The Daily - A Mother Talks to Her Sons About Brett Kavanaugh

Episode Date: December 28, 2018

This week, “The Daily” is revisiting some of our favorite episodes of the year and checking in on what has happened since the stories first ran. In October, we sat down with a group of teenage girls in Brooklyn to talk about their reaction to the accusations against Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. After that conversation aired, we received dozens of emails from listeners who wanted to hear the same questions posed to a group of boys. Guests: Ann Powers, a listener in Oregon, interviewed her two sons and one of their friends. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. This week, The Daily is revisiting our favorite episodes of the year, listening back, and then hearing what's happened in the time since they first ran. Today, a new episode, inspired by one of those shows, about one of the biggest stories of the year, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. At the center of that process

was the accusation from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her when they were in high school, an accusation he denied. Their closely watched testimony fueled a national debate about who is believed and who is blamed.

It's Friday, December 28th. Am I too close to you? No? In October, I sat down with a group of teenage girls in Brooklyn to discuss their reaction to his confirmation hearings. You know, I have friends that have had something like this happen to them or worse. And they have only gone to me and a select group of people about it because of the fear that nobody's going to believe them, that their parents are going to be angry at them for whatever reason.

I'm curious what you think as high schoolers, should what you do now, should what anyone in high school does now follow you around for the rest of your life? Yes. Because I feel like, like obviously high school is like a rite of passage and you've got to make mistakes and learn your way through it, but there are certain things that it's just like sexual misconduct. That kind of stuff follows the victims forever. And if it follows the victims forever, well, then you've got to deal with it too, since it's your fault, you know what I mean? After we originally aired this conversation,

we received dozens of emails from listeners who wanted to hear the same questions, this time posed to a group of boys. Okay, thanks guys for being here. One of those emails came from a woman named Ann Powers, who lives in Oregon and offered to record a conversation with her two sons and one of their friends over the Thanksgiving holiday. So the Daily asked me to ask you a few starter questions. Tell me your names, how old you are,

what your relationship is to each other, and describe, just do a little description of yourself. My name is Zach, I'm 13 years old, and I'm in eighth grade. I like to play sports, I like to play video games. I also like to drum, I'm in a band with my friend Elliot. I'm Elliot. I'm Zach's friend. I'm also 13 and in eighth grade. And yeah, we're in a band and that's pretty cool. And I'm Patrick. I'm 20. I'm Zach's older brother and I'm a second year student at Oberlin College.

All right. Did any of you watch the testimony, either her testimony or his? Yeah. I watched Dr. Ford's testimony before school, and I thought she sounded very sincere. It did seem like she was traumatized and uh and i understand why she came forward uh but part of me was um a little confused why it took her so long to come forward and i understand traumatized but if you want especially if you want someone to go down for especially with something bad they did to you doing it sooner rather than later is the better move and it's it's not just about your personal comfort zone because if he's still out there he can go on to do it to more girls i mean some people there maybe

he was just drunk but there are serial rapists or he didn't actually rape her but it gets to a point where it's not just about how you feel it's kind of about like looking out for everyone in my opinion at least well i know she was um describing a scene where judge cavanaugh and his friends were kind of like cornered her and got her into like a bedroom at a party and I feel like I was really moved by her bravery in coming forward with the story and yeah. Were kids talking about it at your school? Yeah. Yeah. We live in a more conservative area so most kids in my school were saying Dr. Ford, her testimony was fake, that it didn't actually happen, she was lying, she was stuttering in her testimony. The majority of kids in my school were saying Brett Kavanaugh was innocent. That's also what the majority of kids in my school said.

About half, for the girls, it's about half and half. And basically the teacher showed a clip of some of their testimonies and we were talking about what we thought. And one of the girls brought up like how something about christy ford and then like half the boys in the back just yelled like fake fake yeah like that and i think that it shouldn't be enough to ruin his career just one woman coming forward saying that he raped her because they tried to i mean there was an fbi investigation the people in power did say, hey, we want an FBI investigation.

And they weren't able to find much. I mean, they were able to find quotes in his yearbook and they were able to, like, they found out there were other people there, but none of those people were able to say anything that they remembered. We'll be right back. Anne Powers offered to record a conversation with her two sons and one of their friends about one of the biggest stories of the year, the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Okay, let's talk about Kavanaugh's testimony.

