When allegations of sexual misconduct surface against a public figure, the machinery moves fast. A name. A story. A cascade. Endorsements collapse within hours. A career ends before a single charge is filed. I’ve been watching the Eric Swalwell story unfold this week, and I recognize every piece of it.
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
