Out Of The Blue Podcast Series

Accused - Acquitted - Ruined
  • 5.0 (3)
  • Documentary
  • Updated Weekly

I was arrested in 2017 and acquitted nearly four years later to the day. This is what happened in between. www.outofthebluepodcast.com

  1. 5d ago

    Introducing Beth Pacunas

    For three years, Out of the Blue has been a one-man show. I wrote it. I voiced it. I produced it. Hundreds of episodes. The heart of that work was a ten-part series about being wrongfully accused of rape at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. It covered four years of my life. From arrest to acquittal. From the headline to the silence that followed it. I told that story alone because I had to. Now I am ready for a change. And this is a good one. Meet Beth Pacunas My new co-host is Beth Pacunas. She is a writer, producer, and filmmaker. She is also a progressive feminist, and she says so without apology. Beth has spent years working with women challenged by poverty, domestic violence, and sexual violence. These are women whose voices are often drowned out in the noise of social media. Beth works as an on-set intimacy coordinator for motion pictures. Consent is not an abstraction for her. It is her job. She is an outspoken advocate for rape victims and for people caught in the cycle of domestic violence. She is also a survivor. That is exactly why her voice matters here. We do not always agree. That is the point. Beth brings a fresh, provocative, and nuanced view to the questions I take on each week. In This Episode Beth talks about her own experience as a victim of rape. She talks about what it took to name it, and what it cost. Then she tells me what she thought when she first heard about the accusations against me. She did not start out on my side. She describes how her thinking shifted, and what moved it. It was not loyalty. It was the facts, and the questions nobody seemed willing to ask. We talk about why a survivor would choose to sit across the table from a man who was accused. We talk about what it means to hold two things at once. That rape is real and devastating. And that an accusation is not a verdict. And Beth explains why she wants to confront the hard questions in our debates about sexual violence. Biased media. The mixed messages coming from social media and politics. The pressure to pick a side before anyone knows what happened. Why Due Process An accusation travels at the speed of a headline. A vindication barely travels at all. That asymmetry is where this show begins. When I was arrested, my name was everywhere. When I was acquitted, almost no one called. The institutions that amplified the charge had no interest in the outcome. The damage was public. The correction was private. Due process is not a technicality. It is the promise that facts come before conclusions. It protects the accused. It also protects survivors, because every verdict built on evidence makes the next survivor more credible, not less. Beth and I start from a shared belief. You can take sexual violence seriously and still insist on the presumption of innocence. Those two commitments are not enemies. Treating them as enemies has hurt everyone. What’s Ahead Each week, Beth and I will look at how stories get told and who gets to tell them. Media accountability. Institutional credibility. The way certainty spreads faster than evidence. The way trauma can become currency, and how that cheapens real suffering. We will take on politics, movies, books, and the authors who shape how we think. We will look at the cases in the news and the cases nobody covers. We will ask why a woman’s agency is honored in one room and erased in the next. We will argue. We will change our minds. We avoid slogans. We think it is a conversation worth having. We hope you will listen. *We know this is a long episode, but felt we needed to give the conversation some space to unfold. *Note: This episode includes graphic descriptions of sexual violence 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

    Introducing Beth Pacunas

  2. Oct 20

    The Scales Can't Hold

    This is the audio of a written article from last week. Please note, I’ve fixed a few minor errors in the original written article, and are included in this episode. There will another podcast yet this week. 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

