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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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- 2 days ago11 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
- 1 weeks ago13 min
"Known Predator"
Apparently I’m a known predator. I’m a known, predator. That comma has a lot to say in describing me, or what you think about me. One is a label. The other, an accusation and a lie.I bring this up because I came across some screenshots of comments posted online after my brief visit to the Renaissance Festival just about one year ago. I was there with Penn & Teller, who were celebrating their 50th reunion as a performing duo, which began at the festival, and where I met them. I’ve covered that in a previous podcast.The post came from a performer at the show whose calling, as she sees it, is to exorcise or diminish any man at the festival, or in the world in general, she believes is a predator. Which, apparently, is most of them. Her position, that men are inherently oriented toward rape and violence against women, is a shibboleth among a certain strain of activist. Andrea Dworkin built a whole feminist philosophy in the 1970s around the idea that male violence against women isn’t just possible, it’s inevitable.That word “inevitable” is doing a lot of work. We are far from resolved on the issues of sexual violence, rape and exploitation in this country. But the notion that it’s inevitable isn’t bound by evidence. It’s bound by belief.I bristle at the idea that my allegedly predatory behavior was widely known, as if it was confirmed. By whom? It’s circular. The word “predator” gets used as an established fact that’s commonly known. No further questions need to be asked. Question the accusation and you’re branded ignorant, or assumed to be arguing in bad faith.It’s not true. There is zero evidence to support the claim, and I’ve covered that at length. But under the rules of a moral panic, evidence and truth get sidelined for what you must believe.The old definition of a moral panic assumed it was temporary. Something happens, a group gets frightened or outraged, certainty spikes, and eventually the fever breaks and life goes back to normal. That’s not what we have anymore. Politics today doesn’t cycle through panics. It runs on one continuously, just swapping out the target. There’s always a villain of the week, always a badge to wear, always a group whose certainty is the price of admission. The machinery never powers down long enough to be called an episode. It’s just the weather now.That matters, because a temporary panic eventually corrects itself, people calm down, new information gets in, the group reassesses. A permanent one doesn’t have to correct, because it never stops long enough to be checked. Before one target is even fully discredited, the apparatus has already moved to the next name, and nobody circles back to update the record on the last one. The machine doesn’t need to be right about yesterday’s villain. It just needs a villain for today.I got caught in a small, local version of something that, at a national level, has stopped being an aberration and become a permanent feature of how we argue with each other. So how did my reputation flip in such a short window, with no real history of the behavior I was suddenly guilty of? The answer is simple. There wasn’t one. It was manufactured, and social media was the delivery system.Here’s what that delivery system actually does. Before any of this, most people who knew me held some private, unremarkable opinion. Positive, mostly. Nobody had organized around it, because there was nothing to organize around. That’s just people going about their lives with a version of me in their heads that happened to be accurate.A single hostile public post changes the physics of that. It doesn’t just add one more opinion into circulation. It converts private, scattered impressions into something visible, and once something is visible, it moves on its own. People don’t need to check whether it’s true. They only need to notice that others are already agitating, and decide whether to join in or get out of the way.That’s the part that did the damage, not the accusation itself, but what happened once it was seen being seen. People who’d have shrugged off gossip in private suddenly had to reckon with a public position. Staying quiet started to look like taking a side. Screenshots got reposted, comments piled onto comments, and each new share felt like independent confirmation, when it was really the same claim, echoing. A handful of people pushed harder than the rest, reposting, prodding others to join, and the crowd behind them grew. Underneath the slogans and the moral language, the actual sentiment was cruder than any of it: f**k that guy, light him up. Forty years of a mostly positive reputation didn’t get argued down with evidence. It got buried under repetition dressed up as evidence.To be clear, this isn’t persuasion. It’s performance. Nobody had to convince anyone I was guilty. They only had to make guilt look like something everyone already agreed on, and once it looked t
- 1 weeks ago4 min
Beyond The Mote
