Scribble

Audie Cornish

00:00:00

'This past weekend, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo posted a surprising 17-minute video online.

Andrew Cuomo

00:00:07

And that is why I announced my candidacy today for mayor of New York City.

Audie Cornish

00:00:12

Now, in any other case, this would not be like that big a deal. He's a moderate Democrat with major name recognition, eyeing the seat of a scandal plagued incumbent in Mayor Eric Adams. But the announcement was an eyebrow raiser because, I mean, like, let's hop back in the Wayback Machine and crank it to, let's say, August 10th, 2021.

Andrew Cuomo

00:00:38

Thank you for the honor of serving you. It has been the honor of my lifetime. God bless you.

John King, CNN Archive Tape

00:00:48

'Simply blockbuster news. The 63-year-old Democratic Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, announcing he will resign 14 days from today. That in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment, a report produced by the state attorney general, in which 11 separate women said the governor had behaved inappropriately around them. This is a seismic moment in national politics, in democratic politics and in the cultural conversation, the national conversation about mistreatment of women in the workplace.

Audie Cornish

00:01:20

'Democrats for the last few years had been leading the charge for public officials accused of sexual impropriety to leave the job. Cuomo had been among the highest profile to face the consequences of reported abuse and harassment. But here we are post-"Me Too," and Cuomo says he's learned his lesson.

Andrew Cuomo

00:01:40

Did I make mistakes? Some painfully? Definitely. And I believe I learned from them and that I am a better person for it.

Audie Cornish

00:01:49

Now what exactly he's learned? He didn't say. To the activist who helped turn the MeToo moment into a movement that he's even running is frustrating.

Tarana Burke

00:02:01

The kind of world. And so many of us say that we want to live in. We will not get there when we keep making these same kinds of mistakes. When we discount violence against women as a serious enough offense, right? That that it always gets dismissed.

Audie Cornish

00:02:18

'The so-called "canceled" men from Hollywood, media and politics have been welcomed back to the public sphere, and the "believe all women" approach is no more. So what was the point? What really has changed? Today, I'm talking with two women who have an answer. Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson and the mother of Me Too, Tarana Burke. I'm Audie Cornish, and this is The Assignment. Gretchen Carlson is what you might call a Me Too success story. She sued former Fox News head Roger Ailes in 2016 for sexual harassment. She won a $20 million settlement and got an apology from Fox, that is. But at the time, it didn't feel much like a victory.

Gretchen Carlson

00:03:10

Well, I thought I was just going to be sitting home crying my eyes out for the rest of my life. You know, my career that I had killed myself for, to get to the top of television was stripped from me for no good reason. I mean, I hadn't done anything wrong and I was doing a great job.

Audie Cornish

00:03:26

Her ordeal became one of the main storylines in the Me Too movement. Her story was turned into TV and movies. She's been played on screen by Naomi Watts and Nicole Kidman. But her career as a TV anchor was more or less over. Carlson has since founded a group called Lift Our Voices to lobby for laws that prevent employers from going after survivors who speak publicly about harassment in the workplace. This is not where she thought she would be after she took on Ailes and Fox.

Gretchen Carlson

00:03:58

Because I've reinvented myself so many times and this last time around has been the most significant.

Audie Cornish

00:04:04

Yeah.

Gretchen Carlson

00:04:04

You know, it's just it's really going to turn into my legacy as an advocate, more important than any person I've ever interviewed as a journalist. And that is so gratifying.

Audie Cornish

00:04:15

'It landed in this moment where what became the mainstream Me Too movement enters the consciousness, meaning you have like allegations against Harvey Weinstein, you have allegations against candidate Donald Trump, and that intersects with Twitter, its activism, and that comes around to folks like Tarana Burke, right, who had been working in the space of sexual violence for a long time. So it was a strange kind of perfect storm --.

Gretchen Carlson

00:04:48

Exactly.

Audie Cornish

00:04:49

'-- for the broader culture to talk about it all at once.

