I'm 90% sure I know who accused ex-Boalt dean John Dwyer of sexual harassment (since elevated by the media to sexual assault). Last Sunday, I wrote about why I think it is important for the media to out the accuser, and pointed out how easy it ought to be, given the vital statistics the papers have already delivered to us--that she is a 2002 Boalt grad who passed the California bar last July, that she was active in the Berkeley Law Foundation while at Boalt, that she is now working at a public interest law firm in SF, that she is 27, that she wrote her thesis under the guidance of Boalt professor Linda Hamilton Krieger (who, significantly, is an expert in discrimination law). So much information was out there that I decided to do some detective work myself, just to see what I could come up with.

Well, Google is a beautiful thing, and it didn't take me long to come up with the name of a woman who fits this profile. I won't publish it here just yet, because you have to be 100% sure about these things before you act. There could be other women who fit the profile that I didn't find; the woman I did find fits the profile above perfectly, as far as I was able to check it. I don't have a list of women who wrote their theses under Krieger--if I did, I'd be able to confirm whether the name I've come up with is the right one. I'm pretty sure it is, though.

So, every morning, I trawl through the California papers to see whether the media has done its job yet, and so far, no dice. I'm sure I am not the only person who has tried to work out the identity of the accuser; I've got it on good authority, for instance, that a reporter who works at the San Francisco Chronicle has sleuthed it out, but is also sitting on it out of respect for the accuser's desire for anonymity. Apparently they have a policy at the Chron about respecting the wishes of "victims" in this regard.

But it's precisely the concept of respecting the wishes of "victims" that needs some pressure here. How do we know this woman was a "victim"? Because she and her lawyer and her outspoken former law professor say she is. That's not knowledge, that is assertion that has been elevated to the status of knowledge by policies such as the Chronicle's. We do not know that this woman is a victim. All we know about her is that she is an accuser (which is why that has been my term of choice for her here at Critical Mass).

Policies dedicated to protecting the anonymity of accusers by casting them as devastated victims do more to conceal the truth and thwart the pursuit of knowledge than anything else. They assume that women never lie, that in particular a woman would never lie about something like sexual harassment or assault. But women do lie about harassment and assault--often. Earlier this month, for example, a UC Davis student who claimed to have been raped on campus recanted her story when police investigators found holes in her account. The Sacramento Bee's report notes that "according to 2001 statistics from the federal Department of Justice, up to 9 percent of sexual assault reports are later determined to be unfounded -- about the same rate for false reporting of other crimes."

Policies dedicated to protecting the anonymity of accusers also assume that women are always right about these things--that in a he said/she said situation like this one, what she says is accurate whereas what he says is wrong. There is no room in such a set of assumptions for the ambiguity that often clouds sexual relations and that obviously clouds this particular case, with its drunkenness, its poor decision making (what sort of a student drapes herself drowsily on her bed while her drunken Dean is peeing in the next room?), its period of unconsciousness (or alcohol-induced blackout), its incomplete recollections, its morning-after regret. Our accuser showed poor judgement several times over that night, by her own account. What's to make us think she's behaving honorably and sensibly now? This is not to "blame the victim," but, rather, to suggest that we do not rightly know at this point just who the victim here is. After all, it's Dwyer who is ruined, not the accuser.

If the media wants to contribute to the heterophobic mythology perpetuated by the sexual harassment industry, then it should continue "reporting" (i.e., spinning) the story as it has been doing up to this point. If, however, the media is serious in its commitment to the truth, it will stop protecting the accuser, stop parrotting her lawyer, and start telling the whole story.