--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is it. This is our moment. This is. It's been a long time coming. A whole week in the making. This mattress firm appears to be up these stairs. I see mattresses! Oh, man. Baby, I'm back! I feel like... I'm back! I'm back at Mattress Firm! We did it! You did it! I gotta say, I know I have to say this, but like, visiting this mattress firm where my man's yelling at me, we're covered in mattresses, it's way better than going to mattressfirm.com slash podcast using the coupon code podcast then before June 5th to get 10% off.
--:-- [Sound of excitement and chaos]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Feels like coming home. Let's jump on some mattresses. New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman was one of the biggest thorns in Donald Trump's side.
--:-- [Sound of a clip from Samantha Bee playing]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But there is hope on the horizon. a hero who stood up to democracy's nemesis before. Look up in the sky. It's a bird. It's a plane. Oh, my God. He's... Schneiderman, Schneiderman Does whatever a Schneider can Only he can save us all Schneiderman He was also one of the biggest champions of the Me Too movement. Here he is in an interview with WNYC last week.
--:-- [Clip of Eric Schneiderman playing]
--:-- Eric Schneiderman: I mean, look, the movement is extraordinary. I think it's changing the conversation. It is a part of what I see as this moment of social transformation and of the emergence of a new political movement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And just a few days later. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman built his career as a liberal progressive who stood up for women's rights. But on Monday, in a New Yorker report, the 63-year-old was described as a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, who was physically and emotionally abusive in private, toward four women.
--:-- Anna North: I mean, I feel like it's always a big deal when an attorney general resigns amid scandal, but Eric Schneiderman's resignation this week is an even bigger deal than usual.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, it's a huge deal. It's especially a huge deal right now, sort of in the context of Me Too, because Eric Schneiderman has been, you know, this longtime big champion of women's rights and specifically one of the heroes of Me Too for a while there was really going after Harvey Weinstein in this lawsuit in February.
--:-- Anna North: And the suit itself honestly still remains sort of like required reading on the Harvey Weinstein case. It's just this really incredibly detailed document. Goes through all these details of what different women have alleged and also of the ways that the company really allegedly covered up Weinstein's behavior and sort of enabled him.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And to see the person who kind of masterminded putting that together and was a crusader on this issue, being accused of these things himself is really difficult.
--:-- Anna North: Before we get into what he has allegedly done, I'm wondering if you could just tell me a bit about Eric Schneiderman, his path, where he came from, where he was headed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so, you know, he's New York's attorney general. He has been sort of a long-time progressive and a long-time kind of feminist. He just got an award from, I believe, the National Institute for Reproductive Health for sort of championing reproductive rights.
--:-- Anna North: In his acceptance speech for that award, he talked about working at an abortion clinic when he was just 17 years old. And I remember women pleading with doctors that they needed to go home sooner than the medical staff thought was safe because they had not been able to tell anyone they were going to get an abortion and they had to fly back home before their employer or parents or very often their husband learned that they had left town.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I learned an important lesson at a young age. If a woman does not have the right to control her own body, she is not truly equal.
--:-- Anna North: And earlier in his career, he also championed a law that actually involved penalties for strangulation, which is something that he was accused of.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: We've begun a long overdue recognition with our culture of violence and silence. You know, so he's been this anti-domestic violence advocate. He's been this reproductive rights advocate. You know, and then as attorney general, of course, this kind of Me Too advocate.
--:-- Anna North: And he was, I think, probably eyeing bigger office. So what are the specific allegations against Schneiderman and who's making them?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: There are four women who are featured in this New Yorker story that came out on Monday night, and two of the women have come out under their names. We have Michelle Manning Barish and Tanya Selva and then two of the women in the story are anonymous
--:-- Anna North: But they all basically allege some sort of physical abuse in most cases in the context of a romantic relationship
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Tanya Selvaratnam said she met Schneiderman in 2016 and described her relationship with him as a fairy tale that became a nightmare. She alleged he would frequently slap her across the face, choke her, and spit on her. It wasn't consensual, she said. this wasn't sexual play acting.
