If you think women in Hollywood have it bad, or those who worked for the New Republic’s former literary editor Leon Wieseltier, or MSNBC’s Mark Halperin, try serving while female in the military. There, Harvey Weinsteins abound, stalking the barracks with near impunity. Reprisals are more likely than justice, and perpetrators get promoted before they get prosecuted.
It’s worse than the casting couch, a newsroom or Silicon Valley. In civilian life, as damaging to a career as it might be to flee a predatory colleague or boss, you can, in fact, flee. Few do, of course. Instead, most women develop interpersonal coping mechanisms to let the jerk know he’d better quit while stopping short of wounding his ego to the point where he retaliates. The skill should be taught in business school.
Post-Weinstein, thousands of women are sharing their experiences on social media using the #metoo hashtag. If enough women speak up, others won’t be so scared of being slut-shamed if they do. Non-disclosure agreements are being questioned as everyone wonders what exactly former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly could have done to pay out a record $32 million.
And this is just a guess, but I’d bet something close to that sum that fewer men are holding business meetings in their hotel rooms.
But in military life, the old saw “you’re in the Army now” applies. There’s no Option B. Once Uncle Sam gets you, you are there for the duration of your tour, no matter how horrendous your treatment. You often don’t get to go home at night, and you report the attack knowing you may end up in a foxhole or other close quarters alone, with your fellow soldiers angry that some fragile flower has ruined esprit de corps for everyone.
A recent study by USA Today showed how the system rots from the top. Its investigation documented at least 500 cases of serious misconduct, largely sexual, among its generals, admirals and senior civilians that slides by until someone cries foul.
The list is long, so hunker down. There was a promiscuous Army general who led a swinging lifestyle at strip clubs using his official credit card. Another general had an affair and then, without a place to live when it ended, moved in with a defense contractor, a situation the Army saw nothing wrong with until the USA Today report.
Gen. Joseph Harrington, in charge of forces in Africa (Niger, anyone?), badgered the wife of an enlisted man with increasingly offensive emails: “Make up sex is fun.” “I’d enjoy being in a tent with U.” “U can be my nurse,” to quote a few. U get the drift. When sexting got old, he asked if they could get together, all the while asking her to please delete their emails. She didn’t, and when they became public, Harrington was cashiered out.
Harrington is an outlier. Military justice remains an oxymoron. The most recent Defense Department report estimated there were approximately 15,000 sexual assaults in 2016, with 6,000 victims willing to report them, a slight uptick in the number of women willing to run the gauntlet.
At the same time, the ability to hold people accountable decreased, with only 389 courts martial and 124 convictions. Eight out of 10 survivors did not have enough confidence in the system to seek justice.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s been trying to correct that since 2013 when, as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on personnel, she called the first hearings on the subject since an inquiry into the Air Force Academy scandal in 2003. “The Invisible War,” a riveting Oscar-nominated documentary on sexual assaults at the elite Marine barracks in Washington, had just come out. And Congress couldn’t turn away from the infamous case of Lt. Col. James Wilkerson.
An ace fighter pilot at Aviano Air Base in Italy, he was accused by Kimberly Hanks, a house guest and civilian contractor, of waking and assaulting her at three in the morning, with his wife in the next room. When Mrs. Wilkerson heard the ruckus, she threw Hanks out in the in the middle of the night, in the middle of nowhere, with only one shoe. Hanks’ defense attorney, Don Christensen, a celebrated third-generation Air Force officer who’s handled more sexual assault courts martial than anyone, got his conviction. Wilkerson was dismissed from the Air Force and sentenced to a year in prison.
But then the powers that be weighed in. Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin overturned the conviction, reinstated Wilkerson, consulted with him about what he’d like to do next, and gave him a promotion.
That’s when Christensen snapped. He’d been watching men of high rank routinely get off (he defended as well as prosecuted). In 70 years, not one Air Force general had ever been prosecuted for anything, despite the improbability of there being no occasion to do so.
He watched as women coming forward were considered liars until proven otherwise, and then maybe not even then. The few victims who make it to court find they sit on the quiet side of the courtroom while character witnesses and boosters of the accused crowd benches behind the defense. There’s little deterrence when those guilty as charged lose only one star and keep most of their pay.
And so, here were are: Despite Christensen’s efforts and Gillibrand’s, you are still more likely to be sexually attacked in the military by someone you know than in a dark alley at home and without the protections of your local police precinct. It’s a closed system where the hunter and hunted work in close quarters and a power imbalance means the victim may have to salute her attacker the next day.
Although commanding officers are no longer permitted to quietly move perpetrators from base to base, like bishops inflicting abusive priests on unsuspecting parishes, a victim getting a transfer is a hurry-up-and-wait process.