You guys all saw at least some of his testimony, right? Right. And what did you think of it? He seemed very defensive. And if you want to, I don't know what happened. I'm not going to say he did it. I'm not going to say he didn't. But if you want to convince people don't know what happened. I'm not going to say he did it. I'm not going to say he didn't. But if you want to convince people that he didn't do it,

I don't think, like, the way he presented himself, it was very, I don't know. It made me more likely to believe that he did it. Oh, really? That's interesting. Yeah, just the way he was very. A little too defensive. Yeah, a little too defensive. Kind of, like like throwing in stuff when

he didn't need to i could understand where he's coming from at some point and uh especially though if you're you know about to get your dream job and then some you know so you've been working hard your whole life something comes along your way to mess that all up i understand why he would be so defensive right yeah but i mean there is a saying innocent until proven guilty so i'm not gonna assume if he did it i my position on that is pretty neutral but i just think i think he he could have handled it yeah i don't know i feel like the to me it was just so like it gave me this really gross feeling and my other is just it was just gross all over because the way he was talking yeah because it was like the whole thing of um oh you know i i hung out

with my friends with my boys and he had like his calendar with his friends like nicknames right from from back in the day and he was like my my boys and I were just out there like having a good time bonding doing guy stuff like just guys being dudes right and then tied into that is the indignation that he seemed to feel around um the assumption that anything could disqualify him for this job right like I know you guys are talking about, oh, you know, I can understand, like, where he's coming from, he's about to get his dream job.

And to me, it was just like, wow, this guy has absolutely no doubt in his mind that he somehow deserves this job, that this belongs to him already, and that everything should be just a formality. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Do you think that what you do right now and what you do in high school and college, should you be held accountable for that for the rest of your lives?

I think that if you rape someone or commit a serious crime like that, then, yeah, I think it should stick with you because by high school you know you're gaining that awareness um kind of like being able to judge your actions and like stuff like that but i don't think that like a tweet that you make should be able to ruin your career later on in life like it does for a lot of athletes or like a video that surfaces of you because it gets to the point where it's just people looking to ruin your career right people find out you raped someone that's different but to just say oh look i found this video or i found this tweet it's like it's kind of just like you

need to mind your own business and stop getting offended well what about the video of trump the video okay yeah no i mean that that makes sense but like well i mean when you're mean, when you're, I think when you're a president, it's different. But I don't think that that should have been, like, if, say, he were applying for a job, I don't think that that should have been able to really, like, disqualify him. I think it should have because, I mean, it could have harassed him and in the workplace. I guess it's looking at the implications that it has, right? It's like... I think if he truly regrets it and he's sorry for what he said and he's you

know he's changed his ways because that video is very old then then that's very different but it didn't appear that he had changed much do you know of any boys who have been accused of sexual attacks or sexual harassment um and rightly or wrongly accused? I do, actually, myself. And last year, I was in seventh grade, I had a pretty ugly breakup with a girl. And after that, you know, a couple days later, the principal calls me in the office and said, this girl, you know, she came forward and said that you sexually harassed her, that you touched her inappropriately or making inappropriate remarks.

And at that point it was kind of a he said versus she said situation and after that you know her friends came forward and said like oh yeah he did this to me too and it even got worse than that because um no one was you know blaming the victim by school you know everyone's you know shaming on me saying all that stuff then just to be clear you did not do it i it. I did not do it. So you were falsely accused. I was falsely accused, yes. Okay. People thought it was funny.

Girls were giggling about it. They thought it was like a joke to like do it and it was funny. And at that point, looking at half the student body, the female student body, versus just me as one guy, like that's where the whole Me Too movement, I feel like that's kind of what's wrong because you can just get a bunch of people because you'd be surprised what people do for attention. I've kind of experienced that firsthand. But that's what made my seventh grade year in middle school just complete.

It's awful. How do you prove you didn't do something? How do you prove you did? Yeah. And, I mean, at some point the uh you know the principal checked the cameras and all that it was cool and I turned out to be yeah it was innocent I didn't I didn't get in trouble with it you know the school but um you know but then there's points where I was just like I didn't want to go to school I was scared to go to school yeah I was figuring out how can

I walk home avoiding these people it It sucked having to go through that. But the big part of it for me was that it just made me really sad. You know, a bunch of women use their power like that. Some of them, you know, help out a friend. Some of them are angry. Some of them, you know, they just thought it was funny. And it just kind of makes me sad. Does it make you not trust girls as much?

It definitely does. And it's kind of bad because when there are to is it doesn't make you not trust girls as much it definitely does and it's kind of bad because when there are real situations where that stuff does happen people don't believe them yeah if what people don't believe them it's kind of like the boy who cried wolf situation so you also had a bad middle school experience with girls didn't you yeah i had a bad middle school experience in general. I doubt that very many people had awesome middle school experiences. Why don't you tell your, if you're willing to, tell your girl middle school experience. Yeah, so this was my seventh grade year. Also, there was a girl who I really liked and who, like, it wasn't really a secret.

