I opened the large envelope from Instacart, inside was my career kit to become a professional shopper. Inside was a manual outlining my benefits, a laminated badge I would wear while shopping, and a debit card for my earnings. Not a job I had ever imagined doing at my age, but I needed the money, and at least it got me out of the house.
It did not last. Within days, I received a letter rescinding the offer. It included copies of the lurid headlines about me, the rape accusation, and a thumbnail of my mugshot. Nice. All fiction, of course, but how would they have known? Where there is smoke, right? They gave me an opportunity to clarify, but that was never going to help. “Oh no, none of it’s true!” Sure, that will get me the gig.
My wife told me to reapply or find another company that would take me. I tried a few applications, and each time the same response. They could run a background check, and I was clean, but the digital record deformed my name and history. No one looks beyond “festival director raped photographer.” As if that were not damage enough, reckless articles in the Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, and elsewhere had rendered me into something closer to Mephistopheles. It was foolish to think otherwise. There was no way to recover—not just hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the possibility of ever working again, certainly not for someone else.
Over time, I learned that working for myself was all I could do, and even that would take years to rebuild. It was unlikely I would ever make enough to pay off the debt. Losing my ability to provide for our family made me hate myself. I spent years confronting the internal thugs of fear, anxiety, and depression that were always ready to beat the hell out of me. I could not fix this. It was exhausting, demoralizing, and endless.
In a 2011 article in Academic Matters, Catherine Burr, a Canadian conflict and investigation specialist with more than thirty years of experience examining workplace harassment, writes about how institutions label things. When an accusation cannot be proven, they call it unsubstantiated. It sounds neutral, almost merciful, but it is anything but. My accusation was unsubstantiated, but my ruin was not. The jobs that vanished, the lost income, the silence that followed my name—all of it is substantiated. It exists in emails, in records, in the refusals that close every door. The only thing unsubstantiated was the truth.
When systems retreat to words like “unsubstantiated,” they sound judicious, but for the accused it becomes a life sentence of ambiguity. Institutions survive by suspending judgment; people do not.
Burr distinguishes lies from false allegations by intent, calling a claim false only if the accuser knows it is untrue. But intent is a weak compass. It may be unknowable, but consequence is not. Falsehoods born of delusion, therapy-induced recovered memories, or social contagion still wreck lives. Intent does not feed a family, restore a name, or repay a loss. The law can afford to care about intent; real life lives in aftermath.
Her analysis is procedural, focused on what counts as evidence and what a “reasonable person” might conclude, but she ignores what happens next. The aftermath is where the truth of harm lives: the empty inboxes, the rescinded job offers, the silence from people who once called you friend. When institutions refuse to name a falsehood, they outsource punishment to rumor and to search engines. That is what “unsubstantiated” really means—the bureaucracy saves face, and the accused loses theirs.
Burr goes further, suggesting that facts themselves are socially constructed, that what counts as harassment or harm depends on who is watching and when. Maybe that is true in theory. But in my world, the facts were not abstract. They were written, cached, and indexed. They lived in the servers of Google and the archives of local news. My destruction was not a social construction; it was a measurable event. The panic of virtue does not need proof; it only needs belief.
Legal scholars like Jessica A. Clarke, in The Rules of #MeToo, describe #MeToo as an ad hoc system of justice, a way to fill the vacuum where courts failed survivors. She says journalists did the vetting, editors checked the facts, and consequences were proportional. Maybe that is true in theory. But in practice, it is a fantasy. There was no investigation, no editor, no proportion—only replication, each story copying the last until it became its own truth. What Clarke calls a new form of accountability was, in my life, a contagion of righteousness, a collective unreason powered by the illusion of certainty.
Burr and Clarke both describe systems that claim to manage truth. But systems do not manage truth; they manage risk. And that difference is everything. Burr’s world is procedural, guided by evidence thresholds and labels like unsubstantiated. Clarke’s world is moral, built around exposure and public consequence. Both assume that institutions act in good faith, that if the facts are clear enough, justice will follow.
But that is not how it works. Institutions do not usually seek something like truth; they seek cover. They survive by being cautious, not courageous. And nowhere was that clearer than at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, where their image replaced their integrity and clever silence became a sort of policy.
I had worked at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival for 45 years, as both performer and Artistic Director. I had a long-term relationship with the owner and his staff. The festival management did not believe the accusations. I know that and they said as much in private. For nearly a year they kept me on contract, though I was not allowed to work, which was understandable considering the seriousness of the charges. So close were we with them, that our attorneys worked together, which told me they knew the accusation was, as much as anyone can actually know, false.
