But the label of rapist, or predator, is attached to the accused from the moment the arrest is made public, long before there is a trial. Speaking from my own experience, the labels alone are enough to kill careers, destroy marriages, and ruin reputations. My life was flattened within hours of my arrest, and finding work is impossible, still. The jury took about an hour to acquit, not surprising, and I was free, but I was also damned forever.

In a recent episode I wrote about the idea of being referred to as a “known predator,” of having been “credibly accused.” Admittedly, the number of people who use these terms against me is low. However, if my name comes up in some group discussion, it isn’t long before the heretics are out with branding irons and fire.

That has led me to question the lexicography of ugly memes. If I’m a “known predator,” then why can’t I label my accuser a “known _ _ _ _”? I know, it could be very provocative, but no less so than calling me a predator. What is the equivalent of a “known predator”?

I understand that sexual violence is about power, and men have the upper hand. History is replete with stories of women who have been abused, raped, used, preyed upon, and manipulated. Countless women reported crimes and were questioned about their motives, their dress, the “did you ask for it” sort of thing. Women were accused of lying, of covering up behavior that could be judged as “loose.” Some women have seen their attackers arrested only to see them acquitted for lack of evidence, or by a jury that simply didn’t believe her story. Many more women have lived in the shadows of guilt and fear, never reporting a crime, but living with the self inflicted shame. All true. All bad.

But there are also those of us who have been falsely accused, and our lives ruined. By some estimates, six to eight thousand wrongful accusations are made per year, maybe more. And when we object to the moniker, our motives are questioned. If we ever dare say she, he, or they are lying, we risk more legal trouble. If we point to the lack of evidence, we’re quickly reminded that rape happens in private, and the absence of evidence proves nothing. We will never see our accusers brought to justice, acquitted or not.

But we get labeled, in social and news media, and those labels stick. To give you a sense of the rhetorical challenge, here is a list of a few words used against men like me. It’s worth noting, nearly all of these were used to describe me, on social media, in legal documents, or in news stories:

Rapist, sexual assailant, sex offender, sexual offender, perpetrator, attacker, assailant, abuser, sexual abuser, predator, sexual predator, exploiter, groomer, harasser, serial rapist, serial predator, monster, beast, deviant, pervert, creep, pig, menace, dangerous, accused rapist, alleged rapist, suspected offender, defendant, respondent, the accused, accused abuser, known predator.

So I went looking for a word that I could cast at the woman who accused me, something that might stick to her life like all of the words above have stuck to mine.

There should be some equally charged words standing on the sidelines, just waiting to be put into this game of epithets. I need a big brute of a word, something with knuckles and jaw. I went looking because some nights I wanted a word that would follow her around, taunting her.

The first problem is, she’s never been publicly named. It’s ludicrous of course, so the first thing I would do is post her name. So, then what?

I thought about liar. But that’s too small a word, as common as pollen. We all lie. Only a chosen few are predators. You can be a liar and still get invited to the party. You can lie routinely, as a brand, and get elected to the White House. I digress.

Fabricator. Nope. Sounds like shop class, something knocked out of sheet metal.

Serial accuser. Meh. Not a potboiler, and it doesn’t even fit my case. As far as I know I’m the only one she’s ever accused. Also, nobody’s making a monster movie about a serial accuser.

Predator, obviously, doesn’t work. It’s been trademarked by the accusation industry to describe, almost exclusively, criminal men. It simply doesn’t attach easily to women. Sorry, it’s true.

More than half a million words in the English language, and not one of them is truly dressed up and suitable to hang on my accuser. We built an entire vocabulary, forty plus terms deep, for what a man might be capable of. Rapist. Predator. Monster. Beast. For her, there is nothing. It doesn’t feel like justice. It feels like being handed a knife with no blade.

I’m a kind human being, but there has to be something. I spent a night trying to build the word out of spare parts, let’s see, there’s liar, slut, fraud, snake, and others that bubble out of the bilge of abhorrent language, but none of them held. Not because I’m a better man than the people who called me a predator. I’m not sure I am, some nights. They failed because the language just doesn’t fit the feeling, and it doesn’t belong in the room. The ugly words feel more comfortable in my presence when I’m acting small and petty.

But then it hit me. While I don’t have a word for her, I have a better word for me, one that has weight.

Innocent.

And it wasn’t pulled from my stupid big dictionary set. It was a gift of sorts, given to me by twelve strangers who heard the testimony, saw the evidence, watched her testify, and took about an hour to decide none of it was enough. It’s real. It’s also not enough, most days, to fill the hole the other word left.

I decided long ago I wasn’t going to say her name in my writing, I wasn’t going to give her some nasty honorific. I know exactly what a shitty name does once it’s loose in the world, I watched it happen to mine in real time. Using it on her wouldn’t be justice. It would just be me, finally, joining the mob. I’m not willing to become the thing I’m angry at, even on the nights I want to.

I’ll never get over what happened to me, so I looked for the word. I wanted it so bad. I didn’t find one, and even if I had, I don’t think I’d have used it anyway. Some doors, once you go through them, don’t let you come back out the same size you went in.

Here’s how we met. Fifteen years before the end of the 20th century, I was working as a part time Bingo caller at the Mystic Lake Casino in Shakopee, Minnesota. Back then, the Casino didn’t look like the cornfield Las Vegas it does today. Even though it was in the boonies it was a busy late night hot spot where you could buy tax free cigarettes and booze, or visit the massive bingo hall which is where the real action happened.

I got a job as one of its bingo callers, entertaining hundreds of people each afternoon. Players would sit at long tables with their printed game sheets and brightly colored blotters. Those playing bingo in the middle of a weekday afternoon were mostly older women who were dead serious about the game, which didn’t match my natural performing joviality. My style of calling a game was to add humor, and self-effacing commentary, two things not normally associated with professional bingo calling. For instance, I’d learned to palm a bingo ball I’d pulled from the expensive tumbler, and made it look as though it magically traveled from one hand, suddenly appearing on the board, lighting up the number on various electronic signs around the hall. I also learned that if I pinched a bingo ball in just the right spot, it would shoot away from my fingers, and bounce around under the tables, forcing a floor worker to catch it and bring it back. I used to do imitations, character voices, including an imitation of speaking in slow motion. So funny. So, so funny.

I was fired only a few months after I’d started. My boss, a tall, balding man with a triangular shaped head, ears that seemed to move independently while he talked, and a mouth missing several teeth told me “This job isn’t for you.” Unfortunately, that was the case with nearly all of my jobs in my youth. If work wasn’t fun, what fun was it to work!

While my luck ran out on Bingo, there was a spectacular new paramutual horse racing facility being built a few miles north of Mystic Lake, and someone, oddly, had recommended me for a job managing the entertainment for a night club being built next to the track. Apparently, someone had seen me doing my hysterical but ill advised bingo shtiklach and called for an interview.

