Susan Estrich

Smash and Grab

February 4, 2022 by Susan Estrich Leave a Comment

The worst was the Home Depot store on Friday night. A swarm of robbers ran in and grabbed sledgehammers—presumably to use to rob additional department stores and high-end boutiques. Later that night, four suspects in the sledgehammer theft were arrested by Beverly Hills police after an “alert” citizen noticed cars driving around Beverly Hills without license plates.

On Wednesday and again on Friday, swarms of robbers descended on malls in fancy neighborhoods in Los Angeles, raced into upscale department stores, headed straight for the fancy handbags and made off with thousands of dollars of merchandise. Nordstrom seems to be a favorite; they were hit at least twice. So was the Bottega Veneta boutique on fashionable Melrose Place and assorted other high-end outlets. The Grove was hit, and so was the Beverly Center and the Topanga Mall.

Everyone is talking about it except the local media. The word around the collective water fountain, which is what social media has become, is that the relative silence, not to mention the absence of pictures, is a reflection of our collective discomfort at what you’ll see. Or won’t see.

Maybe it’s selectivity in reverse, maybe it’s not accurate, but the pictures I’ve managed to unearth are an advertisement for racial profiling. In Hancock Park, a few days later, a video that even I’ve been sent twice shows a woman with a stroller being followed inside a gate where she is then robbed. Two Black men are being sought. On the video, it looks like they are taking something from the baby!

Merry Christmas. What do we do?

You know what is going to happen. Young Black people: Watch out when you go shopping. Don’t shop in groups. Stay away from the fancy handbags, even if you’re interested in buying one. Keep away from large windows. Make sure your license plates are up to date.

It is horribly unfair.

My son tells me he and his girlfriend were followed by a security guard the other day. They figured he was looking for someone safe to follow, and my son and his girlfriend fit the bill. There is that, too, the reverse racism when the car with no license plates turns out to be driven by a middle-aged white woman who is almost certainly armed with nothing more dangerous than an oversized handbag.

We are not at our best, individually and collectively, when we are jumpy as hell. If you’re not suffering sticker shock when you walk into a store, if you’re not trying to figure out whether you should even be there in the first place given that no one seems to know anything about this new variant, then you need to keep an eye out for a swarm or for an overzealous security guard or for a shopper taking matters into their own hands. Me, I’m shopping online even more than usual, which means I buy less.

In point of fact, the police called off the tactical alert on Saturday. But that doesn’t stop the rest of us from feeling the added uncertainty. The problem with correlations—like the one between young Black men and crime—is that they are both statistically accurate and inherently racist. This is not about causation. We have a right to be treated as individuals.

I used to teach a hypothetical in my criminal law class about young men in gang attire window-shopping in Beverly Hills. A shop owner calls the police. You are the police officer, I would ask my students. What should you do?

Susan is a contributor to The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, and is commentator on CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC, CBS and NBC. A best-selling author, Estrich is the Robert Kingsley Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Southern California Law Center. She serves on the Board of Editorial Contributors for USA Today. After graduating as a Phi Beta Kappa scholar with highest honors from Wellesley College in 1974, Estrich went on to attend Harvard Law School. She was selected president of the Harvard Law Review and received her JD magna cum laude in 1977. Susan Estrich lives in Los Angeles.

From Just Me to #MeToo to Not You: Part I

November 25, 2021 by Susan Estrich Leave a Comment

In 1974, when I walked out of an alley in Boston’s Back Bay, it was pretty much “just me.” Of course, millions of women were raped (we didn’t have a word for sexual harassment then), but it wasn’t something you talked about or reported. The stigma was sufficiently bad that when I told my mother, she insisted that I tell no one because no decent man would ever have me.

Maybe so. But I told everyone.

I told the guys at the bar I worked at and will always be grateful to Somerville’s Winter Hill Gang (made famous by Whitey Bulger, but run then by Howie Winter, who gave the order) for protecting me while I bartended my way through nearby Harvard Law School.

I told the judge I clerked for, the late, great J. Skelly Wright, and in 1977, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overruled the requirement that the testimony of a rape victim (unlike victims of every other crime) must be corroborated. “This one’s for you,” he said, and I was on my way.

I told the criminal law class I was teaching at Harvard in 1981 (and every such class I have taught in the 40 years since), and the death threats started. The police tapped my phone. The dean and his wife sat with me. I wrote my tenure piece on rape. Then I wrote a book. I told my story.

