In the past week, two prominent women have been accused of sexual abuse, resulting in questions about the #MeToo movement’s integrity. The first was Avital Ronell, a professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, who was suspended for allegedly harassing an advisee, Nimrod Reitman. The second was Asia Argento, who, according to a report in The New York Times, paid off a younger actor named Jimmy Bennett so that he would not go public with his allegation that she sexually abused him when he was a minor.

In the case of Ronell, a renowned intellectual who is not a #MeToo spokesperson, her allies in academia—including feminist luminaries like Jack Halberstam, Judith Butler, Chris Kraus, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—have closed ranks around her and sought to discredit her accuser. The controversy surrounding Argento’s scandal is different: She was one of the first Hollywood stars to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of abuse, and was an early leader in the #MeToo movement.* She deplored the way Weinstein and his enablers covered up abuse through secretive deals and legal maneuvers.



Yet the implications of Ronell and Argento’s cases were similar: As The Los Angeles Times asked, “Do the claims against Asia Argento invalidate the #MeToo movement?” Did they not expose the hypocrisies of feminists who themselves have been accused of being too quick to condemn and of succumbing to a mob mentality?

Weinstein’s lawyer pounced, saying the Argento story “reveals a stunning level of hypocrisy.” Her “sheer duplicity,” he said, “should demonstrate to everyone how poorly the allegations against Mr. Weinstein were actually vetted and accordingly, cause all of us to pause and allow due process to prevail, not condemnation by fundamental dishonesty.” In its write-up of the Ronell case, The New York Times said the complaint against her “raised a challenge for feminists—how to respond when one of their own behaved badly.”

In fact, the way feminists have reacted to these allegations has been deeply clarifying. Argento’s allies in #MeToo have taken her victim’s accusations seriously, while acknowledging that women are perfectly capable of committing the kinds of crimes that are also committed against them. If all the allegations are true, then there can be little doubt that Argento behaved irresponsibly in speaking out so publicly against the very things she was doing in secret.