I was surprised when I got the job. I’d never worked in a night club before, in fact, I rarely visited one before this job. It turned out to be an astonishingly successful club, a place simmering with youthful energy. The entertainment and bar staff were all young, happy and attractive, and several times a night the entire staff would dance on tables and bar tops in orchestrated pandemonium. It was wild and fun, and I was in the middle of it.

During that time, my first wife and I became separated, and the club became the personal and professional center of my life. That’s when I met Marian. She was a bar customer, out with some friends, and came up to request we play a dance tune she liked. Memories can’t be trusted to reliably represent the past, they’re fragments at best. But I think my memories of her that first night are as accurate as any in my life. She was well dressed, in heels, her hair confidently short and done, and she carried herself like someone with purpose. She was also poised and attractive and I would look for her each night hoping she’d come back in. She came out several evenings, with different friends, and would always come up to the DJ booth to say hi.

Hair and fashion of the times - Marian (21) and some friends dancing at Winner’s Nightclub.

I wasn’t sure if she would go out on a date with me, after all I was still married and outwardly hopeful for reconciliation with my wife. But, when I asked her out she agreed. We’ve been together since, and have spoken to each other at least once a day, every day we’ve been together. After several years as a couple, we decided to get married.

On our wedding day we shared the Sarum Rite, out of the book of Common Prayer. This passage includes the traditional wedding vows, “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Thinking back, the words didn’t matter to me. Sure, we think, gonna be rich, maybe we’ll be poor, we’ll get sick sometimes. The have and hold stuff, what does that even mean when you’re in your 20’s? It sounds good, a little romantic even.

Wedding Day / Murphy’s Landing

Marian and I could never have imagined what would happen to our lives in 2018, when we shared those vows more than 35 years earlier. And, even as we were pulled into the miasma of a ruthlessly false accusation, we weren’t thinking about our vows, because they didn’t matter, they were part of a lovely ceremonial moment on our wedding day. But I don’t remember them now, and don’t need to. They don’t animate my heart, they aren’t navigational charts.

Murphy’s Landing / 2023

In the dark days after my arrest Marian took on the unenviable task of keeping me from disappearing into depression and suicide while simultaneously becoming something like a paralegal, organizing every detail of the case, making sure nothing was left out. She was also attacked online, accused of aiding in my sexual harassment or rape and should be thrown in prison with me. But, she never flinched from defending me or our marriage, or her assessment of those involved, one of whom was once her closest friend.

Right before our first court date, at the very beginning, her employer let her go without warning. She told me how she fell to her knees in the hallway outside her boss’s door, sobbing, begging them not to do this. Because my career was destroyed, hers was now the only income we had, it was our health insurance, and everything else we needed to pay for, including escalating legal costs. It took her months to find a new job, and during that time she never wavered, she kept our home emotionally stable, all the while I was flailing. I was so broken and weak, and if she was anything other than strong, kind and generous, she never let on.

I used to think saving someone’s life was an episodic moment when a person intervened, heroically sometimes, like pulling someone from a burning home, a car wreck, administer CPR, save a drowning person from a raging river. But, Marian saved my life countless times, over four years. It was these small things — wanting to go for walks with me, to walk the dogs together, have a picnic to get me away from the darkness that had enveloped our home. She encouraged some friends to build a studio space for me. Telling friends to call, encouraging people to visit. I was so down, but she was always there to remind me of what good there was in my life, again and again. She told me about the evidence, how solid our case was, working with my attorney so closely, and a million times “We’re going to be okay.” And a million more, “I love you.”

One of the darkest days of my life was the day the Minnesota Department of Human Rights put out a press release that declared me guilty of rape. I knew there was an investigation happening, but I was completely blindsided by the report. Standing in our living room, reading it, I started to scream something I said frequently whenever some ugly new twist emerged. “They aren’t going to stop until I’m in prison or they kill me!” Marian held me until I calmed down, and repeated her mantra, “We’ll be alright. You’ll be okay. They have nothing.”

If not for her I might have succumbed to the overwhelming desire to relieve the churn of pain and fear I was caught in. I’m not entirely without inner strength and resolve, but we pulled together. She never wavered, she never doubted, even when I was close to the edges of a horrible darkness.

Shakespeare wrote that love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, that it bears out even to the edge of doom. That’s a popular vow, and certainly better written than the one we said at the altar. I guess what I’m saying is words, however well written, are still just words on a page.

It’s a mild late spring evening, the windows are open and the song of crickets is tumbling with a slight breeze. I’m looking at her again, still on that couch. Thirty-five years since a church, since a passage from a prayer book, since vows we wrote ourselves and can’t recall a word of now.

What I remember is her sense of humor, her fearlessness and resolve. But it’s the dark passages I recall most vividly: her hand on my back while I raged, her calm assurances when the nightmares came. “We’re going to be okay,” she said, over and over, “it’s alright.” We never spoke of the vows. We didn’t need to. They were already our marriage.

I bring this up because I came across some screenshots of comments posted online after my brief visit to the Renaissance Festival just about one year ago. I was there with Penn & Teller, who were celebrating their 50th reunion as a performing duo, which began at the festival, and where I met them. I’ve covered that in a previous podcast.

The post came from a performer at the show whose calling, as she sees it, is to exorcise or diminish any man at the festival, or in the world in general, she believes is a predator. Which, apparently, is most of them. Her position, that men are inherently oriented toward rape and violence against women, is a shibboleth among a certain strain of activist. Andrea Dworkin built a whole feminist philosophy in the 1970s around the idea that male violence against women isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.

That word “inevitable” is doing a lot of work. We are far from resolved on the issues of sexual violence, rape and exploitation in this country. But the notion that it’s inevitable isn’t bound by evidence. It’s bound by belief.

I bristle at the idea that my allegedly predatory behavior was widely known, as if it was confirmed. By whom? It’s circular. The word “predator” gets used as an established fact that’s commonly known. No further questions need to be asked. Question the accusation and you’re branded ignorant, or assumed to be arguing in bad faith.

It’s not true. There is zero evidence to support the claim, and I’ve covered that at length. But under the rules of a moral panic, evidence and truth get sidelined for what you must believe.

The old definition of a moral panic assumed it was temporary. Something happens, a group gets frightened or outraged, certainty spikes, and eventually the fever breaks and life goes back to normal. That’s not what we have anymore. Politics today doesn’t cycle through panics. It runs on one continuously, just swapping out the target. There’s always a villain of the week, always a badge to wear, always a group whose certainty is the price of admission. The machinery never powers down long enough to be called an episode. It’s just the weather now.

