The allegations levied against labor and civil rights icon Cesar Chavez are stomach turning.
The New York Times this week published a story in which a years-long investigation revealed numerous women had allegedly been sexually assaulted by the face and front man of farm workers throughout California in the 60s and 70s.
To be clear, some of the victims interviewed are women now but were girls then, as young as 13 years old.
In the story another labor rights leader, Dolores Huerta, revealed she had two children with Chavez after two separate sexual encounters.
Those children, according to Huerta and The Times, were kept secret and were raised by different families.
The fallout from the story was immediate and ongoing. Locally celebrations honoring Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993, were hastily cancelled while at the municipal and state level discussions were scheduled to determine what would become of all the public buildings and thoroughfares named after him. What will become of the state and federal holiday Cesar Chavez Day?
And yet…
As troubling and sickening as these allegations are—and that’s what they are and may always remain legally—I could not quiet the voice in my head that whispered “But what about our President of the United States? Isn’t he just as bad? Worse?”
Prior to November 2016 there were suspicions and allegations that Donald Trump abused women. A month before he was elected president the first time an audio recording captured him referring to grabbing women in a vulgar way.
Since then he was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting a woman in a dressing room decades ago. Yet in 2024 he was elected to the White House a second time.
Trump is currently linked to convicted, and dead, pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. And yet he remains the president and still has a devoted following among voters and political leaders.
The comparison of Chavez to Trump is not to diminish the allegations against Chavez or defend his abhorrent actions. It is merely a prelude to the question: If the behavior is heinous when perpetrated by one man isn’t it heinous when perpetrated by another, especially when he is the leader of the United States?