Gretchen Carlson

00:04:51

Exactly. I always call it a perfect storm, Audie. That's the best way to describe it. And then just the other thing I'd add is that the American public got pissed off because they were like, wait a minute, we're still treating people like this in the workplace. And the reason that they thought we had come much farther along than we actually had was because all of these cases were going to secrecy. And that's what I really found out after I came forward. I mean, I realized there was an epidemic, still, of sexual misconduct in the workplace, but there was an epidemic as well, of silencing these people. And the thousands of people who reached out to me they all said the same eerie thing, which was, thank you for being the voice for the voiceless. And I was like, what the hell is going on here?

Audie Cornish

00:05:36

Well, the public all of a sudden knew what an NDA was, right?

Gretchen Carlson

00:05:39

And what what forced arbitration was. And people still don't understand what that is. But that's what my two laws are about that that passed. And so that really became the genesis of my advocacy work.

Audie Cornish

00:05:52

'Two federal laws passed, which, by the way, passing anything. Just add someone covering politics, like passing anything right now is so hard. That would ban arbitration and NDAs and workplace sexual abuse harassment cases. The reason why I bring this up is because these are victories, right? Like on paper, that is a legislative victory. What happened over the years started to feel like cultural rollbacks, right. So you have some of the men who are allegedly taken down or "canceled" -- that was the biggest thing being "canceled" -- very much back in the public eye. And then in entertainment, that might mean, like a Louis C.K., for example. Right. And I'm picking him because he's someone who actually kind of apologized publicly for harming the women who were harassed by him. And in politics, of course, you have the Brett Kavanaugh hearings that were a turning point where Christine Blasey Ford surfaced these allegations from their high school years in hearings. You have Donald Trump, who was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll by a Manhattan federal jury. This was not disqualifying to these men, and they were not, in the end, hounded from the public space. And in fact, I've heard the term "me too martyr." And I'm wondering, from your point of view why you think this all took a turn?

Gretchen Carlson

00:07:16

'Yeah, it's a problem. And we saw that really in the last election cycle with these far right wing, misogynist men who skyrocketed to the top of social media and started galvanizing our young men across America to start celebrating being a misogynist again. And I have --

Audie Cornish

00:07:36

But do you think that's because young men we're hearing again, 2016, 2017, 2018, they're hearing. The problem is with men and young boys and rape culture. The problem is with men and young boys being told X. The problem is, and after a while, they start to gravitate toward someone who says they're not a problem.

Gretchen Carlson

00:07:52

Yeah, no, I mean, well, and it also fits into the power structure in our country. Like, who wants to give up any power? You know, men, I mean, not to harp on them because they're a huge part of this equation. And I always say I'm an extending the olive branch to them to join our fight because we need them. But when you look at the power dynamic in our patriarchal culture, and suddenly women are having more power and people of color are having more power, and then you have this whole revolution of of men being brought down by Me Too. If if anyone comes out and says, hey, I'll be your savior for you, and you know, you don't have to follow those rules anymore and you can get your power back. That's, I think, how this whole thing fit together is that. Yeah. You know, and a lot of, a lot of young men in our culture had been struggling as of late trying to find jobs. Trying to keep jobs. And so I think it was, again, this kind of perfect storm in the opposite direction, where there was a rallying cry for, especially white men, to fall in line. And, and a lot of them decided to support Donald Trump.

Audie Cornish

00:09:01

'Criticism of Me Too, has always been around the idea that it went, quote unquote, "too far," that it created a spectrum of abuse that was so wide everything was sort of caught in it. Um, and then you saw organizations like the Time's Up organization in Hollywood that fell apart for its own organizational reasons. Do you think you and your organization Lift Our Voices -- Do you think you're doing well because you're picking legal fights? Right, like you're doing something that's discreet, achievable. Like is there something -- Do you think in some ways the Me Too conversation got too vague, too hard for people to get their arms around?

Gretchen Carlson

00:09:43

Yeah. I mean, look on purpose and lift our voices. We are laser focused on one thing, and that is getting rid of silencing mechanisms that keep all this stuff secret. Forced arbitration and NDAs. That's it. Time's Up really started taking on way too many other causes, and it's very easy to fall into that trap. But I have found that the strategy of being incredibly disciplined and laser focused on our mission is the silver bullet to equity in the workplace, because if you're a company that believes in silencing your people about these issues, you probably also don't pay your people fairly, and you probably also don't promote them adequately. So we believe that getting rid of all of this changes the entire dynamic for all American workers. And in staying so disciplined and laser focused, I believe that that is why we have had success.