When I started this podcast, I had a clear idea of what I wanted it to be. Twelve episodes. I would tell the story of the false accusation brought against me, from arrest to acquittal. Four painfully long years.I wrote it, voiced it, and produced it alone. I released it to a small group of people. Then I rewrote it, re-recorded it, updated every episode, and released it again earlier this year.When I listen to some of the episodes I recorded more than two years ago, I’m struck by how calm I sounded. The writing was uneven. But what I hear underneath all of it is vulnerability. I really did put it all out there. I left myself open to attack. To ridicule. To the possibility that someone would invent a new accusation just to shut the project down.The cost of doing this podcast, in practical terms, was close to twenty-five thousand dollars. The show is a loss. My audience is small, growing here and there, but still little more than a small theater, where ticket holders often don’t show up for a particular performance. That’s the metrics. But the engagement rate is impressive. Most people who start an episode finish it.What I didn’t think about in this process is what comes after the last episode. After the acquittal. What’s next?So I kept writing and recording. But I couldn’t find a strong pulse. I tried writing about other men who may have been wrongfully accused. I wrote about media bias. I wrote about pieces of my recovery, the long tail of it.A few months ago, I started to feel like I was circling the same thing. It started to feel forced.The episodes that feel good to write and record these days are the ones where I travel beyond the moat. My story about burying animal remains. Driving to New York a year ago. The horses of Linton. Those feel much closer to who I am now. Not the ugly disfigurement of my life by underhanded clowns. Something else. I’ll still be writing and commenting on media and culture. But I don’t want to be known as the guy defending people accused of ugly crimes, innocent or not. I don’t want to spend precious life toiling over statistics and academic jargon. I don’t want to continually dip my pen in the bitter ink of discord, anger, dishonesty, and the dangers of mob justice. It’s not easy work for someone with cognitive impatience, because my mind is constantly churning. After my arrest, and all of the things I spent 50 years building were destroyed, writing became a way to process the overwhelm, to dig out, and to recenter my mind on the present. That was much easier when the enemy of my existence was so obvious, now, the challenges come from inside me, trying to find some balance and direction in this long arc of healing. As I move forward, more of my content will be paywalled. Purely because I have to try to recover something for my time. Any reader is a good reader. Paid readers are great readers. My goal is one thousand paid subscribers in the next year.There are a couple of important things I’m working on. One is a book. I hope it will be out this fall, or sometime next year. I want to work with a publisher, so it may take a bit longer. There are also some bigger projects on the horizon that I can’t wait to tell you about, when I can.Thank you for your support. I hope to keep feeding these pages, and keep attracting new readers and subscribers with your help. And to the many people who listen, and who share their thoughts with me directly. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe
- 2 weeks ago9 min
Rape, Rape, Rape: The Sound of Nobody Knowing Anything
I’ve been following the many sordid stories about former Maine senatorial candidate Graham Platner, a trash-stashed, communist “oyster farmer” who apparently has been undone by a series of ugly stories about his behavior, including allegations of rape. Oh boy.I’m not going to list the many bizarre and strange things he’s said and done. You can Google it. As for the rape allegations, that’s exactly my point. They are only allegations at this point.As of today, two women have publicly accused him of sexual misbehavior and violence, and it brought his campaign down. The first accusation came from Lyndsey Fifield, a former girlfriend, who claimed in a New York Times article that he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom, and held the door shut so she couldn’t get out. She called him the most toxic, abusive man on earth. Pretty ugly stuff. But her accusation didn’t sink him. The media passed it off as, well, she’s a Republican operative or something. Good grief.The next woman, Jenny Racicot, was featured in a Politico article. She said she also dated Platner, and claimed he showed up at her house drunk and forced himself on her while she repeatedly told him to stop. After the encounter, she broke off all contact with him. Platner denies that anything non-consensual happened. Racicot is progressive, so some people are claiming bias in reverse. And Jesus. Settle down.Because of what I’ve been through, friends have asked what I think about all this. Rape is a serious charge. It requires serious evidence. I have no way of knowing if either woman is telling the truth, and neither does anyone posting about it. His past public statements and verified behavior suggest a pattern that makes the allegations seem more plausible. But plausible isn’t proof. I don’t know what happened. Neither do you.Everything I’ve read about this guy makes him look messy, maybe creepy, maybe a drunk creep. But I don’t think he should have resigned. He hasn’t been formally charged. He hasn’t had a chance to legally defend himself. Let it work out through the courts. That would have been the right move.I also don’t believe a good argument is “Well, Trump is a dirty pig, with more baggage than a Kardashian on vacation, so we have Platner.” It’s true, but it’s also not the point.Let me sort this a bit more. I think it’s legitimate that he lost the confidence of his party. That’s their prerogative, whatever the reasons. For the same reason, the Minnesota Renaissance Festival was under no legal obligation to keep me on contract after I was accused.But they didn’t believe the allegations. They worked with my legal team, providing documents important to my defense. That was the right thing to do. They had no legal obligation to keep me on contract. But didn’t they have a moral one? If you believe someone who works for you is innocent, shouldn’t you spend both social and financial capital to make that case, instead of just walking away?Their insurance company wouldn’t allow me back on site. So what. Find another insurance company after I’m acquitted. This is the same insurance company my wife spent hours with, going over every detail, every piece of the story. At the end of one day, they told her this was little more than a nuisance lawsuit. They said