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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know this from the inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The title sounded promising.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Objection, counselor.

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

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

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

And finally, Foster closes with this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or maybe I hadn’t.

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

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

AI Voicing / Eleven Labs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, here’s the original headline again:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us to the deviant.

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

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

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

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

Here is where my case gets instructive, and inconvenient.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It isn’t.

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

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

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

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

I was acquitt…

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

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

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

https://gofund.me/57d18916d

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

https://gofund.me/d74cba5eb

On June 15th, 2018, two days before my 60th birthday party, I heard a loud pounding on my front door. I had been wrongfully accused of rape. This is the story of what happened next — the warrant, the drive, the darkest thoughts, and the moment the handcuffs went on in my own backyard. Read aloud by me.

This episode takes you through that day. The frantic drive through the city contemplating suicide. …

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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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As I walked, I felt a peculiar sadness descend, not the sadness of envy, I long ago reconciled with not being able to have a family with children, but the sadness of temporal dislocation, of finding myself much older than I ever imagined being. Does anyone in their fidgety twenties imagine the uncomfortable rigidity of age, seeing themselves as old? I had never envisioned a life beyond my career, never conceived of any other than constantly working, nor imagined that my life would be rendered into tatters by grotesques who sought, and succeeded, in dismantling everything I had built, to be exiled. I live now in a kind of no man’s land, suspended in the territory between the end of my career and the end of my life.

I am animated, still, by relentless and often torturous creative impulses, and yet I am burdened, too, by the anxiety of oblivion, by the knowledge that the life I knew, the life I built, effectively ended on June 13th, 2018, and whatever this is, is merely an afterlife, a postscript to a story already concluded. I’m alive, but everything I did has died.

There is a thing I am loath to speak of, even to my closest friends: how difficult it has been since the acquittal. One would think I should be rejoicing that I am not confined to the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud, that I walk free under the winter sky. And it is true, I am relieved, profoundly grateful even, but the struggle against invisibility and oblivion is of a different order than relief. I know we are all rendered into particles and dust barely remembered after we’re gone, it’s the stories that remain, but for those of us wrongfully accused, the ugly stories will be the only memory.

This is not like losing employment, where one might secure another position, or losing a partner, where we might, in time, meet another. I have lost the accumulated work of nearly half my life, forty-some years of building and creating and collaborating, and there will be no other. That chapter is closed, the book sealed.

In this version of death there are no memorials, no elegies composed, no kind words inscribed in some lovely obituary, no gatherings where people speak warmly of what was. The hardest truth of all: there is nothing to show for my decades of effort except these brutal false accusations. My life has become a haunted house, populated by ghosts of my own making, specters that rattle my confidence like chains in the night. I wonder, sometimes, if I will ever be free of the fear that stalks me.

But I am not dead, not yet, and I remain resolved, or try to, to battle against the demons that hunt me in the small hours. Just last week I dreamed I was hiking across a prairie landscape, that great openness I love, when a wolf attacked and nearly severed my leg. It was a dream of being caught between two states: freedom and spaciousness and peace on one side, being hunted and attacked and wounded on the other. In another dream I was consumed alive by a pack of wild dogs. In yet another I was led to the gallows to be hanged. Each time I wake, gasping in the dark, I am grateful simply to be breathing, to have survived another night’s assault.

As an autodidact I am never short of interests, project ideas, but I have few people with whom to collaborate, few companions for the work. In this afterlife, communication with the living has become nearly impossible. I am no Patrick Swayze, able to animate a penny through sheer force of will. The friends and collaborators who once sought my professional counsel, who valued my insight, who worked alongside me and compensated me for my experience, all of them have receded beyond my reach, as if I exist now on some other plane of being, visible but untouchable.

I do not know if my pen is a shovel with which I might dig myself free. I do not know if what I write will reach anyone, or change anything, or matter at all in the great turning of the world. But I know this: when I am writing, I am not in the grave. I am not walking circles feeling exiled from my own species. I am making something, call it art if you must, though sometimes I do not know what it is, I know only that if I do not do this work, if I stop writing, I will drown in anxiety and sadness the way a moth drowns in summer oil.

But it is not enough merely to have a daily practice, to move words around a page, as if a sentence alone can argue with this reality. I have become a kind of poltergeist, restless and agitated, wanting to move things, to throw things, to be obstinate and intrusive and loud and discomfiting. I want to rattle the chains not only for myself and my family but for all the others who are trapped in this same liminal space, this territory between one death and the next, including those who have truly been violated, truly harmed.

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Proctor is arrested for witchcraft. The court offers him a choice: confess to consorting with the devil and live, or refuse and die. When he agrees to confess, knowing it to be a lie, but wanting desperately to live, the court demands more. They want to post his signed confession on the church door, to display it as proof that the condemned are guilty and the court is righteous. But at this final humiliation, Proctor rebels, pleading to keep the only thing he has left, his name. This is from a production at the Globe Theater, in London.