    The Scales Can't Hold

  3. Oct 8

    The Machine Comes To Cornell

    The now infamous story about seven college students accused of drugging and raping a woman at Cornell is ubiquitous and ugly. Reading through the articles, I felt a familiar knot in my stomach. Is this the start of another moral panic? Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it plainly: “Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman.” Not alleged. Not accused. Stated as fact by a sitting member of Congress about a case no court has decided. The picture forming is of campuses overrun by drunken fraternity parties where rape is routine. Celebrities condemning. Politicians commenting. I could almost smell the torch fuel and hear the mob. I thought, here we go again. They might all be right, but history suggests it’s more complicated. This episode isn’t about deciding what happened in that house. It’s about how the story of what happened gets built, who builds it, and what it costs the people inside it, long before anyone hears the evidence. In case you missed it, Jane Doe, of course not her real name, filed a civil lawsuit on September 14 alleging, among other things, that Cornell University was negligent in its handling and investigation of her 2024 complaint. In that complaint, she alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by seven fraternity members. Cornell did conduct an extensive internal Title IX investigation, but Doe now argues in civil court that the university’s investigation was wholly inadequate and caused her additional harm. Her claims have not been tested in court. The original prosecutorial review resulted in no charges. The criminal matter was reopened in September, and on October 1, Governor Kathy Hochul appointed New York Attorney General Letitia James as special prosecutor. So far, no criminal charges have been brought against the men. But given the intensity of the public outcry, it may only be a matter of time before the gallows go up in the digital commons. Before I go any further, I want to be clear about something. I realize rape victims have to face deep trauma and confront years, sometimes decades, of recovery. They struggle to trust others. Many end up on substances that dim the pain, or get lost in abusive relationships. There is no finish line to recovering from such violence. The pain is in remission. That is exactly why this case deserves care, and not a stampede. For most of history, men weren't held to account for sexual violence. Women weren't believed, cases weren't pursued, and institutions protected their own. The correction that came, on campuses and in workplaces, was overdue, and often uneven in its enforcement. But a correction can overshoot. When the lesson becomes "the accusation is the proof," we haven't fixed the old injustice. We've traded it for a new one. Now that social media and the protests are growing, people are demanding immediate justice for Jane Doe. But it’s not clear who is guilty of what. According to reporting, a couple of the accused men simply walked into the room where something was happening, and then left. One says he kissed her. She says it was forced. Not every accusation in this case is the same accusation, yet all seven are being treated as rapists. That isn’t a judgment about her. It’s a distinction the coverage should be making, and mostly isn’t. The internet has already ruled. The names of all seven are everywhere, paired with group rape. The student newspaper printed their names and faces. That was an editorial decision, made by journalists, and everything downstream runs on it. TMZ is going 24/7. A former South Park talent says he’s building a website to post their photos, their messages, their documents. He says billboards are going up next. This feels uncomfortably familiar. Guilty before the court of public and political opinion. Guilty because the accusation itself is treated as proof. Guilty because “All Women Are Jane Doe.” This is the same violence I had to endure. It was quite literally an assault not just on my life, but on my existence. The commitment to ad hominem knows few limits when it comes to allegations of sexual violence, rape or molestation. Once accused, I was done. My life upended, my career destroyed, and my reputation damaged in ways that can never be completely repaired. All of this began with a criminal complaint alleging a grotesquely violent rape, for which I was ultimately acquitted. But the public narrative was a flood that drowned out any sense of propriety and fairness. The accuser’s attorney, John Klassen, told the Star Tribune that there had been an “ongoing and years long issue of sexual harassment” and sexual exploitation at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, adding that I was “the face and controlling authority over there.” Scott County Attorney Ron Hocevar described the allegations as “a pretty bad alleged abuse of power and physical superiority.” Klassen went further, describing the alleged assault as one of the most vicious cases he had encountered in 25 years of practicing law. The stories in the press were how most people learned about my case. You wouldn’t be blamed for thinking those stories made me look guilty. Of course my denials were reported, and a few facts appeared, but skepticism wasn’t in any line of copy. The accusation remained the organizing fact around which everything else was arranged. That is the issue. It becomes the foundation every future story is built on. That can happen in subtle ways. Word choice. Which details are included. Whom a reporter chooses to quote, how much space those voices receive, and where their comments appear in the story. Consider an August 8, 2018 Star Tribune story by Liz Sawyer. After page after page of gross allegations about me and the supposed culture of the Renaissance Festival, the story finally introduces people who weren’t on board with those claims. One of them was Jen Cowitz, who was a performer at the Renaissance Festival at the time. “He’s fundamentally not violent,” she told the paper. “This community is torn apart by this.” That’s a few words from her. She later told me it was a long interview, and that she said much more, but it was cut to that line. The newspaper did include someone who offered an alternative image of me. But placement matters. By the time a reader reaches Cowitz, the narrative has already been established through allegations that I was a groomer, that I sexually harassed women, that I had a “casting couch,” and that I cultivated a sexually hostile workplace. Jen’s brief quote arrives deep into the story, and the story just as quickly turns back to describe further allegations against me. This is what I mean by an organizing narrative. My guilt inferred. A denial may be included. A contrary witness may even be quoted. But the accumulation, sequence and weight of those choices can still leave the reader with an unmistakable story about what happened, long before any of it has been tested in a courtroom. The arithmetic of the media coverage in my case shows the same kind of narrative building now happening at Cornell. When I was charged in 2018, the Star Tribune devoted roughly 900 words to the story. It described the accusation in graphic detail and included trigger warnings, language that underscored the violence of the accusation. The alleged brutal beating. The alleged violence of the rape. That she vomited. That I threatened her. The supposed physical evidence and the words I was alleged to have spoken. None of it was tested before it was printed. Four years later, when a jury acquitted me on both counts, the newspaper devoted roughly 280 words to the verdict, less than a third as much. And that story didn’t include any of the evidence the jury actually heard when weighing my guilt. There was no examination of the facts, the inconsistencies exposed at trial, the defense evidence, or why twelve jurors acquitted me so quickly. A Star Tribune reporter was present at nearly every one of my court appearances. Not one came to the trial. The accusation had been explained at length in 2018. The acquittal in 2022 was merely announced. Then, nothing. Except it never really ends. Search my name today and [FILL IN: what comes up first, and where the acquittal appears, if at all]. The 2018 story is still doing its work. The 2022 story barely registers. That’s what the arithmetic looks like once it’s permanent. By the time the evidence arrives, the story is already finished. And at Cornell, the story is being finished faster. In my case, the narrative was built on a criminal charge. At Cornell, there is no charge. There is a civil complaint, a reopened investigation, and a member of Congress who has already announced the verdict. The narrative has now expanded to include a cover-up. Transcripts released this month show that in her November 2024 interview with Cornell police, Jane Doe said, "I can say with 100% confidence I was raped." That line was left out of the statement Cornell police sent to the Tompkins County District Attorney, who says he never saw it, and who based his decision not to charge on her signed statement. That omission is real, and it deserves answers. But "cover-up" assumes a motive no one has shown. And the same transcript describes drinking, drug use and gaps in her memory, while the district attorney says her signed statement described her participation as voluntary. One sentence from a 120-page transcript has become the headline. This isn't to say she wasn't raped. It's that, like everything else in this case, it's messy, and it's still unclear what happened that night, and who is responsible for what. In an online exchange, I pushed back on a woman I know who had posted a public shaming meme: photos of the seven students under bold letters reading SAY THEIR NAMES. Her own comment at the top of the post went further, invoking graphic physical violence. She suggested her mother would have insisted these boys be “strung u

