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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and we appreciate you being with us. Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson continued on Tuesday, and let me confess, I did not want to listen to them. Now, I know, I know. I'm the host of a daily news and information show and I'm a political scientist. I should have been popping corn and having watch parties, but these confirmation hearings for the first Black woman nominee to the court, I didn't want to listen because I was afraid of what I would hear.

Melissa Murray: Justice [unintelligible 00:00:39] has spoken extensively about the way in which she, and primarily she, is interrupted, not only by her colleagues on the bench but also by litigants before the court.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is Melissa Murray, Professor of Law at NYU, faculty director of the Birnbaum Women's leadership network, and co-host of the legal podcast, Strict Scrutiny.

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[00:01:21] Melissa Murray: No, she's not said so explicitly, but I think we can all get the subtext that this is largely because she is a woman and a woman of color. Tanya Jacoby at Northwestern University, with one of her students, has done a study of interruptions on the bench, and she's found that the women justices are the ones who are more likely to be interrupted, not only by their colleagues but also by the parties who appear before them.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Yes, here, Professor Murray is naming one of my concerns. I didn't want to listen to the predictable rudeness Judge Jackson was likely to endure, so I figured I'd just catch the highlights when it was all over. On Monday, when we talked here on The Takeaway with Fatima Goss Graves, President of the National Women's Law Center, she suggested that the tone of this hearing, well, it just might be different.

Fatima Gross Graves: I think there's an opportunity with Judge Jackson for the Senate to do a bit of a reset, to understand and look at this particular nominee who is so extraordinarily credentialed and qualified and actually hold a lot of promise to help us think about the court differently.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. A ray of hope. Maybe these hearings might be more civil, more substantive. So reassured and void by wanting to bear witness to this historic moment, I listened to Tuesday's confirmation hearing.

Male Speaker 1: On a scale of 1 to 10, how faithful would you say you are?

Female Speaker 1: Can you provide a definition for the word woman?

Male Speaker 2: Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Throughout it, all Judge Jackson maintained admirable composure. As Professor Melissa Murray noted, evoking these issues wasn't really about the nominee at all.

Melissa Murray: These questions about being tough on crime, about appointing activists, judges. These aren't about her. She's merely the vessel for them. This is really about the Democrats and the Biden administration. This is the Republican party laying a set of sound bytes that are going to be picked up and carried over into the 2022 midterm elections. Again, in 2024 in the presidential election. She's just providing them with a forum for airing these views.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: In both forum and substance, Tuesday's hearing performed and reinforced the social rules that govern race and gender interactions in American law and politics. Women, and most especially, Black and brown women, have to prove their fitness for public life by demonstrating the ability to endure harsh brutality without openly fighting back. [chuckles] Sure, it's tempting to imagine giving a full-on Congresswoman Maxine Waters treatment to the senators.

Male Speaker 3: With the house [crosstalk]--

Female Speaker: Reclaiming my time.

Male Speaker 3: With the senate.

Female Speaker: Reclaiming my time.

Male Speaker 3: [unintelligible 00:03:59]. Okay.

Female Speaker: Reclaiming my time.

Male Speaker 3: Matter of fact--

Melissa Harris-Perry: Of course, that wasn't possible because the rules of engagement are all too clear: Push back too hard, stand up for yourself too firmly, call BS on the whole thing and you're through. Labeled angry, shrill, unpredictable, unfit, the emotive outbursts of Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Brett Kavanaugh during their confirmation hearings prove the rules are different for men.

Male Speaker 4: This is a circus.

Male Speaker 5: This is a circus.

Male Speaker 4: It's a national disgrace.

Male Speaker 5: You're a coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name.

Male Speaker 4: It is a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks.

Male Speaker 5: To blow me up and take me down.

Male Speaker 4: It is a message.

Male Speaker 5: You saw the win.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For women, bearing up under public degradation is a test of worthiness. Maybe it's even a bit of practice for the dozens of times that male colleagues are going to interrupt them on the bench. Tuesday also brought claims of something more sinister.

Melissa Murray: She has been questioned about her position on criminal defense, on the rights of criminals. I think it's a little easier to make these kinds of claims about being soft on crime when the nominee is in fact, an African-American woman.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What was directed at Judge Jackson was more than insinuation of a general softness on crime. Senators made highly specific allegations that Judge Jackson is lenient with child sex offenders.

Male Speaker 6: The federal sentencing guidelines recommended a sentence of 97 to 121 months in prison. Prosecutors recommended 24 months in prison. Judge Jackson gave the defendant three months in prison.

Male Speaker 7: As I listened to your testimony, I believe you are someone who is compassionate. I believe you care for children, obviously, your children and other children. I also see a record of activism and advocacy as it concerns sexual predators that stems back decades and that is concerning

Melissa Harris-Perry: That Senator Cruz could so [unintelligible 00:06:02] dismiss Judge Jackson's parental commitment, while he described her as an advocate for child sex predators, reveals just how differently Jackson has been treated compared to her predecessor.

Melissa Murray: I recall very clearly in the Barrett confirmations how much her motherhood was a central part of her narrative. Her motherhood was front and center, and the Republicans made quite a lot of it. They talked about it almost incessantly, using it both as a sword to burnish her credentials, she'd achieved so much and she had seven children at the same time, and as a shield to guard against attacks on her proposed judicial philosophy. We aren't seeing the same kind of narrative with Judge Jackson.

