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Out Of The Blue Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Wrongfully Accused - Rightfully Acquitted: The Experience Of Being Wrongfully Accused
A podcast series on the long journey of recovery after a false accusation during the time of #metoo. www.outofthebluepodcast.com
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- 1 weeks ago15 min
Nothing More, But Everything Else
I keep coming back to this.Not because I haven’t said it before. I have. I look at all of this from a dozen angles. I used to think this would have a finale, it would be finished. That somewhere there was a final version of this argument, and once I found it, I could stop. I don’t think that anymore. I don’t think of this as a wound as much as it is a mission now. Each pass shows me something the last one missed, like a part that fell on the floor, and it was found later in another pass. I told a friend of mine, when you get your teeth knocked out, and your jaw broken, it takes time to put all the pieces back together. It takes time, not just to learn how to talk, but to articulate, to find clarity. So here it is again, from a new angle, closer to the bone than I’ve gotten before.I’ve written so much about my experiences over the past decade, though admittedly, the images grow smaller each day, fading as I age away from it. I guess I wouldn’t write another word of it had any of those who did this been charged for their deceits. It does at times feel unseemly, that I complain about four days in jail. It was Scott County after all, and while it was unnerving and unpleasant, it’s not Riker’s Island. Four days in a tiny cell is nothing in the grand scope of things, it’s an uncomfortable inconvenience. It was expensive, too. With all that it cost in legal expenses, investigators, experts, lost income, my savings were gutted, my career was shot in the head. But, you know, I was acquitted and I’m free. Am I though?I get the argument. Moving on is supposed to be an important psychological step. The experience was once fluid, but now it’s turned to plaque and chipping away can be tedious. I was told by a “good friend”, that walking away from it isn’t hard, it’s just one small step in front of another. But, that’s the same pattern when walking in circles. The relief isn’t walking away from it, it’s carrying it with you when you go.I don’t want to give up this conversation, because the machine, or rather, the mechanics of accusations, both false and “real,” involve similar parts and similar problems. Given the damage to those wrongfully accused, and the danger to those who have experienced sexual violence without recompense it feels like a worthy pursuit. But, this thing is forever and always a problem of proof and the challenges of evidence. Given it’s a crime that goes unseen, this is the central challenge for those seeking justice, and those seeking protection from vicious falsities. I keep picking at it, like tugging at scabs. Being accused, particularly in the humiliating limelight of public news and social media, means that no matter the outcome, you’re either metaphorically, or literally, in jail forever. False accusations mean you’re never really cleared, you’ll always be wearing an invisible ankle bracelet that can, without warning, be tripped. Go to lunch with a friend, someone sees you and posts on social media. See someone that recognizes you, and they can’t flee fast enough. Want to work, forget it, someone will eventually recognize you and the cycle starts all over again. “Guilty, f*****g slime,” I was called that only a few weeks ago. I don’t give up in part because they don’t give up. Being found guilty would have meant no ambiguity, but that also comes with a lengthy prison sentence (they were asking for more than 20 years in my case). My attorney told me that if I was found guilty, she would file for a mistrial, or an immediate appeal. Both would mean I’d still spend time in prison. Being found not guilty seems should have cleared my name, but it didn’t. Without a full confession from my accuser, you see, she’s still a victim. The ambiguous outcome didn’t clear my name, but at least I can go to the movies whenever I want, spend time with my wife, take a piss in my backyard. Because, freedom.I’m pissed off that my accuser walks away, while victims of sexual violence often don’t get justice and 6 figure settlements. I complain about how brutal it all was, but, victims of sexual violence will carry the unforgiving scars of everything that follows such an assault. The raw emotions can become infectious, and over time turn gangrenous: shame, guilt, fear, depression, anger, and sadness. It’s not an easy road. If a victim goes to the police, she’ll have her parts probed and swabbed, and answer ugly questions that on any other day would seem obscene. If she’s fortunate enough to get a female investigator, she’ll need to be prepared to talk about every detail: where did it happen, what was she wearing, how did it start, did he use his fingers, where did he put his cock, did he cum, did he smell, what did he say before, during, and after. Fill out forms. Sign here. That’s just the first round. She’ll do it again for the DA. And if she’s lucky (meaning he was c