  4. Sep 30

    Can You Take Back A Yes?

    Look up the word consent in the Oxford English Dictionary, and you’ll find it has a twin. Same sound, but two spellings. One is with a c, like a penny, a cent. One with an s, like something you send in the mail. Concent, with a c, is really an old word, mostly out of use now. It means harmony, several voices singing together, each one distinct, none of them lost. Consent with an s, well, that comes from a different Latin root, to feel together. I’m Carr Hagerman, and this is Out of the Blue. For centuries, the words were confused with one another, and that makes sense to me. One means harmony of sounds, the other means harmony of sentiment. I’ve started to think the confusion was never really about the spelling. These days, consent gets talked about a lot, like it’s a light switch. On or off. I do, I did, we do, we did. Yes, no. But what happens when yes contains a maybe? Consent in relationships, and around sex in particular, is full of line-by-line implications, many of them diffuse and complicated. The word consent used to be approachable, you know, t-shirts and flip-flops. It was thumbs up or thumbs down. Now it’s in a three-piece suit, if you will. A legal contract, triplicate signatures, record video, have witnesses. If things go right, run as planned, and everybody is happy with the agreement, then the outcome should be good for everyone. The word permission was the innocent antecedent to consent, if you will. But permission, we’re told, is patriarchy language, Catholic Church stuff. It’s something you ask for. It’s something that can be granted. “Excuse me, Sister Ann, may I have permission to go to the bathroom?” Permission comes down from someone with authority. Sister Ann could say no. Consent is supposed to happen between equals, so when it comes to sex, we’re not asking for permission. Well, that’s so yesterday. Now we’re seeking or giving our consent. The shift implies personal agency. The decision is yours. Hold on to that difference. It comes back. Regardless of how clear we are, how much we talk it out, no matter how much we might believe it, consent is still only an agreement made by people in a particular moment. The word doesn’t overcome all the challenges surrounding that agreement. Consent, for instance, doesn’t answer every question. It answers just one. Did I choose to do this? It does not tell us whether the choice was wise, healthy, fair, loving, embarrassing, foolish, or harmful. Those are all different questions. Now, once I give my consent, I’m saying yes to whatever it is we have decided on. Once you give yours, we can theoretically move forward with some confidence. Theoretically. A yes is given in one moment. The responsibility, well, now that lasts a lot longer than the moment does, and that’s part of the problem. In the movie The Invite, there are two neighboring couples. One is married, and they aren’t happy, and they haven’t had sex in a year. The other couple is dating. They’re seemingly happy, and they have wild, exotic sex that includes threesomes and, well, moresomes, and the couple downstairs can hear them screwing all the time. Consent takes an interesting turn when, after lengthy and sexually enticing offers, the couples decide to swap. Seth Rogen plays something of a loudmouthed schlub who complains a lot, but the idea of shagging the neighbor, who, by the way, looks exactly like Penélope Cruz, gets him pretty excited. I understand. I was excited for him. Finally, once consent had been discussed, he clarifies something they all talked about earlier. Cruz likes anal sex, and she says her boyfriend likes getting it as well. Rogen calls it back. He’ll consent to everything, but the whole pegging thing, well, that’s just not going to happen. Consent is specific to the act. It isn’t a hall pass to get whatever freak-on you want. What gets me about that scene is that it’s four people. They’ve all talked it through. They’ve agreed as a group, and Rogen is the one who understands that the group’s yes is not his yes. He pulls his own line out of the chorus and makes sure it can still be heard. That’s concent. Four voices, one agreement, and each voice still has its own. A room full of people can agree to something together and still leave every person in that room without the one thing that was supposed to matter. Their own yes, standing on its own, meaning what they meant it to mean. “The group consented” sounds like it covers everybody, but it doesn’t. It just makes it harder to notice that it doesn’t. Harmony is several voices agreeing. Unison is several voices you can no longer tell apart. From the back of the room, they sound exactly the same. And then there’s the version that’s harder to talk about than either of those, because it doesn’t have a villain conveniently waiting at the end of it. “Yes, we had sex, but you know, later I realized I really didn’t want that, so he abused