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.

Some of you are paid subscribers, some aren’t yet. Either way, you’re here, and that’s what matters for now.

Out of the Blue is the podcast at the center of this Substack. It’s my first-hand account of being wrongfully accused of a crime that didn’t happen, couldn’t have happened, the destruction of my career and reputation, the legal fight, and what came after. Some episodes are behind a paywall. The new ones will keep coming.

If something here earns your attention, share it. Please feel free to post in the chats, I’ll respond directly. That’s how this grows.

More coming soon.

Carr

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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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The truth is cleaner, and worth a glance.

She was a long-standing performer at the show, along with her husband, and had become Queen before I had much of a role in management. Her version of the character was poised and strong. She understood how to command an audience. The owner of the show preferred a King to match, so she was paired with another veteran performer whose good looks and charm were a garnish on the Queen’s arm, and whose weak skills as an actor were obvious.

A few years passed. Then the Queen announced she would be stepping down to pursue a Master’s Degree. She said so in front of a small group. I was there. So the next season we cast another woman as Queen, which seemed uncontroversial.

I was wrong, of course. One thing I’ve learned since being accused is that I’m a convenient pin cushion for complaint. If something went bad, or someone was unhappy, it was because of me. Somehow. The truth is, I never dumped her.

A couple of years ago I ran into this actress at a theater in town. We were both there to see a show. We sat in the lobby before it began and talked. It was a nice conversation. I told her I regretted not doing more to convince her to come back the following season, even after she’d announced her intention to focus on her studies. She made it clear she felt no animus toward me. She’s a credible sort. We parted with kind words.

But.

This is how it works.

It’s a strain to admit, but our value to others is completely situational. I thought we were good. I thought she was being forthright about our professional relationship, and she was — at the time. Nothing changed after that lobby conversation. Except the valuation. I have little or no social or economic value to her or to that community anymore. My value had been assessed in relation to my power within the enterprise. This is an insignificant relationship, and I’m long gone from the place. But it’s illustrative of how worth gets determined, what changes it over time, and how little we understand the process while it’s happening.

It took years of self-reflection and conversation with friends to understand why some of my formerly close friends vanished in the wake of the wrongful accusation. Someone once offered the insight that I “collect people” and assume, erroneously, that we will remain friends for life. That’s not true. But I want it to be true. I believe it should be true, even as I have myself abandoned past friendships for reasons I can no longer remember.

The whole idea of friendship is a bit of jive. As if it’s an independent thing that lives and breathes and lasts as long as we like it. It doesn’t work that way. Like everything else, valuations change. A close Christian friend faded away after I told her I was an atheist. A very close professional friend quit because remaining my friend, post-accusation, was too expensive. The women she worked with made it prohibitive. Gone.

What happened is simple. What I had to offer the world changed, and for some people the price of remaining publicly attached to me became too high. For a few, they rewrote our history and cast me as the villain. The guy who “unceremoniously dumped” them.

In a social thread in 2018, one of the scolds suggested that the common thread running through all the complaints about me, accusations of violence, predatory behavior, personal callousness and arrogance, was me. That I need not look any further than the mirror.

Some of that is true. I lacked focus. I could be cold and indifferent. True. True.

But the harder reality is that a clutch of aggrieved irritants, through a coordinated effort, simply changed the valuation. They shifted the calculation so that standing near me became more than most people were willing to pay. And since my power within the community was stripped, I wasn’t worth much to anyone. Add to that the loss of income and status, and now being my friend is just about being my friend. No coupons to offer. No million-dollar home to hang out in. No free travel. I lost my utility within the community, and branded a rapist for life.

What I’m naming here is the stigma of disgrace that now attends my name, even without evidence that I did anything disgraceful at all. In the wake of the accusations and the news coverage in particular, my value was reduced from being a whole person to something broken, contaminated, and impure. Some of this was brought about by people who, in reality, had much to hide in their own pasts, and who could use me as a cause célèbre to tacitly rehabilitate their virtue. By attacking me, or standing with those making specious claims, they got to look good.

The tragedy in all of this is how distorted one becomes to oneself in the wake of shit-slinging, and how the relentless invocation of violence can lead a person to believe the accusers must be right. It never occurred to me that I might start to believe I was guilty, because the media hue and cry looked so real. But it was all a goddamned mirage.

Jon Ronson spent three years interviewing victims of public shaming. He identified the mechanism precisely. We want to destroy people, he said, but not feel bad about it, so we reach for a word that makes them something less than human. “We are defining the boundaries of normality by ruining the lives of those outside it.” (His TED Talk is well worth the viewing)

The sociologist Erving Goffman had a name for what happened to me. He called it a spoiled identity, the process by which a person is reduced, in the social record, from a whole human being to something broken, contaminated, and set apart. The spoiling doesn’t require evidence. It requires only enough noise, and enough people willing to move away from the smell.

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 tha…

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“This simmering fear, this cloud of worry that hangs over me, follows me around. I feel like I’m …

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For four years, I fought the charges. In 2022, a jury deliberated for only minutes before finding me not guilty. But by then, the damage was catastrophic and irreversible.

This Substack chronicles my story: the false accusation, the legal battle, the media frenzy, and the devastating consequences of being publicly condemned before being proven innocent. I’ll share the full account that was never heard outside the courtroom, examine how accusations become convictions in the court of public opinion, and explore what happens when that slippery word “alleged” gets lost in the hysteria.

I spent 45 years at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, rising from teenage performer to Artistic Director. I built a career as a consultant, speaker, and writer. And in an instant, all of it was gone.

This isn’t a story about heroic resilience or finding silver linings. It’s about the actual experience of wrongful incarceration: the panic attacks, the institutional indifference, the way time distorts in a windowless cage. About a kid covered in tattoos who shit-talked by day and wept at night. About discovering that small acts of service—even cleaning a shower no one asked you to clean—can be a path back to yourself.

I spent four days and three nights in Scott County Jail. I missed my 60th birthday party and saw our daughter through a video screen instead of in person. This episode is the beginning of a five-year legal ordeal that changed everything.
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It is raining in Minneapolis today. A cold, all day rain, the kind that arrives as a rebuke after a few days of seductive spring temperatures that had people believing the nice was here to stay. Even my big expensive water dogs don’t like the pouring cold, but they like to shit in the neighbors yard, so we walk.

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.