On Oct. 21, 2021, comedian, leftist, and former Minnesota Senator Al Franken said something future historians might consider as marking a low point in American civilization. During an interview with Los Angeles Times journalist Jackie Calmes, Franken brought up the 2018 speech Senator Susan Collins gave in defense of Brett Kavanaugh and due process. Sounding irritated, Franken dismissed the Collins’ speech as “some convoluted thing where at the end it’s something about ‘the presumption of innocence.’” (See the 33.00-minute mark of this video.)

Ah yes, that “convoluted thing” we call due process and, along with it, the presumption of innocence—formerly known as the bedrock principles of the American judicial system. After an extended trial period of abandonment, with terrifying results over the last decade or more, it seems those convoluted things may be making a comeback. Still, it’s horrifying to realize just how close the country came to full banana republic behavior before seeming to regain our moral and constitutional sense.

Talking to Politico recently, Mike Davis, a former senate GOP aide and current Trump supporter, spelled out what is happening. We are entering, as Politico put it, “a post-Kavanaugh standard.” No more accusing someone of a crime and declaring them guilty without evidence or proof, as was being done to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for the Secretary of Defense.

“In order to disqualify a qualified cabinet nominee, you have to come forward,” Davis told Politico. “The burden is on the accuser to come forward with clear and convincing evidence that they’re not fit for the current job based upon their prior misconduct. It has to be testimony and not innuendo. It has to be testimony, not anonymous sources.” Added Davis, “You make an allegation, and then Kavanaugh is guilty until he proves his innocence? I said, ‘[Forget] that. We’re gonna do the American presumption of innocence.’”

No sooner had Davis completed that Politico interview than the exotic dancer, Crystal Mangum, who once accused three Duke University lacrosse players of raping her admitted that she invented the 2006 allegations. Mangum, who is now in prison serving time for second-degree murder, said she “made up a story that wasn’t true” against one-time defendants David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann who “didn’t deserve that.” Soon after the Mangum story broke, it was reported that ABC News and their top anchor George Stephanopoulos reached a settlement with Donald Trump in his defamation suit. ABC News will pay $15 million to Trump for falsely calling him a rapist. The network will also pay $1 million to cover Trump’s attorney fees. 

Things are finally changing. The devils of Loudun are being exorcized.

Over the past six years I have written a lot about the Kavanaugh hearing, including here at Chronicles and in a book called The Devil’s Triangle. I was a classmate of Kavanaugh’s in high school in the 1980s, and in the 2018 confirmation hearings for his appointment to the Supreme Court, I was accused of drugging girls, gang rape, and being in the room when a woman named Christine Blasey Ford claims she was attacked by Kavanaugh in 1982. I have been criticized for writing too much about it, but I always pressed ahead because there was one glaring and unresolved issue: the question of due process. I have written about the subject because I could not rest until I had assurance that due process would be restored in America—that what happened to me and Brett would never happen to anyone else.

The details, some of which even many conservatives are not aware, are crucial here. When faced with a nominee they don’t like—basically anyone to the right of Bernie Sanders—the left finds a way to make accusations of sexual misconduct. Here is the important part: These accusations are often completely fabricated and amount to criminal attempts at extortion. This is what they did to me.

The plan was to get me, a former drinker, to pin some crazy stuff on Kavanaugh whether any of it was true or not. This is why when Ronan Farrow called me in September 2018 and asked about me “and Brett Kavanaugh involved in sexual misconduct in the 1980s” he was so vague. I was accused by Farrow of doing something bad, somewhere, to someone, at some time during a 10-year period. That left room to extort me because I was given no facts to deny. They could claim I was anywhere at any time and then demand I sink my friend—or else.

On Sept. 24, 2018, I got a phone message from a sinister voice. “You like f**king with people?” it hissed. “I like to f**k with people too. Give me a call. We can work out a deal.” On Sept. 26, my lawyer asked me to come into her office. I sat down and she asked a direct question: “Who did you lose your virginity to?” Apparently, there was someone claiming that “in the context of a conversation about losing virginity” I’d talked about how I had lost mine. I’d lost mine, the claim was, in a group sex situation that may or may not have been rape. Among others, Jane Mayer, The New Yorker reporter who fell for the Russia collusion hoax, went on MSNBC to claim that as kids “while at Georgetown Prep” some friends and I had group sex with an older woman. Mayer is now the lead hound in the media dogpile going after Pete Hegseth. In the end, I had to tell my lawyer the name of the girl to whom I had lost my virginity. Fortunately, the woman in question is a terrific person, a wife and mother now, and I can only assume she vouched for me because I never heard about it again.

Again, this is criminal behavior, the purpose of which is to humiliate and extort—which is why the FBI background check into Brett during the hearings ended abruptly. They found out what was going on.

For example, there was another woman who said that Brett and I were “present” at parties where gang rapes were taking place claimed she was victimized at one of these parties. This person was subsequently featured in all major media and interviewed by Kate Snow of NBC News. She also said she filed a police report. Jackie Calmes, a journalist at The Los Angeles Times and the woman to whom Al Franken was expressing his disdain for the concept of due process in the quote above, tried to find that police report.

Towards the end of her book Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court, Calmes reveals what happened when she tried to uncover that police report: “County officials never did search for any police filing. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including [her lawyer Michael] Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through three thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so but rescinded the work order when [the accuser], in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.” Of course, this damning fact was buried at the end of a poor-selling book. This woman’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, is now in jail for—wait for it—extortion.

The reason for bringing all of this up is to, once and for all, kill the left’s meretricious claim that every nomination for a government position is somehow “a job interview” and that, therefore, there is no need for things like the Fifth Amendment or due process. As the dorky and malevolent Dahlia Lithwick recently argued in Slate: “This is a cynical attempt to graft a concept from criminal law—where the government faces a high burden before it can convict and imprison a defendant—onto a legislative proceeding that is, in essence, a job interview. It’s an effort to exempt Hegseth and other nominees from any meaningful scrutiny. It affords no legal process to an accuser and an infinite presumption of innocence to the nominee. It’s a rhetorical device, not a legal principle.”

I can only answer that hogwash by recalling a ghastly memory from 2018. Brett Kavanaugh and I were being flogged night and day in the media, accused fordoing all kinds of horrible things (including in states I have never even visited), and the liberals were still claiming we deserved no constitutional protections because we were talking about “a job interview.” I’ll never forget seeing a clip from CBS News where the anchors were making the “just-a-job-interview” argument, only to be interrupted by a lawyer who was on the panel: “Well, you do realize that Judge and Kavanaugh have been accused of multiple felonies?” Felonies. The anchors had no response. Kavanaugh and I easily could have been charged, arrested, and stood trial for their version of a “job interview.”

Yet because the media is filled with people who have no character, it’s not surprising that Dahlia Lithwick, the Slate hack who in 2018 was so “traumatized” by the fact that Kavanaugh was confirmed she couldn’t even do her job, has subsequently defended two people who have been accused—credibly and with evidence—of sexual misconduct. She has also attempted to shame the victims of this sexual harassment. In her book Lady Justice: Women, the Law, and the Battle to Save America, Lithwick celebrates crusading feminist lawyer Roberta Kaplan, who had to resign from Time’s Up due to a “conflict.” So who is Roberta Kaplan, and what was her conflict? Let’s check The New York Times:

The fallout from a damaging report that found Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women widened on Monday when Roberta A. Kaplan, a nationally prominent lawyer with ties to the governor, resigned from Time’s Up, the organization founded by Hollywood women to fight sexual abuse and promote gender equality.

Ms. Kaplan, the chairwoman of Time’s Up and the co-founder of its legal defense fund, was one of several prominent figures whom the report found to be involved in an effort to discredit one of Mr. Cuomo’s alleged victims, and she has continuing legal ties to a former Cuomo aide accused of leading that effort.

Dahlia Lithwick, a woman who was so badly shaken that she couldn’t return to work after the Kavanaugh hearing—a hearing which produced not the slightest evidence that Brett had ever met Christine Blasey Ford, much less been involved in gang rapes—valorized Roberta Kaplan, who according to The New York Times and official reports was “found to be involved in an effort to discredit one of Mr. [Andrew] Cuomo’s alleged victims.”

There’s more. As part of her promotional tour, Lithwick did an extended interview with her old friend Al Franken. Franken, a former Saturday Night Live writer and personality, resigned from the Senate in 2017 amid accusations he had been involved in sexual misconduct. There were eight accusations in total, including from Leeann Tweeden, a radio news anchor, who says Franken groped and forcibly kissed her during a USO tour in 2006, before the former comedian was a senator.

Tweeden says Franken “aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth” when the pair rehearsed a skit that featured a kiss. A photo emerged showing Franken looking at a camera while pretending to grab Tweeden’s breasts as she was sleeping. According to Vox, “Franken apologized repeatedly but said he wasn’t sure if he’d done the things he was sorry might have happened. ‘I take thousands and thousands of pictures, sometimes in chaotic and crowded situations,” he said. “I can’t say I haven’t done that. I’m very sorry if these women experienced that.’”

Although he tried to shame Susan Collins about her legal scruples, Franken no doubt appreciated that “convoluted thing” called due process when he needed it.