Audie Cornish

00:10:39

Now, you've got to go forward in an era where company after corporation has gone out and said DEI? I don't know her. Like, they are just rolling it back, right? The Trump administration has put out all kinds of executive orders against diversity, equity and inclusion policies. I think in some places this conversation about sexual harassment was like under those umbrellas. Do you feel an environment change, a vibe shift, even in the work you do? Right. Where like, I don't even know if some of these human resources people are still hired.

Gretchen Carlson

00:11:17

What I would say about the work that we do at Lift Our Voices is that we don't believe it's DEI. The truth of the matter is that our issues also affect white men in very high numbers.

Audie Cornish

00:11:28

But that's a good pitch right there. But before, you might have been like, this is part of making it a more welcoming workplace for women. This is how companies might have thought of it. But I hear you moving with the moment and saying, talking about the things they care about now. Bottom line: Uh, men. Yeah. Like. It's a very different vibe.

Gretchen Carlson

00:11:51

'Yeah. I mean, look, I've always talked about it. The. Here are the facts: The number one group of people that are affected by silencing mechanisms more than anyone else in American workplaces are black women making minimum wage. Okay? True. But not far behind: white men. So we approach this as a workers rights issue. This is -- Men every single day are signing contracts that are putting them into forced arbitration and NDAs at almost the same rate as African American women, who is the, you know, the biggest group affected by this.

Audie Cornish

00:12:25

'This, right? And again, around issues of conduct not like company trade secret--

Gretchen Carlson

00:12:29

Exactly. No, we're in favor.

Audie Cornish

00:12:30

'--which is what they were intended for.

Gretchen Carlson

00:12:32

'Yeah, that was the intent originally. We are in -- Of course, companies should be able to protect their trade secrets. If I work for Pepsi. I shouldn't be able to walk across the street to Coke and give away the secret formula. We understand that. We're not fighting against that. What's happened over time, Audie, is that these NDAs have become so incredibly expansive that on your first day of work-- By the way, one third of all Americans sign these on their first day of work. One third. And you have no idea what you're signing. You think it's for trade secrets, but it's for every single thing that happens to you from that moment forward. You can't talk about it. It's why at Fox that nobody could warn anyone else about what was going on. I mean, we all sort of lived in our own little bubble because we were made to believe that it was just us, right? And that's a way in which you keep the bad culture at bay, right, because the more people you allow to come together and actually coalesce and say, "Hey, me too," that's how you start these movements. And so I understand why companies have wanted to cover up their dirty laundry. But these these these clauses have exploded--

Audie Cornish

00:13:40

'But this isn't the moment you fear that they'll back away--

Gretchen Carlson

00:13:42

Maybe.

Audie Cornish

00:13:44

'--because of this new administration?

Gretchen Carlson

00:13:45

Maybe. But they can't back away from my laws, so they're still going to have to abide by the laws, which brings us full circle as to why I believe that that was such a crucial thing to start with. So, as I've said before, the train's left the station. Get on board. Join our fight because we're not going away.

Audie Cornish

00:14:08

The 'me too' movement, among many other things, was, I think, about creating a world where no, um, woman, victim of harassment would have to say, nobody ever believed me. Nobody would believe me. Do you think we're closer to that vision?

Gretchen Carlson

00:14:27

'So, you know, these kinds of cultural shifts -- I don't have to tell you this. They take a long time. And this movement has been ultra successful in a very short period of time. And any movement has, they have. We've had roadblocks in every other movement. We've had pushback. We've had letdowns. Um, I just have to continue to to speak loud and clear, that I'm optimistic that we're going to continue to move this forward, like, why are we going to just give in? We can't. We can't give in. And we've seen a market change this time around from this Trump administration versus the last one. I mean, the last one, we had women's marches and we had people, you know, screaming from the top of mountaintops. That's not happening this time. And I'm here to say that we have, we have to be continuing to have a rallying cry, even if it's more covered up. Maybe we're not going to actually go and do marches in DC, but we still have to galvanize people to not give up this fight.

