The streets are full of earthworms. Thousands of them crossing the sidewalks, slithering the edge of driveways, each a meandering migrant from here to there, or blithely stretched along curbs and drainage easements. They’ve spent the winter deep below the god forsaken frozen crust of ice and snow, waiting, in the dark, until the conditions changed. I can’t blame them for wanting to move.

The rain didn’t create them. They’re always there, just a few feet below every frozen step, or tangled in the garden trowel of summer’s malleable soil. It’s the natural structure in the cycle that draws them out, creating the conditions by which they respond, knowing they’re safe, that they won’t freeze. The worm doesn’t need the rain to exist. It needs the rain to move.

In the landscape of human political engagement, permission structures work the same way, giving hatred and radicalism the ability to move. They don’t generate hatred, anymore than rain makes the worm. That’s the misunderstanding in how people talk about mobs, about the specific social weather that produces ugly rhetoric and violence. We want there to be a source, an origin, a bad actor, a nut job, who manufactured the thing. It’s cleaner that way. It assigns responsibility in a generalized direction, over there somewhere. Close enough.

Many of our fellow citizens harbor low-grade hatreds the way soil holds worms. Quietly, usually inert in the rumble of ordinary life, remaining in the subcutaneous layer, rarely emerging, except at family dinners or over drinks with that asshole that voted for that asshole. But bigger passions come out with enough rain, and movement feels not just possible but logical, necessary, and righteous.

What changes the conditions for the worm is rain and warmth. For the radical it’s permission. This doesn’t require authority, or a written note style of permission. It’s the permission of agreement, of company.

Consider Me Too. The proposition was time’s up for predators and harassers, for the patriarchy and the powerful to be brought to heel for their sexist barbarism. Though rape and sexual violence were already criminal offenses, the cultural conversation created a permission structure for women to safely come forward with their own stories, to tell their truth, to put the powerful in check.

No one I know thought this was a bad thing. But underneath the accountability mechanism was something more primal. The declaration itself, the act of mass, public, named identification of a target class, functioned as rain. It dissolved the barrier between impulse and action for so many women who had been carrying something and waiting.

Some of what emerged was legitimate. Some of the justice was well served. But the structure didn’t distinguish. Once the rain comes the soil releases everything it has been holding, and there are few mechanisms inside it that separate the warranted from the unwarranted. The conditions don’t know the difference. And critically, the people doing the emerging rarely know the difference either. They feel the rain. They move. They experience the movement as justice because the weather tells them it is. Everywhere and everyone all at once looks like an unimpeachable reality. But it’s not reality. It’s why some shooters claim their actions just made sense, that someone had to do it, as if the impulse to kill was universally felt and they were simply the one willing to act on it. An unreasonable action that looks entirely reasonable from inside the weather system these people have been soaking in.

Now the rain has a new name. The target is different. The platforms that function as soil, warming, concentrating, making the dark wet and inviting, are doing what soil does. X. Blue Sky. Truth. The comment sections and the group threads and the dinner tables where a certain kind of contempt has become not just acceptable but socially required. You demonstrate your values by the temperature of your hatred. Hating Trump correctly has become a credential. A fashion. An identity for the left, and now in some factions of the right as well.

The zealot who takes it further is not an aberration. They are the logical product of saturation. They emerge because the conditions are right, because the rain has been falling long enough and hard enough that movement feels not just permitted but ordained. The millions who performed the right contempt, said the right things, cheered from the right angle, they are the worms who didn’t make it quite that far. Not more virtuous. Just not quite as wet.

The structure doesn’t require them to know what they’re participating in. It only requires the rain.

None of this is an argument for diminished responsibility. The people who threaten, who harass, who pull triggers, they own what they do. The rain doesn’t absolve the worm that crosses the road and gets crushed under a tire. The permission structure explains the conditions that made action feel rational. It doesn’t transfer the moral weight of that action onto the culture, the platforms, the rhetoric, or the rain. Mangione chose. The people who came for me chose. Understanding why the conditions were right is not the same as excusing what people did inside them.