- 3 weeks ago17 min
Blood Is Slower Than Ink
Arthur Reed Kimball, writing in The Atlantic in 1900, was concerned about the invasion of yellow journalism, a press turning increasingly toward sensationalized headlines and scandal for its own sake. I was interested because, you know, being on the target end of scandal wreaked immense havoc on my life. But sensationalism itself wasn’t his real target. As he put it, to lay exclusive stress on the demoralization of what is sensational is to overlook a more serious condition, the quiet journalistic invasion of so much of the intercourse and thinking of life. He meant something broader than any single scandal. He meant that the habits of the newsroom, treating people as characters, treating private lives as copy, treating guilt as a formality that story momentum could outrun, had started reshaping how ordinary people thought about each other outside the paper altogether. Guilty or innocent is downstream. The momentum is the point. Blood, it seems, is slower than ink.He wrote that before radio, decades before television, and the internet was not yet even an idea. A hundred and twenty-five years later, he would certainly recognize exactly what happened to Jason Arday, or me, or anyone who is run over before they can scream.Now, the recent story of Jason Arday is troubling and instructive. Some of what he was accused of, by his own admission, was true. Many of the details of his life of personal accomplishment and academic achievement were, apparently, exaggerated or invented outright. He was the pride of Cambridge, a storied career, a gentle effete, a man of accomplishment and grace, and also a young man of color. With his long braids, smooth dark skin, he was a compelling figure in the lofty world of academia. Maybe someone had suspicions and said nothing. Maybe his charm and his kindness were equally disarming. Whatever the case, the accusations piled fast, and piled hard. And the press came a knock’n.I don’t want to repeat all of the accusations, they are reported at length elsewhere. But, a brief overview: there were questions raised about passages in his doctoral thesis that resembled earlier academic work. Liverpool John Moores University investigated and upheld his doctorate, and Arday denied plagiarism, although he acknowledged errors in his doctoral work. Further reporting raised questions about some positions and affiliations on his CV, the scale of his charity fundraising, some of his extraordinary athletic claims, and other episodes he had described publicly. The university eventually announced an investigation after receiving what it called “new information” regarding his qualifications and academic conduct; Jesus College separately said it had begun disciplinary proceedings after finding inconsistencies in information supplied by Arday.Even his famous childhood story has been disputed. Several people who knew Arday as a child told journalists that they remembered him speaking and joking when young. But other former classmates and adults who knew him supported his account, remembering a child with serious learning difficulties who communicated little or not at all verbally. Who knows for sure, but the evidence suggests things weren’t quite as they were presented. Okay.Earlier this month, the scrim of inconsistencies kept tearing and some of the strange details of his life became visible, fresh fodder for the media. It got ugly fast. He resigned from Cambridge, writing in his resignation letter: “The response from so many people across the world was overwhelming. Thousands celebrated not simply my appointment, but what it represented: that talent, perseverance and hope can triumph over even the greatest adversity.”Some of the evidence that caused his fall is inconclusive. His claims about marathon feats didn't hold up against what elite athletes said was physically possible, and no records supported them. But other parts of the case were less clean than they first appeared: a university that investigated the plagiarism charge, cleared him outright, then called it an "aberration" and cited "new information" without ever spelling out what that meant. Competing accounts from people who knew him as a child. None of it added up to what it was made to sound like. I’m not going to toil over every detail, surely there will be many discussions about Arday in the years ahead. However, Jason Arday won’t be part of those. He died last week, at the young age of 41; I assume it was self-induced, but that’s not been announced. It seems certain that Arday created more than one story about himself, some of it very clearly was invented. But, on a personal note, he was by many accounts a kind, generous, and gentle human being. He had a family, and frie
