I, too, was (allegedly) a sexual harasser

Al Franken, Kirsten Gillibrand, and the politics of accusations and blowback

This one’s personal. So there’ll be no food analogies segueing into the topic. I’ll just get right to it.

In the wake of Gillibrand’s departure, I’ve been arguing on Twitter about what happened to Al Franken, and one of the points I made is that the injustice of it only harms the #MeToo movement. Franken never got his day in court; he was pushed out before the investigation which he demanded had a chance to clear (or damn) him.

So, in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m going to reveal the one time I was accused of sexual harassment. This way, you can decide if my defense of Franken is just self-serving, personal bias from a creep. Or, at the very least, you can calibrate against whatever bias you detect.

To protect the guilty, I’m going to avoid sharing most of the details, but I’ll otherwise do my best to be accurate. I’m also going to stick to gender-neutral terms, quite intentionally. It’ll be interesting to see what assumptions readers make.

So, at some indefinite but fairly distant point in the past, I joined an unspecified large company and encountered a co-worker whom I found attractive. They didn’t work in the same part of the company or in the same role, but I did run into them from time to time. And when I did, I was distracted.

There was evidence that the attraction was mutual, but I was still recovering from a relationship that had ended badly and wasn’t really in the market. Besides, dating a coworker seemed like a bad idea at the time. In fact, it turned out to be. But my common sense had to contend with more basic urges, and it was a losing battle.

About six months later, you could cut the sexual tension with a waterjet. It was so noticeable that co-workers were openly commenting about it. The gist of the peanut gallery’s good-natured but nosey remarks was that, if we weren’t already a couple, we should be. We should just get it over with, or get a room already. That room turned out to be an elevator.

At the end of a workday, we wound up alone together in an elevator heading for the streets, and it was awkward. In the middle of my desperate attempt at small talk, they interrupted to question me about why we weren’t dating yet. I didn’t have an answer to that, so I suggested that we should have dinner together. I remember that we were both pretty happy about this at the time. We were relieved, after all that will-they/won’t-they tension.

Later that week, it was the Friday of our first date. I was surprised and wary when my manager sternly called me into his office, and even more so when I noticed that he had a witness in there with him. I could tell that this wasn’t going to be a casual chat.

He didn’t waste any time: he told me flatly that I had been accused of the sexual harassment of a co-worker and that this was a very serious matter. I honestly wasn’t sure what to make of it all. My first thought was that maybe my date had second thoughts or something, but I’d just seen them in the hallway and they seemed enthusiastic about our plans for the evening.

So I asked my boss whom I was accused of harassing. He wouldn’t say. I then asked who had accused me. Same response. More annoyed than flustered, I pointed out that, if I didn’t know what this was about, then I couldn’t say anything, either. That stumped him, so the meeting ended. However, my relationship with my manager took a big hit.

That night, over Chinese food, I told my date this story and they laughed about it, as confused by the whole thing as I was. That dinner went well, and over the course of the next month or so, we went out a few more times before we broke it off, amicably and by mutual agreement. We just didn’t have that much in common, despite that attraction. And after we’d given in to it, we found that there was no basis for anything deeper.

Still, whenever we bumped into each other in the office, it became clear that the sexual tension had not gone away, and had perhaps gotten worse because we knew what we were missing. We tried to keep things professional, but there were still many awkward moments. We even relapsed briefly, kissing in the elevator, before immediately coming to our senses. After that, we did our best never to be alone together, with mixed results.

We hadn’t told our co-workers that we’d been dating, so we didn’t have to tell them once we stopped. As a result, they continued the comments about how we’d make a cute couple and all that. I wanted to just say to them that, no, we weren’t really compatible. But I hadn’t forgotten that bizarre yet scary sexual harassment accusation, so I kept my mouth shut.

To this day, I have to wonder if the relationship would have gone better if we hadn’t had to keep it on the down low. Probably not, but still, I have to wonder. It doesn’t matter. By that point, I had accumulated a variety of good reasons to leave this job, besides my misadventures in dating, so I started looking. It didn’t take long for me to find a place that would let me make a fresh start. When things are uncomfortable, leaving is the natural reaction.

Before I left, I did find out more about that sexual harassment claim, through a backchannel. It turns out that, as the timing suggested, it had actually been about my date. However, the accusation came from a third party; a co-worker who had hit on them and been rebuffed. Presumably, they saw me as a rival and went after me out of some sort of jealousy.

The bottom line is that I was falsely accused of sexual harassment, so I naturally have some sympathy for others who face such allegations. In my case, it didn’t really amount to anything, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that I faced a faceless claim against me and had no way to defend myself. About half of Franken’s accusers were likewise anonymous and the one who started the whole thing had questionable motives, much as my rival did.

I also knew my job was on the line, and the fact that my manager didn’t have my back was further motivation not to bother sticking around. That’s why I don’t blame Franken for resigning under pressure when his own party threw him under the bus. It’s not a sign of guilt, but of despair; of wanting to get away from a situation that’s unpleasant and uncomfortable, when those you count on to protect you from unfair treatment are not on your side.

Some people might read this heavily-censored autobiographical account and take home the idea that I’m only defending Franken because I was falsely accused myself. Others, I hope, will consider that my experiences have made me more sensitive to how it feels to be on the receiving end of such an accusation, and more sympathetic to someone who gives up when they lose faith in their colleagues.

My sympathy is not one-sided, because I’ve been on the other end of things. I was sexually harassed earlier in my career, by my own manager. It was a quid-pro-quo request in order to keep my job, and I chose to leave, but didn’t bother reporting it.

When I talk about the problem of false accusations, what bothers me most is that, because there is so much stigma and risk around accusing someone of sexual harassment or worse, most claims made publicly and without the shield of anonymity are true. As a result, every visible instance of a false claim is used to undermine the legitimate ones that vastly outnumber them. I don’t want my defense of one particular person to be abused into a defense of the guilty.

This is what I meant when I said that the Franken debacle harms #MeToo. There is a culture of exaggerating the risk of false claims so as to undermine victims, and what feeds this narrative are the rare exceptions: the illegitimate accusations that get disproportionate publicity precisely because of their rareness. “Man bites dog” is newsworthy, “dog bites man” is not, so you’d think from reading the papers that dogs fear men biting them and not the other way around.

The only way to undermine this attempt at intimidation is to starve it of support. Yes, #MeToo taught us to #BelieveWomen, but this has to mean that we take their claims seriously and investigate them neutrally, not that we rush to judgment in either direction. False accusations hurt real people, not just the falsely accused but the victims who aren’t believed because there’ve been a few well-publicized false accusations. So we need to trust but verify, not trust blindly.

Some accusations are malicious, others stem from some level of misunderstanding, but the overwhelming majority are legitimate. These legitimate accusations are the ones we need to protect by blocking the illegitimate and mistaken. Moreover, as Pence shows us, a world where women are seen as an occupational risk is not good for women. Excessive zeal to punish the guilty creates harmful blowback that hurts the innocent.