Luigi Mangione didn’t emerge from nowhere. He emerged from years of saturated soil. The logic was simple: insurance companies kill people, the courts protect them, the system is captured, and therefore. The “therefore” is where vigilantism lives. It doesn’t require psychosis. It requires convincing enough people that official mechanisms of accountability have failed, that the target class has earned what’s coming, that action outside the law is not crime but correction. Mangione pulled a trigger. Millions of people felt the rain and didn’t. That’s not a moral distinction. That’s a matter of degree.

The same structure produces political assassination attempts. The same structure produces coordinated harassment campaigns. The same structure produced the people who wanted me dead.

I know this from the inside.

In 2018 I was accused. It started with Weinstein. Arguably it started with Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, and the misogynists who needed to be felled. The rhetorical rain had been falling long enough to lubricate the passions, to warm the soil. People who had known me for decades discovered a strange new certainty about me, nearly overnight. People who had never questioned anything I’d done found it not just possible but necessary and even natural to piss on my name. They weren’t manufacturing hatred. They were responding to the downpour. The mechanism told them it was righteous, that the courts wouldn’t be enough to overcome a powerful man at some dinky arts festival in a Minnesota cornfield. Some of them said so directly.

I am not Donald Trump. Neither are most targets of these structures. It doesn’t require a president or a celebrity or a traditional villain of national proportion. It requires a profile high enough to serve as a focal point. The actors experience it as conscience. That is what makes it so effective and so dangerous. When you’re committing violence out of conscience, misplaced or otherwise, strictly speaking, you don’t need to be a lunatic to take action.

These days you don’t need to be guilty of any sin to be the target of violent rhetoric, or violence itself. Last August I visited the Renaissance Festival for the first time since my acquittal, nearly three years after the fact and nearly seven years after my arrest. I became a target once again. The dumb and the damned pitched a fit that I would be allowed entry. Social media roiled. People threatened. Luckily I was only there for a few hours before I went home, unscathed.

Given what I’ve been through, you might forgive me for raging against those who perpetrated this, the cast of characters so deeply dishonest, the painter, the prince, the king, the courtly fool, the peasant, and the moron. But it was never an option for me to step on the worms and bait my hook with them. These days I pick up hundreds of worms caught in the rain, stranded by clearing skies and sunshine, and throw them back into the moistened grass.

That’s what you do with the worms when they come out. You save them, and set them free.

Today in my Google Alerts is a story from Cleveland.com (The Plain Dealer) written by attorney Eric Foster, whose bio says he’s a lawyer in private practice from Atlanta, who has “tried 10 felony murder jury trials and argued more than two dozen felony appeals.”

The title sounded promising.

It piqued my interest because grappling with the often complicated realities of false allegations is far too rare in modern media. These days, accusations of any kind of sexual violence or predation are a near automatic death sentence to the accused’s livelihood, community standing, and reputation and few people seem to care. In this piece, Foster doesn’t dismiss the wrongfully accused, but acknowledges as I do that most accusations are true. But most isn’t all, and my position is that these contradictions provide camouflage for media coverage to tar and feather the subjects long before there has been any evidence sorting, motions, or anything resembling a jury trial.

Foster starts off in the right direction, with a story about a high school friend, a basketball player he knew, who was wrongfully accused but “was later found innocent by a jury.” That’s the first flag. Mr. Foster is a lawyer with criminal trial experience so he should know there is no such verdict. The accused enters the courtroom presumed innocent. After considering the evidence and the witnesses, the jury finds defendants guilty or not guilty. Not guilty only means the prosecution failed to prove its case, and the defendant leaves the courtroom as they entered: innocent. That distinction is the entire architecture of due process, you can’t skip pass it.

Foster covers the usual dusty statistics on rape, citing that only 5.9% of accusations are false, so they’re rare. That figure comes from one study, one university, over ten years. More importantly, what’s the denominator of that 5.9%? It’s not hard to find. That study only counted cases where investigators affirmatively determined falsity, meaning she admitted to lying, or there was unimpeachable evidence she was elsewhere. Cases that were dropped, unresolved, or marked unsubstantiated don’t enter the false report column at all. Foster, like many others in the press, presents this as settled science. It isn’t.

He then mentions the famous 2% number, pulled from the musty closet of worn out data. As far as anyone can establish, it originated in a single speech in 1974 and has never been peer reviewed.

Whenever you see a rape statistic cited, ask what that data is standing on. What counted as a report? What counted as false? Who decided, and how? Strip that away and you don’t have useful data, just inference.

