RUTHFULLY YOURS

In December 2017, the #MeToo movement claimed Judge Alex Kozinski, widely recognized as one of the most brilliant judges on the Ninth Circuit. Kozinski was also a libertarian in an activist circuit. Ironically, it now turns out that his close friend, the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a judicial activist, was the real sexual harasser.

At the #MeToo movement’s height, around fifteen women claimed that Kozinski, a Romanian-born child of Holocaust survivors, had sexually harassed them. Their charges ranged from his showing female clerks pornography, to using trying to read a hidden label name tag as an excuse to touch the woman’s breast, to kissing both male and female lawyers on the cheeks.

An interesting aspect of Kozinski’s departure was that one of the main people to help push him out was Heidi Bond, who alleged that Kozinski showed her pornography on the office computer, asked inappropriate questions, and was generally abusive to her.

Bond was in the news again in December 2019 because of her alternative career as bestselling romance novelist Courtney Milan. The Romance Writers of America kick Bond out after she used social media to accuse other romance novelists of racism. Bond, who is half Chinese, wrote on Twitter that one novelist’s 1999 work was a “f**king racist mess.”

While conceding that she not read the book, Bond found offensive the way the novel described its Chinese heroine. It was a vicious attack against a book that tried to write with sympathy (whether successfully or not) about a different culture two decades before “cultural appropriation” was a thing. Bond’s role in two attacks from the left, one against a judge and the other against an author, doesn’t mean that her accusations were wrong. Still, her commitment to identity politics is noteworthy.

The real irony is that the truly vile judge on the Ninth Circuit wasn’t Kozinski, it was Judge Stephen Reinhardt, an activist judge and an icon of the left. Although Reinhardt died in 2018, a House Judiciary subcommittee heard testimony on Thursday about Reinhardt’s incredibly abusive, demeaning conduct towards Oliva Warren, a female clerk:

The allegations in Warren’s testimony are downright shocking. Here are some of the worst ones:

• The alleged harassment began on the very first day Warren began work as a clerk for Reinhardt. In her testimony, she indicated on that day she came across a sine chart with “two round dots to the top of the curves such that the chart resembled a woman’s breasts.” Reinhardt added the dots.
  Her testimony continues, “In addition to emphasizing how proud he was of the nipples he had drawn on the chart and confirming that he and the clerk had made it, he asked me a question about whether or not it was ‘accurate.’ Based on his tone and demeanor, I understood his question to be asking whether or not the drawing looked like my breasts.”
• Warren also testified that Reinhardt would she her photos of female law clerk applicants and say “which candidate was more attractive and which candidate had nicer or longer legs.”
• She testified that the judge “routinely and frequently made disparaging statements about my physical appearance, my views about feminism and women’s rights, and my relationship with my husband (including our sexual relationship).”
  “Often, these remarks included expressing surprise that I even had a husband because I was not a woman who any man would be attracted to. In that vein, Judge Reinhardt often speculated that my husband must be a ‘wimp,’ or possibly gay,” Warren testified. “Judge Reinhardt would use both words and gestures to suggest that my ‘wimp’ husband must either lack a penis, or not be able to get an erection in my presence.”
• [snip]
• Warren attempted to engage Reinhardt on the subject of sexual harassment by describing sexual harassment she’s experienced, Reinhardt “became enraged.”
  “He yelled at me to stop speaking, and said that none of what I had just said was true. He explained to me that I had never been sexually harassed because no one had ever been sexually attracted to me.”
  “He said that to the extent that I believed I was sexually harassed, it was because men wanted to silence me and used harassment to do so—which, he added, was within their rights to free speech.”

While Reinhardt’s conduct is gross, it’s consistent with the hypocrisy that infuses progressivism. By preening about their political virtue, leftists, especially powerful men, believe that they have a pass to behave badly. Because Leftists have abandoned traditional norms, all that they have to fall back on is the hope of goodwill from each other. Sadly, it turns out that there’s very little of that to go around.