Jack Shafer

Yesterday, The Daily was first to name Karen Kraushaar as one of the two women who worked with Herman Cain at the National Restaurant Association and accused him of sexual harassment. As the Poynter Institute’s Kelly McBride wrote, Business Insider and the Daily Caller repeated the Daily‘s report that Kraushaar had made the sexual harassment claim, and NPR got her to confirm her identity as “Woman A.” Shortly thereafter, Kraushaar was talking to the New York Times, and the whole world knew who she was.

For what good reason was Kraushaar’s identity concealed in the first place?

Politico, which broke the sexual harassment claims story on Oct. 31, didn’t really explain why it did not name the accusers in its scoop, reporting only that it had “confirmed the identities of the two female restaurant association employees who complained about Cain but, for privacy concerns, is not publishing their names.”

Why grant accusers anonymity for reasons of “privacy,” but not the accused? It makes no sense, especially in the Cain episode. No legal finding of sexual harassment was made, and the only evidence that Cain committed sexual harassment is that cash settlements of $35,000 and $45,000 were reportedly paid to the two accusers. But that’s no evidence at all—the cost of defending a sexual harassment charge is so steep that paying severance of $35,000 is a bargain even if a case has little merit.

Mind you, I’m not saying that the charges against Cain have no merit. I’m as open to the argument that he created a hostile environment of sexual harassment as defined by the law as I am to other interpretations of his alleged conduct (that he’s fresh, that he’s a masher, that he’s a creep on autopilot, that he’s wicked Uncle Ernie, that he’s stepped out of line too many times, and that you’d rather have your daughter walk 10 miles home barefoot in the snow than to accept a ride home from him).

But I’m also open to the possibility that he’s no rampaging sexual monster—and you should be, too.

Politico’s decision to bestow a privacy setting on the accusers put Cain in a tough position. If he names them in an attempt to refute the charges he opens himself to charges of “violating” their privacy. By not naming them, he resigned himself to fighting phantoms.

As a phantom-fighter, Cain has not impressed, I should add. Combing through the various defenses he mounted, I was struck by their non-denial denial quality. Cain kept saying that he had not committed sexual harassment and that appears to be legally true. I know of no legal finding of sexual harassment against him. By definition, his alleged encounter with Sharon Bialek would not rise to a case of sexual harassment because she wasn’t working for him or with him at the time. (It may qualify as sexual assault, although it would have been difficult to prove as many have noted.) The question people want answered is not whether his behaviors fall under the definition of sexual harassment but whether he routinely violates current socio-sexual norms in the workplace. And Cain knows it.

Another Cain accuser—one who did not file a sexual harassment complaint—told her story to the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal last week. “She said the behavior included a private invitation to his corporate apartment” and that he had “made sexually suggestive remarks or gestures,” according to the AP. Both the AP and the Journal gave the woman anonymity because she feared “retaliation.”

Retaliation? What sort of retaliation? The accuser described in the AP and Wall Street Journal no longer works for Cain, so he can’t directly retaliate. Obviously, he could hire detectives or others to stalk and bully his accusers. But assuming that Cain knows who has made the charges—and I think that’s a safe assumption—he’s already in a position to stage such retaliation if they ask reporters for anonymity. The fears of retaliation are a journalistic fig leaf, designed to serve reporters who want to coax a story out of reluctant sources. Few sources are ever beyond the long arm of the accused bent on retaliation.

You could say that Bialek and Kraushaar are suffering a kind of retaliation now as the press questions the motives of Cain’s accusers. The AP reports today that Kraushaar filed a second complaint against employers at the job she got after leaving the National Restaurant Association, making her look like a bit of a serial accuser. Bialek, meanwhile, is being cast as a post-bankruptcy gold-digger in the press.

I doubt very much whether any of the accusers are much appreciating the scrutiny being directed at them. I know I wouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean the press should conceal their identities. Under our system of law, bringing accusations of wrongdoing and other acts of whistleblowing is not an easy thing, nor should it be. It requires stamina and patience, and a willingness to be cross-examined. As it should! Sometimes false accusations are brought and the accused is innocent. He is just as deserving of justice as the accuser.

The shape of the Cain debate and the press treatment of the accusers both imply that we think sexual harassment is such an incendiary offense that we must observe a taboo against naming accusers. It also implies that we think that those accused of sexual harassment are so all-powerful in today’s culture that they can destroy accusers via “retaliation.”