After citing these questionable statistics, Foster suggests that if 10 men were accused of sexual assault, at most only one of them would be falsely accused. That’s wrong. The number represents false reports out of reported cases. Not every accusation becomes a police report. Not every accused man is in that denominator. He’s applying a rate built from a narrow sample to a universe of accusations far larger than that sample ever captured.

Objection, counselor.

The math only works if you assume the only accusations that matter are the ones that reached police at a northeastern university between 1998 and 2007.

The Lisak study, which Foster’s statistics rest on, shows that 44.9% of those 136 cases were classified as “Case Did Not Proceed.” Unresolved. Not exonerated, not cleared, just gone. His claim that at most one in ten treats nearly half the data as if it doesn’t exist. (The Lisak study has been mostly denounced)

I’ll give the man a break because he’s not a statistician. Neither am I. But when my life was set on fire by the machinery of accusation, I got educated fast. We shouldn’t use a partial denominator to make a universal claim about accused men whose entire lives are in the balance. Rhetoric is not an argument. It’s the costume of one.

And finally, Foster closes with this:

“If, my fellow men, you need any further evidence of the frailty of our reasonable concern about false sexual assault allegations, consider this scenario: Your daughter or sister or mother comes to you claiming she was raped. Is your first instinct to doubt her? Or would it be to go find her rapist?”

What he’s really saying is that these statistics, which he doesn’t fully understand, prove that false accusations are so rare that due process is an inconvenience. Follow that logic and my accuser could just as well have had me shot for what the statistics declared I must have done. This isn’t a stretch. After I was arrested the online rhetoric was terrifying. Statistics don’t just mislead. In the wrong hands, they become a noose.

I’d challenge Mr. Foster by turning his proclamation around. Your son, your husband, your brother is accused of rape. Is your first instinct to doubt him? Foster doesn’t answer that question. He never asks it.

There's a term from psychology; Perseverative Cognition. Repetitive, negative, circular thinking that's hard to disengage from. I have struggled with this myself. But I also see it in conversations about rape statistics, where numbers get cited, repeated ad infinitum, and we nod along. Round and round the numbers go, where they come from nobody knows! But few stop to ask what these numbers are standing on or where they came from, because asking would require taking your own argument seriously. After all, if a statistic is confirming your priors, you're less likely to argue with it.

Turns out, nearly 80% of trial lawyers who pass the bar can’t understand basic statistics. That’s a fact. I can’t prove it.

Eric Foster Opinion https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2026/04/false-sexual-assault-allegations-may-be-rare-but-will-that-matter-if-youre-the-one-accused-eric-foster.html

The Lisak study (the 5.9% source) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21164210/

The 44.9% “Case Did Not Proceed” problem / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape

The 2% origin, traced to Brownmiller and a judge’s casual remark The 2% figure appears in Susan Brownmiller’s book, but was refuted when it was revealed the statistic was based on a casual comment made by a judge at a bar association meeting. Ballard Brief Best source for this is the Center for Prosecutor Integrity piece and the Loyola Law Review article by Edward Greer: https://www.prosecutorintegrity.org/pr/one-third-of-sexual-assault-allegations-in-the-criminal-setting-are-unfounded-call-for-renewed-focus-on-fairness-and-due-process/https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2216&context=llr

The Slate piece / balanced, acknowledges the methodological mess from both directions https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/false-rape-accusations-why-must-we-pretend-they-never-happen.html

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Subscribers: As my writing has grown, so has the time it takes to produce it, and I don't post as much as I'd like. I'm using a few tools to free up more writing time. For some shorter pieces, you'll hear an AI voice narrator. For the longer work, you'll still hear me.

When you hear that a false accusation can ruin someone’s life, most people think of the obvious losses — career, reputation, income. What they don’t account for is what happens to the people closest to you. Accusation triggers something tribal. Some friends step forward into the fire, picking sides, rewriting history, emerging covered in war paint. Some disappear. And a few, a few, publicly stand with you. My good friend Scotty Roberts was quite vociferous in his support and said he didn’t care what the agitators had to say about me, about him, about his tiny manhood. Yes. Glass blower Steve Weagel was ardently out with his outrage, knowing me since I was a young’n. Penn and Teller made sure I would attend their 50th Anniversary show at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, any complainers be damned.