- Aug 19, 202612 min
To Be Original
*I apologize for the ridiculously low and gravely voice. Allergies taunt my voice, so I sound like I’m doing a voice over for a 1980’s movie trailer!”Going to a museum is, for too many of us, a tedious thing. We wander the galleries the way we’d shuffle the aisles at Target, or wander an outlet mall, mostly unable to put together a coherent sentence about what we see in front of us, or why any of it matters.I remember going to the Art Institute of Chicago several years ago, specifically to see Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.” Standing in front of it, I was overwhelmed by its beauty, and by the care of its presentation in that gallery.A young couple walked up next to me, and the woman said to her boyfriend “Wow, that’s so cool,” and they just as quickly wandered away. Don’t get me wrong, the painting is cool. But she didn’t know what, exactly, made it cool, or why it’s considered a masterpiece. To be fair, I knew the painting, I knew about Seurat’s technique using pointillism, but I didn’t know much about Seurat himself, until later. Worse, I was illiterate about almost everything else in that amazing museum. There is no foul in not giving a damn about museums, or finding this, that and the other thing cool. A museum, like a good book, should make you want to know more about what you’re looking at, to open its covers, so to speak. Galleries are built for this, to give people space to consider a work in context, alongside the others near it. It takes practice, patience, and choice. Without some connection to art, to history, to language, a museum is pretty dull. I still feel dumb when I don’t “get” something. But I’ve learned to slow down and let it reach me on some level first, and once I feel that connection, I go looking for the rest.Writing, like standing in front of a work of art, is about describing reality: a place, a person, a thought, a feeling, an insight, past or present. Good writing isn’t just clean and legible. A grocery list is clean and legible. Good writing has the potential to move us. It takes dumb patience, at least for me, because writing is a bit like squinting into fog, like canoeing across a lake where the horizon’s disappeared into the vapor. I paddle forward, or think I do, and often end up somewhere that wasn’t on any map.But these days writing, like reading itself, seems a bit old school, because now we’re all mesmerized by the flickering magic in our hands, the fifteen-second video, news reduced to masticated AI has quickly allowed everyone to become the best writer. And what a loss. The idea that we should all read like college educated English majors, or novelists, is to lose our originality. I’m no Dickens or Steinbeck, but now I can run my writing through an AI overlay that mimics the greats. I don’t need to fight with an idea anymore, or learn a new thing. I can tell my AI buddy what I want it to say, and then claim that’s exactly what I was thinking, that’s what I meant to write all along. The AI is just helping me say the thing I was already thinking. I sound knowledgeable. My sentences are, well, they’re perfect. But that’s the problem. AI doesn’t do anything original.What’s the point of thinking at all, when the machine can do it for me? What’s the point of writing, when it writes it for me? What’s the point of making an argument that used to require me to think, damn it, think, when I can offload that onto the LLM? I no longer have to feel dumb, because now I’m the smartest of all the smartest people that have ever been smart. Perfection isn’t human.But making mistakes in my writing is part of honing not just the sentence, but the idea, the thought. The malapropism, the clumsy sentence, the paragraph that circles back on itself twice before it finds what it’s trying to say. What makes the mistakes important is that they’re evidence. Evidence that I was thinking, working something out, failing, working again. I wrote it, maybe it sounded stupid, so I wrote it again. Or I didn’t. A well written AI sentence is always a straight line. It’s always right. An AI writer is a groveling servant: yes master, you’re so smart, yes, you make the right point. A sentence I wrote without the AI gimp is more likely to be a crooked path, and that means I was there. It also means it’s more likely to be interesting.My house is filled with stacks of books, and the collection is always growing. I read some. I read others. A few I finish as soon as I get them. Books are an old technology. They require slow thinking, thinking through, fighting with, crying over, being outraged about. When I turn to my AI instead of my book, or the page, or my pen, aren’t I abdicating my responsibility to learn, to arrive at what I’ve learned honestly? I’ve earned the insight.I don’t like AI to write for me. I like it as an editor, to correct language and flag structural issues, ask qu
- Aug 13, 202612 min
