Ana Murguia remembers the day the man she had regarded as a hero called her house and summoned her to see him. She walked along a dirt trail, entered the rundown building, passed his secretary and stepped into his office.
He locked the door, as he always did when he called her, and told her how lonely he had been. He brought her onto the yoga mat that he often used in his office for meditation, kissed her and pulled her pants down. “Don’t tell anyone,” he told her afterward. “They’d get jealous.”
The man, Cesar Chavez, one of the most revered figures in the Latino civil rights movement, was 45. She was 13. . . .
The two women have not shared their stories publicly before, and an investigation by The New York Times has uncovered extensive evidence to support their accusations and those raised by several other women against Mr. Chavez, the United Farm Workers co-founder who died in 1993 at the age of 66.
Martin Luther King was a serial philanderer, heading a lost list of crusaders for good who did the same. Thomas Jefferson was a monstrous hypocrite, not just about slavery but also concerning personal morality and financial probity. Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, a hero to many of my female friends, was a Stalinist who justified all the dictator's crimes.
I after pondering this problem across my whole life, I have decided that it is usually a mistake to say people are good or bad. They are good or bad in particular ways. Chavez was an excellent advocate for the farm workers he represented, but an abuser of girls. He joins the vast panoply of people were extraordinary in one area of life – politics, art, science – while being monsters in others.
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