Michael Avenatti said Monday evening that his client, Julie Swetnick, did not witness first-hand Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh allegedly spiking the punch at high school parties in the early 1980s. But he knows a woman who claims to have seen the act, and while she is willing to speak to…
"People want fame, they want money, whatever."
“The question is, ‘Who can you trust?’”
Conservatives pounce, the media fiddles.
The Catholic League president is doing more to discredit the Catholic church than perhaps anyone else.
Missouri's governor is facing invasion of privacy charges related to a sex scandal, but a wholly separate claim about computer tampering will be tricky to get out of.
A 12-year-old girl in Baltimore County, Maryland, complained to her teachers, her guidance counselor, and her middle school principal when a boy wouldn't stop harassing her. He leered at her in class, and, she says, touched her out on the playground in a way state law classifies as a sexual…
The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have sparked a major reconsideration of appropriate behavior between the sexes, both inside the workplace and outside of it. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before tech entrepreneurs, the geniuses who brought you Soylent food substitute and the Yelp-for-people…
The “Shitty Media Men” list that came into a short-lived existence during the Harvey Weinstein awakening enjoyed a second life of sorts Tuesday and Wednesday, in the form of a viral controversy about its creator and a pending magazine story about the #MeToo movement. The result is that we now know…
Hollywood these days is investing more and more resources into rebooting old franchises. And not just in movies. Last week, a new blue-ribbon committee to investigate and eliminate sexual harassment in Hollywood announced that its chairwoman would be Anita Hill.
Women are more likely to have been sexually assaulted by the age of 44 if they didn’t go to college, according to a new study from the University of Michigan. The study, spearheaded by sociology professor and researcher William Axinn, found that the risk of “experiencing forced intercourse” is more…
For a Republican to lose the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions one year after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Alabama by 28 points, everything had to break just right for the Democrat. And it did. Turnout was high in heavily African-American Democratic counties. It was low in rural and…
How does an accused sex offender go about getting elected to public office? With Alabama’s special Senate election taking place Tuesday, Republican Roy Moore has chosen to pursue a bold strategy: putting on the full armor of Trump and vanishing almost entirely from the voters’ view.
On December 5, the Republican National Committee formalized its support for Roy Moore by sending $170,000 to aid his campaign in the race’s final week. The decision came days after President Donald Trump announced his endorsement of Moore. The money is a pittance in the world of modern campaign…
Sen. Al Franken took a quick glance up at a jam-packed Senate press gallery as he entered the chamber Thursday, preparing to ask Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, who was presiding over the chamber, to allow him to make the speech that would end his political career.
After a week spent limping along under the weight of accusations of sexual misconduct, Sen. Al Franken announced his resignation from the Senate Thursday morning.
Today on the Daily Standard Podcast, deputy managing editor Kelly Jane Torrance talks with host Eric Felten about politicians felled—and one not felled—by sex abuse scandals in recent days.
I’m not sure who coined the term “pervnado” to describe the torrential whirlwind of sexual harassment allegations roiling the already morally unhinged mirror worlds of show business, media, and politics. (Although, from the looks of it, we can thank headline writers at the New York Post for the…
Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore's account of when he began dating his wife Kayla would place the start of their courtship before her divorce from her first husband, according to court documents.
Birmingham, Ala.
Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., would be more likable were it not for the fact they’re craven opportunists.
Alas, if recent polls are right, Roy Moore is likely to win his Senate race in Alabama. That means we’ll have to spend at least the next two years doing something that fills me with abject dread: hearing the name "Roy Moore."
The Alabama special Senate Election is a bit of a rollercoaster. Republican Roy Moore held a real lead over Democrat Doug Jones for most of the race—until the Washington Post and other outlets published credible allegations that Moore had inappropriate sexual contact with teenagers while he was in…
President Trump retweeted three incendiary videos from a fringe far-right British activist, called for a boycott of CNN, floated the firing of NBC executives for propagating “fake news,” and suggested an investigation into the 2001 death of an aide to then-Rep. Joe Scarborough: a matter the far…
President Trump retweeted three incendiary videos from a fringe far-right British activist, called for a boycott of CNN, floated the firing of NBC executives for propagating “fake news,” and suggested an investigation into the 2001 death of an aide to then-Rep. Joe Scarborough: a matter the far…
Longtime Today host Matt Lauer was fired Wednesday morning after a complaint of sexual misconduct, the latest public figure to fall from grace during a remarkable moment of cultural reckoning. As NBC is one of President Donald Trump’s favorite punching bags, he wasted no time crowing about it.
Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore made his first public appearance in nearly two weeks Monday night, dodging press and refusing to take questions at a rally in Henagar, Alabama, as he railed against “malicious and false attacks which reflect the immorality of our time.”
In the two weeks since sexual misconduct allegations began to surface against him, Senator Al Franken has repeatedly apologized to the four women who have accused him of groping them. He’s said he’s “embarrassed and ashamed,” and insisted that “we have to listen to women and respect what they say.”…
The New York Times suspended one of its star reporters Monday after allegations surfaced that he had made inappropriate sexual advances toward younger colleagues throughout his career.
The wave of sexual abuse allegations against men from Harvey Weinstein to Roy Moore has prompted significant reflection among liberals about how Bill Clinton’s misdeeds were handled and how his accusers were treated in the 1990s.
Asked about allegations Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore dated and engaged in appropriate conduct with teenage girls several decades ago, Alabama state senator Dick Brewbaker commented, “I do not buy the idea that suddenly because it’s now the U.S. Senate, she felt like she had to come…
Earlier this week, we published a scorecard of where Republican senators stood on the allegations against Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore. With the #MeToo campaign hitting the other side of the aisle in the upper chamber—Al Franken has been accused by news anchor Leeann Tweeden of groping and…
A Los Angeles news anchor and former model on Thursday accused Sen. Al Franken of sexually assaulting her during a USO tour to the Middle East in December 2006.
An attorney for Roy Moore failed to defend his client Wednesday from multiple allegations of past sexual misconduct printed in theWashington Post, and instead questioned the credibility of a separate accuser’s account and attacked her celebrity representation, Gloria Allred.
Nearly a month ago, I wrote “There's an Awakening Against Sexual Assault, So Why Is No One Talking About Bill Clinton?” It took long enough, but there is a growing chorus of voices on the left demanding that Clinton’s crimes not be ignored. The disturbing allegations against Roy Moore appear to…
Most Republican senators have been quick to distance themselves from Roy Moore since allegations emerged in the Washington Post late last week that he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl when he was 32 and pursued relationships with three other teenagers. With legislators having time to review…
Breitbart News sought this weekend to discredit the Washington Post and a woman who accused Roy Moore of trying to initiate sexual encounters with her when she was a minor, but the right-wing tabloid ended up doing the exact opposite.
A new accuser has come forward with an accusation of sexual assault against Senate candidate Roy Moore.
Roy Moore has a story, and he is sticking to it. One day after a damning Washington Post story alleging that Moore, the GOP candidate in the upcoming Alabama Senate election, sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and sought out relationships with three other teenagers between the ages of 16 and 18,…
Since the Washington Post published its bombshell report Thursday—in which a woman alleges that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore molested her when she was a 14-year-old and Moore was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney—almost all Republican senators and President Trump have said that Moore…
Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va., said Friday she believes allegations about Roy Moore and demanded this type of misconduct end.
The Senate campaign arm of the Republican Party on Friday severed ties with Roy Moore, one day after the Washington Post reported that Moore had sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl and pursued inappropriate relationships with several other teenagers while he was a district attorney in his 30s.
In November 2014, a female member of Brown University’s debate team had oral sex with a male colleague while they watched a movie. Eleven months later, she filed a complaint with Brown, accusing him of sexual assault.
Judge Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for Alabama's upcoming special Senate election, denies allegations that he romantically pursued teenagers as young as 14 when he was in his 30s. Even if the allegations are true, one statewide elected official in Alabama said it's "much ado about nothing."…
Senate candidate Roy Moore allegedly sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl when he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney in Alabama, according to an explosive new report by the Washington Post.
My first contact with Leon Wieseltier was by letter. The year was 1977. Written on Balliol College, Oxford, letterhead stationery, the letter informed me that I was a force for superior culture in America, one of the few contemporary intellectuals worthy of respect, and through my writing the all…
My guess is that up until two weeks ago, the name of Harvey Weinstein meant little if anything to most people, including readers of this magazine.
