J'Accuse (All of Us, of Not Listening to Women)
The latest woman to come forth and accuse a powerful man of inappropriate behavior is a SpaceX employee who was paid $250,000 to keep her allegations against Elon Musk silent.
Musk shown with Ghislaine Maxwell at a party in 2014. He denied having known her and said that she had “photobombed” him
The wealthiest man in the world was recently accused of sexual misconduct by the friend of a flight attendant who had worked for his company SpaceX:
The attendant worked as a member of the cabin crew on a contract basis for SpaceX's corporate jet fleet. She accused Musk of exposing his erect penis to her, rubbing her leg without consent, and offering to buy her a horse in exchange for an erotic massage, according to interviews and documents obtained by Insider.
The incident, which took place in 2016, is alleged in a declaration signed by a friend of the attendant and prepared in support of her claim. The details in this story are drawn from the declaration as well as other documents, including email correspondence and other records shared with Insider by the friend.
According to the declaration, the attendant confided to the friend that after taking the flight attendant job, she was encouraged to get licensed as a masseuse so that she could give Musk massages. It was during one such massage in a private cabin on Musk's Gulfstream G650ER, she told the friend, that Musk propositioned her.
For the refusal of his advances, the flight attendant was punished and eventually bribed to keep silent, though she confided to her friend what had happened and this friend was compelled to come forward finally:
The flight attendant told her friend that work began to dry up after she refused Musk's advances. "Before the incident, she regarded Mr. Musk as a person to look up to," the declaration says. "But after he exposed himself, touched her without permission, and offered to pay her for sex, she was full of anxiety."
"She figured things could just go back to normal and she would pretend like nothing happened," the friend told Insider. "However, she started to feel as if she was receiving some sort of retaliation where her shifts were cut back, and she was starting to feel really stressed."
Eventually, the declaration says, the attendant felt "she was being pushed out and punished for refusing to prostitute herself."
As will always be the case when powerful men are accused of impropriety (or deeply criticized), they are quick to deny everything and smear the accuser, even one who remains anonymous, often inspiring a legion of fans and apologists to do the same. Other women who have come forward, such as Tara Reade, Anita Hill and Christine Blasey Ford have had their lives upended at the behest of the powerful men they dared to drag into the light. A common defense of these men of influence can be found in the seemingly fair-minded appeal to the rational sensibilities of fairness and rehabilitative justice: we should not allow a casual accusation to potentially ruin anyone’s life and should require proof of the allegations before deciding how to proceed. Innocent until proven guilty, in all cases.
Never mind that to many of the authoritarians and chauvinists who would defend those powerful men, the accusation of impropriety is enough to justify violent reprisal in the case of already-marginalized people who cannot defend themselves. For Emmet Till or countless other victims of lynch mobs (and the millions currently unnecessarily incarcerated in the US), the mere allegation of impropriety legitimizes swift extralegal retribution as a punishment which is necessary to provide an example for other would-be offenders, whereas for Donald Trump and other fabulously rich scions, the court of public opinion must prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he assaulted anyone before it can even minorly inconvenience him with justice or opprobrium.
We are not presently in a court of law. There, the accused are innocent until proven guilty as a safeguard against the authoritarian overreach of a kangaroo court. In the court of public opinion, no such leeway is necessary and in fact only safeguards the powerful, who have at their disposal disproportionate wealth (and therefore the confidence that can only come from financial stability, which their accusers typically do not enjoy), sympathetic law enforcement and media, PR firms, and prior notoriety. The system of public scrutiny as it exists now is set up to ensure that abusers are never held accountable—the only party who may suffer as a result of going public is the accuser, who faces undue scrutiny, threats and attacks, ridicule from sycophants and hangers-on, and other kinds of misogynist thuggery. Given the treatment of accusers in recent years, how many women hesitate to come forward out of a (fully justified) fear of public repercussions? The number is surely vast, which in comparison to the likelihood of any particular accusations being false (for example, false allegations of rape likely only account for 2-5% of all cases and in virtually all such instances, the accused is exonerated before being incarcerated or otherwise punished), argues for a burden of proof that in this case falls on the accused, who should be considered guilty unless able to prove innocence.
There are two outcomes of this court of public opinion. First, if the defendant is harmed by the allegation (a loss of platform, business, or customers for example), then the act of accusing them was demonstrably effective and the only way to hold certain male power holders accountable for their actions, assuming legal charges do not follow. From their position of power, these men fear very little and act in a manner consistent with that security, justifying their life’s work to themselves with pat rationalizations (“if I didn’t do it, someone else would take my place,” etc.) or abandoning morality altogether and not even pretending to be anything but avaricious. If a potential accusation from a woman they abused along the way causes them pause, all the better.
In the second case, if the accused is not harmed or meaningfully shamed by the revelations, then there is not even this potential for the unwieldy mob of public opinion to damage their livelihood and therefore no downside to bringing attention to their misdeeds should their victims desire some closure (or to issue a warning to other potential victims, or any other motivation). Elon Musk, for example, might be upset and embarrassed and get skewered in the media, but any extralegal loss he suffers will likely be vanishingly small in comparison the benefit (psychological or otherwise) his accuser is able to enjoy in coming forward. In either case the accuser must be supported.
