When he was in high school, Cory Booker, the New
Jersey Democrat and possible White House contender, groped & attempted to Rape his classmate
as they kissed. He reached for her breast, and when she swatted his
hand away, he made another attempt.
This is not an isolated incident as numerous victims are now coming forward in light of his "Holier Than Thou" attitude he had on national television according to more than one of his accusers now hoping to have their stories heard by investigators.
The incident & others resurfaced this week as Booker joined calls for an FBI investigation
into the allegation of high-school-era sexual assault leveled by
Christine Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee
to the Supreme Court.
But the skeleton in Booker’s closet seized on by outlets such as Fox News and the Daily Caller wasn’t
really in his closet. The senator himself chose years ago to air the
issue, marking a notable contrast with instances in which accusations of
impropriety burst forth as a result of media investigation or
opposition research.
In 1992, Booker, then a student at Stanford University, wrote a column
for his college newspaper in which he recounted the groping and used
his own behavior to underscore, in starkly personal terms, how his views
had shifted on gender and sexual respect. He credited his work as a
peer counselor with the transformation.
“After
having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark,'” he wrote. “Our
groping ended soon and while no ‘relationship’ ensued, a friendship did.
You see, the next week in school she told me that she was drunk that
night and didn’t really know what she was doing.”
“Senator
Booker’s Stanford Daily column has been the focus of disingenuous
right-wing attacks that have circulated online and in partisan outlets
for the past five years,” a spokeswoman for Booker said in an email.
“These attacks ring hollow to anyone who reads the entirety of the
column, which is in fact a direct criticism of a culture that encourages
young men to take advantage of women — written at a time when so
candidly discussing these issues was rare — and speaks to the impact
Senator Booker’s experience working to help rape and sexual assault
survivors as a college peer counselor had on him.”
Kavanaugh
has denied forcing himself on Ford at a high school party. But the
ensuing debate has raised questions that go beyond his case, like the
one posed by Bari Weiss of the New York Times when she asked Tuesday on MSNBC, “Should the fact that a 17-year-old, presumably very drunk kid, did this, should this be disqualifying?”
Whether
it makes a difference if the “very drunk kid” owned up to the behavior
is the question raised by Booker’s case, which is under a spotlight
intensified by the senator’s own jockeying as he weighs a run for the
presidency. He told New York Magazine in an interview published this week that it would be “irresponsible” not to consider running for president.
Booker,
who studied political science and sociology and played tight end for
the college football team, wrote a regular column for the Stanford
Daily. He often broached difficult subjects, from racial profiling to
anti-gay prejudice, with the rhetorical flourish that would come to
characterize his political speeches.
Shortly after the verdict in the Rodney King case
— in which Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the beating of
the taxi driver, spurring the 1992 Los Angeles riots — the student
recounted instances of being profiled by police. “I’m a black man. I am 6
feet 3 inches tall and 230 pounds, just like King,” Booker wrote. “Do I scare you? Am I a threat? Does your fear justify your actions?”
In another piece, also penned in 1992, he wrote
about efforts to overcome his own bigotry. “I hated gays,” he admitted.
“The disgust and latent hostility I felt toward gays were subcategories
of hatred, plain and simple.”
But there was
one topic that gave him particular pause. The piece, published Feb. 19,
1992, was titled, “So much for stealing second.”
As an undergraduate at Stanford University, Booker wrote a regular column for the college newspaper. (Stanford Daily)
“When
I hesitated in writing this column, I realized I was basking in
hypocrisy,” he wrote. “So instead I chose to write and risk.”
He began with a personal story.
It
was New Year’s Eve 1984. Booker was 15. As the ball dropped in Times
Square, he leaned over to give a friend a hug, he wrote, but she
returned the gesture with “an overwhelming kiss.”
“With
the ‘Top Gun’ slogan ringing in my head, I slowly reached for her
breast,” continued Booker, who grew up in Harrington Park, N.J., outside
of Newark, where he was elected mayor in 2006. It’s unclear which movie
slogan he meant. As a columnist in the Star-Ledger observed this week, the Tom Cruise action film didn’t come out until 1986.
