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    In Australia, a Validation of Sorts for Brittany Higgins

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    More than three years after Brittany Higgins went public with her claim of rape, her case reached a conclusion of sorts.When a young former government employee said on national television in 2021 that she had been sexually assaulted in Australia’s Parliament two years earlier, it shocked the nation and unleashed a wave of anger aimed at the country’s insular, male-dominated political establishment.The employee, Brittany Higgins accused her colleague Bruce Lehrmann of raping her when she was inebriated, and said that she felt pressure from the government at the time not to report the assault. She became a figurehead for a reckoning on women’s rights that ultimately contributed to the electoral ousting of Australia’s conservative national government. But for years, there was no legal conclusion to the case.On Monday, it was finally — somewhat — settled, in a roundabout way.Mr. Lehrmann lost a civil defamation suit that he had filed against the television station that first broadcast Ms. Higgins’ account, with the judge ruling that based on the available evidence, it was more likely than not that Mr. Lehrmann had raped her.The proceedings did not take place in a criminal court, and the offense did not have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Instead, the standard of proof was a balance of probabilities — a legal term meaning whether something is more likely than not to have occurred.Still, for many, this was a long-awaited validation for Ms. Higgins.“Something resembling justice has been done,” said Sarah Maddison, a political science professor at the University of Melbourne.Justice Michael Lee of the Australian Federal Court in Sydney determined on Monday that it was more likely than not that Ms. Higgins had been inebriated, unaware of her surroundings, and lying still “like a log” while Mr. Lehrmann assaulted her. The judge found that Mr. Lehrmann had been “hellbent” on having sex with her, disregarding whether she had the capacity to consent.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The History Behind Arizona’s 160-Year-Old Abortion Ban

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      The state’s Supreme Court ruled that the 1864 law is enforceable today. Here is what led to its enactment.The 160-year-old Arizona abortion ban that was upheld on Tuesday by the state’s highest court was among a wave of anti-abortion laws propelled by some historical twists and turns that might seem surprising.For decades after the United States became a nation, abortion was legal until fetal movement could be felt, usually well into the second trimester. Movement, known as quickening, was the threshold because, in a time before pregnancy tests or ultrasounds, it was the clearest sign that a woman was pregnant.Before that point, “women could try to obtain an abortion without having to fear that it was illegal,” said Johanna Schoen, a professor of history at Rutgers University. After quickening, abortion providers could be charged with a misdemeanor.“I don’t think it was particularly stigmatized,” Dr. Schoen said. “I think what was stigmatized was maybe this idea that you were having sex outside of marriage, but of course, married women also ended their pregnancies.”Women would terminate pregnancies in several different ways, such as ingesting herbs or medicinal potions that were thought to induce a miscarriage, Dr. Schoen said. The herbs commonly used included pennyroyal and tansy. Another method involved inserting an object in the cervix to try to interrupt a pregnancy or terminate it by causing an infection, Dr. Schoen said.Since tools to determine early pregnancy did not yet exist, many women could honestly say that they were not sure if they were pregnant and were simply taking herbs to restore their menstrual period.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Saudi Arabia, Lagging on Women’s Rights, Is to Lead U.N. Women’s Forum

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      Saudi Arabia will chair a United Nations commission on women, bringing condemnation from human rights groups, which said the kingdom still has an “abysmal” record on women’s rights.Saudi Arabia won an uncontested bid to lead a United Nations body dedicated to women’s rights for the 2025 session, bringing condemnation from human rights groups that argued that the kingdom had an “abysmal” record on women’s empowerment.On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.N., Abdulaziz Alwasil, was elected chairman of the Commission on the Status of Women, a U.N. body whose aim is to protect and promote women’s rights around the world.The Saudi state news agency wrote that the country’s new chairmanship “confirmed its interest in cooperating with the international community to strengthen women’s rights and empowerment” and highlighted strides the country had made toward greater social and economic freedom for women.But the decision drew scathing criticism from human rights groups. Amnesty International’s deputy director for advocacy, Sherine Tadros, said in a statement that Saudi Arabia had an “abysmal record when it comes to protecting and promoting the rights of women.” She argued that there was a “vast gulf” between the U.N. commission’s aspirations and the “lived reality for women and girls in Saudi Arabia.”The commission, established in 1946, has 45 members that are selected based on geographic quotas. No vetting process is required for a country to be elected to the commission, and there is also no requirement that it meet certain standards of gender rights to join.Saudi Arabia had been expected to win the chairmanship, which typically lasts two years, and its bid was reported to have drawn no dissent from other member states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      R.B.G. Award Organizer Cancels Ceremony After Fallout Over Honorees