they saw no evidence that suggested I was guilty. They said this is where they spend most of their time, on b******t lawsuits that are, by design, about getting money.Take this a step further. Instead of taking a principled, moral stand and defending me, the festival settled all the claims out of court. No lawsuit was ever filed. Only the threat of one. Two women performers and my accuser were given substantial amounts of money. To be clear, “substantial” in my estimation is anything more than a dollar. But they got a lot more than a dollar. I have no idea how much. Whatever it was, it was too much.To seal the deal, the festival admitted no wrongdoing. The women were paid. They’re no longer allowed to perform or appear in costume at the festival. I was no longer on contract, though there was no agreement, no stipulation, that I wasn’t allowed to visit or attend.This is a bad outcome for me, and it rewards connivers with cash. It further destroyed my reputation and the festival’s. And in the end, there’s no admission of wrongdoing on anyone’s part? How does that happen?They should have stuck it out through the trial. Then, after I was exonerated, told my accuser’s attorney eat s**t, and maybe even invited me back to work. Sure, it would have been controversial, and there’s a good chance I wouldn’t return, but it feels more, righteous. I didn’t break any laws. I didn’t attack or hurt anyone. I was smeared, and of all the people in this story, I deserved better. That would have been a principled outcome, not a practical one.After I was acquitted, I joked with someone on the festival’s ma
- 2 weeks ago10 min
What Kindness Costs
A photoshoot with wild horses in Linton, North Dakota becomes an unlikely mirror. Watching strangers earn a horse’s trust one slow, patient gesture at a time, I recognized a structure I’d been living inside for years, since I was wrongfully accused, since the trial, since I had to decide, over and over, whether to answer cruelty with rage or with something harder to sustain.This one includes the backyard fire where I tried to burn my old performing life to the ground, and what it took to stop.Enjoy. Please, like and share! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe
- Jun 29, 20268 min
The Coat Rack
What happens when truth gets replaced by agreement? I start with an odd dream I had last week, a monologue to a stranger, and work through the political situation in NYC, and end up somewhere personal. Agreement isn't truth. And silence isn't neutral. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe
- Jun 29, 20268 min
The Coat Rack
I had an odd dream last night that lingered well into the day.I was having a conversation with a guy. I don’t know who he was. Young. Colored hair, tattoos, tackle box hardware on his face. We were deep into it, and I went into a monologue.“It’s not enough to have truth on your side. For crying out loud, even saying it is a cliché. It’s not that you believe something is true, it’s that you think your belief is the truth itself. You start with certainty, because doubt is a sign of weakness. You know everything because you researched it. You have all those tabs open on your damn computer so you can look it up. But sometimes you’re wrong. We all know plenty of things, but know so little. And some of us are really smart and know more than the next person. Truth is not a coat rack to hang your belief on. It’s the other way around, man, it’s the other way around!”When I woke up I was trying to sort out what enzyme started that dream. What thought had been drifting around at the margins that set off such a show.I’ve been watching the political situation in NYC with some fascination, Mamdani and company sweeping into office on a tide of conviction. I don’t live there. It doesn’t affect me directly. But the rhetoric is fascinating because it’s hyperbolic college speak about ideas that have not been tested, at least in our system of government. Fine, that’s a common problem. And like Trump, yes, like Trump, there’s no apparent recognition that being wrong is even possible. Because to be wrong would be to admit that your ideas, and your self, are not invincible. And repeating a falsehood ad infinitum doesn’t change what’s true.It’s the opposite of Socratic. It’s dogmatic, didactic, vapid, and banal. Intransigence isn’t a moral failing anymore. It’s a superpower. Before you send me a note complaining that this has gone political, I’m not here to argue for or against any of them or their ideas. What’s bristling is something underneath the ideas. The disappearance of truth as a necessary component of public discourse.Truth is something measurable. Right? Something knowable. Now it means something agreed upon. To be clear, consensus isn’t always wrong. Scientific agreement, legal standards, and even the messy democratic process, these are forms of shared belief we depend on. The problem isn’t agreement. It’s agreement as a substitute for evidence. And opinions, as strongly felt as they can be, aren’t truth either, no matter how many people hold them.I think values can function as truth, and they sure present as deeply felt. If you believe abortion is evil, to you, that’s not an opinion you hold loosely, it’s a fact, as real as stone, derived from premises you hold as foundational. It’s also measurable, within that system. People who believe in free choice also see this as truth and fact. Both sides are arguing from different value systems, and they’re coherent to them, each producing its own version of truth. I don’t think that’s the problem. People have always organized around values. The problem is when a value-based truth gets presented as empirical fact, as something measurable outside the belief system, when it isn’t.If a group of parents agrees that vaccines are harmful, the agreement becomes the truth. If a coalition believes government does everything cheaper, the coalition makes it so. We say it with conviction. We all agree, therefore it is so. The point isn’t