Judging the judge for nude photos says more about you than it does her

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This article was published 05/01/2016 (3903 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Actress Jennifer Lawrence and disgraced Manitoba judge Lori Douglas have a lot in common.

Both women had their privacy invaded. Both women had nude photos posted to the Internet without their consent. Both women were shamed for even agreeing to take nude photos in the first place.

And both women have publicly called that violation what it is: a sex crime.

Douglas lost her career, her reputation and nearly took her own life after her late husband, Jack King, used nude photos of her – without her knowledge – in a truly warped attempt to spice up their love life. In an incendiary Canadian Lawyer magazine cover story, she says the subsequent disciplinary proceeding was like being repeatedly raped.

“What it felt like is the torture that’s inflicted in war on women,” she’s quoted as saying of having the photos repeatedly viewed by many senior judges, lawyers and colleagues who looked at the nude pictures during the Canadian Judicial Council process. “It hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt, hurt like agony when I had to be interviewed by people who had looked at them.”

It’s a heartbreaking quote in an article full of them. But unlike Lawrence, who refused to stay silent or apologize for something she didn’t do, Douglas was effectively silenced — and eventually worn down — by a long and fraught investigation. Until now, that is. In the article, Douglas pulls no punches and says the CJC should have stood up for her instead of taking her through a disciplinary proceeding. After all, she had done nothing wrong. But the very existence of illicit photos was enough to call into question her efficacy as a judge.

She suggests the reaction would likely have been different if she were a man. “If I had been a man whose wife was taking pictures, the CJC would have said, ‘Poor Joe. He’s married to a wing nut,” she’s quoted as saying. She’s probably right. Think of all the male judges who have committed actual transgressions that legitimately call into question their efficacy as judges. I’m looking at you, Robert “sex was in the air” Dewar. (As the Free Press reported in 2014, the complaint against Dewar was reviewed by a single judge and never taken to a public inquiry.)

One might say that comparing what happened to Douglas to what happened to Lawrence and several other famous women in the celebrity photo theft of 2014 is a false equivalency, because judges should be held to a higher standard than actors. And, sure — it’s reasonable to expect that a judge be made of good stuff: morality and integrity.

But isn’t also reasonable to conclude that even judges have sex lives, and that those sex lives may not necessarily be vanilla? And isn’t it also reasonable to conclude that what happens between two consenting adults in someone’s private life has little to no bearing on how well that person does her job? For that matter, we don’t know what Douglas consented to; she says she never actually saw the photos and says she didn’t know if King had film in the camera when he took them.

Judging the judge for taking nude photos says more about your values than it does hers, and arguing that she brought this on herself is to blame Douglas for her own victimization and humiliation.

“She should have known better” exists on the same continuum as “she asked for it.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti