Well, he won an Oscar, and now Jared Leto joins the cancel club amid “fresh claims” from ten women, some of whom say they were teenagers when the alleged conduct occurred — four of them alleging criminal sexual conduct, including one account involving California’s statutory age of consent. Again and again, the headlines hang the accused while the accusers are treated with dignity and presumptive credibility.
The Hollywood Reporter uses the formal language of “allegation,” but the article’s tone assumes the credibility of the claims, not further questions, at least not yet. Its ugly headline pairs Leto’s denial with “bombshell BBC doc” before we are given even a glimpse of the supposed evidence.
Given ten accusers, statistically, some of these claims are probably true. Even writing that feels presumptuous, because statistics don’t prove any individual case, and I know that better than most. I know, all the usual caveats apply, women do not generally invent accusations of sexual assault. But I know from reality that sometimes women do make false accusations. Both propositions can be true at once. We need to wait and wait and wait, before we kill a person’s career. Oh, too late.
Now we have ten women, some of whom say they were minors, making claims against the same man. The sheer number makes the accusations appear more likely to be true.
But does it? This is the part of the story that really sucks. If human nature wasn’t so flawed, or, to quote the Jesus people, “full of sin,” and a few women didn’t make ugly false claims, then there wouldn’t be a reason to doubt. Also, if men didn’t lie about attacking women. If juries weren’t swayed by the media. If investigators weren’t lazy. I digress.
Let me offer a few questions in light of these caveats.
These claims come to us through a BBC documentary, not a court of law. It’s entertainment. We have become accustomed to treating documentaries as faithful records of reality, but they are edited media products, seeking an audience, and to get and keep the audience, the tawdry and taboo are salient activators. A director will select, arrange and frame the evidence. They may be accurate. They may even be scrupulous. But they are not subject to the rules of evidence, cross-examination, or the adversarial testing required in any courtroom. Perhaps we should withhold a verdict. Oh, too late.
Were the women’s accounts genuinely independent of one another? Did they know about the other accusations before telling their stories? Were any reports made at or near the time of the alleged conduct? What exactly did friends and family “corroborate”? Did they witness anything, see messages, or receive contemporaneous disclosures, or did they simply hear the accusations later? Are there police reports, medical records, photographs, emails, texts, or other evidence? Were inconsistencies identified and examined? Were any of the women also included in the earlier Air Mail article? How did Leto answer the individual allegations rather than merely issuing a general denial?
The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t ask these questions. All it says is that the BBC “corroborated” some accounts with friends and family, but it does not explain what was corroborated or how. Corroborated could mean a friend who saw a text the next morning. It could mean a friend who heard the story a decade later, over drinks, after the story had already taken shape in the telling. The word is doing a lot of work for something the article never unpacks.
I remember reading headlines and hearing stories and feeling as though my head might explode, because I knew what was true, and so did a great many other people. But because accusations of sexual misconduct are ordinarily treated as credible, and they should be, the accused person’s knowledge of his own innocence counts for almost nothing in public.
Accusers should be treated with dignity. Their claims should be taken seriously. But taking an accusation seriously is not the same thing as treating it as established fact. And for what it’s worth, because this shit is so serious, the accused should also be treated with some basic dignity. Right?
The number of accusers featured in a documentary is not a verdict. A documentary is a constructed narrative made for an audience, and this one is sticky and popular, which is exactly the problem.
All of these accusers deserve their day in court, as does Mr. Leto. It should bother everyone that his career is likely destroyed before he’s had a chance to protect his innocence in a courtroom, which is where this belongs.
The article uses the rhetoric of due process, but abandons its spirit. It repeatedly says “alleged,” while framing, accumulating, and amplifying the accusations as though their essential truth has already been established. I know this. I was accused of rape, featured over and over again in the local press, and it was not true.
The grammar says allegation. The headlines declare guilt.
So where does that leave us? I don’t know if Jared Leto is guilty. I don’t know if these women are telling the truth, or all of it, or some of it shaped by each other’s telling. I hold that uncertainty honestly, and I’d ask you to hold it too.
But I’m less uncertain about the mechanism. I’m of a mind that accusations this serious, rape, sexual violence against minors, should be tested in a court of law before they’re allowed to define a person in the media. I understand the free speech complications with that position, and I’m not pretending they don’t exist. But as long as production companies and civil attorneys, or activists can leverage the systems for profit, for clicks, for revenge, before any of it is tested, innocent people will keep getting hung before they’re heard. That’s true whether or not Leto turns out to be one of them.
I’ll take up that argument in more depth in an upcoming podcast. For now, hold the doubt. Don’t let the grammar fool you into a verdict.
