Every morning, after I’ve read the news, much of it depressing, I feel the need to write. Since my blog launched in 2024, I’ve written consistently, and over the past year my output has doubled. Add research, reading, and production time, and my work on Out of the Blue is a full-time occupation — admittedly, not a lucrative one as of yet.
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.
