The Coat Rack

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 management team that the quickest way to get rid of the worst performers and crafters at the show would be to bring me back. It would be an exodus of the idiotic. Bring out the confetti. Graham Platner, like me, is innocent until proven otherwise. In my case, there was no trail of evidence, no ugly texts, no drunk behavior, no social media posts, no police reports, no complaints. A jury found me not guilty, with little deliberation, and sustained my claim of innocence. Platner hasn’t had that chance yet. If I were him, I’d want a trial. I’d stand behind my word that I was innocent. I wouldn’t leave the race. And I’d tell the establishment to go to hell. But the institutions that hire us need to stop waving the white flag at the first sign of trouble. I know. I know. It’s not that easy. It’s a risk calculation. But like so many things in life, that calculation should be biased in favor of truth. If everything comes down to a cost-benefit analysis, morality rarely wins. Backing people we believe are innocent is potentially costly. Sometimes we get it wrong. But if institutions wait for the investigation to run its course before they act, then people like me don’t get crushed in the process of paying off the loudest voice in the room. I know I’m oversimplifying it. Juries are unpredictable, and had I been found guilty, the insurance company would likely have had to fork over millions. The festival was in a difficult spot, but, again, given the paucity of incriminating evidence, and the abundant and available evidence that I didn’t do this, I wonder what would have happened had they waited, and publicly supported me. We’ll never know. Today, social media is full of people yammering about rape. They’re accusing the women of lying. They’re accusing Platner of lying. They’re saying the establishment bailed on him because he was sinking in the polls. Creepy. Rape. Rape. Rape. Put up or shut up. It seems to me our political class is increasingly being run by children, our media has no depth perception, and the adults have left the room. Maybe it’s a little foolish to say you should stand by your word. Let the voters decide. Let the jury decide. Quit listening to mewing mobs. Patience. The last people who should be deciding the outcome of this mess are the politicians who backed him through thick and thin, until now. You owe it to the accuser and the accused to act on principle, not the polls. And somewhere, an insurance adjuster closed a file years ago, called it a nuisance, and a folder with my name on it went into the drawer right behind it. In order to keep this podcast going, suggest it to friends or people you know, visit out of the blue podcast dot org. 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 [https://www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

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 [https://www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

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 [https://www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

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 matter. The truth was in the intent of the posting, not the reality. The logic goes like this: false accusations are rare. Getting struck by lightning is rare. Therefore, because it’s rare, it’s probably true that he raped her. They agreed with the idea, therefore it was true. It rewards ignorance, celebrates stupidity, and is intellectually lazy. Even more important to groupthink, these types of logic chains provide a clean answer, make agreement easier because they shut off the irritating rattle of disagreement. And that idea, that something is true based on mutual agreement, is surrounded by landmines. Anyone who tries to challenge it gets blown up. After I was arrested, the cast of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival was roiling. That’s not my opinion, I heard it from people who were there. There was real disgust at what many saw as a completely ridiculous accusation. I think I’m safe saying the bulk of the cast didn’t believe it, with only a few vociferously speaking out against me. To challenge the idea that I had violently raped someone in the middle of the day, in one of the busiest buildings at the show, with thin walls and a door that doesn’t lock. But the landmines of disagreement, were too costly to step on. So people I’d known and worked with for decades stayed quiet. Because you know. BOOM. That’s how groupthink takes over. It’s not that most of the cast thought I’d raped someone, they didn’t, but to speak out against them was to make yourself their target. That’s how you lose the moral ground and cede it to the lunatics. But if the truth still matters, even when we’re not entirely certain, then we have a moral obligation to take a stand. The more who do, the more will follow. It’s not about hating or overthrowing those who disagree. It’s remaining steadfast in support of what is knowable, and true. Accepting ambiguity is intellectually consistent. And being willing to change course when what we believed turns out to be wrong is not weakness, it’s the point. To make the point, I have substantial, conclusive evidence that I didn’t do this, thousands of pages of it. She, they literally have nothing. The DSA. The far right. The loudmouths who controlled the conversation about my guilt at the little s**t circus. Different flavors of the same thing, dangerous, potentially life-threatening, and so much of it built on the sand castle of falsity. After being the target of groundless accusation and insidious threats, the defense is conversation, not a monologue. Dialogue, not a decree. It starts with: I might be wrong, or I don’t know. It moves with: I’m listening. If we ignore the pitchforks, the haters, the dumbest and the destroyers, we only have ourselves to blame when we’re too late to step forward and defend what is precious. BOOM. 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 [https://www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

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 [https://www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]