--:-- Anna North: Some of the details are really chilling. Barash talks about at one point, she says that Schneiderman choked her and also slapped her in the ear so hard that she had problems with her ear for months. And at one point, blood trickled out of her ear down to her collarbone.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the story paints a picture of a pattern. It's very disturbing. It seems like everything here happened pretty quickly.
--:-- Anna North: Tell me about how he responded after these allegations were published in The New Yorker on Monday. He says that he has never assaulted anyone and that he's never engaged in any kind of non-consensual sexual activity.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So he essentially denies the allegations in the story. And then also saying that they relate to personal conduct and not professional conduct, but that they were just going to impede his ability to do his work as attorney general.
--:-- Anna North: So because of that, he was resigning. Was he asked to resign by the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. I mean, the governor of New York tweeted about that, so we do know. Do you know what he tweeted?
--:-- Anna North: I don't follow Cuomo on Twitter. Oh, you should. It's good stuff.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Goldbide. On Monday night, Governor Cuomo did tweet a statement saying, you know, no one is above the law, including New York's top legal officer.
--:-- Anna North: He mentions that he will be asking for an investigation. and then he says, given the damning pattern of facts and corroboration laid out in the New Yorker article, I do not believe it is possible for Eric Schneiderman to continue to serve as attorney general and for the good of the office he should resign.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What does that mean for Eric Schneiderman's work for his Harvey Weinstein investigation and all the other cases he was pursuing?
--:-- Anna North: Yeah, that's a really good question and that was actually the first, one of the first questions that came to my mind when I saw that he had resigned. According to the AG's office, they are going to continue work on the civil rights lawsuit against Weinstein.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Cuomo had directed Schneiderman's office to investigate the Manhattan DA's office because it was the Manhattan DA, Cy Vance, who had been in charge of investigating when Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual assault in 2015.
--:-- Anna North: and that was just spinning up. I mean, Schneiderman had announced the beginning of that investigation like last week.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I'm not sure what's going to happen with that, especially since now the DA's office is going to investigate Schneiderman. It's obviously a bizarre turn of events and I don't think we know what's going to happen with that state investigation.
--:-- Anna North: Is there something about New York where, you know, you had Eliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and now Eric Schneiderman, like something in the water, the high-profile Democrats who all get in the same kind of trouble, it seems?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, look, New York politics is famous for criminals. The state does not have a good record when it comes to its, you know, elected officials.
--:-- Anna North: And, you know, a few years back, Trump actually tweeted, Quote, Wiener is gone. Spitzer is gone. Next will be lightweight AG Eric Snyderman. Is he a crook? Wait and see. Worse than Spitzer or Wiener.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was March of 2013.
--:-- Anna North: And has the president tweeted since Schneiderman resigned?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Well, a number of the president's associates have been really crowing about this. You know, Kellyanne Conway, I think, tweeted something like, gotcha.
--:-- Anna North: Donald Trump Jr. has tweeted multiple times about Schneiderman, including making some jokes about Schneiderman's eyeliner that I don't fully understand.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Does he wear eyeliner?
--:-- Anna North: I'm sorry, I know it's not relevant, but it looks like he does. I've looked into this issue, Sean. I don't feel like it looks that much like he's wearing eyeliner.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I don't know. Maybe I'm not like eyeliner sensitive.
--:-- Anna North: Is the reason Kellyanne Conway and Donald Trump Jr. are tweeting about Schneiderman because he was something of like a thorn in the president's side?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yes, he was a big thorn in the president's side. So he was involved in litigation around Trump University that resulted in a multimillion dollar settlement against Trump.
--:-- Anna North: He was one of the first attorneys general to come out and start explaining the powers that state attorneys general have to confront this presidency, even before there was a special prosecutor on issues like the Muslim ban that the president tried to introduce and other policies.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: policies, Eric Schneiderman was one of the attorneys general leading the resistance to the Trump presidency.