He cries out: “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

Proctor understood what I’ve learned: once your name is stained with an accusation like this, you face a stark choice, disappear quietly into the shadows, grateful you’re not in prison or refuse to let them have the final word. Of all the losses I have endured, of all the things that once seemed trivial, it is this stain upon my name that makes the afterlife so unendurable.

Once you are dead in this way, the stain remains. Words alone cannot rewrite the ending that has already been written, cannot restore what has been taken. But what else do I have? What else is left to me but words? In the end, we’re all the dust and particles of history, but while I’m still here I write. I must write. Not because it will restore my name, not because it will resurrect my reputation or rebuild what was destroyed, but because refusing to be silent is the fight that remains. The poltergeist does not haunt in hope of forgiveness or redemption. It haunts because it is still here, refusing to dissolve into the darkness. And so I write, and walk, and breathe, and rattle.

The facts of my case were simple: I was charged and arrested for an alleged in 2018, the case was dismissed in 2020, recharged in 2021, and I was acquitted in 2022. Those are the facts without shine or opinion. Everything beyond the basics is story and narrative. My writing on Out Of The Blue is my story about those years under the thumb of prosecutors who were seeking to put me in prison and what they did to me. But it’s also a guide for reading news narratives more critically—learning to distinguish fact from story, status from proof, and recognizing where credibility breaks down.

Facts alone can be compelling, but the narrative around those facts is how we make sense of the story, what it means. University of Southern California Professor Walter Fisher, who wrote extensively about narrative and communication at USC, calls the tests we instinctively use coherence and fidelity. Coherence asks, does this story hold together on its own terms? Fidelity asks, does it ring true against what we can check—history, character, evidence, lived experience? Meaning, he says, sits in that narrative context.

Consider: “A man was seen leaving a building at midnight.” That’s a fact. But wrap it in narrative—”He was fleeing the scene” versus “He was working late”—and suddenly the same fact points to guilt or innocence. The story we build around that single moment determines what we believe happened.

The media does something similar to any storyteller. Start with facts (ideally), build a story around those facts to create context so readers can understand what’s happening. But the moment they launch off the facts, assuming those are knowable, the story is vulnerable to bias, invention, and slant because no one outside the story—in my case, my accuser or me—can truly know what happened.

My accuser knows. I know. You don’t, and neither does anyone in the media. Her best friends don’t know. Mine don’t either. My wife believes me, but she cannot know with absolute certainty because she wasn’t wherever my accuser claimed I was. By Fisher’s test, that uncertainty is fine as long as the story stays as close to what is known as possible, keeps the timeline straight, and aligns with the best available record. When it doesn’t, coherence and fidelity break.

That sounds like a useful frame, but man, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Because as hard as I worked to be as unvarnished, clear, and true as I can, there are challenges. First, my emotions cannot be sidelined when I’m writing or presenting my case. These emotions certainly harbor my anxieties, my anger and outrage over what my accuser did to me. Secondly, I cannot know why my accuser did what she did or why some came to believe her so adamantly. I know one thing: I didn’t do this. It is up to storytelling to carry the water, to make a coherent and honest case for my innocence. You can ask, does my story ring true, does it match the facts as they are known, and does my character and history reasonably support what I’m presenting? In other words, coherence.

My accuser’s story, given to the police and presented in news media, contained the kinds of inconsistencies I’ve documented in earlier episodes—shifting timelines, contradictory details, claims that didn’t align with physical evidence. Facts are solid; stories are fluid, and opinions about a thing are editorial.

When you read a news story, you can be pulled by what I call narrative capture. That’s when you’ve been presented with a ready-made plot that, essentially, seduces or persuades, sometimes without the anchor of evidence. The frame arrives first (hero or villain, motive, moral), and you likely will follow the plot laid out by the author instead of the facts. Strong language, good writing, and a tight arc pull you forward. The facts slide behind the scrim.

In earlier episodes, I argued that while the media often got many small facts right about my case, it ornamented those details and repeated unverified claims without due skepticism. Inference layered upon inference until the story outpaced the record—or, to put it another way, false statements gained credibility through repetition alone.

Those violent headlines and tawdry subtexts find purchase far quicker than anything as pedestrian as the truth. We would like to think we are not susceptible to predation by narrative, but of course we are.

The problem is exacerbated when a story aligns with a set of beliefs. If you believe corporations are corrupt, any story about corporate malfeasance feels true. If you believe the justice system is broken, any story about wrongful prosecution feels true—including, perhaps, mine. What’s stunning about our current cultural moment is how few of us actually take the time to check the narrative, to test the story against available fact-checking resources. If we did that as a habit, we would likely find that much of what we believe is true is a mixture of fact and fiction.

