{A Trigger Warning That Isn’t: This post talks about Ford v Kavanaugh, but doesn’t contain any details regarding the alleged crime itself, focusing instead on the ability to verify dates and contemporary testimony.}
One of the biggest questions resulting from the questions involving Bret Kavanaugh’s alleged attempted rape in high school is whether, in fact, he did it. Sexual assault cases are hard to prove under most circumstances, and attempted sexual assault even moreso. Once you add in a thirty year time differential, people are correct to say that we will never know what truly happened. You have your opinions, I have mine. We can talk until we’re blue in the face, but we will never know for sure.
This isn’t really about Kavanaugh and Ford, though. It’s about our ability and inability to construct a series of events. What was the night in question? Was Kavanaugh there? Who else was there? What were they saying at the time? Ford’s case depends in part on what she told a therapist in 2012, and what she told friends in 2017. It occurs to me that while sexual assault cases will never be easy or hard to disprove, a lot of them might become easier over time. Because whether we like it or not, we have records now involving everything and it’s just becoming more comprehensive and more permanent. To the point that the absence of a record will, unlike this case, be a sort of record on its own.
As luck would have it, I have been going through old emails. Like, all of them. Well, to be more precise, all of them from about 1999 on. I have been opening old long-forgotten PST (email archive) files, Thunderbird directories, free email accounts I have long since stopped using, and everything I can find. I’m putting them all in one place. It has reintroduced me to people and things very long forgotten. There are some love interests I still don’t remember, but most of them have jogged on some memories. Some better than others.
I looked inside it because I had to. Became really interested in this person I was exchanging a lot of emails and got on extremely well with and had no recollection of. SMJ? Who is SMJ? Flip, click click…. OH HER THAT ENDED VERY BADLY
— Will Truman (@trumwill) June 9, 2018
There have also been a lot of areas that I mostly steered clear of. Because I remember the story. I remember keenly how it ended. Or how good it was until it did. Or how miserable it was throughout. There are also friends I had a falling out with. Friends that have died. You get the idea. But if I wanted, I could reconstruct some of my relationships with surprising depth. Just using emails.
I started interacting with girls with flirtatious intent back in 1996. Or, at least, that’s when I started doing so without a complete lack of success. While I have been romantically involved with more than four individuals, it actually breaks down relatively cleanly between Jane (1995-96), Julia (1997-2001), Eva (2001-03), and Clancy (2003 on). Separating this into “eras” helps me place communications in any given year. Going in reverse order, I have the emails I traded with my future wife right after we first met. I have the blog post I wrote after the weekend where we met, that she read and knew instantly that I felt the connection too. (I thought I was being subtle.) I have some of the down times, too. It’s all there.
This is even more true of Eva, with whom I traded a lot of emails. I even have chat logs, though that’s because I am a packrat. Since we emailed and AIMed so often, I could reconstruct just about every week. It would bring back memories I have long since forgotten. I could probably account for most of my weekends during that period, just from my communications with her. The same is true with regard to the end of my relationship with Julia, but not the beginning. Some of that is that we were emailing each other a lot more as things were slowly falling apart over the last 12-18 months. If you knew where to look, you could also find a lot more in my conversations with others. Likewise, you could piece together a lot of Julia’s relationship with the guy that came after me by looking at emails between Julia and myself.
And then there’s Jane. And with Jane, I have almost nothing. In terms of my personal archives, it’s like she never existed at the time when she existed most. We had extensive cybercommunications, but it was all on BBSes and the records were destroyed. The only traces I have of her are actually from years and years later, solely as an artifact of those records being automatically (or routinely) kept, and not because of any personal significance.
Along those lines, I have a lot of emails with less significant people in my life from the later years, while some of the most important things from earlier in my life are completely unrecorded.
I mention all of this because I have been asking myself in light of Kavanaugh, what would I be able to prove if there were some sort of accusation? Not just me, but people around me. If someone told me something that would later indicate that they weren’t making something up, would I have a record of it? If somebody needed an alibi for a time we were together, would I have it? It just depends on when.
As far as email goes, it’s the Eva Era that is probably the best. So much of my life was recorded in emails to this person or that one. If I needed to account for my time with someone during that period, it’s probably in email. Before that, it was more likely lost to BBSing or telephone calls. After that, there is a lull as communication transitioned to unsaved texting, but then it’s on Facebook and later Google Hangouts and there start being records again just not of the email variety. A lot of my text messaging did get lost, but starting a couple years ago I started using an app called Pulse that keeps everything for me. Eventually I expect all of them will keep everything for you, and the records will be permanently stored, just waiting for a subpoena.
Despite some ebb and flow, however, everything is trending in a particular direction. We talk about this when it comes to the NSA and all of that, but it will also have an effect when it comes to needing to know where we were and when. And it’s not just text. I have little in the way of photographic evidence of anything up until 2002 or so when I bought my first digital camera and could take pictures without getting them developed. And then in 2010 or so I got my first smartphone with a camera good enough that it could substitute for the digital camera, and I could take pictures anywhere. And it shows. If I need to know when I took a trip somewhere, I can find it in my photograph archives. And those, too, are being backed up automatically.
All of this is to say that the notion of not knowing things in our personal history, and not being able to check and subpoena them, is passing. You will likely never know what happened at any given party at any given time, but you will be far more likely to know what people were saying about it at the time.
Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter. ...more →
It’s an interesting topic. But just like you can never be confident that a record is gone, you can never be confident that it isn’t. Older systems may not be compatible with newer. Files get corrupted. There are backups and mirrors, sure. But do they meet forensic standards? Is the creation date on a snip of a spreadsheet admissible? There are also ways of avoiding documentation.
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