And then one day she asked me out and i was like so happy right because i was like this kind of unpopular seventh grader and whatever um and i was really pumped and then like a week a week went by and stuff was really weird and then one of the other girls in the class i think kind of took pity on me and told me like her friends had put her up to it like had dared her to ask me out as a joke um and i was just like crushed because i looked so you know i had such this huge crush on this girl and i was so sad and then after that they created a fake facebook account to pretending to be some random girl on the internet who was who was like into me um and then I found out that it was fake uh because I

googled like stock photos of like it was like the second photo I was like wait a minute something's not right uh so but no did you ever figure out who did it oh totally yeah no it was the same girls it was the same girls um how did you handle that? I mean, I was really hurt. And it definitely stung my trust in girls for a while. And I think the immediate thing that I did was fall back on girls suck, girls are mean, they're liars, they're blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada. And I think in middle school, when a lot of the girls are being super mean to a lot of the boys um and you have that negative experience it can sort of set you on this path that shoots you out as a you know 20 22 year old that is just really bitter sexist misogynistic

like really bad stuff but they have a reason too but they and they have a reason that is from seventh or eighth grade they haven't had a positive experience that pulls them out of it i don't think it should be a thing that it's expected oh this is going to happen in middle school it will get better that it shouldn't be a thing that happens in the first place this is one of the reasons why you know there's a controversy between genders This is one of the reasons why, you know, there's a controversy between genders and why some men are, you know, angry and they can be sexist towards women. I also was sort of thinking while you were talking, I think the reason why I was able to move past that stuff that happened in middle school is that I stayed in school with that group of people for a few years and a few years later they we were pretty close friends and they apologized repeatedly for the way that they had acted in middle school and I think that

hearing that from them and watching those people evolve and go through legitimate character growth and then apologize for the way that they had been earlier in our lives kind of let me move past that yeah well we've talked for a long time we should probably wrap things up um you know i'm hoping i'm raising boys and I'm hoping to raise you to be honorable, kind, strong men. And it's a real question. Like, what do you do when you get falsely accused? What is the high road for you as boys and men? You know, I'm, I'm worried that these Brett Kavanaugh hearings are teaching boys a bad lesson, what I think is a wrong lesson, which is that if you make a mistake and somebody accuses you of it, what's the right thing to do? If you've actually made a mistake, you've treated somebody badly,

what's the right thing to do when they accuse you? Well, i think it depends on the severity of what you're being accused of the way it ties in with a relation to the situation um so yeah if you're accused of rape oh well i don't know anything if you're accused of anything and you've done it what's generically for you what's the right thing to do but that's what i think i think it's different i think if that maybe say that you let's think of something that's rather innocent you drank the last of the milk when i told you not to right okay say that i did that yeah see that i did that but it were five years later um and the cops had come because I had been drunk driving. No.

And then you went, oh, yeah, Elliot does have a tendency to drink things. Like, when he drank the milk. Keep going. I'm with you. Like, when he drank the milk five years ago. And I think, like, I don't know. It just seems to me like that's not needed. Okay.

That's a very funny example. But I think there is a generic rule that I would hope that you boys already know this. When you make a mistake, you need to apologize for it. You need to own up to it. You need to own up to what you did. You need to apologize for it. You need to do what you can to own up to it you need to own up to what you did you need to apologize for it you need to do what you can to make it right and then you need to take steps to make sure that you don't do it again right so those are the four steps that should be in your back pocket anytime you

make a mistake those are the four things you should do and you should be able to do them graciously because you will make mistakes and some of them are dumb mistakes some of them are minor mistakes sometimes you'll you make mistakes that really hurt people and um maybe you can't make it right it's tough so it's harder when you're wrongfully accused or Don't be Brett Kavanaugh. Yeah, don't scream and shout. It's okay It's that's one of the things though. Like I don't think he should have acted like that But I understand why it's it's hard not to I mean, I know when I was falsely accused I was very upset and I I was yelling I was always being hyster was being hysterical.

And looking back, I probably should have been more calm about it. But I can see why you would act like that. Yeah. And I think it's really hard when you're falsely accused. I don't have that nice little formula of four steps for when you're falsely accused. What do you do? formula of four steps for when you're falsely accused, what do you do? Um, Alia and Zach, do you have any last words before we wrap up? Uh, no, I don't think so. Zach? No. Nope. All right. We're done. Thanks for talking. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday. Plus, plus your first month free.

It's a good deal. To learn more, visit nytimes.com slash thedailyoffer. That's nytimes.com slash thedailyoffer. And thank you.