The truth or falsity of the allegation in this and many other similar cases is impossible to prove and is therefore immaterial. It could be disproven, if for example Musk was able to show that he was never alone with the accuser, but it can never be proven true beyond a reasonable doubt outside of video evidence or reliable eyewitness testimony (standards of evidence for establishing the ultimate truth or falsity of an event need not apply here). We should believe women because historically their allegations have been overwhelmingly borne out and male misbehavior is a known problem, whether this applies generally to all men in positions of power (to a sufficient degree to elicit suspicion) or as a pattern of abusive behavior in particular cases (Donald Trump’s known history, for example). The employee’s claim that she was encouraged to pursue a masseuse’s license for Musk’s benefit is evidence of harassment: as a woman in a male-dominated corporate milieu and a new flight attendant, this implication put her in the unfair position of having to consider her career prospects as contingent on performing a duty she was not hired to do and was uncomfortable doing. Her punishment after refusal is an illustration of the dangers of workplace harassment: her livelihood was on the line so any consent she would have given to fulfill Musk’s desires wouldn’t have been given as a free and equal actor, but rather as someone who was afraid to say “no.” The fact that she felt coerced to give Musk a massage problematic enough, to say nothing of his subsequent propositioning and touching.
The benefit of the doubt should be given to the accuser, but in the US in 2022 she will instead be accused in turn of lying for some kind of personal aggrandizement or the settling of a grudge. She will be dismissed as a disgruntled former employee, opportunistic gold digger, or simply a fame seeker (in this particular case her maintained anonymity is part of non-disclosure agreement—the allegations were made public by a friend who is also remaining anonymous). We must ask in any case what any accuser stands to gain by coming forth in such a public manner, given the negative attention they will ultimately receive from certain sectors of the population—do they resent powerful men for their power? Are these increasingly-exposed men simply the victims of jealousy or hatred, public figures who are constantly imperiled as a result of their success?
Musk’s preliminary response to inquiries is revealing and instructive:
"If I were inclined to engage in sexual harassment, this is unlikely to be the first time in my entire 30-year career that it comes to light," he wrote, calling the story a "politically motivated hit piece."
A tried and true strategy to invalidate the claims of one’s accuser or opponent is to charge them with hypocrisy or bias, a conveniently baseless and unfalsifiable form of character assassination that is all the more effective for its lack of evidence and meaning, and his accuser is not on trial in the court of public opinion, he is. Politics are not relevant in any case—if Musk was a hardline communist, he might be less likely to have ascended to his position of corporate dominance, but his abuse of his power would be nonetheless immoral (see the Soviet politician Lavrentiy Beria for one such example). If the accusation was politically motivated, surely she would be aware of how much damage false allegations could do to whatever movement (“Me Too” for example) motivated her to come forward and would take the very rational step to ensure that the story is consistent, plausible, and free of any evidence of possible political motivations if it was indeed made up.
More damningly, he claims innocence by citing his effective inability to cover up his sexual harassment, a common strategy abusers use to dismiss concerns even when multiple accusations are coming to light. “Surely, if I was an abuser, it would have been revealed long before this” is a meaningless statement that can be made at any point in the process regardless of the weight of the accusation or even the number of times it was levelled in the past, because as long as the abuser has a shred of credibility left, they can dismiss those previous claims as having been insufficiently established. This much is made obvious by the fact there is any doubt about the accusations; only when thoroughly disgraced and ostracized would Musk be unable to say something similar, and at that point no one would be asking him. Besides this, as the most wealthy man in the world, his ability to cover up past indiscretions is certainly robust. If he had, for example, paid her more than $250,000, would she have remained silent? How many other women have been similarly bribed (coerced might be a better word given the economic inequalities associated with the transaction)?
If we are allowed to make baseless assumptions about the accuser, we could just as easily assume that all rich men in positions of power are sexual abusers; this is obviously not the case, but not all powerful men need to be abusers in order for there to exist a concerning pattern and their position carries with it both incredible benefits and the responsibility to wield that power with the health and safety of others in mind. Elon Musk has failed this in numerous ways, with the most recent revelations actually being among the least damaging of his transgressions.
True or false, the accusation has been levelled and it must be considered. Musk is in no danger of a physical lynching or any other kind of mob justice such as might have been meted in out in the past when a black man was accused of rape in the South, and his wealth will be quite healthy even after judgment has been passed. He, unlike his accuser, is sure to be fine. None of us are going to mete out justice to Musk; no one individual can decide his fate and our opinion on the validity of this story is irrelevant. What we can do, however, is simple and costless. We can believe accusers when they come forward with a story about a powerful man, to be supportive and encourage them to unashamedly pursue what justice they able, thereby reducing the popular stigma that weighs heavily on victims. This would allow for more scrutiny and accountability for a privileged class that has historically gotten away with untold crimes of both an economic and sexual nature (both SpaceX and Tesla have faced multiple allegations of harassment and discrimination, indicating the likely existence of a workplace culture that tolerates abusive behavior). We can do what we have so far unforgivably failed to do, to listen to women and other victims.
The flight attendant’s friend who has come forward on her behalf put it best:
"I absolutely felt a responsibility to come forward with it, especially now," she said. "He is the richest man in the world. Someone with that level of power causing that kind of harm and then throwing some money at the situation, that's not accountability. There are predators all over the world. But when someone is particularly wealthy and powerful, they literally have systems that are like a machine working for them, to set them up to be able to do whatever they want."
Remaining silent, the friend said, would make her complicit. "When you choose to remain silent, yeah, you do become a part of that system," she said. "You do become a part of that machine that allows someone like Elon Musk to continue to do the horrible things that he's done."
Addendum: Musk is now engaging in the classic abusive behavior of making light of the allegations and bullying his accuser:
