When it can still make you cry

It’s been a long time since I’ve been as thrown by a piece of reporting as I was in the middle of today when, after a lengthy morning meeting, I settled down at my computer and read about Cesar Chavez.

I have written a lot over the years about sexual harassment and sexual assault, considered individual and systemic angles on these behaviors; reported on the anger and freedom of finally telling long-buried stories, and also the fear and grief of cold backlash against those who’ve spoken up. I am not surprised by allegations of harassment or assault, nor am I reflexively persuaded by every one of them. I don’t entertain carceral revenge fantasies, nor do I believe that we live in a world that is close to demanding other forms of accountability from abusers. I don’t think that sexual abuse is the purview of any party or ideology and I know that people who are heroes of mine might just as easily turn out to be abusers as some of my personal villains. I know that many people who have been abused often punish themselves for not speaking out sooner, and I know that those who do speak out often wind up punished professionally, socially and economically.

During 2017 and 2018, I was among the many reporters whose inboxes were flooded by accounts of assault allegedly perpetrated by famous people and unknown people, CEOs and artists and coaches and babysitters, many but not all of them men. A huge majority of those allegations would never get fully reported in any outlet, in many cases because they couldn’t be responsibly and securely documented; in some cases because neither the accused nor the accusers were well known enough; and also because to try to tell each story, or even most of them, would be like trying to account for all the drops of water in the oceans. The scope of the alleged harms was too vast to even wrap one’s head around. Around me in media’s town square, MeToo agonistes were already caterwauling about the storytelling having gone too far, gotten too expansive, yet all I could hear were my pinging email alerts, and think to myself: you have no idea what’s still out there.

All of this is to say that by most standards, I have developed a pretty hard shell when it comes to stories of sexualized power abuse.

So I was surprised when the air left my lungs today. When I felt like I was going to vomit. When I looked at the photographs of Cesar Chavez with young girls, 8 and 9 years old, taken when he was reportedly already grooming them, before he allegedly started touching them as teens. I wasn’t prepared for tears to erupt as I imagined New York Times reporters Manny Fernandez and Sarah Hurtes, who had been investigating the claims against Chavez for five years, getting to the part of their job where they had to call Chavez’s 95-year-old United Farm Workers cofounder, Dolores Huerta, for comment, only to have her reply: Me. Too.

I don’t have anything wise to say. I don’t have anything new to say. I don’t even care to link to any of my past writing where I’ve said things that probably apply to this moment or circumstance. I don’t even know why I’m writing this entry except that I hope that those who read this post will sit down and read the Times story, beginning to painful end. And also read the full statement that Huerta issued today.

And that maybe, like me, even the most calloused readers will permit themselves to really feel the fresh slap of shock, and of sorrow, and of fury.