Death By Media
The wrongful accusation wounded, but the ugly media killed.
Journal Entry - August 2018
“They have opinions, but I have the facts. What’s important to you is to stand with someone that represents something they believe in. Those jeering crusaders, is blinded to truth, because they have to stand with someone that represents a thing they believe in. They’ll never question what he/her/they/them have claimed, because they have to stand with someone that represents something they believe in. Maybe they know I’m innocent, and that I’ve been wounded, but they can’t stand with me, because I don’t represent a thing they believe in.
“The wicked flee when no one is pursuing, but the righteous are bold as a lion.”
The first time a photograph of me appeared in a newspaper was in 1975. It was an image of the Rat Catcher, my street character, sticking my tongue out at the camera — a promotional image used in newspaper ads by the marketing department. That same year, there were a couple of news stories on local TV stations in which I was interviewed. For a kid still in middle school, it was a big deal.
Throughout my professional years I enjoyed some friendly attention from the press, enough so that my mother kept a bulging scrapbook full of all of them. She died 20 years ago and didn’t live to see the dark days of press coverage that came in the wake of the wrongful accusations against me.
Headlines like “MN Renaissance Festival director accused of raping photographer” or this from the NY Post: “Renaissance Festival director accused of rape on event grounds”.
The handful of performers who made complaints about me seemed like they were part of a larger coordinated effort to demean my name. They convinced an ambitious investigator that I had committed a crime. They hired a civil attorney who spoke to the media using vile rhetoric about me, and journalists who in my opinion were all too eager to publish his remarks, for what seemed like a campaign to pressure an insurance company to settle out of court, to make the nuisance go away. I was just a nuisance.
When the story about my arrest on rape charges was published in multiple news outlets, there was no hiding from it; my name and mugshot were everywhere. Outrageously, the story included trigger warnings because the description of the alleged rape, though false, was so horrific.
In August, two months after I was arrested and jailed, the Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, as well as a small regional paper published expansive and damaging articles about me, my family and the Renaissance Festival, which were all false, and equally grotesque.
In ancient Italy, there was a form of public shaming called Pittura Infamante, or “defaming portrait.” The paintings, or frescoes, were put on wooden boards and hung in busy and visible places. They featured men accused of petty crimes or social mischief, and were meant to humiliate the featured subject, portraying them as adulterers, traitors, thieves, and miscreants. The subject was depicted hanging upside down from their feet. (If you’ve ever paid for a tarot card reading, you might have seen the illustration of a Pittura Infamante, or what they call in a tarot deck the hanging man.)