It was a cool afternoon in late September, 2016, when Jason and I sat down at a picnic table to talk. Jason, not his real name, was a handsome and talented kid, an aspiring actor in his mid-twenties whose character work was impeccable. Though he was hardworking and sincere, some of his peers thought him arrogant or aloof. I saw something different, someone reserved, myopically focused on his craft, confident in his abilities, and admired by audiences.
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.