what’s true. The point is the agreement.Parsing out these differing values with others and making them into law, or doctrine, or policy, is what governments, courts, and even the church are designed to do. Not to declare one value system the winner, but to create a process by which competing truths can be heard, weighed, and negotiated. That process depends on one thing: a shared commitment to honest argument. Not agreement. Argument. And it’s a constant conversation. It never stops. We have to contend with the vulnerability of consensus, that sometimes a majority agrees on something that we don’t agree with. When the consensus alone gets mistaken for truth, the institutions don’t just fail. They get captured. By the loudest. By the most organized. By the most certain. And certainty, as we’ve established, is the one thing that has never required being right.The machinery of groupthink is everywhere now. MAGA. Moral panics. Socialist vanguards. The specific flavor doesn’t matter. Surround yourself with people who agree with you, minimize contact with the dirty and infected ideas of those who don’t, and utopia becomes possible. Of course it’s ridiculous. But stupid is as stupid is.Around the time I was facing arrest, before or after, I don’t recall exactly, a woman I know was posting on social media that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to be wrongfully accused. The amen chorus applauded. It was stupid, and it wasn’t true by any measure. But it didn’t m
- Jun 25, 20266 min
In Traumatic Fashion
The Monday I was released from jail, in June 2018, was an odd and distorted day. I was in a psychological fog, I hadn’t slept. When I was processed into the jail, I was told that “vegetarian isn’t a medical condition” and so I mostly picked over the meals, but mostly didn’t eat in lockup.Being released was uneventful. After posting bond ($100K), I was taken back to my little cell until everything was processed, and eventually taken to a room where I changed back into my street clothes, then down an elevator and released, out a door into a warm, muggy afternoon. For the first time I was visible to the world as “rapist.”Of course, the accusation was traumatic, but much worse was the long and pernicious aftermath. It’s impossible to calculate the real costs of such an accusation. Other than pedophilia, an accusation of rape comes with a stigma that is unmatched, and it doesn’t matter if it’s true. My attorney once quipped, “You’d have been better off accused of murder.”Given the trauma of these events and the long tail of ruin, it’s not surprising I want to talk about it. After I was charged and arrested, I was told not to talk about it to anyone, and I had to sustain that silence for four years. Once I was acquitted I knew it was going to be important for me to speak about it, not just with people closest to me, but to anyone and everyone who would listen. I was done hiding. But trauma distorts the view of the self, which makes it challenging to speak or write about. There is a heavy shame that comes with an accusation of sexual violence, again, even if it’s not true. Because false accusations are so rare, most people just assume an accusation is true. My calculation is that by talking about it, people will reason that I didn’t do anything. After all, guilty people don’t usually walk around telling people what they did.But is talking about it so often turning the broken bones and bruises into something purely performative?The academic Catherine Liu has a phrase for what happens when private suffering gets deployed publicly to establish credibility and draw an audience. She calls it a passkey to authenticity. Her example was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman photographed crying near a fence some distance from a migrant facility, performing grief for an online audience. Private suffering deployed publicly. A passkey.My accuser understood this instinctively. She leveraged a false claim, not only for a financial settlement, which was substantial, but also, and perhaps more importantly, she gained a coveted credential among the legions of survivorship.But does this argument also apply to me?Am I using my trauma, the loss of everything, to authenticate my story and thereby make myself special? By continuing to whip the posts, am I rendering myself more and more into a version of AOC standing in front of a fence? Me. Me. Suffering Me?I’ve set up a podcast and write for hours every week on the subject. I’ve built a small but growing audience and they pay me for it. None of my work is a lie, but it is, out of necessity, performative. In this transaction, what is lost? What troubles me more is this: who am I without this thing? What is my work without that fuel? Is it possible to do anything else?The more I write, the more uneasy I’ve become. I’m afraid that if I stop I will have nothing left to say. And if I have nothing left to say, where do I go? The question isn’t whether I should quit. The question is whether I would recognize myself without this.Art bites. It can blind us, tear out our tongues, torture us. But it also expands our view of the world and can lead somewhere we couldn’t have predicted. Expression isn’t a straight line. To render our wounds into something the world can hear, can experience, can feel, we have to do it again and again and again. Layer upon layer goes on and comes off.The answer is, I don’t know. What’s on the other side of this canvas is as much a mystery to me as to anyone else. And like any great mystery, the clues are hidden. In my case, they’ll be revealed in the arc of writing and creating. Or they won’t.Charles Bukowski wrote, “Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the ground crying and screaming. And then you will get up, because you always do." And I would add “..and you write about it.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe
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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