Audie Cornish

00:15:30

'Gretchen Carlson is the co-founder of Lift Our Voices and the author of the book "Be Fierce: Stop Harassment and Take Your Power Back." After a quick break, the woman who coined the phrase "me too." Stay with us. I think of the phrase me too is a bit of a relic of peak Twitter hashtag activism. It exploded into the public consciousness in 2017, when celebrities started using the hashtag in solidarity with victims who had gone public with allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. But the phrase itself dates to 2006. That's when Tarana Burke used it on her MySpace page as a way to support women speaking out about experiencing abuse. Tarana Burke, welcome to The Assignment.

Tarana Burke

00:16:23

Thank you. Audie, thank you for having me.

Audie Cornish

00:16:25

'When you think back to that moment when the 'me too' movement explodes into the public consciousness -- into the media's consciousness -- and people start to come around to you, right, as someone who had been a long time activist, did it feel like a moment? Or did it feel like a movement?

Tarana Burke

00:16:43

So there's two ways to answer, I guess, because it's always felt like a movement to me. It felt like a moment that was giving birth to an opportunity for the movement.

Audie Cornish

00:16:54

Ooh, say that again. "A moment giving birth to an opportunity.".

Tarana Burke

00:16:57

'Yeah. It felt that's what it felt like. And it was a convergence of two worlds that don't always mix well. Um, but quite quickly, I realized that this was a moment that was really giving birth to a big opportunity for a movement that was already moving. And not just 'me too,' but the movement to end sexual violence, right, it's a has a long history and there's there's like every movement, there are ebbs and flows and ups and downs. And what has happened since "me too" has gone viral probably couldn't have happened in 20 years without that moment. So that's kind of -- I realized that pretty quickly.

Audie Cornish

00:17:36

It was such a big moment, and there were so many high profile men in media and entertainment in particular, also in politics, who were quote unquote "canceled." And I say quote unquote, because it's like a mixed bag of things that happened to them.

Tarana Burke

00:17:51

Correct.

Audie Cornish

00:17:51

And it didn't necessarily happen in courtrooms.

Tarana Burke

00:17:54

Yeah.

Audie Cornish

00:17:54

And then a conversation about what was fair to them and what was unfair to those men. Can you talk about how that may have fed into or affected what would become the backlash?

Tarana Burke

00:18:08

'Oh, absolutely. I think -- I know -- in this country in particular, even though this was a global phenomenon and it happened the same way around the world, we were not used to seeing men -- powerful men, definitely -- being held to account for anything.

Audie Cornish

00:18:23

Yeah.

Tarana Burke

00:18:23

'Right. It was not a--

Audie Cornish

00:18:25

Or having to answer for anything, so to speak, right?

Tarana Burke

00:18:27

'Not at all. Just the idea that you would accuse and be called out. Just that. Forget anything beyond it. Anything legal or [indecipherable]. Just that one act was such an affront for so many people. And I say people, not just men, right? Culturally, we are so steeped in patriarchy. And it's why when a woman -- and I'm being gendered for a moment -- but when so many women were simply opening their mouths to say, "This hurt. You hurt me. I've been harmed," all people could hear was a man's life being ruined. We should have heard people saving their own lives. People making an attempt to bring some healing into their own lives--

Audie Cornish

00:19:17

Yeah.

Tarana Burke

00:19:17

'--by freeing themselves of this burden. I do think that in the fervor after that moment, and I try to explain it to people like, you gotta give people some time, right? There has not been in the history of this country, a time where, again, women collectively have been able to raise their voices and say, yes, this is what we've been dealing with. Now you see it. We have this, this, this sort of vehicle to help explain what we've been trying to tell you in all kinds, millions of different ways. Right. Like we've been screaming at the top our lungs for years. We've just found a frequency that you can hear us on. And so now that you can hear it and you understand it, there's going to be a lot of catharsis. There's going to be a lot of yelling and screaming and demanding and, you know, and so --.

Audie Cornish

00:20:03

It gets messy.

Tarana Burke

00:20:04

It gets a little messy because, you know, people have space for the guy, jumped out the bushes and violently raped the woman. They have space for the drunk husband who beat up his wife. They don't have space for the girl who was in the bar at 2:00 in the morning and got pissy drunk, went home with the guy.

