11. "She's the one that has told me 'no.'"
A month before the Weinstein scandal broke, public response to a news story about another sort of misconduct had illustrated the same dynamic.
I’m trying to remember how long it took before it became a commonplace, in the fall of 2017—outside of Black Twitter, I mean—to remark that the Weinstein story would never have gained the traction it did if the New York Times and New Yorker exposés had not focused on the experiences of a handful of famous, rich, white women. A cursory internet search suggests it took 21 days.
“Over the last 24 hours, the internet has been cheering Jane Fonda,” wrote Kevin Fallon on The Daily Beast on October 27, after Fonda had appeared with Gloria Steinem on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hays” representing something called The Women’s Media Center. “It feels like something has shifted,” Fonda had said.
“It’s too bad that it’s probably because so many of the women that were assaulted by Harvey Weinstein are famous and white and everybody knows them. This has been going on a long time to black women and other women of color and it doesn’t get out quite the same.”
On November 9, Me Too’s original founder, Tarana Burke, was still quoting Fonda in an opinion piece for The Washington Post about how Anita Hill and other black women had for decades been accusing men like Clarence Thomas and superpredator R. Kelly, and how they had been largely ignored. It was almost as though, despite her own new-found prominence and prestige, Burke felt that no one would pay her any mind without the support of a famous white woman to confirm what she was saying.
A month before the Weinstein scandal broke, public response to a news story about another sort of misconduct had illustrated the same dynamic and raised the same moral dilemma for the well-meaning and well-intentioned.
On August 31, the Thursday before Labor Day, a nurse on the burn unit of a Salt Lake City hospital had held a press conference where she and her lawyer had released footage of an incident from late July in which she had been violently arrested by a cop who wasn’t getting what he wanted.
The cop, a police detective with the Salt Lake City PD named Jeff Payne, had been sent to get a blood draw from a comatose patient on behalf of another law enforcement agency. Because he didn’t have a warrant and because the patient was neither under arrest nor able to consent to the procedure, the nurse, Alex Wubbles, had denied him access.
She had been following both the law and hospital policy. In footage of the incident—of which there were several versions, some from two different bodycams and some from hospital security tapes—this was pointed out to Payne. In the version most widely circulated, she has printed out the policy and is showing it to Payne, holding her phone out horizontally so that he can hear the voice of her supervisor on speakerphone. “Why are you blaming the messenger, sir?” the supervisor asks, and Payne replies: “She’s the one that has told me ‘no.’”
We hear the supervisor telling Payne, “You’re making a mistake, sir, you’re making a huge mistake because you’re threatening a nurse.” Then the cop barks “No!” and “We’re done here!” a couple of times and paces menacingly toward Wubbles as she backs away. He snatches at her phone and tries to slap it out of her hand, roaring, “You’re under arrest.” Then he lays hands on her and, as she screams and shrieks, rough-houses her off the floor and out of the building, where she is flattened against a wall and cuffed with her hands behind her back.
After footage of the incident was released by local news organizations, things happened pretty fast. On Friday, the Chief of Police and the SLCPD as a body issued public apologies to Wubbles, as did the Mayor of Salt Lake City. The Police Department announced that Payne and another officer had been placed on administrative leave. Major newspapers, including the New York Times and Washington Post, gave the story prominent coverage, as did every major television news network. By the end of the day the Salt Lake County District Attorney and County Sheriff had announced there would be a criminal investigation into the matter. The story was covered in the next issue of The New Yorker, and before the week was out, the FBI would become involved.
Clear to anyone who wasn’t either kidding themselves or a moral idiot was the fact that the incident would have gone unnoticed had the nurse not been white. (Also, maybe if she hadn’t been blond.)
The off-the-charts outrage on White Twitter came from two perspectives, though. Some white people—a lot of them—were incensed that this had happened. Others joined Black Twitter in being incensed at the outrage itself because, in the final analysis, nothing very terrible had happened to the nurse: she had been subjected to indignities, sure. And bullied. And assaulted. The cop had used excessive force, seizing and overpowering her, half-carrying her off the ward as she cried out “You’re hurting me!” and “Help me!” and “I’ve done nothing wrong!” And, after being cuffed, she had been forced to sit in a police cruiser for about twenty minutes.
But unarmed people of color getting shot in the back and subjected to other forms of lethal force didn’t garner this sort of attention and outrage from the white community. Nor did these and other instances of brutality receive such a swift and unambiguous official response.1
I don’t know whether, heading into the holiday weekend, the hashtag #WatchWhitenessWork was trending, but you sure saw it a lot.
Those who disliked seeing race brought up argued that people were outraged because Wubbles was a nurse—a nurse! And besides, she’d been protecting the civil rights of a patient in her care. But then that raised the question of whether the incident would have been less heinous if she had not been a nurse. If she had been a secretary, say, or a cab driver or a line cook or a janitor, or if she had been unemployed or homeless or a refugee, would it have been more okay for a cop to get violent and vindictive and arrest someone just because he felt disrespected, just because he was frustrated that he wasn’t getting his way?
One aspect of the affair that got little attention, except in The New Yorker, was the question of why a blood sample was wanted at all from William Gray, the patient whose rights Officer Payne had hoped to violate. He was not in fact a suspect, as Payne implied when he arrested Wubbles for “interfering with an investigation,” but collateral damage in a fatal collision caused by a police pursuit. A pick-up that members of a neighboring law enforcement agency had been chasing had crashed head-on into Gray’s truck. The driver of the pick-up had died on impact, and Payne wanted a sample of Gray’s blood so it could be checked for illegal substances. Quite probably the quest was, as Amy Davidson Sorkin put it in The New Yorker, for “something that might place some of the responsibility for the crash on Gray himself in case he complained that the police had been reckless in their pursuit.” (Gray would die from his injuries before the month was out.)
In other words, there was no “criminal investigation” for Wubbles to obstruct, no “exigent circumstances” laying the foundation for “implied consent” (all phrases that Payne used at various points during the encounter). This was just a bunch of cops trying to help cover the asses of their brother officers. Wubbles had been roughed up, punished, and humiliated all because some guy with a badge hadn’t wanted to take “no” for an answer.
If you doubt this, then Google “Washington Post” and “Utah nurse” and after you click on the article with the headline “‘This is crazy,’ sobs Utah hospital nurse…” scroll to the bottom of the piece and check out the first “related” news story, about a black teenager who got punched in the throat, thrown to the ground, kneed in the back and kept immobile while police searched her belongings and set an attack dog on her before throwing her with bound arms and legs, into the backseat of a cruiser because police had mistaken her for a black male suspect. I don’t guess that made it onto Ari Melber.