Sarah Harte: Will anything really change in how sexual harassment allegations are dealt with?

Certainly, it is a story of legitimate public interest involving a so-called celebrity — several women who have courageously come forward with disturbing allegations and the cultural gatekeepers who may have turned a blind eye to Brand’s questionable behaviour over time, including the BBC.

Channel 4 and The Sunday Times conducted a rigorous four-year investigation into Brand which threw up allegations by four women including allegedly of sexual assault and rape.

You can understand why the media does not want to have legitimate reporting curtailed (they perform an important function in shining a light into dark places) but does the attorney general have a point? Reporting can influence how juries, even judges, think.

And more widely, there is a current tendency to try people in the court of public opinion. Social media has allowed people to say anything they want, with virtually no consequences, and this erodes the presumption of innocence (along with a lot of other things).

It is a crucial part of our judicial system that every person accused of a crime be presumed innocent until it is established in court beyond reasonable doubt that they are guilty. This is a higher standard of evidentiary proof than in a civil case where it is “on the balance of probabilities”. It is easier in theory than in practice to protect this important right. It is natural to rush to judgement without interrogating the facts of a case, particularly when somebody may be a creep. Honestly, when the story broke, weary of the endemic violence against women, part of me thought, throw the book at him.

But the book cannot be thrown at him unless it is established that he committed a crime and trial by media or social media is not a barometer of fairness by anyone’s standards.

Perhaps the reason the story has struck a chord is not just down to his celebrity status but also the utter fatigue women feel over how allegations of sexual harassment are dealt with.

Sometimes it feels as if it is one step forward, and two steps back and nothing ever really changes. It is nearly six years since the sexual allegations against Harvey Weinstein first broke, and here we are.

Brand is said to be a reformed character. Having daughters often seems to enlighten men and give them another lens.

However, a Pauline conversion will not save you if you have committed a sexual offence in a former incarnation.

There’s no statute of limitations for a crime, as actor Danny Masterson of That ’70s Show fame has just discovered. He is serving a 30-year sentence for drugging and raping two women in the early 2000s.

As Moira Donnegan wrote in The Guardian, “last week, Masterson became that rarest of artefacts produced by the American criminal justice systems: a man given a meaningful prison sentence for rape”.

Many people have cast doubt on the women who have come forward to accuse Brand, asking why they waited so long. Let’s have a guess. Could it be the extremely low conviction rates for rape? Or the fact that many victims feel that they are put on trial, re-traumatising them. Or could it be if you work in a particular organisation or industry you fear that you will be labelled a troublemaker if you complain?

Many women reading this will grasp only too well that there may be a complaints procedure, but good luck using it if you want to get ahead.

Depending on the industry, an ambitious woman who has spent years working and training will weigh up whether it is worth complaining and risk blowing up her career.

In the 2000s, women were routinely sexually objectified and belittled while male ‘sexual virility’ was celebrated. The tabloid media was at the heart of this rampant sexism, but it extended beyond that. Go back to the late 1990s and witness how 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky was ‘slut-shamed’. The Wall Street Journal, for example, called her a “little tart”. 

The public narrative has changed, but that is all. Scratch the surface and misogyny is deeply embedded in professions, industries, and companies.

As the female comedian Vix Leyton wrote last week, “the depressing part is that when the furore over this specific incident has died down, we know that very little will have changed”. The Brand affair has been referred to as Comedy’s MeToo# but sexual harassment is still rampant and is certainly not confined to the entertainment and media sector.

There was the recent Spanish soccer #MeToo moment when Luis Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso after their World Cup win. He has been given a restraining order by a Spanish court preventing him from going with 200m of the footballer and forbidding him to contact her during the investigation. However, the forced kiss and whether it legally amounts to assault will be tested in court and will come down to the matter of consent.

The British medics are having their #MeToo moment as well. This month, the British Journal of Surgery (BMJ) released an explosive study reporting that two-thirds of female surgeons in the NHS had been subjected to sexual harassment and one-third reported being sexually assaulted in the last year, including raped.

Earlier this year, the Irish Medical Organisation reported that more than half of female doctors have been the victims of gender-based harassment. Only 26.3% said that a patient had been responsible.

In conversations with other women since the allegations against Brand surfaced, the same men’s names from the Irish media and entertainment industry popped up repeatedly as having pushed their sexual luck (a euphemism).

And they exist in law, in medicine, and elsewhere.

As the Brand story plays out, it will be interesting to see how long these latest #MeToo blow-ups stay in the media spotlight, and whether there is a knock-on effect here.