Everything Is Broken
When I was a kid, I found comfort in the predictable rhythm of the news programs my mother consumed. In Minneapolis, particularly on bad weather days, WCCO Radio was always on. In the evenings, the 6 and 10 PM broadcasts brought the same anchors and faces, a sense of familiarity into the home. She never missed them. I remember it being calming. First, because it meant I was with my mom and felt safe. Second, because she never seemed upset or worried about any of it, or if she did, she hid it well. Other than the assassinations of JFK and MLK, I don’t remember anything the news actually said. Just her calm face, and the two of us together.Today I have a hard time listening to, reading, or watching any news. So much of it agitates, and confirms whatever view I already hold as morally superior. It thin-slices my rivals. Either tacitly or with purpose, my neighbors become fascists, “libtards,” Nazis. News, newsletters, TikTok videos: civilization is collapsing and must be saved from HIM! HER! IT! Blame Trump. Blame Reagan. Blame Obama. Blame you. RNC, DNC, DSA: all bad, all evil, all good, ruined and ruptured. Dylan wrote, “Ain’t no use jiving, ain’t no use joking, everything is broken.”What if Dylan is right, and everything is broken? Politics. Media. Food. Medicine. Capitalism. The courts. The environment. All broken. By broken, I mean they don’t function or operate in ways that consistently produce the best results. In aggregate, they fail their remit. They come up short.“Seems like every time you stop and turn around, something else just hit the ground.”But what if that’s not all true? What if, as Steven Pinker argues, the world has made spectacular progress in every single measure of human well-being? That things are good, and getting better all the time? Based on some pretty convincing research, we overestimate how bad things are, and ignore the evidence that things across almost all areas of human society are good, though far from perfect. But sometimes ugly realities are impossible to negotiate. Sometimes things really, really are as bad as we fear, because we’re in it.Bad to worse was my fate from 2017 to 2022. From the moment I was arrested and taken to jail, I was overcome by dire anxiety, and the news of my potential future was as dark as I could imagine. If a jury decided against me, I would go away for more than a decade. Bad news produces anxiety, which is a hostage-taker from within. It, or rather we, seize almost every resource to amplify the message of doom. During those long nights in jail, whatever healthy, lucid thoughts I might normally have had, abandoned me. Everything was broken. Everything felt helpless.Sitting in a Scott County jail cell with no windows was, in some respects, one of the most deeply illuminating passages of my adult life. There was nothing I could do to change what was happening, at least on the surface. That’s why the slightest expression of kindness toward me was so remarkably loud and obvious. A Scott County guard brought me a message from a former sheriff, who also worked, for fun, at the Festival, and had firsthand information that made what I was accused of impossible. He knew I had been maligned. He asked the guard to treat me kindly, and to let me know that a lot of people on the outside already knew this accusation was wrong.In the moments after the guard left my cell, I felt a little better. After all that had happened in the previous 24 hours, that small gesture just made a huge difference. I decided then that I would return the effort by treating everyone I met from that point forward with generosity and gratitude. Maybe it’s hard to understand. While being accused of an ugly crime and arrested was an appalling injustice, at the same time, nearly everyone I would encounter would give me a chance to practice something important to me, something I’d been quietly working at for years. Radical kindness.I follow a teaching I never talk about, one that rests in a very private corner of myself. It animates the way I think. It’s from one of the oldest religions still practiced today, out of India. It’s Jainism, if you care to look it up. To me it’s less a belief system than a discipline, built around doing the least possible harm, to any living thing, in thought, word, or deed. But it starts within. Internally felt, externally expressed as radical non-violence and kindness. I’ve been vegan, or vegetarian, most of my adult life. I go out of my way not to hurt, harm, or needlessly kill anything, insects included. It sees every living thing as a fellow traveler, to be regarded and respected. I don’t do it well, but it helps me move through the world.What if, I thought, everything was a chance to practice. Instead of seeing the guards as nameless overlords, or meddling public servants in the halls of criminal indifference, I treated them as good, spoke to them as good, acted like they were good. After so
- Aug 6, 20266 min
Fauci Was Right. About What?