What drives most people from not speaking up isn’t that they lack conviction. It’s the real fear of being associated with the stain of the accused, and having their own lives attacked. I don’t blame anyone for protecting themselves and I understand it.

One of the ugliest parts about being accused of a crime, well, of a sex crime, is how deadly the reaction is to the charges. I can’t overstate how agitated and threatening that crowd was. In a matter of hours, I went from being an esteemed member of the cast, a long time manager and performer, to an outcast, a demon that had to be expelled, or for some, bloodied and broken.

A former close friend of ours, who lived with us for a couple of years when she needed a place to crash, and who was in the room when my mother was dying, seemed to take special joy in the media beating. I was told she didn’t believe I raped anyone, but she was happy to see me burn. She wrote “I’m so here for this!” Several years ago I asked her to take a step back from her work as my production assistant at the festival because it was clear she was struggling with some mental health issues. I would have done almost anything for her, but somehow she decided I did it for other reasons. I didn’t share in the animosity and had always hoped we would talk again. She passed away not long ago. Death makes final any hope of renewal.

After I was arrested, the prosecution planned to present Spreigl Evidence, a legal procedure in the State of Minnesota that allows the prosecution to introduce allegations of prior bad acts, not to prove the charged offense, but to tell the jury there is a pattern to the allegedly bad behavior. The reality is that it imports your entire alleged life history into a trial that was supposed to be about one thing.

The list of people subpoenaed to testify for the Spreigl was a rogues gallery of former friends, each with some complaint about my behavior. I told my attorney when I read some of the statements given to the prosecutors, “These people are not just full of shit, they’re suffering from brain damage.” I won’t go into the details — the motion was dropped. Some of the people on the list never responded to their subpoena. Others didn’t want to be part of it anymore. Maybe the thought of cross examination was a bit too much for these charlatans.

One of the women included in the Spreigl was a high-profile performer at the Festival, someone we welcomed into our home for months at a time. She was a traveling performer who wanted to live with us when she was in town. She had her own wing, a bedroom and shower, and regularly had her boyfriend over. Depending on which article you read, she either had to show me her breasts, or have sex with me, in lieu of rent. Neither version is based in reality.

She was just one of several women, each with their own saddle to ride, riding one after the other, bound and determined to take the stand and mule kick the shit out of my reputation. And in all the news stories it sounded like there were all these women, when in fact it was really only three who were given out of court settlements.

When I thought the Spreigl was going to happen, and saw the small group set to testify, I wondered what had I missed, what hadn’t I seen? I was a fool. How did I get it so wrong?

Or maybe I hadn’t.

I’m not responsible for their accusations, nor am I accountable for their animosity. I didn’t hurt anyone, either deliberately or unintentionally. I loved and cared for these people because I did. I’m not responsible for what was done to me.

A couple years ago, I posted an image from one of the parties we held at the Big House. Everyone is happy, smiling, having a great time, some of the same people who were going to torch me in court. The caption read “I love everyone in this image.” I meant it then. I mean it now. It was never past tense.

AI Voicing / Eleven Labs

Clue...a secret that everyone knows is not a secret. It was a decision to not speak up or report it because he was useful, for a time. It was a partisan protection racket, because he said al…

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I don’t know what Eric Swalwell did. Neither do you. Neither does anyone reporting on it. That’s not a defense of him. That’s an indictment of the process.

It starts with one person. Then, as the story gains traction in the press, or in what’s called a whisper network — the informal, private channels through which allegations circulate within communities long before they ever become public — more voices come forward. That’s sometimes how buried truth surfaces. It’s also how a stream gets contaminated. False or distorted claims find cover in the cascade. Journalists have no reliable method for distinguishing one from the other, and almost none of them slow down long enough to try. Time constraints, institutional bias, and the simple fact that no one wants to defend a person who is, at that moment, a pariah.

I know this because I was run through the same machinery.

In 2018, Minnesota Public Radio ran a story about my alleged decades of bad behavior. One voice belonged to a woman who called herself T. Lake. She claimed I threatened her when she told me her dance troupe wouldn’t be returning to the festival. Her story was provably false. But she could make the claims under the safety and cover of moral panic and a journalist who gave her a pass. The allegation itself came out of a closed community, led at the start by one performer who was overheard, literally whispering, that she was building a list of women willing to antagonize management with claims. That’s not a whisper network surfacing truth. That’s a whisper network manufacturing it.