--:-- Anna North: So he's caused problems for the president in the past and potentially was going to cause problems for him in the future.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is there a special place in hell for men who act like feminists and treat women like trash? That's after the break.
--:-- [Clip of a mattress store playing]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is Today Explained. Jamal this is a great store you got here Absolutely. Awesome. Upstairs. Second floor. That's a great store. Do you sell a lot of mattresses here? I see you've got at least 20, 30 mattresses out.
--:-- Jamal: Yeah, we have also over there and we have a bunch of them. Twin, queen, king. Yeah, and then we have awesome price going on. Big sale price drop. You can get a queen for the price of a twin.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Exactly. It looks like 0% APR for 72 months. Absolutely, yeah. Awesome, that's great. Two promotions. So is that to say, like, if you can't afford the mattress right now, you could kind of, like, get some help, some payment plans, some quotas?
--:-- Jamal: Yeah, absolutely. I love it.
--:-- Anna North: The thing that's obviously shocking about this, Sean, is that Eric Schneiderman seemed like a quote-unquote good guy in this Me Too movement.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How do we make sense of people being such aggressive advocates for women and then having these really, really terrifying sort of demons in their closets, allegedly?
--:-- Anna North: You know, I don't know how someone reconciles doing public work against violence and then committing violence in private. I don't know how you compartmentalize those things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: To me, the biggest takeaway seems to be that no one is immune to this. And just because someone has good politics in the public sphere, just because someone has been like a really active advocate for women or a really active advocate against sexual violence, against sexual harassment, unfortunately does not mean that they don't engage in this stuff in their private lives.
--:-- Anna North: And he's not the only example of this, right? like a high-profile man who purports to be a feminist who then has these allegations made against him?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, I mean, you know, we've seen this time and time again. You know, we saw with Al Franken, who had worked on a lot of legislation that was good for women, and at the same time, he was accused of groping women or trying to kiss them or forcibly kissing them.
--:-- Anna North: It goes back to Bill Clinton, too. You know, he was a supporter of reproductive rights. He, you know, signed the Family Medical Leave Act. He did a lot of things that, you know, could be seen as very pro-woman.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And he also had a sexual relationship with an intern while he was the president. And then he was also accused of rape. And he was accused of sexual misconduct by a number of other women. And he has denied those accusations. He's always denied that, but they're out there.
--:-- Anna North: Liberals do that again and again. Why? What's that about?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I would contend these are mechanisms for their own power. They use them. And on the left, you get protected because you've already convinced everyone else that you're not the enemy.
--:-- Anna North: There's sort of examples among cultural figures, too. So you can look at Junot Diaz about how he sort of called out toxic masculinity, and then he's been accused of forcibly kissing someone. He's been accused of bullying women.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And then you have someone like Louis C.K. How do women still go out with guys when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We're the number one threat. To women, globally and historically, we're the number one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We're the worst thing that ever happens to them.
--:-- Anna North: That's true. You know what our number one threat is? Heart disease. That's the whole thing. That's it. Just our own heart going, dude, I can't.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Certainly, he was lauded as someone who was like really woke and understood sort of gender politics. and, you know, while his show got criticized, sometimes he seemed like someone who really got it to a lot of people.
--:-- Anna North: He was accused. And in fact, he has admitted to almost all of the allegations that he was accused of in terms of basically masturbating in front of women without their consent.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: These allegations against Eric Schneiderman, his victims allege abuse that's years old. I wonder when your abuser is someone who purports to be a feminist and is doing work that is important in this case, the Harvey Weinstein investigation, does that make it that much harder to come out and speak on the past abuse?
--:-- Anna North: Yeah. And I mean, some of the women talk about that directly. Like they'll say, you know, it was hard to it's hard to talk about this because he was this this champion for women. I wasn't sure if I should come forward.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: The New Yorker writes about one accuser saying, quote, it's torturous for me to do this, as she puts it. But what do you do if your abuser is the top law enforcement official in the state, which on many occasions he was happy to remind these women of?