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”—Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science”Last week, scrolling Facebook as part of my morning routine, I saw a post from a friend of mine, a retired nurse who was on the front line of the Covid nightmare. She saw, first hand, the ravages of that fast-burning disease, and how unprepared we were. I remember her posts from the middle of it: the people who weren’t taking Covid seriously, the front line workers who rarely rested. She’s earned the right to comment.So last week, after Anthony Fauci pleaded the fifth one hundred and eleven times in a senate hearing, some are calling it a show trial, she posted: “Fauci was right!” A friend of hers asked, “About what?” She answered, “Don’t be ridiculous.” Then the pile-on. Against the question. Against the questioner.About. What.That’s the question we should all be asking, isn’t it?I take Feynman’s line to mean the worry isn’t about being wrong. It’s when you stop looking once you’ve decided you’re right. I think Fauci was doing his best in a moment of extraordinary chaos. Trump was deeply unpopular. Distrust in our institutions was spiking like the virus itself. Fauci was, for most of us, the adult in the room. But in retrospect, some of what he said was wrong. And in retrospect, a lot of what he said was right. We will never get a real accounting of the failures, on any side, until the next pandemic shows up, and it will. If we can’t question the scientists, we’re doomed to repeat.It occurred to me that believing something as a matter of faith isn’t a sign of healthy skepticism. Take an accusation: a woman who says she was assaulted should be believed. That’s a complete thought. But it isn’t a full stop. Believe, then examine. Ask the questions. Investigate. All of it starts with that first word, believe, and through the process we move from believe to confirmed. Right?Now take Mr. Fauci. I’m not going to wrap myself around the cultural critique of him, that’s not my point here. I’m going to start with believing him, and just as we do with an accusation, we question, we evaluate the evidence, we determine the facts. In Fauci’s case, we’re screwed, because the politicians have turned him into the Covid monster, hanging every mistake made anywhere on him. I’d plead the fifth too, considering the pitchforks lined up against him.My objection isn't to women, or witnesses, or scientists, or expertise itself. It's not that we believe first, we do, and we should. It's when belief is the only move, when examination never comes. "Believe all women" and "believe the science" get twisted into stopping points instead of starting points, ways to skip the part where evidence gets checked. A woman can be telling the truth and still face cross-examination. Fauci can be brilliant and still be wrong. Scrutiny is good and it's necessary. But in our current politics, questioning Fauci, or questioning the science, has become a loyalty test. Doubting my accuser makes you a rape apologist.It's the same move religion makes for a god, or a coach makes for "the system," or a company makes for "leadership." That's what faith is for: a way of holding a claim that doesn't need evidence to stand. Say "have faith in science" and any scientist worth her degree will likely correct you. Science doesn't run on faith. It runs on testing, measuring, questioning, and all the friction that faith has no patience for.The law works the same way. Imagine a courtroom: “Your honor, Mr. Hagerman is accused of rape, and while we’d love to show you the evidence, we have none. But we have faith that she’s telling the truth.”We shouldn’t replace facts with faith.I’m on the side of the scientific method. I’m also a skeptic. I don’t think Fauci is Jonas Salk. He’s an institutional scientist, a bureaucrat, and he’s been in public office for as long as I’ve been alive. We should acknowledge his contributions, and he should answer every question we have of him, until we’re done. And the grandstanding politicians should be focused on what matters to the public: what did we do wrong, what did we do right, what did we learn, how can we do it better next time.It was the same with my accuser. Answer the questions. Show the evidence. Prove your case. It’s the least we should expect.Science is supposed to be self-correcting. The law runs on evidence and proof. The trouble starts when correcting the scientist gets treated as an attack on science itself, or asking an accuser for evidence gets treated as calling her a liar.Nope. It’s a process for grown-ups, and it really is life and death. And none of us, scientists or not, should put up with this childish b******t. Fact over faith. Evidence over authority. Anything else is just shitty theater. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with othe
- Aug 3, 20267 min
She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. He said.