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      The Opperman Foundation said it would “reconsider its mission” but did not say whether those selected, including Elon Musk and Rupert Murdoch, would still receive the award.The organizer behind an honor named for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a lifelong champion of women’s rights and liberal causes, is canceling the award ceremony scheduled for April after facing blistering criticism from her family and friends over several of this year’s planned recipients.Justice Ginsburg helped establish the award in 2019, the year before she died. It was originally intended for “women who exemplify human qualities of empathy and humility,” but four of the five intended recipients this year are men. Among them are Elon Musk, the tech entrepreneur who frequently lobs tirades at perceived critics; Rupert Murdoch, the tycoon whose empire helped give rise to conservative news media; and Michael R. Milken, the financier who was a face of corporate greed in the 1980s and served nearly two years in prison before becoming a philanthropist.“The last thing we intended was to offend the family and friends of R.B.G.,” Julie Opperman, the chairwoman of Dwight D. Opperman Foundation, which awards the prize every year, said in a statement on Monday. She added: “The foundation is not interested in creating controversy. It is not interested in generating a debate about whether particular honorees are worthy or not.”Ms. Opperman explained that the reason for including men as recipients this year was to reflect and uphold Justice Ginsburg’s “teachings regarding equality.” The foundation “did not consider politics” but focused on selecting leaders who “have made significant contributions to society,” she said.Before the foundation released the statement, the children of Justice Ginsburg had demanded that their mother’s name be removed from the prize, which until this year was called the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award.Her daughter, Jane C. Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia, said the choice of winners this year was “an affront” to the values the justice stood for.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Woman Who Tried to Make Porn Safe for Feminism

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      How the archive of Candida Royalle, a porn star turned pioneering director, landed at Harvard — and inspired a new book challenging the conventional history of the sexual revolution.Harvard’s Schlesinger Library is the nation’s leading repository for women’s history, home to the papers of suffragists and social reformers, poets and politicians, the collective behind “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and iconic figures like Amelia Earhart, Angela Davis and Julia Child.But in its basement vaults, carefully preserved in a box, you can also find a rather different artifact: a costume from the 1978 pornographic comedy “Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls.”The movie, starring John C. Holmes as a pimp who oversees a prostitution ring masquerading as a pizza delivery service, was history-making in its own way, as one of the earliest examples of what became a classic trope — porn with pepperoni. But the costume is at the Schlesinger because of another name on the bill: Candida Royalle.Royalle, who died in 2015, was a minor celebrity in her day. She was a porn star from the 1970s golden age who moved to the other side of the camera, producing feminist erotica that focused on female fantasies, and female audiences.During the so-called sex wars of the 1980s, Royalle faced off against anti-porn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, who dismissed women in the profession as stooges of the patriarchy. And in the 1990s, she became a godmother to the mediagenic sex-positive feminists riding feminism’s third wave.Today, Royalle’s name may ring few bells. But her voluminous archive is now housed at Harvard, where the trove of diaries, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, videos and memorabilia is opening up a new window onto the sexual revolution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      New York Asks Realty Company to Investigate Sexual Assault Allegations