That matters, because a temporary panic eventually corrects itself, people calm down, new information gets in, the group reassesses. A permanent one doesn’t have to correct, because it never stops long enough to be checked. Before one target is even fully discredited, the apparatus has already moved to the next name, and nobody circles back to update the record on the last one. The machine doesn’t need to be right about yesterday’s villain. It just needs a villain for today.

I got caught in a small, local version of something that, at a national level, has stopped being an aberration and become a permanent feature of how we argue with each other.

So how did my reputation flip in such a short window, with no real history of the behavior I was suddenly guilty of? The answer is simple. There wasn’t one. It was manufactured, and social media was the delivery system.

Here’s what that delivery system actually does. Before any of this, most people who knew me held some private, unremarkable opinion. Positive, mostly. Nobody had organized around it, because there was nothing to organize around. That’s just people going about their lives with a version of me in their heads that happened to be accurate.

A single hostile public post changes the physics of that. It doesn’t just add one more opinion into circulation. It converts private, scattered impressions into something visible, and once something is visible, it moves on its own. People don’t need to check whether it’s true. They only need to notice that others are already agitating, and decide whether to join in or get out of the way.

That’s the part that did the damage, not the accusation itself, but what happened once it was seen being seen. People who’d have shrugged off gossip in private suddenly had to reckon with a public position. Staying quiet started to look like taking a side. Screenshots got reposted, comments piled onto comments, and each new share felt like independent confirmation, when it was really the same claim, echoing. A handful of people pushed harder than the rest, reposting, prodding others to join, and the crowd behind them grew. Underneath the slogans and the moral language, the actual sentiment was cruder than any of it: fuck that guy, light him up. Forty years of a mostly positive reputation didn’t get argued down with evidence. It got buried under repetition dressed up as evidence.

To be clear, this isn’t persuasion. It’s performance. Nobody had to convince anyone I was guilty. They only had to make guilt look like something everyone already agreed on, and once it looked that way, jumping on the bandwagon required no evidence at all.

Nowhere is the mechanism clearer than Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Most of the country never read the testimony, never weighed the timeline, never sat with the specifics. They didn’t need to. Everyone around them already believed, or already didn’t, and that was enough. The hearing wasn’t really a fact-finding exercise for most of the people watching it. It was a referendum on which badge you were wearing, “I Believe Her,” “Believe Women,” Time’s Up. That’s the mechanism at national scale. What happened to me happened at festival scale, with the same parts.

We should all be wary of mechanics this simple, the rush to label and condemn that’s become so common. I didn’t believe Christine Blasey Ford, not because I thought she was lying, or insincere. Quite the opposite. Let me be precise. I didn’t believe the evidence was sufficient to convict. In many progressive circles, Kavanaugh is a known rapist. On the right, he’s simply innocent. Both sides are certain. Neither side is working from more evidence than the other. I believe he’s innocent. But I don’t know.

It never occurred to me that I’d end up on the wrong end of a #MeToo accusation, let alone one alleging rape. But the permission structure doesn’t just encourage accusation. It discourages the question. In 2017, more than a dozen women from the cast sent me screenshots and texts. They showed a small faction inside the performing community running on outright misandry. Several of those women had pushed back inside the group, only to be shunned or called rape apologists. Some left rather than keep fighting it.

Calling me a known predator means nothing outside that group, because it’s been disproven, repeatedly, to everyone but the people who never needed proof in the first place. Inside the group, it isn’t treated as belief anymore. It’s treated as settled fact, without ever needing evidence to become one.

The woman who called me a known predator isn’t unusual, and by her own colleagues’ account, not a popular figure. She found a pattern that she believed explained everything about men, power, predation, and then went looking for men to fit it. Once you have a pattern like that, you don’t need new evidence for each new case. You just need a name. The pattern does the rest.

This is also, if we’re honest about it, the basic architecture of conspiracy thinking. A conspiracy theory doesn’t fail because it lacks a mechanism. It has a mechanism, and the mechanism is airtight. Every new fact either confirms the theory or gets explained away as part of the cover-up. Point to condensation trailing off a wing at altitude and the true believer doesn’t see water vapor, he sees the proof he was looking for. There is no piece of evidence capable of disproving the theory, because the theory was built to survive contact with evidence. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the design. Conspiracy theories make dumb people feel smart, because they’ve discovered the secret, untied the knot, found the hidden pattern everyone else missed.

Her framework works the same way. Every man is either a confirmed predator or a predator who hasn’t been caught yet. My forty years without a single complaint isn’t evidence I’m not a predator. It’s evidence I’m good at hiding it, or that women were too afraid to come forward, or that the institution protected me. Whatever the story requires, the story provides. That’s the tell. A belief with an answer for every possible piece of counter-evidence isn’t a belief anymore. It’s a closed system. And closed systems don’t get corrected by facts, because they were never built to be falsifiable in the first place.

The people most certain they’d never fall for a conspiracy theory are often running one. They just don’t call it that, because the targets feel righteous instead of shameful. Nobody thinks of themselves as the guy with the corkboard and the red string. But structurally, that’s what she is. She has her string, and I’m the pin at the end of it. She isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at the shape she already believes in, and I happen to be standing where that shape needed filling.

It’s what makes moral panics durable instead of momentary. A liar knows she’s lying. She doesn’t. A lie requires knowing the truth and saying something else. She isn’t doing that. She’s saying what she’s certain is true. That’s the difference, and it’s the whole problem. Certainty doesn’t check its work. Only doubt does.

The women who reached out to me in 2017 understood this before I did. They watched the group harden around a belief that didn’t have to answer to facts anymore, and they tried to push back from inside it. Some of them told me directly that it felt crazy, like watching a room agree the world was flat. The world isn’t flat. But inside that group, flat was in fashion, and questioning it got you nowhere fast. Pushing back became socially expensive. Some of them left rather than keep paying that price. Dissenters become heretics, and heresy is expensive, so the group never corrects itself. It just gets smaller as people leave, and the ones who stay get more certain with every departure.

How do we solve for that? Evidence, where evidence exists. And where it doesn’t, the harder, less satisfying answer: we don’t know. That doesn’t mean throwing up our hands. Even without proof, we can weigh what’s actually there, a person’s history, the consistency of the story, the incentives at play, and arrive at an informed position. That’s different from certainty. It’s also different from nothing. It’s the position I hold on Kavanaugh: informed, not certain.

Here’s the test I’d apply to any of it. If someone is a known anything, the questions are simple. What do we know. How do we know it. If the only answer you can give is how strongly you believe it, sit down. There’s no reason to take your word for anything.

That comma I opened with, known, predator, one is a label, the other an accusation, didn’t survive the group very long. Give it a few weeks of repetition and the comma just disappears. Nobody types it anymore. It becomes known predator, no pause, no separation between what’s alleged and what’s true, because by then there’s no difference left to mark. The punctuation was the last place doubt could still live in the sentence, and doubt, as always, was the first thing the group got rid of.