So, my little project is to focus on the habits of media consumption, rather than media reporting, to cultivate skeptical views of information and ideas.

In my case, time and again, I came across people who believed the stories about me simply because they appeared in the news. The outlet’s reputation lent the stories credibility. But reputation isn’t proof, and institutional trust can’t replace critical reading. Readers need to verify claims, check timelines, and ask whether the narrative fits the available evidence.

I’ve learned to start with a simple act of self-protection: name the frame. Before I let a headline, a lede, or a quote settle into me, I pause and ask, “What is this reporter setting up? What are they asking me to believe, and why?” I’ll even say it out loud: “This story wants me to believe X about Y because Z.” That little sentence has saved me from a lot of confusion. It’s a habit now.

The second practice is humbler than it sounds: I invest in my knowledge, but I’m most cautious, not about what I consume, but about what I believe after I consume it. I try to notice what hardens, the conclusions I leap to, because once it hardens, for me at least, it’s harder to let go.

We don’t just process facts; we live by coherent stories that we believe are true. But we might be wrong. Feeling strongly isn’t the same as proof. So, here are three rules for reading news narratives.

I’m quoting specific words and phrases from the 2018 Star Tribune article, printed the day after my arrest. I’m not quoting the entire article here, if you’re interested in reading it first, you’ll find the link in this episodes text.

Rule 1: Check the verbs; locate the status.

The Tribune article states that I had “been charged with two counts.” That verb, “charged,” describes a status, not a proof. It tells you where the legal process stood that day; it does not tell you anything about what actually happened. The date matters because narratives flow in time, and early stories are often snapshots taken in motion, and often turn out to be wrong.

It goes on to say that I was “being held without bail.” Again, a status. Custody is not evidence. It is a condition of a system that, at its best, is still sorting claims from truth.

This is what I mean by checking the verbs: distinguish status from proof, process from fact.

Rule 2: Flag hedge words; ask for receipts.

The Tribune article is full of examples. The county attorney says, “We believe there are other people that can come forward” and describes “a pretty bad alleged abuse of power.” Notice “believe” and “alleged”—these are hedges. If you can’t see the evidence behind them, lower your confidence.

Festival management called the allegations “abhorrent.” That’s moral language, not proof.

I’m quoted denying the assault. Then: “Attorney could not be reached for comment.” My denial gets two lines; the accusations got paragraphs. That imbalance doesn’t prove guilt—it shows who answered the phone.

“Medical records confirm that her wrist was placed in a splint.” “Confirm” means a record exists, not how the injury happened.

Another passage: a witness heard noises that “sounded like banging.” Perception words signal distance—how something seemed, not what was proven.

Rule 3: Test for narrative coherence and fidelity.

Coherence asks: Do the claims fit together without bending time or memory? Fidelity asks: Does this square with the public record and how people actually behave under scrutiny?

Across the coverage of my case, claims shifted, timelines flexed, details contradicted each other. Much of what stayed loud in print didn’t match the court record or real-world patterns. That mattered because it was my life.

Listening to this, perhaps it’s too much, too many steps, to slow for fast news. But, I won’t let go of the idea that we, all of us, can do better in how we read the world, how we grapple with complexity. I’m hoping, that by taking what happened to me, and so many others, I can present an example of what happens when breaking news is ingested without the proper enzymes to break it down. This approach to reading and thinking should make room for our compassion, and every filter of kindness we can apply.

Listening to this, perhaps it sounds like too much—too many steps, too slow for a world that moves at the speed of breaking news. But I refuse to let go of the idea that we can do better in how we read the world, how we meet its complexity. What happened to me, what has happened to so many of us, stands as proof of what breaks when we swallow the news whole, without the time or tools to digest it. We deserve a better way forward. One that makes room for our compassion. One that reaches for every filter of kindness we possess—and holds them there, stubbornly, in the face of everything that tells us to move faster, react harder, feel less. This is the work. It’s my work. And it matters.

Once he sat down, he seemed uncertain, distracted in a way I hadn’t seen before. He told me quietly that he and his girlfriend had broken up some time ago and that he was dating someone new. The ex, he said, was now calling him a predator and claiming psychological abuse. She had told people she had a restraining order against him. He said none of it was true, but he wanted me to hear it from him first and even offered to quit the show to avoid distraction.

I told him to continue performing at the show, and if something changed, or new information came to light, we’d talk again. Maybe I was wrong, maybe he should have been fired, or suspended, but without more information it just wasn’t my place to pass judgement. Of course, I didn’t know what was true. I barely knew him, and I saw seemed to me a young guy daunted by accusations that could end his career before it began. Little did I know, that a year or so later, I would be accused, and judgement would be rendered quickly.