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 s**t 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
- Jul 30, 20268 min
"Known ____"
I spend more time than most looking at headlines and reading stories about men who are accused of sexual violence or harassment. It’s ugly reading. Based on statistics alone, most of those accusations are likely true, although until it’s gone through the courts and there is a trial verdict, the accused is still innocent.But the label of rapist, or predator, is attached to the accused from the moment the arrest is made public, long before there is a trial. Speaking from my own experience, the labels alone are enough to kill careers, destroy marriages, and ruin reputations. My life was flattened within hours of my arrest, and finding work is impossible, still. The jury took about an hour to acquit, not surprising, and I was free, but I was also damned forever.In a recent episode I wrote about the idea of being referred to as a “known predator,” of having been “credibly accused.” Admittedly, the number of people who use these terms against me is low. However, if my name comes up in some group discussion, it isn’t long before the heretics are out with branding irons and fire.That has led me to question the lexicography of ugly memes. If I’m a “known predator,” then why can’t I label my accuser a “known _ _ _ _”? I know, it could be very provocative, but no less so than calling me a predator. What is the equivalent of a “known predator”?I understand that sexual violence is about power, and men have the upper hand. History is replete with stories of women who have been abused, raped, used, preyed upon, and manipulated. Countless women reported crimes and were questioned about their motives, their dress, the “did you ask for it” sort of thing. Women were accused of lying, of covering up behavior that could be judged as “loose.” Some women have seen their attackers arrested only to see them acquitted for lack of evidence, or by a jury that simply didn’t believe her story. Many more women have lived in the shadows of guilt and fear, never reporting a crime, but living with the self inflicted shame. All true. All bad.But there are also those of us who have been falsely accused, and our lives ruined. By some estimates, six to eight thousand wrongful accusations are made per year, maybe more. And when we object to the moniker, our motives are questioned. If we ever dare say she, he, or they are lying, we risk more legal trouble. If we point to the lack of evidence, we’re quickly reminded that rape happens in private, and the absence of evidence proves nothing. We will never see our accusers brought to justice, acquitted or not.But we get labeled, in social and news media, and those labels stick. To give you a sense of the rhetorical challenge, here is a list of a few words used against men like me. It’s worth noting, nearly all of these were used to describe me, on social media, in legal documents, or in news stories:Rapist, sexual assailant, sex offender, perpetrator, attacker, assailant, abuser, sexual abuser, predator, sexual predator, exploiter, groomer, harasser, serial rapist, serial predator, monster, beast, deviant, pervert, creep, pig, menace, dangerous, accused, alleged rapist, suspected offender, defendant, respondent, the accused, accused abuser, known predator.So I went looking for a word that I could cast at the woman who accused me, something that might stick to her life like all of the words above have stuck to mine.There should be some equally charged words standing on the sidelines, just waiting to be put into this game of epithets. I need a big brute of a word, something with knuckles and jaw. I went looking because some nights I wanted a word that would follow her around.The first problem is, she’s never been publicly named. It’s ludicrous of course, so the first thing I would do is post her name. So, then what?I thought about liar. But that’s too small a word, as common as summer pollen. We all lie. Only a chosen few are predators. You can be a liar and still get invited to the party. You can lie routinely, as a brand, and get elected to the White House. I digress.Fabricator. Nope. Sounds like shop class, something knocked out of sheet metal.Serial accuser. Meh. Not a potboiler, and it doesn’t even fit my case. As far as I know I’m the only one she’s ever accused. Also, nobody’s making a monster movie about a serial accuser.Predator, obviously, doesn’t work. It’s been trademarked by the accusation industry to describe, almost exclusively, men. It simply doesn’t attach easily to women. Sorry, it’s true.More than half a million words in the English language, and not one of them is truly dressed up and suitable to hang on my accuser. We built an entire vocabulary, forty plus terms deep, for what a man might be capable of. Rapist. Predator. Monster. Beast. For her, there is nothing. It doesn’t feel like justice. It feels like being handed a knife with no blade.I spent a night trying to bui
- Jul 27, 202611 min