The Swalwell case raises questions I can’t answer. There are gaps in the timeline. There are political motivations worth scrutinizing. There are statements suggesting his behavior was the worst kept secret in Washington — and if that’s true, who knew and said nothing? These are legitimate questions. A jury may eventually have to answer them. But a jury hasn’t. And in the meantime, his career in politics appears to be over.

That’s the problem I keep coming back to. Not whether he’s guilty. Whether the process that’s already punished him is capable of distinguishing guilt from accusation.

I’m interested in due process as a journalistic standard, not purely a legal one. Whether journalism has any obligation to apply a presumption of innocence before the courts do. I’m interested in the period between accusation and charge, where the damage is done and no institution is accountable for it.

Here’s the thing about defamation. I’m free to plant a yard sign that reads MY NEIGHBOR IS A FASCIST. My neighbor is also free to sue me for defamation. Unlike my neighbor, I have no equivalent remedy when a journalist or a whisper network defaces my life with a false accusation. There is no lawsuit that restores what was taken. There is no correction that reaches everyone who saw the original.

Everything else flows from that. The cascade dynamics. The force multiplier problem. The contaminated accusation stream. The zero verification threshold. Those are all mechanisms. The question underneath all of them is: does journalism owe the accused anything? And if so, what?

I believe it does. I believe the period between accusation and verdict is where journalism does its most consequential and least accountable work. And I believe that until we treat due process as a journalistic standard and not just a legal one, we will keep watching the machinery do what it does, fast, loud, and final, long before anyone has proven a thing.

CNN report https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/10/us/eric-swalwell-sexual-misconduct-allegations-invs

Corroborating coverage of the four accusers https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/ex-staffer-accuses-eric-swalwell-sexual-assault-california-governor-rcna273731 https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/10/former-swalwell-staffer-accuses-governor-candidate-sexual-assault-report

The political motivations of Katie Porter and Cheyenne Hunt - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/katie-porter-influencer-cheyenne-hunt-eric-swalwell-allegationshttps://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/4522426/influencer-eric-swalwell-allegations-ties-katie-porter

The cascade in real time, endorsements collapsing within hours https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/04/california-governor-race-swalwell-allegations https://abc7chicago.com/post/eric-swalwell-endorsements-withdrawn-california-governor-race-sf-chronicle-report-sexual-assault-allegations/18870861

The accusations circulating online before charges, the whisper network going publichttps://www.foxnews.com/politics/misconduct-allegations-dog-swalwell-dem-rivals-seize-opening-california-governors-race

“Plymouth, Massachusetts police officer Samantha Pelrine and husband arrested, charged with child rape”

That’s the headline posted from the national CBS News website. Scroll down and there is a photo of a woman who looks terribly distressed, broken and afraid. I don’t know what she’s feeling, but I recognize that face. Given what she and her husband have been charged with, it’s the face of terrifying anxiety and heartbreak. I’m skeptical of this story. Not of the charges. Of how the story is being told. I’m not here to assess their guilt or innocence. That’s for a jury to decide. I’m here because the way this story was reported follows a pattern I’ve been documenting, and that pattern does damage regardless of how the trial ends.

The story structure is one I recognize and have been writing about. Whether intentional or tacit, the piece is the latest example of a public shaming by media.

Let’s start with the allegation, as reported by CBS.

Samantha Pelrine faces four counts of child rape, and her husband Daniel Forand faces three for incidents that, according to the accuser, allegedly happened over seven years from 2018 to 2025. Forand is also charged with two counts of indecent assault and battery.

“The allegations are that the sexual abuse started when he was 14-years-old and continued up until last year, another term for that is ‘grooming.’” The accuser, a 21-year-old male, lived with the couple during that time.

Look at the CBS headline, which features Pelrine’s name and her status as a police officer in the same sentence as “child rape.” Forand, her husband, who is actually charged with additional counts, isn’t named. That’s an editorial choice, and it’s vicious. If the alleged crime doesn’t involve her official duties as a cop, her on-duty conduct, use of badge, squad, or authority, then “police officer” in the headline is sensationalizing and, of course, a near guarantee she won’t keep her job or ever work as a cop again (she’s already had her badge revoked), even if she’s acquitted. The published headline isn’t just about an accused person. It’s about a cop accused of child rape.