But after I was acquitted, they offered nothing. No statement, no restoration, no gesture of courage. They said nothing because silence is cheap. In their calculus, the risk of looking bad to a few mattered more than integrity. They were not guarding against guilt; they were guarding against proximity, against perception. While they were privately happy I was acquitted, none of them showed up to my trial at any time. I suppose they didn’t want to appear biased, or have anyone in the jury think there was interference. There’s an unspoken rule in reputational management and PR: don’t stand too close to the fire.
The festival became the perfect example of what happens when the procedural world of Burr meets the moral theater of Clarke. Bureaucratic neutrality met performative virtue, and the result was not fairness but paralysis. They did not need to believe the lie to obey it. They only had to fear the optics of defending me.
What made it worse was what followed. The same enterprise that once hired me for my imagination and voice not only didn’t make any statement about my acquittal, they continue to contract the very people who helped destroy me—the gossipers, the opportunists, the ones who cost the festival thousands in legal fees. They are back at work, smiling in the lanes, performing for crowds. Meanwhile, I remain the ghost of a story they were too afraid to correct. This is another moral failure on their part: the inability to distinguish between legal caution and ethical responsibility.
The festival’s promotional imagery celebrates valor and honor, such as the courage of jousters featured in all of their advertisement. But courage in costume is not courage in practice. While I could hardly blame the company for staying mute as the case made its way through the courts, my acquittal gave them an opportunity to make a statement of support that could have helped restore some part of my reputation, and even their own.
When the festival stayed on the sidelines, others did not. It took the moral courage of two magicians, Penn & Teller, to get me back on site for their anniversary show. The management did not want me there, even though my name had been cleared and I had been swiftly acquitted. They worried that my presence might make someone uncomfortable, or as one manager said, “I don’t want all that stuff to come up again.”
Penn and Teller did not flinch. They told the festival plainly that if I was not allowed on the grounds, they would not perform. It should not have taken that kind of leverage to do the right thing, but it did. Their position was simple: if the truth no longer carried weight inside the institution, they would carry it themselves.
The contrast was absolute. The festival managed risk; Penn and Teller practiced conscience. One acted from fear of optics; the other from moral clarity. They did not convene a committee or issue a statement—they simply stood where decency required them to stand. That is what courage looks like when it is stripped of theater.
Penn and Teller did not fix anything material. They did not erase the headlines or restore my career, but they did something better: they restored proportion. Courage is not abstract; it is specific. It is not what you believe—it is what you do, and sometimes there is a cost to it. Moral courage does not need applause or acknowledgment; it is not policy but conviction, action, and word.
On the day Penn and Teller performed, my wife and I walked the lanes between their shows. The air was humid and familiar, filled with laughter, music, and applause. For the first time in years, I wasn’t hiding, or performing either. I was struck by how little I cared, and what a tiny little thing it is.
For a long time, I thought recovery meant getting back to where I was, but it does not. Recovery is not restoration. A man might recover after losing a leg, but it will not restore his limb.
The company’s official word for the accusation against me would probably be unsubstantiated. It is a tidy technical term, easy to hide behind. It sounds responsible, impartial, even fair. But my life, and what happened, do not fit inside that word. The accusation was unsubstantiated. The wreckage was not.
Every lost job, every friend who went quiet, every moment of exile is proven. My ruin is documented. The truth is not. And that is what the company, the festival, and so many others never understood. Neutrality is not justice; what’s more, justice cannot survive neutrality. Silence is not decency when what needs to be said can save the life of another. And that is what remains substantiated.
The history of the #MeToo movement will certainly be remembered for how it knocked down some mighty big names, rewrote the language of corporate culture, and redrew the moral and legal boundaries of acceptable behavior, mostly in the way men treated women in professional environments.
But MeToo was also something of a ghost story. In the drama and passions of that reckoning, it opened the gates of hell too, unleashing the animal spirits of the wounded and the vengeful. With help from the media, opportunistic attorneys, and corrupt political institutions, the rules of common decency fell away.
What began as an exigent movement for accountability became theater and thievery. The stories of real harm and long-overdue justice mingled with invention, criminality, confusion, ghosts, until few could tell the difference. Once the apparitions were set loose, they would be hard to contain.
Every company thinks it can manage the big moral fires; few ever do. It is a messy thing, and people get hurt. In retrospect, it is through individual moral courage that we rescue the moment of confusion. Courage matters. Institutions protect themselves; people redeem each other. Justice isn’t a policy or a press release, but in the private act of standing with someone, next to them and meeting the truth as we know it. It’s the willingness to risk the demands that come with moral fortitude, and seeing it through thick and thin.
This essay is part of a continuing series examining moral courage, the failures of modern media, and the human consequences of public outrage and narrative distortion. Coming soon, the complete podcast series, OUT OF THE BLUE that traces the long road from a false accusation to understanding, and from harm to human repair.
This is a listener supported podcast.
*Authors Note: I use AI to assist in editing and clarity. The words are my own.
