Innocent until proven guilty?

It is a fundamental principle of English law, from which American law is derived, that an accused is assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. That principle seems to have gone by the board recently with all the sexual harassment accusations being tried in the press and on social media.

Now there is no question that sexual harassment and outright sexual predation  has been going on for generations, and that the rich and powerful and famous are often involved in it and use their power and wealth to protect themselves.  And there is no question that our male-dominated society has ignored and suppressed and intimidated women when they brought such accusations, and generally behaved shamefully, and even women have participated in this oppression (as when Hillary Clinton publicly attacked and trashed Bill Clinton’s accusers). And I have little doubt that most if not all of the current wave of accusations against people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein are true.

BUT, and this is a big BUT, having no personal doubt they are true is not the same as PROVING they are true. Of course proof is hard in these cases – there are generally no third party witnesses so it becomes one person’s word against another’s, and sometimes about events decades in the past.  Probably the current wave of accusations will have a salutary effect on some men, and that is a good thing.

But politics is a dirty game, and it won’t be long before someone figures out they can ”weaponize” these accusations, pay a woman or two or a man or two to make accusations that ruins the career of their political opponent, or some vengeful spouse or lover uses this method to destroy their former spouse or lover. It will be precisely because it is so hard to prove or disprove such charges that this tactic will be appealing.

This is a dangerous path we are on. The more so because there really has been a great deal of abuse of women, and it needs to stop. But there was a reason that the “innocent until proven guilty” principle became the cornerstone of English law – it was to prevent just this sort of “trial by mob rule” that is going on now. If we begin to abandon that principle, even for a cause as good as this one, then none of us are safe from false accusations that can ruin our lives and the lives of our families.

We have seen this horror movie before, during the Communist witch hunt days in the 1950's when unscrupulous people like Joe McCarthy built a career ruining people's lives with unproven, and often false, accusations. We ought to remember that lesson now.