That’s the whole story, really. Not what was done to me. What happened to a comma. A little mark that used to hold two different claims apart, evidence and belief, label and accusation, worn away by nothing more than people saying the same thing enough times that they forgot there used to be a pause there at all.

I’d like it back. Not for my sake. For the next name the machine picks.

Out Of The Blue podcast is listener supported, and is a stream of income that helps offset the deep debt I incurred when my livelihood was destroyed in the wake of a wrongful accusation. Please like episodes, comment and share. Every subscriber helps. Thank you.

I wrote it, voiced it, and produced it alone. I released it to a small group of people. Then I rewrote it, re-recorded it, updated every episode, and released it again earlier this year.

When I listen to some of the episodes I recorded more than two years ago, I’m struck by how calm I sounded. The writing was uneven. But what I hear underneath all of it is vulnerability. I really did put it all out there. I left myself open to attack. To ridicule. To the possibility that someone would invent a new accusation just to shut the project down.

The cost of doing this podcast, in practical terms, was close to twenty-five thousand dollars. The show is a loss. My audience is small, growing here and there, but still little more than a small theater, where ticket holders often don’t show up for a particular performance. That’s the metrics. But the engagement rate is impressive. Most people who start an episode finish it.

What I didn’t think about in this process is what comes after the last episode. After the acquittal. What’s next?

So I kept writing and recording. But I couldn’t find a strong pulse. I tried writing about other men who may have been wrongfully accused. I wrote about media bias. I wrote about pieces of my recovery, the long tail of it.

A few months ago, I started to feel like I was circling the same thing. It started to feel forced.

The episodes that feel good to write and record these days are the ones where I travel beyond the moat. My story about burying animal remains. Driving to New York a year ago. The horses of Linton. Those feel much closer to who I am now. Not the ugly disfigurement of my life by underhanded clowns. Something else. I’ll still be writing and commenting on media and culture. But I don’t want to be known as the guy defending people accused of ugly crimes, innocent or not. I don’t want to spend precious life toiling over statistics and academic jargon. I don’t want to continually dip my pen in the bitter ink of discord, anger, dishonesty, and the dangers of mob justice.

It’s not easy work for someone with cognitive impatience, because my mind is constantly churning. After my arrest, and all of the things I spent 50 years building were destroyed, writing became a way to process the overwhelm, to dig out, and to recenter my mind on the present. That was much easier when the enemy of my existence was so obvious, now, the challenges come from inside me, trying to find some balance and direction in this long arc of healing.

As I move forward, more of my content will be paywalled. Purely because I have to try to recover something for my time. Any reader is a good reader. Paid readers are great readers. My goal is one thousand paid subscribers in the next year.

There are a couple of important things I’m working on. One is a book. I hope it will be out this fall, or sometime next year. I want to work with a publisher, so it may take a bit longer. There are also some bigger projects on the horizon that I can’t wait to tell you about, when I can.

Thank you for your support. I hope to keep feeding these pages, and keep attracting new readers and subscribers with your help. And to the many people who listen, and who share their thoughts with me directly. Thank you.

I’m not going to list the many bizarre and strange things he’s said and done. You can Google it. As for the rape allegations, that’s exactly my point. They are only allegations at this point.

As of today, two women have publicly accused him of sexual misbehavior and violence, and it brought his campaign down. The first accusation came from Lyndsey Fifield, a former girlfriend, who claimed in a New York Times article that he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door shut so she couldn’t get out. She called him the most toxic, abusive man on earth. Pretty ugly stuff. But her accusation didn’t sink him. The media passed it off as, well, she’s a Republican operative or something. Good grief.

The next woman, Jenny Racicot, was featured in a Politico article. She said she also dated Platner, and claimed he showed up at her house drunk and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. After the encounter, she broke off all contact with him. Platner denies that anything non-consensual happened. Racicot is progressive, so some people are claiming bias in reverse. And Jesus. Settle down.

Because of what I’ve been through, friends have asked what I think about all this. Rape is a serious charge. It requires serious evidence. I have no way of knowing if either woman is telling the truth, and neither does anyone posting about it. His past public statements and verified behavior suggest a pattern that makes the allegations seem more plausible. But plausible isn’t proof. I don’t know what happened. Neither do you.

Everything I’ve read about this guy makes him look messy, maybe creepy, maybe a drunk creep. But I don’t think he should have resigned. He hasn’t been formally charged. He hasn’t had a chance to legally defend himself. Let it work out through the courts. That would have been the right move.

I also don’t believe a good argument is “Well, Trump is a dirty pig, with more baggage than a Kardashian on vacation, so we have Platner.” It’s true, but it’s also not the point.

Let me sort this a bit more. I think it’s legitimate that he lost the confidence of his party. That’s their prerogative, whatever the reasons. For the same reason, the Minnesota Renaissance Festival was under no legal obligation to keep me on contract after I was accused.

But they didn’t believe the allegations. They worked with my legal team, providing documents important to my defense. That was the right thing to do. They had no legal obligation to keep me on contract. But didn’t they have a moral one? If you believe someone who works for you is innocent, shouldn’t you spend both social and financial capital to make that case, instead of just walking away?

Their insurance company wouldn’t allow me back on site. So what. Find another insurance company after I’m acquitted. This is the same insurance company my wife spent hours with, going over every detail, every piece of the story. At the end of one day, they told her this was little more than a nuisance lawsuit. They said they saw no evidence that suggested I was guilty. They said this is where they spend most of their time, on bullshit lawsuits that are, by design, about getting money.

Take this a step further. Instead of taking a principled, moral stand and defending me, the festival settled all the claims out of court. No lawsuit was ever filed. Only the threat of one. Two women performers and my accuser were given substantial amounts of money. To be clear, “substantial” in my estimation is anything more than a dollar. But they got a lot more than a dollar. I have no idea how much. Whatever it was, it was too much.

To seal the deal, the festival admitted no wrongdoing. The women were paid. They’re no longer allowed to perform or appear in costume at the festival. I was no longer on contract, though there was no agreement, no stipulation, that I wasn’t allowed to visit or attend.

This is a bad outcome for me, and it rewards connivers with cash. It further destroyed my reputation and the festival’s. And in the end, there’s no admission of wrongdoing on anyone’s part? How does that happen?

They should have stuck it out through the trial. Then, after I was exonerated, told my accuser’s attorney eat shit, and maybe even invited me back to work. Sure, it would have been controversial, and there’s a good chance I wouldn’t return, but it feels more, righteous. I didn’t break any laws. I didn’t attack or hurt anyone. I was smeared, and of all the people in this story, I deserved better. That would have been a principled outcome, not a practical one.