The asymmetry matters. Forand is a relational appendage: “husband.” Pelrine carries the most damaging stain. He rides in attached to the scandal. That makes her the headline’s narrative engine. The reporters used her status as a recognizable public official, attached a morally radioactive accusation, and drove clicks to the story. Evidence? Nothing yet.

The bail hearing is a procedural event, not a trial.

It was the most humiliating experience of my life. The Monday morning after I’d spent the weekend locked in a tiny cell alone with my anxieties. Looking through the small window on my cell room door, I watched as other inmates were lined up to be taken to the hearing room. I waited. When it was my turn, I was taken alone because they were worried about my safety, or something. I was brought to a small room with a glass-paneled wall in front of the judge, the county prosecutor, my attorney, and a viewing area filled with strangers and the press. The prosecutor acted with the same indignation you can see in the WBZ video. I guess it’s his job to portray me as a “danger to the community” and argue that my bail ($100K!) should remain high. What an asshole, I thought. There was no evidence, of course. But he had big, government balls, and had control over my life at that moment. To stand silently in front of strangers and the media, my name attached to a litany of appalling charges read aloud as if they were unquestionably true. And the idea that a trial would undo the damage from all the shitty press was a fool’s errand.

If you watch the WBZ video, you can see Daniel Forand in the background, at one point barely shaking his head as the prosecutor reads the accusations. I’m sure he was told not to react, to stay still and silent. But I can tell you, that is the last thing you want to do. Your life is under attack, and contrary to every impulse to scream in outrage over the injustice, you have to keep your mouth shut.

What I doubt these two really understand yet, is as bad as the arrest and bail hearing was, they have no idea how dark the nights ahead are, or how many they will have to endure before they have their day in court. It’s all torture and tension.

Now, here’s the original headline again:

Plymouth, Massachusetts police officer Samantha Pelrine and husband arrested, charged with child rape.

CBS and other outlets apparently had information about the accuser’s history, prior false allegations, ongoing communication with the couple, a dispute over housing. None of that complexity made the headline. It didn’t fit the story they’d already decided to tell.

Given what they knew, perhaps a better headline would have read:

“Plymouth Officer Charged With Child Rape; Accuser’s Prior False Allegation Surfaces in Court.”

I don’t know if Samantha Pelrine and Daniel Forand are guilty. Neither does CBS News. What I know is that CBS didn’t wait to find out. They had a headline, a photo, and a police officer’s name. That was enough. Whether this couple is ultimately convicted or acquitted, the press made its call before a single piece of evidence was heard in court. Their innocence or guilt isn’t my point. It’s that the media has made it theirs 3333

Last week, I had a dream where I was flying over water, through the clouds, and came to land on a sailing vessel where all my friends were having a good time. Wake up and it’s war, famine, Trump, protests, guns, and the daily slop of outrage. So much for a good time. Oh Well.

What stands out is that the entire world is now neatly divided between two groups. US. THEM. If you’re with US, we agree with you. If you’re with THEM, you’re an idiot. If you’re with US, you support survivors, you BELIEVE ALL WOMEN. If you’re with THEM, you’re a rape apologist, a misogynist, and WE SEE YOU.

It doesn’t seem to matter what the issue is. Everything divides into groups, and those groups become something like an amoeba — a membrane thickens, keeping out anything that challenges the status belief of the group. Early in COVID, officials said everyone needed to wear a mask outdoors. The CDC later reversed that. People kept wearing masks outside anyway, alone in their cars. Facts don’t always change behavior. The membrane holds.

I’ve really struggled with how group dynamics so adversely affected my experience after I was accused.

How could so many people I respected and worked with turn on me, or at the very least remain silent in the face of evidence that clearly exonerates me? The same question can be asked about any issue where evidence changes the calculations — but the group refuses to change its formulations in response.

In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch ran a simple experiment. He showed people two lines and asked which was longer. The answer was obvious. But Asch planted actors in the room who all confidently named the wrong line. One by one, real subjects went along with the wrong answer. Not all of them, but most. Not because they were stupid or spineless, but because the social cost of dissent is immediate and visceral, and the cost of being wrong about a line is abstract and distant. The math isn’t complicated. It just isn’t the math we like to think we’re doing.

