On Thursday, Fox News “legal analyst” Mercedes Colwin was on with Sean Hannity and Sebastian Gorka to discuss the growing avalanche of reports that Republican family values Christian Roy Moore is something of a child molester. The fact that there was a plural number of allegations against Moore didn’t give the braintrust at Fox News a moment of pause; and as Ms. Colwin explained, she had defended all kinds of executives in sexual assault and harassment cases and “legitimate” accusations were “very few and far between.” Considering that it was Fox News, and Sean Hannity and Sebastian Gorka, this conversation wasn’t so much surprising as it was excessively insane.
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Colwin: Yes. I used to work in sex crimes in the d.a.'s office. It's pitful to see that. Some jurors don't believe it because they have -- in their own lives, people have made these accusations for money. You see it time and time again. Sexual harassment, that term is coined everywhere. The laws are very clear as to what it takes in order to be a violation of the law. You have to have some sort of damage. These individuals, a lot of these women, it's about money. They bank on the fact that these corporations --
Sean: And there are women that are victims, predators.
Colwin: There are. But very few, and far between.
The fact that more and more evidence has come out alleging that Roy Moore is exactly a “predator,” and Fox News has shown that its internal culture has been filled with men in powerful positions sexually harassing and assaulting women for decades, is only a slice of what was wrong in that statement. Ms. Colwin was the managing partner of Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani’s New York office. That seems to have been what constituted Fox News touting her as a “legal analyst.” Her appearance led to the kinds of reactions you can imagine and she tried to walk back her statement on social media with an apology.
American Lawyer reports that Colwin’s apology didn’t achieve the damage control her employers needed—it’s not a good look to boast that your work helps get powerful men out of trouble after they’ve possibly abused women.
On Monday, Gordon Rees firmwide managing partner Dion Cominos released a statement addressing Colwin’s comments and confirmed that she had stepped down from all management roles within the firm, which adopted its current name in 2014.
“The [firm] in no way endorses or agrees with any statements which could even remotely be interpreted as minimizing or trivializing the seriousness and gravity of sexual harassment or similarly predatory behaviors, and we renounce them in the strongest possible terms—in fact, contrary to what may have been inferred from what was said during the telecast,” Cominos said in a statement released Monday.
Cominos added that the “sad reality is that the number of women who likely have not been exposed to such repugnant conduct over the course of their personal or professional lives is, unfortunately, few and far between.”
Colwin might not realize it but she is learning a valuable lesson about rape culture and white supremacy—they do not care much for women. If you are a bigoted, misogynist asshat saying similar things you aren’t going to be left out to dry. But if you’re a woman, it doesn’t matter how much you try to ingratiate yourself—you are always going to be a sacrificial shield in their fight to maintain the status quo.