Commentary: Swalwell resignation shows that the default is no longer to shame accusers

The lightning-fast downfall of Eric Swalwell is a testament to the astonishing, often-denigrated “soft power” of public shame.

Swalwell was shamed out of politics in recent days after being accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct. He ended his campaign for California governor and resigned his House seat representing a district in Northern California. Prior endorsers, funders and staff members fled. In a reversal of age-old cultural patterns, public revulsion and scrutiny focused mainly on the accusations about his behavior, and not on the women who accused him. As French women chanted outside the trial of the wife-raper Dominique Pelicot and his numerous accomplices, shame is changing sides.

No court or agency has validated or disconfirmed the women’s claims, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle and CNN. They include the serious charge that he sexually pursued and later had unwanted sex with an unnamed woman, then a 21-year-old employee in his regional office, when she was too drunk to consent. We know only her side of the story. Before resigning from Congress, Swalwell publicly acknowledged “mistakes in judgment,” apologized to his wife and vowed to fight the charges, which he called “false.” He had earlier threatened to sue the women for defamation.

But Swalwell could not erase what had been said or avoid consequences of those accusations. And, without prejudging the particulars of his case, that’s a good thing.

Far from being a useless and taboo emotion, socially inflicted shame can be a powerful source for public good. As the environmental policy professor Jennifer Jacquet argued in her 2015 book “Is Shame Necessary?”, shaming is one way that societies nonviolently enforce norms that support group survival. It can help shape how we act for the better, by providing immediate emotional consequences — embarrassment, humiliation, ridicule, disgrace, even ostracism — for behavior that inflicts harm on others. This is especially true when organs of government, such as the courts, repeatedly fail to hold wrongdoers accountable. Case in point: sexual crimes against women, widely deplored but rarely effectively prosecuted.

In his book “The Honor Code,” the philosopher (and now New York Times ethics columnist) Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that practices like foot-binding and slavery were abolished after they became subjects of shame. Videos of dolphins being crushed to death in seine-nets helped reform industrial fishing practices. The same might be said of social campaigns against drunken driving, whale hunting and Southern sheriffs turning fire hoses on Black protesters during the civil rights movement.

Something similar is afoot in sexual politics.

Until a decade ago, shame was a weapon wielded widely against female accusers to shut them up. Rich and powerful men largely dictated the public narrative. When accused of acquaintance rape or harassment, they followed a simple playbook: declare innocence or argue consent. Hire investigators to dig up dirt on the woman, and feed the findings to reporters. Watch the alleged victim retract her charges or be discredited and silenced. See the criminal case collapse or end in a mistrial, acquittal or successful appeal.

In an era when “the news” was largely defined by (male) top editors at a few gatekeeper media like the New York Times and the television networks, the tactics often worked. It is no wonder that traumatized women called such treatment “the second rape,” and that sexual assault, of all violent crimes, is the least likely to be reported to police.

Even in cases with corroborating evidence like DNA matches, wiretaps, bruising and security camera footage, woman after woman was dragged through the mud as a liar, an attention-seeker, a nutcase, a cynical participant in “transactional sex” or a blackmailer “out for a payoff.”

During the first criminal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, his attorneys called his young victims prostitutes, drug users and trailer trash. The impeccably upright Anita Hill was disparaged in the Senate as suffering from “erotomania.” The assistant hotel manager who said in 2003 that she’d been choked and sexually assaulted by basketball legend Kobe Bryant saw humiliating and irrelevant details of her prior sexual and psychological history broadcast on sports channels. The coverage generated so many death threats that she withdrew from the criminal prosecution. (Bryant later publicly apologized to her, saying he’d misunderstood the sexual encounter as mutually consensual, and he paid a civil settlement.)

In 2011, a hotel housekeeper and Guinean immigrant, Nafissatou Diallo, who told police she’d been assaulted on the job by IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was falsely called a “hooker” in a gossip column in the New York Post. (Prosecutors dropped criminal charges against Strauss-Kahn, but he paid to settle her civil suit, and so did the tabloid which unjustly defamed her.)

Now our culture is less likely to shame and discredit women who say they’ve been victimized, and more likely to shame powerful men who are credibly accused by multiple women.

Little by little, as women inched their way into decision-making positions in the news business, the focus of shaming changed. The internet loosened the legacy media’s monopoly on defining truth. In 2015, New York magazine photo director Jody Quon harnessed the social power of shaming for the public good by featuring on its cover stark, dignified black-and-white portraits of 35 women who maintained they’d been sexually victimized by the comedian Bill Cosby. The story went viral, and three years later Cosby was convicted of indecent assault against one woman (a conviction later overturned on procedural grounds). Other stories, spearheaded by dogged female reporters such as Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at the New York Times, exposed the nefarious sexual careers of Epstein and Harvey Weinstein.

Oh how the mighty have fallen. The drip-drip-drip of public ridicule has tarred many former masters of the universe and hangers-on at Epstein’s mansion. Their shameless, fawning emails thanking him for designer handbags, or requesting dating advice or top-drawer pajamas in the correct size, are displayed for all the world to see.

To be sure, shame can be counterproductive. We are herd animals, and banishment from the herd, even temporarily, is emotionally devastating. As the saying goes: A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on. That is why we have courts, due process and sober systems of fact-finding — none of which have yet rendered any verdict about Swalwell. It’s also why it’s crucial to reintegrate wrongdoers into society after they are held accountable — something we routinely fail to do, especially with the Black and poor.

Cruel, inappropriately directed shame can blight the lives of people outed for harmless traits such as being gay. In other cases, shame is ineffective: Some people, such as President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, are seemingly immune to shaming no matter what accusations, evidence and felony convictions pile up against them.

But when victims band together against a genuine evildoer operating with impunity, shame can arm the weak against the strong. It can force bad actors to face emotional consequences when courts fail. Perhaps, in time, it might make us a less rape-tolerant society.

For centuries, a small proportion of men — men we now call serial offenders — have sexually exploited and assaulted women because they knew society would usually let them get away with it. Many of them simultaneously sought public adulation. If the threat of humiliation discourages only a few of the next generation of Weinsteins and Epsteins — and they are out there already, operating in the shadows — shame will have proved its value.

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Journalist Katy Butler is the author of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” and “The Art of Dying Well.”