I can’t quite let go of something that I brought up in this Twitter thread.
Still on this. I’ve spent days, nights, weekends, lost sleep, rewritten, had legal & fact checkers all over stories, thrown up, re-interviewed sources to MAKE SURE my #MeToo stories were solid. In 1 week, 2 men get to freely rewrite their abusive pasts? Nobody cared about facts?
Regarding Jian Ghomeshi writing for the New York Review of Books and John Hockeberry penning whatever the hell that was for Harper’s, I have so many questions. (No, I’m not linking to them. Ughghhh.)
But one of the biggest questions I have is this: Why were these men allowed to rewrite history?
It’s one thing to say, “These are personal essays and not news stories,” which might be one (lame) defense offered by those publications. But that’s nonsense. First of all, everyone reporting on #MeToo stories and anything at all related to harassment, predation and similarly fraught issues has had to be so, so careful. Any time these topics are in the mix, fact-checking rigor is necessary.
And even when someone is writing a personal essay or an opinion column, the writers of such works don’t get to pick and choose their facts. I’ve had critiques and columns kicked back to me to make sure every assertion in them was accurate. That’s not a defense that holds water.
It’s unconscionable to me that NYRB and Harper’s both allowed these men to publish poorly written, mawkish articles that didn’t move the conversation forward. That’s bad enough.
Worse yet, they didn’t give the survivors of harassment, bullying, assault and violence a real voice in any of this. That’s awful and gross and so typical, unfortunately. I wrote about this process of de-centering the survivors in this piece about Louis C.K. I am so tired of survivors being ignored in favor of the egos of the men who made these messes in the first place. Whether it’s by the men themselves or their acolytes, it’s always the same boring whining about famous men who want their old lives back.
Survivors don’t get their old lives back after they’ve been abused, bullied, harassed, assaulted and raped. No one is owed a career in the media, in the arts, in Hollywood, in sports, in politics. No one is owed any of that. When speaking of these matters, in relation to any profession or any walk of life, the only people who are owed anything are those who’ve been harmed — but they’re usually left to fend for themselves.