In the pantheon of #MeToo, any man accused casually, officially, or by rumor, s guilty until proven guilty. Why? Because, as Jessica Clarke of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law argues in The Rules of #MeToo, in the absence of effective legal procedures, a set of “ad hoc processes” has emerged to handle such claims. Journalists, she says, now expose misconduct through “rigorous investigations” and “editorial oversight,” audiences demand removal, and employers comply. Clarke insists these “informal systems” offer fair safeguards, that the accused are given a chance to respond, and that consequences are proportionate.

What a laughable load of bullshit. Clarke’s argument is a case against due process, replacing it with the assumption that journalists can be trusted to operate at the highest level of professionalism. Why wait for courts, she implies, when we can adjudicate swiftly and efficiently through public opinion?

Crazy. And yet, it became the MeToo modus operandi.

When Minnesota Public Radio’s Maryann Combs reported on the accusations brought against me, she demonstrated why Clarke’s model of “justice journalism” is so dangerous. Nearly a year before the story ran, a former festival performer and producer at MPR had posted that he was working on a story about what it was like to work at the festival, about sexual harassment. During that year, it appeared that Ms. Combs had talked to a handful of women, some of whom had agreed to be interviewed for a story. None of these women provided Ms. Combs with any evidence—just statements. As a journalist, you have to be aware of your susceptibility to pressure, bias, and narrative distortion. But Ms. Combs had nothing—no documents reviewed, no public records examined. I was never given the full claims in advance, only a perfunctory phone call asking for comment.

Clarke’s imagined standard of fairness, the opportunity to respond—which I couldn’t do—and fact-checking the statements of all the women featured in the story, was nowhere in sight. The story aired anyway. When the charges fell apart in court, and they did, and I was acquitted, MPR didn’t run any kind of follow-up story, no correction, no acknowledgment of harm.

Clarke says this little system is “designed” to repair the failures of law. Who the fuck designed this? What right do journalists have to repair failures of the law by going around it? What I personally experienced was a trial by private media, administered by people who bore none of the legal or ethical burdens of their authority.

Clarke further claims that #MeToo’s punishments were proportional to the severity of the supposed misconduct. I can’t make this stuff up. This from a law professor at a school of law! Media exposure leads only to reasonable accountability? Laughable and absurd.

In the Star Tribune, reporter Liz Sawyer published a long article that was breathtaking in its fundamental lack of fairness to me or the festival enterprise. Again, she was offered the same line-up of women, who repeated the same unverified claims and deftly omitted exculpatory testimony. What she wrote presented me as factually guilty. Even after my acquittal, no correction appeared, no acknowledgment that the central claims were completely disproven. The stories remain online, untouched, algorithmically immortal.

The asymmetry is staggering: the falsely accused lose everything, while those who err in the act of accusation face no reckoning at all.

Clarke imagines a new order where power is accountable—but by whom? Her silly model doesn’t equalize power; it redistributes it to journalists and platforms that act as prosecutors without courts, judges without rules, executioners without consequence.

The problem is not confined to local media or my personal experience. As recently as October 2025, The Washington Post chronicled how principal oboist Katherine Needleman of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra led what the paper called a “#MeToo vigilante” campaign—identifying men, publishing their alleged misconduct on social media, tagging their employers, and effectively securing their removal, all before any formal adjudication of the claims. The article notes explicitly that this method bypassed traditional verification—no multiple independent sources, no transparent right of reply—and yet achieved rapid professional consequences. In other words, the very “ad hoc” process that Clarke treats as a new system of fairness is being applied again, without the safeguards she laughably imagines will magically appear.

These new procedural norms reward journalists for creating tension and controversy, institutions for self-protection rather than courage, and audiences for indulging thoughtless outrage without consequence. My experience demonstrates how quickly this ad hoc justice slides into something indistinguishable from vengeance—all with the help of the media.

The question is not whether victims deserve to be heard; of course they do, and no one is arguing they should be ignored. The question is whether hearing them requires silencing someone else. Due process is the only firewall when you’re the target of group animus.

I keep writing about this because the problem is no longer marginal to #MeToo stories; it has metastasized. Clarke’s ad hoc logic is not being applied selectively or sparingly. It has become a default mode of judgment across civic life. In public life we seem less interested in the hard work of argument than in the spectacle of denunciation and demonstration. Nuance is treated as cowardice, complexity as complicity, and we have outsourced moral judgment to whoever can shout the loudest.

Real justice would begin with courage: reporters who publish only what they can reasonably prove, institutions that prize fairness over optics, and citizens who pause before joining the mob.

The lofty promise of #MeToo was to hold powerful men, and some women, accountable for their bad behavior; its tragedy has been certainty. Between those two lies the work ahead, cultivating fairness, restraint, and moral imagination. Without that, Clarke’s revolution is not a correction of injustice but its continuation, dressed in the language of good.