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      The state comptroller wants eXp Realty to look into allegations that female real estate agents were drugged and assaulted during company events.The New York state comptroller has asked the real estate brokerage eXp Realty to open an independent investigation into sexual harassment and assault allegations exposed in a New York Times article last month.As New York’s chief fiscal officer, the comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, is the trustee of the New York State Common Retirement Fund. According to the most recent SEC filing, the pension fund held nearly 27,000 shares of eXp World Holdings, the publicly-held parent company of eXp Realty.In two separate lawsuits, five current and former agents at eXp Realty said that two top agents at the brokerage drugged and them assaulted them at separate eXp recruiting events. Four of them said they were subsequently sexually assaulted, and The Times investigation uncovered a pattern of eXp leadership silencing those who tried to make reports.“The New York Times report raised a huge red flag for us as an investor in that company,” Mr. DiNapoli said in an interview. “We found the allegations very concerning and as a shareholder, we are asking questions. We want a public reporting of their efforts to prevent harassment.”With $2 billion and $90,000 agents, eXp Realty is one of the world’s fastest-growing brokerages. Ariana Drehsler for The New York TimesHe sent a letter to the eXp chief executive, Glenn Sanford, requesting that the company establish an independent committee to look not only into the allegations, but into gaps in policies that may have set the stage for assaults to occur. Mr. DiNapoli wrote that he was concerned about the “legal and reputational risks” presented by the allegations.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Sandra Day O’Connor’s Legacy Was Undermined by Court’s Rightward Shift

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      Since her retirement in 2006, the court has dismantled her key rulings on abortion, affirmative action and campaign finance.Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who died Friday at 93, was the sort of figure once familiar in American political and judicial life: a moderate Republican ready to look for compromise and common ground.That led her to vote to uphold abortion rights, affirmative action and campaign finance regulations. Since she retired in 2006, replaced by the far more conservative Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the Supreme Court has dismantled large parts of her legacy.That is nowhere more apparent than in abortion rights.Justice O’Connor joined the controlling opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that, to the surprise of many, reaffirmed the core of the constitutional right to abortion established in 1973 in Roe v. Wade.To overrule Roe “under fire in the absence of the most compelling reason to re-examine a watershed decision,” she wrote in a joint opinion with Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter, “would subvert the court’s legitimacy beyond any serious question.”Last year, the court did overrule Roe, casting aside Justice O’Connor’s concern for precedent and the court’s public standing. In his majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Alito wrote that Roe and Casey had “enflamed debate and deepened division.”Justice O’Connor also wrote the majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 decision upholding race-conscious admissions decisions at public universities, suggesting that they would not longer be needed in a quarter-century. In striking down affirmative action programs in higher education in June, the Supreme Court beat her deadline by five years.Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said the timetable was unrealistic and unprincipled.“The 25-year mark articulated in Grutter, however, reflected only that court’s view that race-based preferences would, by 2028, be unnecessary to ensure a requisite level of racial diversity on college campuses,” he wrote. “That expectation was oversold.”Justice O’Connor was also an author of a key campaign finance opinion, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission in 2003. A few years after Justice Alito replaced her, the Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 vote in 2010, overruled a central portion of that decision in the Citizens United case.A few days later, at a law school conference, Justice O’Connor reflected on the development.“Gosh,” she said, “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”President Ronald Reagan nominated Justice O’Connor in 1981, making good on his campaign trail promise to name the first female Supreme Court justice. At the time she was a judge on a state appeals court, not a typical launchpad to the Supreme Court in the modern era, when it has been dominated by former federal appeals court judges.But her origin story was a reflection of her strengths, drawing on a range of experience largely missing among the current justices. Raised and educated in the West, she served in all three branches of Arizona’s government, including as a government lawyer, majority leader of the State Senate, and a trial judge.Her background informed her decisions, which were sensitive to states’ rights and often deferred to the judgments of the other branches of the federal government. Her rulings could be pragmatic and narrow, and her critics said she engaged in split-the-difference jurisprudence.But some of her commitments were unyielding, said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court. “As often as Justice O’Connor and I have disagreed, because she is truly a Republican from Arizona, we were together in all the gender discrimination cases,” Justice Ginsburg, who died in 2020, told USA Today in 2009.What is beyond question is that she was exceptionally powerful. She held the crucial vote in many of the court’s most polarizing cases, and her vision shaped American life for her quarter century on the court. Political scientists stood in awe at the power she wielded.“On virtually all conceptual and empirical definitions, O’Connor is the court’s center — the median, the key, the critical and the swing justice,” Andrew D. Martin, Kevin M. Quinn and Lee Epstein and two colleagues wrote in a study published in 2005 in The North Carolina Law Review shortly before Justice O’Connor’s retirement.In 2018, in a letter announcing her retreat from public life as she battled dementia, Justice O’Connor called for a renewed commitment to nonpartisan values, one that would require “putting country and the common good above party and self-interest, and holding our key governmental institutions accountable.”At the time, Chief Justice Roberts, who had joined the court just months before Justice O’Connor left it, described her place in history.“She broke down barriers for women in the legal profession to the betterment of that profession and the country as a whole,” he wrote. “She serves as a role model not only for girls and women, but for all those committed to equal justice under law.”On Friday, the chief justice added: “We at the Supreme Court mourn the loss of a beloved colleague, a fiercely independent defender of the rule of law, and an eloquent advocate for civics education. And we celebrate her enduring legacy as a true public servant and patriot.”That legacy is striking and real. But in the less than two decades since Justice O’Connor’s retirement, a central aspect of that legacy — her jurisprudence — has proved vulnerable. More

