According to a new report by Georgetown University, at least one in four elected officials across the country who have been accused of sexual misconduct are still in office today. Some of these are men who have been accused of misconduct by more than a dozen women. The authors of the new report acknowledged that there are too few protections for women who come forward with allegations of abuse, while men seem to be able to avoid any real punishment. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
According to a new study from Georgetown University since the 2016 election, 138 officials in governments all over this country, both elected and appointed, 138 have been accused of some form of sexual misconduct or abuse in the last two years. One hundred 38. That startling enough. What’s even more startling is the fact that 25 percent of those accused are still sitting in a public office. Again, this includes people who were both elected to their positions and those who were appointed to their positions. You know, people like Brett Kavanaugh, nonetheless, 25 percent of that 138 that they were able to accurately identify some of whom have had more than a dozen complaints lodged against them. Twenty five percent are still in office today. Here’s what this means, and the report actually does a good job of explaining this. Most of the men, and they were actually have that 1:38. Only three of them were women.
So yes, it’s pretty safe to say that you got 135 predators out there, 25 percent of whom are still in office, but most of these men will never face any kind of consequence whatsoever other than having to resign from their position or not being reelected. Uh, I think they point out that there is a seven civil lawsuits and 12 criminal charges total that had been filed against the 138 individuals who were accused. But that’s small potatoes. That is a tiny percentage of the total number of people who have been accused of this atrocious, disgusting behavior. Most of them will never see charges filed against them. Most of them will not see lawsuits filed against them. And here’s why. According to the rules for most elected officials, this happens to be the case in Washington DC and in many state governments all over this country, there are no rules protecting interns, protecting independent contractors.
It only protects these specific staff employees of a particular elected or appointed official. So when the harassment occurs and it’s against an intern or it’s a against a contractor, that person doesn’t necessarily have any recourse add into that the fact that roughly 70 percent of instances of sexual assault and harassment and other misconduct go completely unreported and you’re looking at a major epidemic here in the United States just among our elected officials. We have to do better as a country. We have to start protecting women literally as the Georgetown report points out. The way this country is structured is that the laws protect the accused and the accusers have virtually no recourse in many of these instances. That has to change, but the odds of getting that changed while these same harassers are sitting in office are next to none. We need to know more about this issue.
We need to know every single politician that has been accused and what they’ve been accused of and there needed to be investigations. They need to be fully vetted. You know, maybe there are some instances where it’s not true. Willing to bet there’s more than a quite a few that are 100 percent accurate though. In fact, I think the false allegations would be very rare to find if you could even find them at all, but we have to know more. We have to do more, we have to get better as a country, and as long as we let these predators continue to write the laws, we have virtually no chance of getting these crazy predator. I mean, God, look, this is an issue that is so disgusting to me and it’s absolutely appalling. And so yeah, sometimes it gets a little hard to talk about these things without just absolutely going on an unhinged tirade against these people. But I will say this, if we don’t know who these people are, if we don’t know who the predators are, if we don’t know the stories and if we don’t investigate them, then we have 100 percent failed as a country because again, the longer these people stay in office, the more they control the laws and the more they get away with this kind of disgusting conduct that apparently is becoming commonplace amongst our elected officials.