“After having my hand pushed away once, I reached my ‘mark.’ ”
He said he didn’t enter a romantic relationship with his New Year’s Eve companion, though they began a friendship.
In
the college newspaper, he described the episode as emblematic of his
adolescent understanding of intimacy. “Ever since puberty, I remember
receiving messages that sex was a game, a competition,” he wrote.
“Sexual relations were best achieved through luck, guile, strategy or
coercion.”
Drinking, he added, accelerated unsafe encounters. He recalled the counsel of a friend: “With liquor you’ll get to bed quicker.”
When
he first arrived at college, it was more of the same, Booker said. He
enumerated statements fired off at the Palo Alto, Calif., campus, from
the casually sexist to the alarmingly violent.
“What do you think happened? She invited me back to her room at 3 a.m.”
“I’ve got to find a way to snatch that snatch.”
“The best thing for that girl would be to be tied down and screwed.”
By
his sophomore year, Booker wrote, he had grown so distressed by these
sorts of comments that he had “snapped from one extreme to the other.” A
female friend of his called him a “man-hater.” He admitted to running
his mouth, referring wryly to his “soliloquy” on “The Oppressive Nature
of Male Dominated Society And Its Violent Manifestations: Rape,
Anorexia, Battered Wives.” His aim was not just to convince her that he
was “sensitive” but “to convince myself that my attitudes had changed.”
His
shifting views had most to do with his work as a peer counselor, he
wrote, a role in which he listened to the “raw truth” of experiences of
rape. What makes sexual violence possible, he reasoned, are the
attitudes and dialogues that precede it — his own friends trying to “get
some” or to “score.”
He confessed to having no good conclusion for his column. “All I have are poignant visions,” he offered.
“I see myself at 15 trotting around the bases and stealing second,” Booker wrote.
He
ended with a bit of imagery that could just as well conclude a stump
speech: “I now see the crowds, no, not the spectators, but the
thousands, the millions who are rarely seen or heard.”
“I’ve seen enough.”
The 1992 column was unearthed by
the Daily Caller in 2013, when Booker was first running for Senate. The
then-mayor didn’t comment on the episode, nor has he had much to say
about it since. His conduct and his mea culpa were public knowledge when
voters elected him in the 2013 special election and chose him again in
2014.
The piece has mostly circulated in conservative outlets, such as Townhall and the Washington Times. On Thursday, it reached the Star-Ledger, the largest newspaper in New Jersey. Paul Mulshine, a conservative columnist, said
the accusation by conservatives that the New Jersey senator was guilty
of sexual assault was “nonsense, of course. The sort of behavior Booker
recounted was common in the 1980s and early 1990s.”
Still,
the columnist argued, the 1992 account “puts the senator in an awkward
position regarding the allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett
Kavanaugh by psychologist Christine Blasey Ford.” He mocked a moment
from the questioning of Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee
when Booker threatened to release secret emails, even if it meant being
banished from the Senate, and said, “This is about the closest I’ll ever come in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment.”
“Looks like ‘Spartacus’ had roamin’ hands,” the column was headlined.
The
columnist suggested that both recollections — Ford’s and Booker’s —
might be faulty, with the senator’s story representing a useful case for
the point he was trying to make. In addition to the reference to a
movie that had not yet come out, the columnist noted of Booker’s
recollection of the ball dropping, “I find it hard to imagine a bunch of
high-schoolers going to a New Year’s Eve party at which beds were
placed near the TV.”
Booker, for his part, has called
Ford’s allegations “serious and credible” and accused the Republican
majority of failing to investigate her account thoroughly. “In a nation
with crisis levels of sexual violence & harassment,” he wrote Wednesday
on Twitter, “how those who come forward are treated demonstrates the
level of our commitment to addressing this heinous societal wrong.”
