BROOKE BALDWIN (HOST): Matt, I thank you as the man here coming on because I think your perspective is incredibly important, too. And I read your piece, harkening back to Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire, and your notion that, yes, in this age of #MeToo, you should always believe the woman. I want you to explain your perspective. And as you do, how do you reconcile believing a woman with innocent until proven guilty?
MATT LEWIS (CNN COMMENTATOR): Right. Well, look, I think -- now obviously nobody's entitled to a Supreme Court seat. That's not Brett Kavanaugh's birthright, so he has no expectation that that should just be handed to him, and he's not in a criminal trial where you have the presumption of innocence, technically speaking. But having said that, look, there's a long tradition in America, Ben Franklin said, “I would rather for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be convicted.” This has kind of been the ethos of America, the presumption of innocence, that the burden is not on the accused, but on the accuser to produce some sort of evidence.
Brett Kavanaugh is being tried in the court of public opinion right now. His political future hangs in the balance, and I do think that we have these two competing values right now. Either you believe the women or you believe in the presumption of innocence. You really can't do both. I think it's mutually exclusive. And I do -- and by the way, I think that most of the time women are telling the truth. But not always. There are cases like the Duke lacrosse case, there‘s several examples where people do lie. I fear that we are headed in a direction where, if you've got a big TV show coming out next week, or a book's about to drop, or you're about to get elected to something --
BALDWIN: Sure.
LEWIS: -- anybody could lodge a charge against you. And if we just assume that you're guilty, that could torpedo your chances. I don't think we want to live in a country like that either.