If Not For Her
Growing old makes a person feel, old. One morning last week, I looked at my wife Marian sitting on the couch across from me, and realized I’ve been with her for most of my adult life.Here’s how we met. Fifteen years before the end of the 20th century, I was working as a part time Bingo caller at the Mystic Lake Casino in Shakopee, Minnesota. Back then, the Casino didn’t look like the cornfield Las Vegas it does today. Even though it was in the boonies it was a busy late night hot spot where you could buy tax free cigarettes and booze, or visit the massive bingo hall which is where the real action happened.I got a job as one of its bingo callers, entertaining hundreds of people each afternoon. Players would sit at long tables with their printed game sheets and brightly colored blotters. Those playing bingo in the middle of a weekday afternoon were mostly older women who were dead serious about the game, which didn’t match my natural performing joviality. My style of calling a game was to add humor, and self-effacing commentary, two things not normally associated with professional bingo calling. For instance, I’d learned to palm a bingo ball I’d pulled from the expensive tumbler, and made it look as though it magically traveled from one hand, suddenly appearing on the board, lighting up the number on various electronic signs around the hall. I also learned that if I pinched a bingo ball in just the right spot, it would shoot away from my fingers, and bounce around under the tables, forcing a floor worker to catch it and bring it back. I used to do imitations, character voices, including an imitation of speaking in slow motion. So funny. So, so funny.I was fired only a few months after I’d started. My boss, a tall, balding man with a triangular shaped head, ears that seemed to move independently while he talked, and a mouth missing several teeth told me “This job isn’t for you.” Unfortunately, that was the case with nearly all of my jobs in my youth. If work wasn’t fun, what fun was it to work!While my luck ran out on Bingo, there was a spectacular new paramutual horse racing facility being built a few miles north of Mystic Lake, and someone, oddly, had recommended me for a job managing the entertainment for a night club being built next to the track. Apparently, someone had seen me doing my hysterical but ill advised bingo shtiklach and called for an interview.I was surprised when I got the job. I’d never worked in a night club before, in fact, I rarely visited one before this job. It turned out to be an astonishingly successful club, a place simmering with youthful energy. The entertainment and bar staff were all young, happy and attractive, and several times a night the entire staff would dance on tables and bar tops in orchestrated pandemonium. It was wild and fun, and I was in the middle of it.During that time, my first wife and I became separated, and the club became the personal and professional center of my life. That’s when I met Marian. She was a bar customer, out with some friends, and came up to request we play a dance tune she liked. Memories can’t be trusted to reliably represent the past, they’re fragments at best. But I think my memories of her that first night are as accurate as any in my life. She was well dressed, in heels, her hair confidently short and done, and she carried herself like someone with purpose. She was also poised and attractive and I would look for her each night hoping she’d come back in. She came out several evenings, with different friends, and would always come up to the DJ booth to say hi.Hair and fashion of the times - Marian (21) and some friends dancing at Winner’s Nightclub.I wasn’t sure if she would go out on a date with me, after all I was still married and outwardly hopeful for reconciliation with my wife. But, when I asked her out she agreed. We’ve been together since, and have spoken to each other at least once a day, every day we’ve been together. After several years as a couple, we decided to get married.On our wedding day we shared the Sarum Rite, out of the book of Common Prayer. This passage includes the traditional wedding vows, “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Thinking back, the words didn’t matter to me. Sure, we think, gonna be rich, maybe we’ll be poor, we’ll get sick sometimes. The have and hold stuff, what does that even mean when you’re in your 20’s? It sounds good, a little romantic even.Wedding Day / Murphy’s LandingMarian and I could never have imagined what would happen to our lives in 2018, when we shared those vows more than 35 years earlier. And, even as we were pulled into the miasma of a ruthlessly false accusation, we weren’t thinking about our vows, because they didn’t matter, they were part of a lovely ceremonial moment on our wedding day. But I don’t reme
About Out Of The Blue Podcast
A podcast series on the long journey of recovery after a false accusation during the time of #metoo. www.outofthebluepodcast.com
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