Audie Cornish

00:20:24

But you know, that's when you hear more dialogue about the gray area. The dialogue about consent. Also defensive mechanisms around well, actually what position what position are we putting young men in? I feel like you picked the perfect example for that.

Tarana Burke

00:20:39

100%, because I spend a lot of time on college campuses.

Audie Cornish

00:20:43

Ooh.

Tarana Burke

00:20:43

'I saw the danger of what was happening while we had these young, really just wide-eyed, feminist, young women who were like, we're on this campus and how can we get these toxic men to hear us that they're sexist and misogynist? And I'm like, okay, let's take a step back. We are all raised in the same country. We're all socialized pretty much with the same pop culture, the same set of dynamics around gender and sexuality. And so if this 18-year-old boy is dropped on a college campus, having maybe had consent ed. in the sixth grade and again in the 12th grade --.

Audie Cornish

00:21:26

If at all. I mean. Yeah.

Tarana Burke

00:21:27

'If at all. If at all. Yes. What you are witnessing is probably is its toxic behavior. Like that description is probably accurate. But do you think screaming at him that he's toxic is going to make him un toxic? It's not because he has been socialized just like you to be that person, and we haven't had a collective moment to stop and talk about what the responsibility is. What is it that we owe each other? What do we owe our communities? What do we owe our children? There has to be a reeducation and a re-socialization in this country.

Audie Cornish

00:22:02

'But did activists push away men, push away the public by basically saying, you're the problem? And I bring this up because when you think about the "manosphere" online, right -- the in that sort of informal collective of helping young men understand the world -- what they say to them is, you're fine. There's actually nothing wrong, right, you know what I mean?

Tarana Burke

00:22:23

So they have some place to run to, to say,.

Audie Cornish

00:22:25

Like, it's the place to go because I don't know why you would stick around that environment you described either.

Tarana Burke

00:22:29

'Yeah. I think that we did not understand the challenge ahead of us. And I think our biggest mistake, meaning us in, in our work in me too, was not engaging men as survivors. Right. And now I'm not going to speak to what other activists did wrong [or] right. You know, I always talk about survivors. It's not a womens' movement. This is a survivors' movement. But if you only embrace men as harm-doers, you don't leave any space for anything else. Right? And so it puts them against the wall. If you know, there's this sort of message that if, if, you know, men would just stop raping, this would all be over. And that's actually not true.

Audie Cornish

00:23:08

I wish I could say I had never heard that sentence. I have.

Tarana Burke

00:23:10

No, it's and I always I'm always trying to like, say please. That's not true. It diminishes the men who have experienced sexual violence at the hands of women, which is so many, so, so many. It diminishes folks who are on the gender spectrum. Right? It just, it just is a wrong statement, really. The other part about it that's a challenge is that we cannot win this battle without everybody, right?

Audie Cornish

00:23:37

Yeah, but now you're not in that position. I mean, in terms of things that have shifted. You've got, frankly, a lot of the men, let's say, in entertainment who are canceled. They are back in the public space. Right? They are very much. Their finances are still good. They may not have the same cultural relevancy that they appreciated, but they found in a whole new audience.

Tarana Burke

00:24:00

Oh, yeah.

Audie Cornish

00:24:01

You have political figures using the term "me too martyr" to talk about a man who has been kind of falsely accused.

Tarana Burke

00:24:10

'Wow. I haven't actually heard that one. That's --

Audie Cornish

00:24:11

'Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. No, it came up during some of the potential cabinet nominees, like, for instance, Matt Gaetz from Florida --.

Tarana Burke

00:24:19

Ah, of course.

00:24:19

'-- who was actually reckoning with an investigation into right his interactions with underage girls and didn't end up going forward. So in that case, it really did hurt him. But I don't think any more I'm not sure it means and I'm not sure it's disqualifying.

Tarana Burke

00:24:40

Oh, I think we are sure that it's not disqualifying in any way.

Audie Cornish

00:24:43

Well, yeah, to be in a public space.

Tarana Burke

00:24:45

'Yeah, it is not. I think that you have some cases that are egregious and people are like, well, sure, that person because you know, like when in the case of Diddy, you know, before that video came out of him, right. Physically abusing Cassie, people were, she is is she a gold digger? Da-da-da.