After I was acquitted, I joked with someone on the festival’s management team that the quickest way to get rid of the worst performers and crafters at the show would be to bring me back. It would be an exodus of the idiotic. Bring out the confetti.

Graham Platner, like me, is innocent until proven otherwise. In my case, there was no trail of evidence, no ugly texts, no drunk behavior, no social media posts, no police reports, no complaints. A jury found me not guilty, with little deliberation, and sustained my claim of innocence. Platner hasn’t had that chance yet. If I were him, I’d want a trial. I’d stand behind my word that I was innocent. I wouldn’t leave the race. And I’d tell the establishment to go to hell.

But the institutions that hire us need to stop waving the white flag at the first sign of trouble. I know. I know. It’s not that easy. It’s a risk calculation. But like so many things in life, that calculation should be biased in favor of truth. If everything comes down to a cost-benefit analysis, morality rarely wins. Backing people we believe are innocent is potentially costly. Sometimes we get it wrong. But if institutions wait for the investigation to run its course before they act, then people like me don’t get crushed in the process of paying off the loudest voice in the room.

I know I’m oversimplifying it. Juries are unpredictable, and had I been found guilty, the insurance company would likely have had to fork over millions. The festival was in a difficult spot, but, again, given the paucity of incriminating evidence, and the abundant and available evidence that I didn’t do this, I wonder what would have happened had they waited, and publicly supported me. We’ll never know.

Today, social media is full of people yammering about rape. They’re accusing the women of lying. They’re accusing Platner of lying. They’re saying the establishment bailed on him because he was sinking in the polls. Creepy. Rape. Rape. Rape. Put up or shut up. It seems to me our political class is increasingly being run by children, our media has no depth perception, and the adults have left the room.

Maybe it’s a little foolish to say you should stand by your word. Let the voters decide. Let the jury decide. Quit listening to mewing mobs. Patience.

The last people who should be deciding the outcome of this mess are the politicians who backed him through thick and thin, until now. You owe it to the accuser and the accused to act on principle, not the polls. And somewhere, an insurance adjuster closed a file years ago, called it a nuisance, and a folder with my name on it went into the drawer right behind it.

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This one includes the backyard fire where I tried to burn my old performing life to the ground, and what it took to stop.

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I was having a conversation with a guy. I don’t know who he was. Young. Colored hair, tattoos, tackle box hardware on his face. We were deep into it, and I went into a monologue.

“It’s not enough to have truth on your side. For crying out loud, even saying it is a cliché. It’s not that you believe something is true, it’s that you think your belief is the truth itself. You start with certainty, because doubt is a sign of weakness. You know everything because you researched it. You have all those tabs open on your damn computer so you can look it up. But sometimes you’re wrong. We all know plenty of things, but know so little. And some of us are really smart and know more than the next person. Truth is not a coat rack to hang your belief on. It’s the other way around, man, it’s the other way around!”

When I woke up I was trying to sort out what enzyme started that dream. What thought had been drifting around at the margins that set off such a show.

I’ve been watching the political situation in NYC with some fascination, Mamdani and company sweeping into office on a tide of conviction. I don’t live there. It doesn’t affect me directly. But the rhetoric is fascinating because it’s hyperbolic college speak about ideas that have not been tested, at least in our system of government. Fine, that’s a common problem. And like Trump, yes, like Trump, there’s no apparent recognition that being wrong is even possible. Because to be wrong would be to admit that your ideas, and your self, are not invincible. And repeating a falsehood ad infinitum doesn’t change what’s true.

It’s the opposite of Socratic. It’s dogmatic, didactic, vapid, and banal. Intransigence isn’t a moral failing anymore. It’s a superpower.

Before you send me a note complaining that this has gone political, I’m not here to argue for or against any of them or their ideas. What’s bristling is something underneath the ideas. The disappearance of truth as a necessary component of public discourse.

Truth is something measurable. Right? Something knowable. Now it means something agreed upon. To be clear, consensus isn’t always wrong. Scientific agreement, legal standards, and even the messy democratic process, these are forms of shared belief we depend on. The problem isn’t agreement. It’s agreement as a substitute for evidence. And opinions, as strongly felt as they can be, aren’t truth either, no matter how many people hold them.

I think values can function as truth, and they sure present as deeply felt. If you believe abortion is evil, to you, that’s not an opinion you hold loosely, it’s a fact, as real as stone, derived from premises you hold as foundational. It’s also measurable, within that system. People who believe in free choice also see this as truth and fact. Both sides are arguing from different value systems, and they’re coherent to them, each producing its own version of truth. I don’t think that’s the problem. People have always organized around values. The problem is when a value-based truth gets presented as empirical fact, as something measurable outside the belief system, when it isn’t.

If a group of parents agrees that vaccines are harmful, the agreement becomes the truth. If a coalition believes government does everything cheaper, the coalition makes it so. We say it with conviction. We all agree, therefore it is so. The point isn’t what’s true. The point is the agreement.

Parsing out these differing values with others and making them into law, or doctrine, or policy, is what governments, courts, and even the church are designed to do. Not to declare one value system the winner, but to create a process by which competing truths can be heard, weighed, and negotiated. That process depends on one thing: a shared commitment to honest argument. Not agreement. Argument. And it’s a constant conversation. It never stops. We have to contend with the vulnerability of consensus, that sometimes a majority agrees on something that we don’t agree with. When the consensus alone gets mistaken for truth, the institutions don’t just fail. They get captured. By the loudest. By the most organized. By the most certain. And certainty, as we’ve established, is the one thing that has never required being right.

The machinery of groupthink is everywhere now. MAGA. Moral panics. Socialist vanguards. The specific flavor doesn’t matter. Surround yourself with people who agree with you, minimize contact with the dirty and infected ideas of those who don’t, and utopia becomes possible. Of course it’s ridiculous. But stupid is as stupid is.

Around the time I was facing arrest, before or after, I don’t recall exactly, a woman I know was posting on social media that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to be wrongfully accused. The amen chorus applauded. It was stupid, and it wasn’t true by any measure. But it didn’t matter. The truth was in the intent of the posting, not the reality. The logic goes like this: false accusations are rare. Getting struck by lightning is rare. Therefore, because it’s rare, it’s probably true that he raped her. They agreed with the idea, therefore it was true. It rewards ignorance, celebrates stupidity, and is intellectually lazy. Even more important to groupthink, these types of logic chains provide a clean answer, make agreement easier because they shut off the irritating rattle of disagreement.

And that idea, that something is true based on mutual agreement, is surrounded by landmines. Anyone who tries to challenge it gets blown up.