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      Rosalynn Carter, First Lady and a Political Partner, Dies at 96

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      She helped propel Jimmy Carter from rural Georgia to the White House and became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor RooseveltRosalynn Carter, a true life partner to Jimmy Carter who helped propel him from rural Georgia to the White House in a single decade and became the most politically active first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt, died on Sunday in Plains, Ga. She was 96. The Carter Center in Atlanta announced her death. It had disclosed on May 30 that Mrs. Carter had dementia. “She continues to live happily at home with her husband, enjoying spring in Plains and visits with loved ones,” a statement by the center said at the time. On Friday, the center said she had entered hospice care at home.Mr. Carter, 99, the longest-living president in American history, has also been in hospice care at their home, but so far he has defied expectations. The Carter Center had announced in February that he was stopping full-scale medical care “after a series of short hospital stays,” and his family was preparing for the end. But he has hung on — and celebrated his most recent birthday on Oct. 1.Mrs. Carter was the second longest-lived first lady; Bess Truman, the widow of President Harry S. Truman, was 97 when she died in 1982.Over their nearly eight decades together, Mr. and Mrs. Carter forged the closest of bonds, developing a personal and professional symbiosis remarkable for its sheer longevity.Their extraordinary union began formally with their marriage in 1946, but, in a manner of speaking, it began long before that, with a touch of kismet, just after Rosalynn (pronounced ROSE-a-lynn) was born in Plains in 1927.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      New Zealand Election: After Ardern, a ‘Scary Time’ for Women in Politics