Axios has put together this nifty series of charts detailing the timeline of sexual assault charges against Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, Roger Ailes, Donald Trump, and Bill Cosby. The charts track the dates of when the various incidents allegedly occurred relative to the years they were first…
My guess is that up until two weeks ago, the name of Harvey Weinstein meant little if anything to most people, including readers of this magazine.
This week on the Confab, senior writer Michael Warren tells why the Trump administration is sticking with the Iran nuclear deal—for now. Reporter Alice Lloyd reports on an Education Department summit about how colleges should treat accusations of student sexual assault. And senior editor Andrew…
One evening in 1984, working late in the offices of the Los Angeles Times, I was interrupted by a reporter giving a local woman a tour of the premises. The woman’s name was Judy Johnson, the reporter informed me, and she was the principal source for a story that had just broken—and had hypnotized…
Wallingford, Conn.
Wallingford, Conn.
Stockholm
Stockholm
Let's get this out of the way up top: This was, by far, Trump's most disciplined debate performance. For 32 minutes, he almost sounded like a normal presidential candidate and for the first hour he wasn't terrible. Trump even seems to have spent some time preparing. He knew the name of a Supreme…
Hillary Clinton said Donald Trump "thinks belittling women makes him bigger" and that he "goes after their dignity [and] their self-worth." Clinton went hard after the Republican nominee at the third presidential debate Wednesday, in reaction to the news that a number of women have accused Trump of…
During the election of 1940, the married Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie, gave speeches from the apartment of his editor girlfriend, Irita Van Doren (who helped write them for him), while the campaign train of President Franklin D. Roosevelt made routine stops at a certain small town in New…
The Survivors' Bill of Rights is poised to receive unanimous support in the House in the coming days, just as it did in the Senate in June. It's an uncontroversial bipartisan bill to straighten out one troublesome kink in the difficult process of treating sexual assault victims.
A lawyer for the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights said it best. At last week's National Sexual Assault Conference, OCR's Rachel Gettler called inconsistent sexual violence data collection by government agencies "a never-ending issue." She added with a chuckle, "We'll see if the…
A piece of California legislation, unanimously approved by the state assembly and just waiting for the governor's pen, would relax the definition of rape to include any non-consensual sexual contact.
Until very recently, The Scrapbook had not thought of any particular connection between Bill Cosby and Hillary Clinton. Of course, both are well known to the public—he as an entertainer, she as a politician—and they share a longtime interest in certain social issues and Democratic politics. You can…
There are two rival bills in Congress addressing campus sexual assault. A nominally bipartisan bill spearheaded by Democrats Claire McCaskill and Mark Warner focuses on heaping more requirements on schools to turn their disciplinary systems into witch-hunts. Republicans in the House of…
Washington Post reporter Nick Anderson’s response to our June 16 critique of his (and three of his colleagues’) very long front-page articles on June 12 as misleading readers about campus sexual assault is revealing, both for what it says and for what it does not.
On Monday I detailed how the Washington Post's survey claiming that one in five women have been sexually assaulted in college is deeply flawed. But there was an aspect of the survey I didn't get to, one that does not bode well for the future of relationships among students.
Outgoing Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently reported on the efforts his department has made against sexual assault within the ranks of the military. A year ago, President Obama directed Hagel to conduct a full review of progress being made, and while Hagel reported a decrease of twenty-five…
Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry was joined in the Benjamin Franklin Room at the State Department in Washington, D.C. by Catherine M. Russell, ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague for a "Discussion on Ending and Preventing Sexual Violence…
President Obama made a rather sweeping statement in his weekly address as his administration launches the White House Task Force on Protecting Students from Sexual Assault. In a show of support to victims of assault, the president said:
On Thursday, Republican senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Democratic senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri joined with several female veterans of the armed forces to speak out against a proposal that would create a new justice system for serious military prosecutions, independent of military…
National Review editorializes:
A former Democratic staffer on Capitol Hill who briefly worked in the Obama administration has been accused of "drugging and sexually assaulting women," the Washington Post reports.