We tell ourselves we’re rational actors weighing evidence. What we’re actually doing, most of the time, is weighing belonging. The group is the variable that matters. The facts are secondary.

Irving Janis gave this a name in 1972. Groupthink. He wasn’t describing fringe movements or mobs. He was describing rooms full of intelligent, credentialed people making catastrophic decisions. The Bay of Pigs. Pearl Harbor. The pattern was consistent across events, across decades, across administrations. Cohesive groups suppress internal doubt. They exclude information that challenges the consensus. They punish the person who raises a hand and says, wait.

The need for unanimity overrides the need for accuracy. Every time.

Janis wasn’t making a cynical argument. He was making a structural one. The same qualities that make a group functional, shared identity, mutual loyalty, common purpose, are the qualities that make it blind. You can’t have one without risking the other. Cohesion and correction are in permanent tension. Usually cohesion wins.

Which brings us to the deviant.

The deviant is the person holding the correct minority position. They have looked at the same evidence as everyone else and arrived somewhere different. In the room, in real time, they are not experienced as someone who might be right. They are experienced as a threat. To the narrative. To the solidarity. To the membrane itself.

Because that’s exactly what they are. A threat to cohesion is a threat to the group. The group responds accordingly. The deviant gets managed, marginalized, expelled. The system isn’t malfunctioning when this happens. It’s working as designed. The group is protecting itself the only way it knows how.

Being right is beside the point. Being right, in fact, makes it worse.

Groups don’t typically correct from the inside. The pressure required to change a group’s position has to come from outside, and it has to be undeniable. An external event. A documented fact that the membrane simply cannot process and survive intact. Even then it takes time. Even then there are holdouts. This is the ordinary story of how groups eventually come around. Slowly, grudgingly, usually without acknowledging what they’re doing. The position shifts. The memory of the previous position fades. Nobody says they were wrong because the group, as an entity, doesn’t have a mechanism for that. It just moves.

Here is where my case gets instructive, and inconvenient.

I was acquitted. That is not an opinion or a characterization. It is an adjudicated fact, documented in a court of law, arrived at by people whose job was to weigh the evidence. A landmark UCL study analyzing nearly six million charges found that jury conviction rates for rape exceed those for attempted murder, manslaughter, and grievous bodily harm. This was not a system tilted in my favor.

An acquittal is about as external and undeniable an event as the justice system produces. If you believed the accusation, the acquittal is the moment the calculation is supposed to change.

For many people, it didn’t. The silence continued. The distance held. The membrane, already thick, simply absorbed the verdict and kept its shape. People who had known me for decades, who had worked alongside me, who had access to the same documented evidence, chose the group position over the factual record.

That is not ordinary groupthink failing in the ordinary way. Ordinary groupthink at least updates when the external event is large enough. What I experienced was something more deliberate. A choice, made repeatedly, by individuals who knew better, to hold a position the evidence didn’t support.

That has a different name. It isn’t confusion. It isn’t tribalism in the passive sense. It’s a decision.

Being wrong is the ordinary condition of anyone paying attention. Being wrong is why we remain intellectually curious. The catastrophe isn’t being wrong. The catastrophe is knowing we were wrong and deciding silence is the right response.

It isn’t.

Solomon Asch — conformity experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html

Irving Janis — Groupthink https://archive.org/details/janis_groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink

UCL / Professor Cheryl Thomas — jury conviction rates Criminal Law Review paper: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/feb/juries-convict-defendants-rape-more-often-acquit

His wife Melissa Gilbert put it starkly:

”This has been the most traumatizing experience of our lives. Our life as we knew it is done. We are grieving what we had, all of our plans, all of our dreams, all of our ideas, all of our projects. For Tim, it’s done. He’s canceled. Eve…

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Over the years, I invited numerous friends and connections in the entertainment and business world to visit the Renaissance Festival in Minneapolis. I thought it would be fun. Of course, I loved the place, but after so many years of working there I’d lost a sense of perspective. My friends saw the place with fresh eyes. One of my vis…

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In June 2018, I was arrested on rape charges. By August, two of Minnesota’s largest news outlets, the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio, had published damaging and reckless stories about me that were built almost entirely on unverified claims, uncontested allegations, and the selective omission of evidence that told a different story.