#MeToo didn’t just happen. It was decades in the making. We called ourselves victims. We changed the law. Courageous women, men who came forward to support us, judges willing to take a second look, prosecutors creating special units, police admitting they needed to change. We created the Victim Rights Law Center. We insisted that no means no. Then we demanded that a woman must say yes.

To those who say #MeToo has gone too far, I beg to differ.

The problem is, as with any movement, the users. The liars. The women, and men, who are trying to pervert half a century of struggle into a seven-figure payout.

I’m not talking about the close cases that we have yet to sort out: the ones involving young people and drugs and alcohol, the ones involving force that is not physical. I’m not talking about the borderline cases in the workplace — cases of inappropriate comments, vulgar jokes, friendly/not-so-friendly hugs, gestures that are potentially ambiguous. In almost all of these cases, drawing lines is complicated by issues of proof.

No, the users and the liars are those who would turn relationships that are private — consensual relationships between adults, however appropriate or inappropriate some of us might think them to be — into opportunities to dig for gold. I’m talking about cases like the one I’ve just filed, against an enterprise that used a completely unsupportable, utterly fictitious label of “rapist” to get even more money than the millions they had already extorted, or at least “cancel” my client in the process.

Consider these facts: A woman invites her lover to come to her apartment to tuck her in, and could he please bring some wine, and she texts him the next morning that “this is love.” And then, seven years later, claims that actually, he barged into her apartment and raped her that night. Confronted with her own texts showing her complaint to be a total lie, she and her law firm came up with an even “better” story of being kidnapped and taken to Jeffrey Epstein’s house in Florida for sex. Except that never happened either: This time, the flight logs proved the fantasy. So then they found a Jane Doe who supposedly once gave a massage to my client at Epstein’s house. Twenty years ago.

I’m glad that “rapist” carries the power it does. For years, decades, I’ve been telling women, “Don’t say no; say rape. Use the power.”

But powerful weapons must be handled with care. That means resisting the urge to convict based on accusations.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Proctoring, Anyone?

October 7, 2021 by Susan Estrich Leave a Comment

My son’s longtime girlfriend (her students call her “Miss”) teaches physics in an inner-city charter high school. She is, happily, back in school; doing labs online with students, slowly sipping coffee outside at McDonald’s as their internet connections come and go, makes teaching law on Zoom look like a snap.

But wait. That’s physics. Yesterday, during her “free” period that is never free, she had a chemistry class.

Note my choice of language: She didn’t teach a chemistry class; she had one.

In a happy coincidence, “Miss” is credentialled to actually teach chemistry, but it doesn’t matter. She wasn’t teaching it. The students in the room — not the class, the room — were taking chemistry online. There was no actual class or teacher. They were all at different points in the software. Miss wasn’t in a position to jump into a course she had not designed, with students she was meeting for the first time, all of them at different points in the course, and she was there only because of the schedule changes for teacher conference week. Otherwise, she might be standing in front of a room full of students taking American history, which she isn’t credentialled to teach; or Spanish, which she doesn’t even speak.

As every parent has learned in the last almost two years, planting a child in front of a computer — even at a well-lit desk, in a quiet place, with reliable Wi-Fi, healthy snacks and no one crying — is not the same as sending them to school with a real live teacher who actually knows them. Sees them. Listens to them. Is teaching them something he knows something about. Knows how to teach the subject.

That’s the little secret about teaching. It’s not enough to know what you’re talking about. That, in truth, is the easy part.

It’s knowing HOW to talk about it. How to teach. It’s a lot easier to teach things you don’t know — you actually can learn along with your students — than to try to talk about things you know about but don’t know how to teach. In college, students are expected to wade through what it takes to get to the kernel of genius. In a word, it’s their job to find it. But even there, the great teachers stand out.

And in high school? It’s actually much tougher. You really do need to teach. And if you don’t? Or can’t?

By and large, independent learning is independent. It is not, by any measure, at the high school level or below.

And what the people at the front of the room are doing is not, by any measure, teaching. It is proctoring. Sit still. Look down. Do not consult other sites. If you can even limit that kind of cruising. Otherwise, the students at the desks are on their own.

I used to spend long days in court sitting through a fairly endless trade-secret trial. I shopped. I expect many of my students date during my lectures. Every once in a while, I would get a text from the general counsel, who sat behind me: “Buy the Mac,” he would say. “I’m paying for it,” and he was. Sit for an hour, buy the entry level.

There are certain things you can do while staring at a computer screen and pretending to do something else. Shopping, for instance.

But let’s not pretend at our children’s expense. Learning isn’t one of them. If this is what it will take for us to start respecting teachers more, then that may be the only lesson to be had here.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.