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      Three years after Ms. Ardern won a resounding victory for her Labour Party, the nation will vote in a very different political landscape.The last time New Zealanders voted in a general election, they were choosing between two women who were self-professed feminists. Three years later, in a sign of how sharply the pendulum has swung, they will pick between two men named Chris.Ahead of next month’s polls, and 130 years after New Zealand became the first country to grant women the vote, the political landscape is in many ways unrecognizable from the era of former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose pursuit of women’s rights and gun control transformed her country’s image abroad.Issues like pay equity, child poverty and the prevention of domestic violence and harassment have seldom featured in the current campaign. Female politicians across the spectrum now say they face extraordinary abuse from a misogynistic and sometimes scary slice of the population. Some women say they did not seek office because of safety fears. The next government is likely to be significantly less diverse than the one led by Ms. Ardern, and the most conservative in a generation. Polling suggests that Ms. Ardern’s center-left Labour Party, and her successor as prime minister, Chris Hipkins, will be voted out. The current opposition leader, Christopher Luxon, of the center-right National Party, is expected to form a coalition government with Act, a libertarian party.Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis of the National Party campaigning in Auckland in June.Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images“It feels like politics here is just different,” said Michelle Duff, who wrote a biography of Ms. Ardern and lives in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital. “It does feel like a scary time in politics for women — which is incredibly disappointing, when you think about how hopeful things seemed.”It is a daunting legacy for Ms. Ardern, who became a global liberal icon but whose government was criticized at home for not delivering the transformational change that it promised.After steering New Zealand through multiple crises, Ms. Ardern was re-elected in a landslide in 2020. She was lauded for her response to the coronavirus, but, eventually, public opinion soured over the country’s path to recovery from the pandemic. And even as her personal popularity remained high, her government struggled with the seemingly intractable problems of housing, inflation and rising crime.In January, Ms. Ardern said she would leave politics after five and a half years in office. “I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice,” she told reporters at the time. Since her departure, her party has stumbled. Four top ministers quit suddenly and, in some cases, dramatically, with one facing legal difficulties and another defecting to another party.Chris Hipkins, New Zealand’s prime minister, campaigning in Auckland this month.Fiona Goodall/Getty ImagesWhen Ms. Ardern formally retreated from political life in April, Heather du Plessis-Allan, a conservative political commentator in New Zealand, described her as “one of the worst” prime ministers in the country’s history and questioned whether she had accomplished anything in her tenure.“She’s left behind no achievements worth mentioning,” Ms. du Plessis-Allan wrote.Advocates for women disagree.Under Ms. Ardern, they say, New Zealand extended paid parental leave from about four months to six months, decriminalized abortion, introduced free menstruation products in schools and strengthened pay equity and domestic violence laws. Her government was the most diverse in New Zealand’s history — more than half of the lawmakers in office are women. And the world-leading response to the coronavirus pandemic spared the country the sustained lockdowns that elsewhere forced many women out of paid work to take on more child care responsibilities.“Her leadership will be a story that is just passed on and on, by women, especially,” said Marilyn Waring, a former member of the National Party. “To have been a girl child who was a feminist growing up while Jacinda Ardern was prime minister would have been incredible.”But where some saw inspiration in her “politics of kindness,” others perceived a threat.“As soon as Jacinda showed a different style of leadership which is more feminine in nature than other people have been allowed to be, there was huge pushback,” said Suzanne Manning, the president of the National Council of Women New Zealand. “It’s designed to silence women,” and some decided to stay out of politics over safety concerns, she said.Marama Davidson, the co-leader of the left-wing Green Party, has felt the change.“As a brown woman in politics, things are particularly hostile,” said Ms. Davidson, who is Māori. All her public appearances are now vetted beforehand by security personnel, she said.Marama Davidson, center, the co-leader of the left-wing Green Party, during a teachers’ strike in Wellington in March.Hagen Hopkins/Getty ImagesNicola Willis, the dynamic deputy leader of the National Party, who is widely expected to helm her party in the future, said the abuse affected women across the political spectrum.“I’ve had all sorts of abuse hurled at me — ‘rotten cow,’ the ‘b-word’, some pretty choice adjectives,” she told the public broadcaster Radio New Zealand last year. “People saying, when I’m being feisty about something, that it must be that time of the month. I’ve learned to laugh most of it off, but, of course, it’s not OK.”Women’s issues, which were at the center of Ms. Ardern’s platform, have scarcely featured in the election campaign of the two main parties. One issue that has — paid parental leave for non-birth parents — has struggled to find momentum or consensus, as lawmakers across the political aisle have stymied one another’s efforts.This worries experts like Ms. Manning, who fear the next government could walk back some hard-won gains that were the result of years of consultation.Ms. Ardern’s steady work on these issues eventually helped to lift more than 75,000 New Zealand children out of poverty, even as her party fell short of its stated goal of 100,000, said Ms. Duff, her biographer. “The symbolic nature of what she’s done shouldn’t be underestimated, either, in terms of inspiring women to get into politics,” she said.Ms. Davidson, of the Green Party, worked closely with Ms. Ardern and had counted her as a colleague and a friend. “Her intentions, her purpose or objectives, her values and vision. I absolutely stand by what she wanted for this country,” she said. “We had different ideas of how to get there.”Ms. Ardern is currently undertaking a fellowship at Harvard University and plans to write a book about her leadership.Speaking on “Good Morning America” this week, she said, of her time as New Zealand’s premier, “I hope it was a call to anyone who is holding themselves back.”For now, she is staying out of the political fray at home.“I’m quite sure she would say that she never achieved what she wanted to,” said Ms. Waring, the former National Party lawmaker. “But she certainly rolled the barrel along.” More