me.” I’ve heard that line, or something close to it, in stories people tell about experiences they later came to understand differently. Sometimes that later understanding reveals something real that was difficult to see at the time. After all, we all grow. Someone may have been worn down over months or years. Saying no may have carried consequences they didn’t fully understand or didn’t feel capable of bearing. There may have been intimidation, dependency, intoxication, manipulation, fear, professional leverage, or some other pressure that made the apparent choice feel less free than it looked. Sometimes it takes some distance and time, or language, or another person asking the right question, to recognize that. That isn’t necessarily a retraction. It can be recognition. But regret exists too. So does ambivalence. So does the strange experience of saying yes while another part of you is whispering maybe. I understand regret. I’ve had my fair share, as we all have. But my regret doesn’t automatically belong to anyone but me. If nothing took the choice away from me, if I wasn’t threatened, incapacitated, deceived about something fundamental, frightened into compliance, or placed in circumstances where refusal carried consequences that overwhelmed meaningful choice, then my consent still belongs to me. If it doesn’t, what is consent worth at all? Years ago, I bought a pop-up camper. The salesman was a real slick closer, and I regretted the purchase. But he didn’t violate me. He sold me a camper. Being persuaded into something isn’t the same as being made to do it. Of course, persuasion can exist on a spectrum, and I understand that. There’s a point where pressure can become coercion, where leverage can make a supposed choice something else entirely. But if every decision we later wish we had not made becomes evidence that someone else overrode our agency, then agency doesn’t mean very much. Many years ago, when I was single, I dated an attractive and intellectually interesting woman. She was terrific. She was also married. She was having an affair with me and didn’t tell me she was married. She got my consent under false pretenses. Regret is real. Harm is real. Neither is automatically the same thing as non-consent. Someone can freely consent to something and later discover that it hurt them. Someone can make a terrible choice freely. Someone can feel ashamed of something they genuinely wanted at the time. Someone can be persuaded and later wish they had resisted. And conversely, someone can appear to consent while circumstances have actually stripped the choice of any meaning. These things are not easy to distinguish from the outside, and honestly, sometimes they’re not very easy to distinguish from the inside, at least not right away. In my Out of the Blue series, I tell the story of a female performer I knew from the Renaissance Festival, from 2001 until 2011. She was one of the closest friends my wife and I had at the time. Six years into that friendship, she and I had a brief sexual encounter. My wife and I had an open marriage at the time. Consent was discussed extensively. There were no promises, no pretenses, and afterward, nothing changed. She continued to be our friend for years. She was in her twenties. I was in a position of authority at the Festival, shared with others in my department. I won’t pretend otherwise. Power is real. But power is not a magic solvent that dissolves adult agency on contact. There was no quid pro quo. And later, when she entered into a relationship, sometime after that, her account of us changed. In 2018, she told Minnesota Public Radio that I had taken advantage of her. I can tell you when the story changed, but I can’t tell you why. That belongs to her, the same way my regret belongs to me. But I know what retrospective reinterpretation does to the question of consent. She stayed close to us for years. As an adult, she traveled with us. She spent time with us, lots of it. She chose friendship with us over and over again. That wasn’t one yes, it was hundreds of them. Not to sex, but to friendship. Those later choices don’t prove that she wasn’t harmed by something earlier. That would be too simple. Any serious account has to accommodate both things, what she says now and how she acted then. That’s precisely the problem with a standard that treats later understanding as though it automatically determines what happened earlier. Applied consistently, it begins to consume the very agency consent is supposed to protect. You can hear the full story in Episode 7 of the Out of the Blue podcast. Word of warning, it is behind a paywall. So that’s the answer to the question I started with. Maybe does exist. It just doesn’t always show up on time. Sometimes the uncertainty is there from the beginning, inside the yes itself. Sometimes it comes later, when we look back and understand the experience differently. That later understanding may reveal coe