--:-- Anna North: And then some of them talk about being angry when he started going after Weinstein or when he started becoming this public Me Too advocate and advocate for women, you know, thinking like this is such hypocrisy. I don't want this to be able to continue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And we seen you know these kinds of decision processes happening a lot I think with women who have spoken out as part of Me Too it always really difficult to call out a high person especially a high man for these kinds of things
--:-- Anna North: It's doubly hard to call that person out under your own name. You know, you're going to get harassment. You're going to get second-guessed. And calling out, in the case of Sey Schneiderman, someone whose work is really highly regarded.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How can women evaluate, like, purported male allies? Is that even possible to – I don't even know if this question makes sense.
--:-- Anna North: Does that – is there a way to know if you're a woman like whether you can trust the men around you or not? I mean Jesus Christ.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think it's a really good question. I think we should talk about it. I think – this is such an important question and it's hard to answer.
--:-- Anna North: I don't think that it's like men are uniquely bad and I don't think women are uniquely good. I think if we saw women, you know, in all the high-profile, powerful positions that we saw men in in society, and if we, like, were raising women the way that we raise men to be like, you deserve to get what you want, I think we'd see the same kinds of things.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So I think a lot of this is really a question of power. I don't know how you decide how to trust someone on a personal level but I do think it's good to have a healthy suspicion of people who are powerful and I think we can sort of broaden that out and say less, you know, like we should mistrust powerful men and more let's look at the ways that we give power to people in this society, right? let's look at how people in government are treated. Let's look at how people in corporate America are treated.
--:-- Anna North: And let's say, you know, if we've instituted systems where, like, there are enormous power imbalances between a few men at the top and everybody else down below, that's going to breed abuse even in progressive organizations and even by people who might think of themselves as, oh, I could never be an abuser.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: How about this? It's really hard to know who's good and who's bad. But since you've been covering this forever, I wonder if you've picked up on any patterns for men to know whether their purported feminism is bullshit or authentic or ways to be a good male feminist without fucking it up.
--:-- Anna North: Yeah, I mean, I can totally give advice on that. Sweet. Don't abuse or harass people. That's easy. No, no, no. You think that's easy. But I mean, I think it's easy not to do the things that Eric Schneiderman is accused of. But I think I've heard from men a lot of confusion about what is harassment and can I do anything these days and whatever.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I do think like, you know, the message that I want to send is like a pretty basic sort of golden rule of how would you want to be treated in the workplace or in a relationship.
--:-- Anna North: And you'll hear people say like, well, can I compliment someone's shoes or whatever? And it's, you know, I don't think anybody is going to try to throw you in jail because you said nice shoes.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah. A lot of what we've seen as part of Me Too is women really coming forward and saying, I couldn't do my job because of the way that this man was treating me. Or I felt afraid in my relationship and I did not feel safe because of the way this man was treating me.
--:-- Anna North: That's what you have to ask yourself. And it's okay to check in about that stuff. And it's okay to communicate about it and it's hard. But I think that's been one of the really good things about the last few months is that people are talking about this.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And as awkward as it is, I think it's fine to ask the women in your life if you're screwing up and they'll tell you. If they like you, they'll tell you.
--:-- Anna North: Anna North writes about gender for Vox. I'm Sean Rameswaram. This is Today Explained. And as for men like Eric Schneiderman, we really don't need them. You know who's a better advocate for women? women. The future really is female, or at least it better be because I am done with this shit.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Jamal, I'm so glad we came in here today and met you. Thank you. You seem like such a great character. You didn't welcome us by saying like, hey, why are you yelling in my mattress firm? You welcomed us by yelling back.
--:-- Jamal: You guys, I love you guys, man. We love you too, man. Thanks. We love you a lot.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Great. I'll take one of each. Yeah. Sure. Please send me a friend. Okay, dude. We're telling a lot of people, I promise.
