J'accuse abuse

I wouldn't know Ruben Foster of the 49ers if he came off the edge and turned me into six feet of compound fractures. But I do know one thing about him.

I know he's apparently not part of the NFL's domestic violence problem.

I know this despite the fact he was arrested for beating up his girlfriend, and I know it because the girlfriend, Elissa Ennis, testified in a preliminary hearing this week that she made it all up. Said she "lied a lot" to the authorities about the alleged incident. Said she did it because she was angry he broke up with her, and so she wanted to ruin his career and milk him for as much dough as she could while she was at it.

Then she said she'd done the same thing to a previous boyfriend when he tried to break up with her.

You know what I know about that?

I know I'm damn glad that time, circumstance and geography never put me in contact with Elissa Ennis.

I also know she just became Public Enemy No. 1 for any woman who actually is getting beaten, sexually assaulted or otherwise abused by a spouse, boyfriend, boss or mere acquaintance.

The #MeToo movement already has drawn the predictable backlash, which is that men's lives are being ruined because woman finally are finding the courage to come forward and accuse them. This of course ignores all the women whose lives have been ruined since time immemorial because powerful men abused their positions of privilege. The #MeToo phenomenon therefore seems merely like a long-overdue balancing of the scales to anyone with any sense of justice at all.

Yet if we've learned anything at all these last few years, it's that justice has become a sad joke in a nation that has lost its sense of self in a mad descent into a bully's paradise. Now here comes Elissa Ennis, providing aid and comfort to that paradise.

I don't know if she understands this, or even has the capacity to understand it. Abused women already have the deck stacked against them for a variety of reasons, and Ennis just cluelessly stacked it higher. At the very moment they were finally finding their voice, one of their own saw fit to drown them out again.

I don't know what the punishment is for lying to the authorities. But I do know one thing.

I know they can't make it harsh enough.