Retaliation is now a crime but not prosecuted, so that 59% of those who report assaults state that they are disbelieved, given bad assignments and shunned. One witness testified that every woman is warned that the most dangerous place on base is the secluded path to the latrines, giving new meaning to the advice do not go gently into that dark night.
As with the opioid epidemic, politicians love to talk about the crisis but are not agreed on what to do about it. Gillibrand’s solution – moving cases to an independent tribunal outside and separate from the chain of command — is still not law. The day before the first vote in 2013, as if the Senate was in a made-for-TV movie, a top Army prosecutor was suspended over allegations he had groped a subordinate. The bill was filibustered to death.
The best argument for a separate system is the 2012 administrative complaint of Air Force Technical Sgt. Jennifer Smith. She served with distinction for 17 years in Iraq, Kuwait, Korea and Germany, and for 17 years worked in an environment that debased women: pornographic screen savers on government computers, lewd official fight songs, and a “Wingman’s Handbook” with instructions on how to pair up to get women (their fellow service members) drunk or drugged and have your way with them. Smith stated that the sexual assault she endured was an extension of a culture so endemic that “even good officers wanting to do the right thing cannot or will not help.”
Her general, like most of the others, did not have the legal training, objectivity, or any business deciding whether a report should go higher, or die on his desk. Hers went nowhere. Most of her allegations were corroborated but only six officers, whose names were not made public, received disciplinary action that amounted to little more than letters of admonishment.
Statistics prove that there are thousands of Smiths caught in the chain of command, not helped by it. But as surely as the crocuses come up every spring, so does Gillibrand’s amendment to defeat. This year it died when Sen. Mitch McConnell called for cloture.
The dire situation hasn’t escaped the attention of President Trump, but not for the good. Back in 2013, Trump tweeted, “26,000 unreported sexual assults in the military-only 238 convictions,” followed by lesson learned: “What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
Should the geniuses expect that nude photos of female Marines, complete with names and units, would be shared earlier this year via a Facebook group called Marines United, a group of 30,000 mostly active-duty Marines? Not really.
Oddly, what to do doesn’t cut clean along party — Republicans Sens. Charles Grassley, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz vote with Gillibrand — or gender lines. Democrat Sen. Claire McCaskill shares her friend’s concern but not her solution.
A former prosecutor, McCaskill believes you can’t reform the system by going around the command structure; you have to reform the command structure. That difference has made for years of point-counterpoint press conferences, fact checks and fact checks of fact checks (the Pentagon’s stats are maddeningly difficult to parse), plus arm-twisting of colleagues for support.
Women stick together on the Hill, and McCaskill found herself isolated from her sisters with her opposition. But in achieving incremental reforms, McCaskill has a lot to crow about: stripping the ability of commanders to overturn guilty verdicts (no more Wilkersons), requiring those convicted to be discharged, and providing victims with better legal representation.
And McCaskill may have the future on her side. More and more, the colonel behind the door deciding what goes to trial, and doesn’t, won’t be Smith’s superior office singing offensive ditties along with his airmen, but a woman.
Gillibrand applauds McCaskill but remains convinced that the chain of command issue is not a discrete one, but one that infects the whole process. She makes a Biblical analogy, “It’s like your brother committing the sexual assault and having your father decide whether to prosecute.”
It’s true that like Solomon, commanders are roiled by competing loyalties: to duty and fairness for sure and to their young recruits, but also to their stodgy lieutenants from an earlier era, and to their human need to kick back for a drink with peers at the Officers’ Club. No legislation can regulate those cascading forces, or human nature, but lawmakers have to try.
The culture, military and civilian, seems impossible to change until it does. In the aftermath of the Weinstein earthquake, there’s been a seismic shift in the workplace. There was a new O’Reilly victim; director James Toback, whose body count is up to over 300 women abused; Wieseltier, who lost his magazine funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs; and then superstar political scribe Mark Halperin, author of the best selling “Game Change” and star of Showtime’s “The Circus.”
What’s surprising is not only that women have been emboldened to unburden themselves after all these years but that men are really, finally, really being disciplined for what they did. MSNBC said that “Halperin is leaving his role as a contributor until the questions around his past conduct are fully understood,” an understanding growing by the minute as more subordinates come forward.
The quick censure, the acceptance of guilty, the remorse with which these new revelations are met may signal a new day in civilian life. In the military, the same conduct will still just as likely earn you a promotion, followed by a series of respectful salutes.
Carlson was the first woman columnist at Time magazine and a panelist on CNN’s “Capital Gang” for 15 years. She now writes for the Daily Beast.