Audie Cornish

00:25:06

Yeah, and "he said, she said." That's usually the term, right, before you have, in that case, Diddy's hotel surveillance video.

Tarana Burke

00:25:12

'Right. And so then we, we we-- Once we decide that that person actually might have been this bad actor, then they become a boogeyman and not just a part of society. And this is the larger societal problem, right? They're just one offs. They're just these boogeymen that just happen to be bad actors as opposed to saying, no, this is part and parcel of what everyday people are dealing with in their lives. This is happening in small towns and in communities across the city, across the world.

Audie Cornish

00:25:41

'Every time one of these guys comes back to the public space, or even there is a high stakes change in the legal system, Harvey Weinstein's a good example. He had his case overturned, and people probably come to you like, beep-beep-beep, what do you think? What does this mean for me too? And what has that been like?

Tarana Burke

00:26:04

Annoying, in a word. I get it. You know, people want to try to understand and make meaning of these moments. But part of the reason why it's frustrating is because this movement really has never been about perpetrators. It has always been about survivors.

Audie Cornish

00:26:26

'Uh, I'm chastising myself in my head because I do think, legacy-wise, I now look back, say Me Too movement. In my mind, I just see boxes and faces of men, who are accused. I don't see the survivors.

Tarana Burke

00:26:38

And it's I mean, I think it's most people, right? If Weinstein and Matt Lauer and R. Kelly and all of that is the first thing that jumps in your mind, it's because that's what the media has done. What I see when I think of it, I can see myself scrolling Twitter and all of those hashtags, one after another after another. "Me too. Me too. Me too." I think about the numbers when we got the demographics back, and it said 12 million people had interacted with this hashtag across social media in 24 hours. Every hashtag is a human being. And we lose sight of that all the time because we spend so much time talking about these, the people who caused harm, the people who were accused of causing harm, and what happened to their material lives. And we never think about the material lives of survivors, and they are just millions more of us.

Audie Cornish

00:27:27

Do you feel like there's more to do in terms of making survivors feel supported or not judged when they come forward?

Tarana Burke

00:27:35

For sure. For sure. We have to.

Audie Cornish

00:27:37

Oh, I was hoping you would say that's one legacy of 'me too,' that it's better now.

Tarana Burke

00:27:41

Now. No, I think that it's I think the legacy of 'me too' around survivors coming forward is definitely that people feel more comfortable coming forward. I think we have more language and we have a shift in attitude with people. Where[as] before there was so much speculation and, you know, and there's still that, but there's much less now. And to give credit to this generation, these younger generations, the Zs and the As and the, you know, the young folks.

Audie Cornish

00:28:09

Yeah.

Tarana Burke

00:28:10

They have an analysis around this that is so sharp.

Audie Cornish

00:28:14

Well, they grew up with it.

Tarana Burke

00:28:15

They grew up with it.

Audie Cornish

00:28:15

If you think about being 10 years old, 12 years old, 13 years old with this stuff coming up, I mean, it's pretty wild.

Tarana Burke

00:28:21

Yeah, So I'm I worry less about that. I think that that will be a longstanding part of our legacy, that we shifted how people understand and think and talk about the material lives of survivors.

Audie Cornish

00:28:32

Is there any strategizing going on meaning going forward? Are people starting to come together and be like, how should we talk about this under this new administration, under this new cultural regime?

Tarana Burke

00:28:45

'Yeah. Well, you know, this is our second go-around. So I think a lot of us, particularly in this work, learned a lot of big lessons in the first era of this administration. What's a little bit nervewracking for me is thinking about what's going to happen culturally or what's happening culturally. You know, watching this administration come in, watching the open arms for people who have been accused of sexual harm or who have been--

Audie Cornish

00:29:14

Andrew Cuomo's running for mayor, right, in New York.