After I was arrested, the cast of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival was roiling. That’s not my opinion, I heard it from people who were there. There was real disgust at what many saw as a completely ridiculous accusation. I think I’m safe saying the bulk of the cast didn’t believe it, with only a few vociferously speaking out against me. To challenge the idea that I had violently raped someone in the middle of the day, in one of the busiest buildings at the show, with thin walls and a door that doesn’t lock. But the landmines of disagreement, were too costly to step on. So people I’d known and worked with for decades stayed quiet. Because you know. BOOM.

That’s how groupthink takes over. It’s not that most of the cast thought I’d raped someone, they didn’t, but to speak out against them was to make yourself their target. That’s how you lose the moral ground and cede it to the lunatics. But if the truth still matters, even when we’re not entirely certain, then we have a moral obligation to take a stand. The more who do, the more will follow. It’s not about hating or overthrowing those who disagree. It’s remaining steadfast in support of what is knowable, and true. Accepting ambiguity is intellectually consistent. And being willing to change course when what we believed turns out to be wrong is not weakness, it’s the point.

To make the point, I have substantial, conclusive evidence that I didn’t do this, thousands of pages of it. She, they literally have nothing.

The DSA. The far right. The loudmouths who controlled the conversation about my guilt at the little shit circus. Different flavors of the same thing, dangerous, potentially life-threatening, and so much of it built on the sand castle of falsity.

After being the target of groundless accusation and insidious threats, the defense is conversation, not a monologue. Dialogue, not a decree. It starts with: I might be wrong, or I don’t know. It moves with: I’m listening. If we ignore the pitchforks, the haters, the dumbest and the destroyers, we only have ourselves to blame when we’re too late to step forward and defend what is precious. BOOM.

Being released was uneventful. After posting bond ($100K), I was taken back to my little cell until everything was processed, and eventually taken to a room where I changed back into my street clothes, then down an elevator and released, out a door into a warm, muggy afternoon. For the first time I was visible to the world as “rapist.”

Of course, the accusation was traumatic, but much worse was the long and pernicious aftermath. It’s impossible to calculate the real costs of such an accusation. Other than pedophilia, an accusation of rape comes with a stigma that is unmatched, and it doesn’t matter if it’s true. My attorney once quipped, “You’d have been better off accused of murder.”

Given the trauma of these events and the long tail of ruin, it’s not surprising I want to talk about it. After I was charged and arrested, I was told not to talk about it to anyone, and I had to sustain that silence for four years. Once I was acquitted I knew it was going to be important for me to speak about it, not just with people closest to me, but to anyone and everyone who would listen. I was done hiding. But trauma distorts the view of the self, which makes it challenging to speak or write about. There is a heavy shame that comes with an accusation of sexual violence, again, even if it’s not true. Because false accusations are so rare, most people just assume an accusation is true. My calculation is that by talking about it, people will reason that I didn’t do anything. After all, guilty people don’t usually walk around telling people what they did.

But is talking about it so often turning the broken bones and bruises into something purely performative?

The academic Catherine Liu has a phrase for what happens when private suffering gets deployed publicly to establish credibility and draw an audience. She calls it a passkey to authenticity. Her example was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman photographed crying near a fence some distance from a migrant facility, performing grief for an online audience. Private suffering deployed publicly. A passkey.

My accuser understood this instinctively. She leveraged a false claim, not only for a financial settlement, which was substantial, but also, and perhaps more importantly, she gained a coveted credential among the legions of survivorship.

But does this argument also apply to me?

Am I using my trauma, the loss of everything, to authenticate my story and thereby make myself special? By continuing to whip the posts, am I rendering myself more and more into a version of AOC standing in front of a fence? Me. Me. Suffering Me?

I’ve set up a podcast and write for hours every week on the subject. I’ve built a small but growing audience and they pay me for it. None of my work is a lie, but it is, out of necessity, performative. In this transaction, what is lost? What troubles me more is this: who am I without this thing? What is my work without that fuel? Is it possible to do anything else?

The more I write, the more uneasy I’ve become. I’m afraid that if I stop I will have nothing left to say. And if I have nothing left to say, where do I go? The question isn’t whether I should quit. The question is whether I would recognize myself without this.

Art bites. It can blind us, tear out our tongues, torture us. But it also expands our view of the world and can lead somewhere we couldn’t have predicted. Expression isn’t a straight line. To render our wounds into something the world can hear, can experience, can feel, we have to do it again and again and again. Layer upon layer goes on and comes off.

The answer is, I don’t know. What’s on the other side of this canvas is as much a mystery to me as to anyone else. And like any great mystery, the clues are hidden. In my case, they’ll be revealed in the arc of writing and creating. Or they won’t.

Charles Bukowski wrote, “Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the ground crying and screaming. And then you will get up, because you always do."

And I would add “..and you write about it.”

Something lighter to start the week.

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My conversation with Penn Jillette dropped into the podosphere last week. It was a long conversation about what I went through from 2018 to 2022. Heavy things. And I talked a lot.

I tried, but I couldn’t listen to it.

I’ve been telling these stories for a couple of years now and every time I do, I feel divided. To talk about my own life feels selfish. Indulgent. I don’t want to be that guy, who pawns your time to buy sympathy. And there’s a deformed social contract around what happened to me, an unspoken agreement that I should remain the guilty monster they imagined. They burned me at the stake. I’m dead, and I should remain in the grave of the banished.

So to speak at all is a violation of their terms.

Talking about this shit is a tangled proposition. And, much of the time it doesn’t feel particularly rewarding. When I share the absurd details of what she said to the police, I’m in a distortion field. Like, that I ejaculated five times during the rape, or when I apparently cackled while violating her, or the deeply twisted idea that I forced my accuser to lick my cum off the filthy floor. Yeah, it’s pretty nutty, and that’s not all of it.

I feel ashamed. Not because any of it’s true. It’s not. But because these stories create images in the mind of a listener of me doing extraordinarily violent things to a mother of three. It naturally raises questions about my character. Could he. Did he. It’s so gross, it’s too dark, and I should never talk about it again.

But I do. But I must.

It’s all make believe. I have a responsibility to tell my story, not just to reveal the ugly process I went through, but what I did to survive. At the same time, I want to acknowledge the plight of actual survivors of sexual violence. The wrongfully accused and real survivors have more in common than people imagine. Neither gets to stop carrying it. Neither gets to be believed without a fight. The difference is in the direction of the lie.

So I sit with these competing feelings every time I open my mouth. The embarrassment of the telling. The focus on me. The fear of being misread. The need, despite all of that, to say what actually happened.

I still don’t know if I’m doing it right.

And now, it’s an old story. Time makes everything less important. Like slowly walking away from a crash, the wreckage grows smaller and eventually falls off the edge of the horizon. The audience yawns. Roll the credits.