Melissa Harris-Perry: No, we are not seeing the same kind of narrative with Judge Jackson. With me, now, is Attorney Jamie White, founding attorney of White Law PLOC. Jamie represents survivors of sexual abuse and assault. Jamie, welcome to The Takeaway.

Jamie White: Hello, thanks for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Thanks for sitting with me through a long introduction, but I wanted to bring us to this place to really understand and contextualize these claims. Now, you have represented survivors in some very high-profile cases in recent years. Can you remind us of some of the difficult cases you've been involved with most recently?

Jamie White: Sure. I represented dozens of women in the Larry Nassar case, in the US gymnastics case. I currently represent several hundred boy scouts who are in litigation, who are abused. We represent victims of the clergy, the Catholic church, and we represented several African-American men in the Dr. Anderson case at the University of Michigan, where more than 1000 men were molested.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jamie, I'm wondering, did you listen to the questioning of Judge Jackson regarding her rulings in several cases involving child pornography?

Jamie White: I did. It was troubling. I'm glad you're bringing some attention to this. In our representation of victims of sexual assault, some of the biggest challenges we have are that the statute limitations has run on a lot of these cases. The average victim of sexual abuse doesn't come forward to the age of 28. In Michigan, for example, where I am, the statute limitations was up until 2018. You only had three years from the time of the assault to report.

Then if you were a child, you had until your 19th birthday. If somebody was 13, for example, and their doctor had molested them, if they didn't report it by the time they were 19, that claim would be forever time-barred. In 2018, we actually passed legislation in Michigan expanding the statute limitations allowing the Nassar victims to come forward and have their day in court. We've seen this trend all over the country. What I found extraordinary about some of the exchanges yesterday and quite frankly, hypocritical is in our fight all over the country, and in particular, in Michigan, the pushback, when whenever we talk about expanding statute limitations or giving people access to the courts, it almost always is the Republican party who pushes back and takes the side of the insurance companies.

To see them grandstand the way they were taking up the torch, so to speak of victims of sexual assault and taking on predators, it's quite frankly, very contrary to what we see in the actual arena.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I so appreciate that. I am, myself, am a survivor of childhood sexual assault. I was shaking yesterday. I was shaking on Tuesday as I watched and listened to this questioning. I think it was on large part, my sense that there are real things, real legislative things that can be done to help protect and provide justice in the aftermath and those things have mostly not happened. You've talked about one here by extending statute of limitations. Pause for me a second because you brought up insurance companies as part of that. What in the world do insurance companies have to do with the statute of limitations on this?

Jamie White: Well, generally speaking, when you're dealing with institutions in particular and you're talking about a civil arena, it's not necessarily the institution is going to be financially held accountable, it's almost always the insurance companies whether it's the church, whether it's the university or The Boy Scouts, it's almost always the insurance companies are going to be on the hook. We do see institutions from time to time kick in, but almost always, it's the insurance companies on the hook. They are very, very aggressive whenever they hear about the idea that victims of sexual assault are going to have an opportunity to come forward because they know they're the ones that are going to have to pay. They have an extraordinarily strong lobby, and they're all over the country doing everything they can to prevent these expansions of blah.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me about what was emerging and the conversation became about non-production child pornography. What is a non-production child pornography charge?

Jamie White: Yes. That's a great question and they attempted to paint her as if she was sympathetic to people that were possessing and/or distributing child pornography without drawing the distinctions that I suspect that she was drawing when she was on the sentencing commission. Non-production of child pornography basically means what it says, that you were not the person who took the pictures, solicited the young person into your venue, and ultimately, distributed. Non-production would be somebody who was caught with it on their computer or in some other physical possession, obviously, very reprehensible, but very different than somebody who were to actually take the child, take the pictures, take the videos, encourage them to participate, or whatever it will be.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For people who care about this issue, who have been touched in their own lives by this issue in any of a number of ways, what are the more productive ways that we can engage in a public discussion about ways to protect children from predators and to hold predators accountable?

Jamie White: Several things, but some of the most important are that we need to listen to young people. When they say, "Something isn't right," it needs to be investigated. Part of the legislative package that we passed in Michigan in 2018 was expanding the field of mandatory reporters including coaches and volunteers and people who interact with children on a regular basis. That's because what we have seen, the data suggests that when you young people come forward, the allegiances to the adults they're accusing sometimes get in the way of reporting.

I encourage any listener that has any interest in helping with this issue to get involved with the legislative process. We've had 32 states in this country so far go back and look at their statutes as it pertains to how we identify child molesters, how we punish child molesters, and how do we give people access to the court who have been abused. Some of those 32 states have made some progress, but we suggest that there's a lot more to make in the remaining states that have not made any progress, we encourage them to get involved.

This is not only about holding people accountable. This is how we find additional child molesters, but for the civil legislative process and the ability to take depositions and gather evidence, many of the perpetrators in the Catholic church would've never been identified. They would've been able to hide behind the statute limitations, lawsuits would've been dismissed, and the discovery process would not have unfolded the hundreds and hundreds of people who ultimately were identified. This is not only a tool for accountability, it's a tool to identify the molesters in the community,

Melissa Harris-Perry: Attorney Jamie White, founding attorney of White Law, PLLC. Jamie, thank you for your work and for joining us.

Jamie White: Thank you, my pleasure.

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