room and had sex with her, very possibly after she had become highly intoxicated or secretly drugged. Somewhat unsure of what had happened, she didn’t report it, but a nurse who examined her did four days afterward.
A couple years later, Hegseth paid the woman off and had her sign a non-disclosure agreement.
Trump, of course, sees nothing wrong there. Who knows, maybe Hegseth got bonus points for not taking any guff from that drowsy or unconscious woman.
The Washington Post was the first to report last week on the confidential settlement agreement between Hegseth and the victim. Subsequently, the Monterey Police Department report was released to numerous media outlets, including KSBW, after they filed public records requests.
To be fair to the proposed defense secretary, a position that our own Leon Panetta and other upright standouts had filled, it apparently wasn’t a clear-cut case. Some of the facts, like the woman’s memories of Monterey, are somewhat fuzzy.
But here’s something I’d like to know, and it involves a part of the Hegseth story that for some reason hasn’t received the amount of publicity it warranted. While Hegseth was at Princeton, he was publisher of a conservative student newspaper that printed a column proclaiming that having intercourse with an unconscious woman was not rape because an unconscious woman was not under duress.
Really.
Did the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office know about that when it decided, three months after the fact, not to prosecute because of insufficient evidence? I suppose we’ll never know.
I also suppose that if the DA were to introduce the Princeton column at trial, the defense lawyer would jump up and object. “Prejudicial,” he would declare. But I also suppose the judge would see the connection and allow it.
So where are we then? Have the election and the spread of MAGA thinking dragged us back to 1974 when rape was a fiction or even farther back when incest was common and domestic violence wasn’t considered a crime?
Or maybe we’re just back to the 1980s and 1990s when the powers that be decided that some of them women might not be making it up.
The U.S. media normalized Trump two campaigns ago and tried to fix that too late. Has the mindless pendulum now swung so far the wrong direction that society is fixin’ to normalize sexual assault and decriminalize attacks on incapacitated women?
It looks like that as attorney general we’ll have someone way worse than Bill Barr, someone who wants to “prosecute the prosecutors” who prosecuted Trump. And by the end of Trump’s term we could have a Supreme Court with a majority of justices appointed by Trump and anointed by the right wing’s richest.
I want to believe that this is just a blip, that the pendulum isn’t working right and that most of the MAGA voters didn’t mean what Trump thinks they meant. I want to believe that truth and justice will win out eventually.
The option is to pretend that things were just fine back in 1974. Not all that long ago.
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