What about about Salman Rushdie losing his eye to a knife attack? He continued to write. Something was taken, but the impulse to write remained. Whatever it is, you learn to compose without it. The eye. The hand. The career. The audience. You find out what you can still do with what remains. You find out what you need to do, and keep doing that thing.

Malevolence of the kind I was put through can’t be forgotten. And I’m not the least interested in forgiving any of them, because to release something the people who did this never acknowledged taking puts it upon me to make amends. Fuck em all.

Without the recollection of those who survive such attacks, the world moves on. I know pain isn’t sustainable. Trauma has a shelf life. The ugly memories flatten, and decompose. But, the pain becomes tolerable the more we write, speak up, and speak out. All I’ve ever wanted is for other’s to listen.

I still don’t know if I’m doing it right.

I’m not sure that question ever goes away.

I’ll keep trying.

I was 30 when Robert Bly’s best selling book Iron John was published, and it was fashionable for men to talk about cultivating enlightened manliness, the hairy beast within. Bly wasn’t celebrating aggression or chest-beating. He was diagnosing something — that men had been cut off from any meaningful passage into adulthood, that without initiation they stayed boys in men’s bodies, angry and lost. This was years before anyone coined the term “toxic masculinity,” and whatever you think of Bly’s methods, he was asking a real question.

I knew men that were going on weeks long canoe man-quests in the Boundary Waters, group camping trips where men could be men, go shirtless into the woods, shit in the woods, sit around campfires sharing feelings while still reveling in the sounds of group farting. A high school friend was part of a men’s group that went on an “Initiation Mountain Climbing” trip, where boys became men by conquering their fear of climbing a mountainside, conquering the stone wall to become more in touch with inner and outer strength.

I wasn’t interested in that kind of manly thing. Instead, I liked to talk, think, and converse, in the comforts closer to home.

For several years I attended a therapeutic men’s group that did not have such lofty physical goals. Rather, it was made up of 6 to 8 grown guys who would gather once a week to sit in chairs and talk about the challenges in their lives, about work, marriage, women, feelings. It set an example for me of how casual conversations, in this case happening with a group of grown men, without any rules, was so revelatory. The therapist who ran the group, had encouraged me to reveal some of the dark secrets I had been carrying, about being raped when I was 11 years old by a camp counselor. That alone was worth it.

I don’t remember many of the conversations we had on those evenings, because at the time my mind was plagued by the implosion of my marriage. But the questions of manliness, of being a dude, were central to our conversations. What is it about being a man that is important, and different than being a woman? Why do men hide their feelings, whilst women are more likely to express them?

My takeaway from all of those years of learning to man up was that men are more likely to respond to criticism with anger, will tend towards confrontation when unfairly challenged, and are more likely to define themselves by what they do in the world than who they are in the world. I’m probably wrong, but it seems correct.

Being a man in the world, or identifying as a man in the world, used to feel really important to me. In some ways it still does, but the identity of being male really doesn’t follow me, because identity in general is a construct. Naming something doesn’t make it so. It is simply the language we use to identify a thing, an attribute, a dimension. I’m a biological male matches with what I see on my body, but everything else that is me, that I identify as me, is about what I have done, or do. I’m married, because we said we are. I’m white, so what. I’m a writer, producer, photographer, brother, son, friend. True. But who I am being in my pursuit of those things, in my life, is the most important piece of me that I truly control.

Rapist! Sexual Predator! Harasser!

These are the labels that have been applied to me since the arrest in 2018. For some, they are true and actually describe what they know of me. They’ll go on social media and describe me using these terms and worse. The press will write about me, quoting others who will use these terms. They are describing and naming a thing that doesn’t exist, and yet it carries a cost to me as a human being because people believe that is what I am.

This is really important to how to think about people like me, who have been mercilessly dragged after being wrongfully accused. These terms, like rapist, are less about naming a person than defining a condition they represent.

Think about the word “rapist.” It doesn’t describe a person it, conjures a monster. A category so far outside the bounds of acceptable humanity that the person wearing the label ceases to exist as a person at all. Once the word attaches, everything that came before, being a man, being married, a professional a good person is chewed up. You’re not man who was accused of rape, you are rape, walking around in a man’s body.

That’s not an accident. The word is deployed to do that. And in cases where it’s true, where a real man did a real thing to a real woman, that obliteration may be exactly what justice requires. But this ugly machinery doesn’t come with a shutoff switch. It doesn’t pause to ask whether the word fits the man. It simply runs, and runs, and runs. And when it runs on the wrong man, what gets destroyed isn’t just a reputation. It’s the entire architecture of a self.

I’ve never asked anyone to take what I say on faith. I don’t want your belief. I want your skepticism, applied consistently, to everything, including the person who accused me. That’s not a defense strategy. That’s the minimum requirement for thinking clearly about anything.

Because here's what happens when skepticism gets selectively suspended: a tent goes up. And inside that tent, evidence does not matter. Context does not matter. The distance between a wrongful accusation and an actual conviction does not matter. We are all the same man. I am Carr Hagerman-Rapist, and that hyphen will outlast anything I ever write or say or do. 3333

This is not just my problem. Every person who has ever wanted justice, real justice, not the kind you perform, has a stake in whether skepticism gets applied to everyone or just to the people it's convenient to doubt. The tent doesn't sort for guilt. It sorts for accusation. And once that becomes acceptable, you've decided that the process doesn't matter. That evidence doesn't matter. That you don't matter, until the day you do.

The issue is not that men are uniquely incapable of admitting fault. It is that an admission of error feels like defeat rather than repair. In other words, just like everyone else in the world, failure is usually a fault of something we’ve done.

A recent discussion on Facebook between my brother and an extended family member over my guilt as a rapist is instructive. This cousin insisted I was guilty because he knew some women at the renaissance festival who were uncomfortable with me. Over what? Who knows. My brother suggested that rather than take the words of a third person, why not call and talk to me about what actually happened. I have irrefutable evidence, after all, and I’d be happy to share it at their leisure. But every option and offer was declined. He said: “We won’t talk to a rapist.”

My cousin is wrong, but he’s in a camp of believers that say to question an accusation is a betrayal, and that seeking evidence first is tantamount to violence, because one is questioning the survivor. It’s a closed system that won’t accept corrected inputs. He cannot accept being wrong, because to do so would be to admit a crack in his certainty. My guilt is the premise, not the conclusion. His certainty, along with many others like him, is built on a conspiracy where the judge or jury were somehow tampered with, bought and paid for by the Festival’s owner, or some other fractured storyline. The video showing that I was somewhere else at the time of the alleged rape was posted on Facebook Live, on the festival’s own Facebook page, and cannot be manipulated. It’s not that they won’t acknowledge this as substantial evidence that led a jury to quickly acquit. It’s that they literally cannot comprehend it as even possible. My guilt is so obvious to them as to need no further inquiry. These are otherwise bright people who choose to believe a really dumb thing.