I was acquitt…

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The NYTimes, which I usually like, is a fantastically successful paper. Not because of its reporting or opinion p…

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What does a stranger’s grave have to do with surviving a wrongful accusation? More than you might think.

In this episode, I write about working in a cemetery, the man buried there, and what his death stirred up in me — including nights when I considered ending my own life after I was falsely accused of a crime I didn’t commit. It’s a piece about suicide, shame, media bias, and two dogs who may have saved my life without knowing it.

This is the kind of story Out of the Blue exists to tell. If you’re navigating false accusations, media pile-ons, or the quiet devastation of public shame, this one is for you.

https://gofund.me/57d18916d

*This post describes my own experience of suicidal thoughts.

A couple of months ago a large gathering of mourners stood in a tight circle around the open mouth of a grave. I could see the backs of the family seated underneath a red funeral tent, surrounded by grieving friends and relatives, all of them looked grim and stuck with pain…

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Last week, the salacious story of Republican Texas state representative Tony Gonzales’s affair with a staff member who later went on to set herself on fire became enough of a scandal that he ended his bid for re-election. Gonzales is married and has publicly admitted to the affair, which ended in June of 2024.

Gonzale…

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“They have opinions, but I have the facts. What’s important to you is to stand with someone that represents something they believe in. Those jeering crusaders, is blinded to truth, because they have to stand with someone that represents a thing they believe in. They’ll never question what he/her/they/them have claimed, because they have to stand with someone that represents something they believe in. Maybe they know I’m innocent, and that I’ve been wounded, but they can’t stand with me, because I don’t represent a thing they believe in.

“The wicked flee when no one is pursuing, but the righteous are bold as a lion.”

The first time a photograph of me appeared in a newspaper was in 1975. It was an image of the Rat Catcher, my street character, sticking my tongue out at the camera — a promotional image used in newspaper ads by the marketing department. That same year, there were a couple of news stories on local TV stations in which I was interviewed. For a kid still in middle school, it was a big deal.

Throughout my professional years I enjoyed some friendly attention from the press, enough so that my mother kept a bulging scrapbook full of all of them. She died 20 years ago and didn’t live to see the dark days of press coverage that came in the wake of the wrongful accusations against me.

Headlines like “MN Renaissance Festival director accused of raping photographer” or this from the NY Post: “Renaissance Festival director accused of rape on event grounds”.

The handful of performers who made complaints about me seemed like they were part of a larger coordinated effort to demean my name. They convinced an ambitious investigator that I had committed a crime. They hired a civil attorney who spoke to the media using vile rhetoric about me, and journalists who in my opinion were all too eager to publish his remarks, for what seemed like a campaign to pressure an insurance company to settle out of court, to make the nuisance go away. I was just a nuisance.

When the story about my arrest on rape charges was published in multiple news outlets, there was no hiding from it; my name and mugshot were everywhere. Outrageously, the story included trigger warnings because the description of the alleged rape, though false, was so horrific.

In August, two months after I was arrested and jailed, the Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, as well as a small regional paper published expansive and damaging articles about me, my family and the Renaissance Festival, which were all false, and equally grotesque.

In ancient Italy, there was a form of public shaming called Pittura Infamante, or “defaming portrait.” The paintings, or frescoes, were put on wooden boards and hung in busy and visible places. They featured men accused of petty crimes or social mischief, and were meant to humiliate the featured subject, portraying them as adulterers, traitors, thieves, and miscreants. The subject was depicted hanging upside down from their feet. (If you’ve ever paid for a tarot card reading, you might have seen the illustration of a Pittura Infamante, or what they call in a tarot deck the hanging man.)

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A friend has generously offered to promote a GoFundMe on our behalf. The goal is straightforward: help retire the massive debt we accumulated as a result of a wrongful accusation and its aftermath between 2018 and 2022. We're grateful for anything you can offer. Click the QR below or follow this link https://gofund.me/74267aa5a

Privacy Fencing

I didn’t know I was all over the news. That’s how little I understood about what was happening to me.

It was late in the evening on June 14th, 2018, and I hadn’t been out of my Scott County jail cell in almost 18 hours, when a voice came over the intercom box on the wall. “Mister Hagerman, officer Jacobs is coming to speak to you.” A minut…

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