I reject both of those views with the same vehemence that I reject the idea that women who bring civil charges of sexual harassment in the workplace must be treated like delicate flowers that will wilt and expire if scrutinized. If you’ve ever filed criminal or civil charges—or sat on a jury—you don’t need me to tell you that justice is never easy. The accused have the right to meet their accusers in court, even when it makes the accusers uncomfortable, a standard that the press—allegedly a bastion of openness and reproducible results—should observe, too. Privacy for accusers is a cop-out.

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I sketched out some of these thoughts this afternoon in a Poynter chat with Kelly McBride and Mallary Tenore. Make your complaints against me public by tweeting at my Twitter feed. Or send them via email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Sharon Bialek speaks during a news conference accusing Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain of sexual harassment in New York, November 7, 2011. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Let’s assume that Herman Cain misbehaved, in the manner that is alleged in Politico, during his time as the head of the National Restaurant Association in the late 1990s.

Such an assumption is hard to make—not because the allegations are unbelievable, or because Cain vehemently denied the charges today at a National Press Club lunch (“I was falsely accused”), but because Politico wrapped the allegations in journalistic gauze that frays and dissolves as you unwind it.

What are the allegations? To review, Politico reports that:

·At least two of Cain’s female employees complained about his behavior, which included “conversations allegedly filled with innuendo or personal questions of a sexually suggestive nature.”

·These conversation took place at “hotels during conferences,” at “association events,” and at “the association’s offices.”

·Cain also allegedly made “physical gestures that were not overtly sexual but that made women who experienced or witnessed them uncomfortable and that they regarded as improper in a professional relationship.”

·A source says one of the women “suffered what the source described as ‘an unwanted sexual advance’ from Cain at a hotel.”

·A source “closely familiar with Cain’s tenure in Washington confirmed” that the claims “disturbed members of the board who became aware of it.”

·This source tells Politico that “sealed settlements [were] reached in the plural” and are said to include payouts “in the five-figure range.”

·Cain allegedly told a campaign staffer this year that claims of sexual harassment could surface.

Granted, we’re talking about a first-day story. Politico may be holding the salient facts in reserve for its follow-ups so it can build its case against Cain a day at a time. If and when they publish them I may change my tune. But right now the subject is today’s story. Until Cain’s accusers speak forthrightly on the record, until Politico shares the underlying “documentation describing the allegations” that it claims to possess, readers have the right to gripe about the charges against Cain being as clear as dappled light on fog.

Before we drag Cain to The Hague’s highest HR court for trial, I’d like to know exactly what Cain said to the women. Did he sexually proposition them? Did he boast about his virility in a vulgar manner in their presence? Did he ask women who worked for him intrusive questions about their sex lives? I’m prepared—especially after Cain’s kooky National Press Club appearance today, at which he sang a bit of “He Looked Beyond My Faults”—to believe the worst about him. As we’ve seen during his presidential campaign, he’s impulsive, he’s an egomaniac, he loves to entertain, and he lives to provoke. Add a wandering eye and lascivious impulses to that bundle and you’ve got the makings of a classic sexual harasser.

But that’s all conjecture. Just because he’s a little bit crazy doesn’t make him a sexual harasser, nor do the vague charges made against him. (I’m very curious about what sort of “documentation” in Politico’s possession describes the decade-old charges against Cain. Transcripts? Internal HR filings? A letter of accusation? A tape-recording? A letter from the lawyers for the accusers petitioning for a cash settlement from the National Restaurant Association?)

If members of the National Restaurant Association board were disturbed by the claims against Cain, surely they were upset by something more detailed than the hazy allegations Politico presents. Likewise, I’d like to know what sort of physical gestures Cain made around his female employees that were not overtly sexual but still made women uncomfortable. If we’re going to judge Cain’s conduct, surely his gestures can be sketched in full by Politico. Why the reluctance? We’re big boys and girls, Politico. We can handle it.

In criticizing the story’s shortcomings, I mean no comfort to sexual harassers. Sexual harassment in the workplace is bad, and not just because it harms women. It injures everybody by arbitrarily discouraging half of the working-age population from contributing their skills and energies to schools, offices, factories, laboratories, and other places of labor. Subtract women from the workplace and you subtract half of all of the creative and industrious workers, damaging the value of goods and services. In the long run, even the men who sexually harass women suffer from their actions, although I doubt that insight will move them to correct their course.

Sometimes the headline of a piece reveals its inadequacies, which seems to be the case with Politico‘s “Exclusive: Two women accused Herman Cain of inappropriate behavior.” If the art of journalism is located in the specifics, the Politico piece deserves just one star.

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What tunes should be on the Herman Cain playlist? Send nominations to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed streams instrumentals only. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for notification of column corrections.

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain speaks at the National Press Club in Washington, October 31, 2011.  REUTERS/Jason Reed