Tarana Burke

00:29:18

'Oh, don't get me started. That's a rant for me. I was literally about to go live, and I never do that on Instagram the other night. I was like, and I hope this stays in because I need to say this. We will never be able to move forward. And when I say move forward, I mean collectively towards liberation. This is not about women or men or even sexual violence, but the kind of world, as so many of us say, that we want to live in. We will not get there when we when we keep making these same kinds of mistakes, when we discount violence against women as a serious enough offense, right. That that-- It always gets dismissed. So what happens is somebody like Andrew Cuomo decides he's going to run for mayor and people are like, oh yeah, he's great. He knows how to govern. He can beat such and such and blah blah blah. And then somebody will say, but wait a minute, what about? And, there like, well, yeah, that was terrible, or maybe that happened, but. And that "but" is what's going to kill us. That "but" is what sets us back. Right there. You can't tell me that there are not other qualified people who don't have a history of abuse of power. And I'm saying that because you you actually stepped down. You actually stepped down from the governor's seat of New York.

Audie Cornish

00:30:37

Yeah.

Tarana Burke

00:30:37

This is the kind of thing that hurts my heart because I'm like, it is like we are going in circles. Out of one side of their mouth. People will say they care about this issue. They want to see an end to violence. But to my point about what we see in an administration, this is cultural.

Audie Cornish

00:30:54

'When I think about Democrats, that's where the 'me too'--

Tarana Burke

00:30:58

You gonna keep getting me in trouble.

Audie Cornish

00:31:00

When I think about Democrats, that's where the 'me too' movement truly confuses me. Right, and let's take that example of New York. We were talking about Andrew Cuomo. I remember Senator Gillibrand being the one to come out and kind of lead the charge, saying Al Franken should resign. And then after he resigned, the last couple of years, it's been like Al Franken was actually a pretty good guy. And he didn't really hurt someone. Maybe he just groped them. Maybe not. We should have looked into that more. Like it's it's actually on the left that there has been this, did things go too far and did it cost progressive politics too much in this way or that way?

Tarana Burke

00:31:40

'One, I think they're not progressive politics. I think they're left politics. Two, my, my, my grandma used to use a phrase "mealy-mouthed." You ever heard that? "Mealy-mouthed?"

Audie Cornish

00:31:50

Oh, yeah.

Tarana Burke

00:31:52

'Mhmm. We got too many mealy-mouthed folks. They say one thing, they mean another. They say one thing, they do another. And so I am, I probably should just leave it at that, but I, I said this during the Kavanaugh hearing. This was political football. They were using Christine Blasey Ford. It's like political football. You can't I don't care what your party is. This is not a political issue to me. It's a human issue. And so you cannot care about it when it's convenient, right? I remember I tweeted, I was so angry when around the Cuomo thing, around some of the stuff I saw, I was like, these people are Dems before fems.

Audie Cornish

00:32:34

Dems before fems.

Tarana Burke

00:32:35

I had to delete it. My people got to me really fast. They were like, take that down. But I just it's frustrating. I don't care what your party affiliation is, we have to hold the line.

Audie Cornish

00:32:46

Yeah.

Tarana Burke

00:32:47

'Right? there has to be an understanding of what's right, and what's necessary to move this issue forward. And then we have to stay there. And I and I'm just gonna say this and end. It's so many missed opportunities from people who are on the left or progressive or whatever you want to call it. There are these missed opportunities. When the bad actors are on that side, there's an opportunity for those who know better, who claim to know better, to say, okay. This happens on a spectrum. Let's handle it like that. Why don't you encourage these -- the person who's been accused -- to come forward and say, this is what happened. I'm going to let this investigation, you know, like?

Audie Cornish

00:33:33

Model it, basically.

Tarana Burke

00:33:36

Model it. Model what moral authority looks like. This moral authority that they always want to claim. You need to model it for people. Stop texting me asking me for $3. Go find a person who knows what they're doing, and model what it looks like to be a moral authority. That's what we need from our leadership right now across the board. And that's why we. Until we get to that point, we going to keep coming back around to the same things.

Audie Cornish

00:34:07

Tarana Burke, founder of the 'me too' movement. Her memoir is called "Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement." This episode of The Assignment, a production of CNN audio, was produced by Sofia Sanchez and Madeleine Thompson. Special thanks to Grace Walker. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Steve Lickteig is executive producer of CNN audio and our technical director is Dan Dzula. We had support from Dan Bloom, Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. As always, thank you so much for listening. Please hit your 'subscribe' button, and share this show with a friend.

The Assignment with Audie Cornish