This brings me back to the men's group. Their collective wisdom wasn't about polishing your image or being righteous and steadfast in your convictions. A better man — a better human being — is one who understands he's wrong more often than not. Not as a failure. As a condition of being alive. We operate in a very small field of what we actually know, and the gap between that and everything else is enormous. Being wrong isn't the exception. It's the default. And once you really accept that, not as an idea but as a daily operating reality, kindness stops being a virtue you practice and starts being the only thing that makes sense. If I don't know, and you don't know, and none of us know as much as we think we do, then the least defensible thing in the world is cruelty. And the most logical response to another person is gentleness.

Fuck you feels better in short, but love you feels better in the long. It only took me 60 years to finally put it together.

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The themes I write about are something like stones from a river of inputs and ideas. I’ve started to become suspicious of my selection process. I think I’m panning for familiar shapes, recognizable patterns. What kinds of stones am I grabbing? What am I missing, leaving behind? Am I blind to my own pattern-seeking? Of course I am.

It’s something I worry about constantly. The anger I feel for being wrongfully accused animates me, fuels my writing — it is the blood in the ink. Once I learned the patterns of wrongful accusation in the countless stories I read, the media bias, the survivor narratives, all the statistics I ingest make a nest where my outrage can roost. It has given rise to my own pattern blindness and a glib certainty that I’m surely right, oh I’m so fucking right. Sometimes. Not always.

What started as a podcast series about what I went through has grown. The aperture widened, and the margins of what I want to write about expanded with it.

Because I write, produce, and record alone, I have blind spots and unchallenged assumptions. I didn’t seek feedback at first. I was emotionally brittle, frightened of being attacked again. There is a notion — a false one — that true artists are immune to critique. When you’re writing deeply personal work around themes of justice, sexual violence, and media illiberalism, the balance is delicate and the risks are real. If I swing too hard without paying attention, I’ll leave a divot that might hurt or mislead. People pore over my work looking for any way to discredit it.

I need to practice caution, but I won’t succumb to the numbness of certainty, or creep into the powdery clownishness of misogyny, or endlessly bray that the media sucks, that journalists are poorly motivated, activists are idiots, the police are corrupt, or that my pain is unique. So let me cover a few areas where I’ve overstated, intentionally or not, the facts or the reality — where I’ve bound and gagged the opposition.

Journalism. The reporting on my arrest and the subsequent accusations of harassment was incredibly biased and unfair. But there is a grounded reason for it. It is the built-in response to documented, widespread, serious failures of the past. Historically, women have been disbelieved by default. The evidence suggests that’s improved, but it’s far from complete. Investigations were conducted to protect institutions and the powerful, not victims. The press buried stories that should have run. None of that is ancient history. The reforms I’m critical of exist because people were genuinely harmed by their absence. That doesn’t make those reforms immune from criticism. It doesn’t mean they can’t be applied badly, or selectively, or in ways that destroy people who don’t deserve it. I know that firsthand. But the strongest case against me is this: maybe the system I experienced is the cost of building something that finally works often enough to matter. I don’t accept that. Harm is harm. Moral choice matters because a bullet shot with indifference kills the guilty and the innocent just the same.

Both the Star Tribune and MPR have historically done good and important work on sexual violence, institutional indifference, and workplace harassment. I’ll leave links on the written page. Even in my case, Liz Sawyer exhibited some effort at fairness. She didn’t go far enough, but she didn’t have all the information at the time. Maryann Combs of MPR was less forgiving, but she has been an important advocate for change within the local arts community — efforts I should have acknowledged.

Motives. I consistently refuse redemptive framing, but my work occasionally edges toward a tone where the arithmetic of what was done to me forecloses curiosity about anyone else’s arithmetic. Readers who are with me on due process but haven’t lived my experience sometimes need acknowledgment that the systems I’m critiquing were responding to descriptions of real harm, presented by multiple women. Those journalists and investigators were doing their jobs. They were inept by any honest calculation, but their motives, at least at the start, were honest.

Statistics. This is an area of intense interest. I hold firm to the notion that journalists need to be more knowledgeable and articulate about the messy, incomplete realities of rape statistics. Using old and leaky numbers to confirm that this or that person is probably guilty is lazy and unjust. Most consumers believe these debunked statistics, and that isn’t their fault. They’re deployed constantly by reporters who don’t take enough time to fulfill their obligations to the truth, even when the truth is surrounded by ambiguity.

My mistake is that I fog the horizon by using math to make a moral argument. Statistics are important, but a girl who has been molested, a woman who has been raped, a coworker who was coerced — they are immune to statistics. If I walk into a room and announce that only X percent of women have experienced rape or coercion, I’ve completely missed the point. Statistics help us understand the severity of a problem. They highlight the need for more study and better information. They don’t disprove any particular case. They can’t buff out the dents or the wreckage.

Well understood, statistics give us dimension and coordinates. I think of them as a sextant — a device that measures angular distance, used to navigate. Without one, you’re navigating blind. We won’t solve anything with accurate data alone, but it gives us a common understanding of the challenges we face and tells us where to assign our moral and political capital.

Agency. One reason I’ve avoided steelmanning my own arguments — articulating the best case against my positions — is that I believe so few writers or journalists have spent time inside the trap I was caught in. The discourse on sexual violence is already saturated against someone like me. There are journalists who have written well about mob dynamics and the overreach of #MeToo, but not as a sustained theme, and certainly not as someone who lived inside that system.

When I was writing about the Eric Swalwell case, I was uncomfortable with the possibility that I might be seen as defending a man with a clear history of bad behavior — or worse, that I actually was defending him. When I watched interviews with some of the young women who came forward, I felt both revulsion and anger. They had real stories. They felt sincerely that they had been wronged. I didn’t give them the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t let their stories stand on their own. They have agency, but that doesn’t make their complaints invalid, any more than his agency validates his decisions. In Christian language, it is grace. In Buddhist language, equanimity. I have inadvertently used them as stand-ins for the women who attacked me for things I didn’t do. I’ve been treating them all as an archetype rather than as individuals.

Voltaire wrote that doubt is not a very agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one. The line between certainty and moral clarity can seem impossibly thin. The war isn’t between me and my accusers, or between due process and belief. It’s between clarity and the comfort of being certain I already have it. Certainty is ridiculous. It just doesn’t always feel that way at six in the morning with the news open and the anger already running.

I’m fighting with my conscience every time I write, which is more than I can say about any of the loathsome, scumbag, immoral, lying reprobates that accused me.

Oh, fact check?

True.

I’m not a legal expert, I’m just a man t…

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In this episode, I’ll walk you into the courtroom and into the emotional and legal chaos of the trial. From jur…

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