    Can You Take Back A Yes?

  5. Sep 9

    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 c**k, 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 charged and there is a trial), she’ll do it again, in front of 12 strangers. You see the problem here? We fidget with those dark realities. We stare down the deep well of those caught in this…mess. We turn them into monochromatic archetypes that everyone on your team can agree with, identify with, support, or humiliate and hate. In this narrow alley, every violent rape accusation is true, survivorship is granted immediate credibility, and the act of speaking up is courageous. That’s probably a good thing, but it sometimes isn’t. This is a morality opera about gender, power, violence, equality, and justice. A system that once produced uneven justice for victims has come some distance for the good. For the most part, gone are the days of slut-shaming and victim ridicule. Victims are given more benefit of the doubt than ever before, and law enforcement procedures, while still limping and imperfect, are vastly better. But those tensions still exist, and they’ve grown stronger and more intractable. With the rise of impatient technology has come an impatient demand for swift resolutions. Thirty years ago, details of an accusation such as mine would have taken weeks, if not months, to slowly melt into the public conversation. But for all of the advances in victims’ rights, we’ve also been set back by the advent of fast news, the moral and social contagions that spread like molten steel, usually without caution or context. They amp up raw emotion and overwhelm nuance, patience, or discussion. Social media is a mob-making rage machine. Anyone with even a modest profile, accused of a sexual assault, will see their life quickly incinerated with little chance of recovery. While assault victims will suffer emotional and psychological wounds that will last a lifetime, the humiliation in the public square, the loss of career, and the ruin of reputation will cripple the accused’s life for decades as well. The curse of technologies isn’t that they over-inform, it’s the incentives they create to skip judgment and reflection. They don’t induce curiosity so much as they kill it through quickness. The mob, whatever that is, doesn’t want good questions, they demand quick answers. The tech doesn’t slow down our thinking. It demands we keep up. And we’re all too slow, and thinking too much is a drag. The new marketplace of ideas has become Amazon: want it now, get it now, no need to wait, why wait, waiting is for fools. That is why I was dead within hours of the accusation, why barely a few hours had passed before my name was set on fire. The mob couldn’t wait, the activists didn’t need to inquire, to abide, they had the god damned answer (GUILTY) before there was a thoughtful question. My name was on the boards, they wanted justice delivered to their door by the following day. Researchers who tracked over half a million tweets on gun control, same-sex marriage, and climate change found that moral outrage spreads fastest. Messages laced with moral and emotional language got shared roughly 20% more often, word for word. But when they looked at specific emotions, one stood apart. Anger and disgust came and went depending on the topic. Sadness consistently dragged a message down; it was the one feeling that reliably failed to spread. This might be an insight into why the outrage of an accusation overwhelms any notion of personal destruction and ruin. The feeling that actually describes what happened to a person, the humiliation, the hollowed-out years, is the one feeling nobody retweets. The thing I remember most about those early days after I’d been jailed, named as a “rapist,” was the sense that I was no longer a human being. Whatever suffering I was experiencing was deserved. Suffering was the point. The swiftness of my destruction was the feature, not the bug. A performing clown and former friend posted on social media within minutes of the news “BELIEVE IT! AND SO MUCH MORE!” It was followed by countless “likes” and comments such as “I knew it” or “Always thought he was a creeper” and worse. Of course, there was nothing more, in fact, there was nothing at all, but the fires had been started. And that brings me back to where I began. When we objectify both the victim and the accused, we render them into one-dimensional game pieces. The media loves little tokens, they’re fodder for the stew, useful for salty headlines that get us into the game. But the accused and the victim are complicated human beings, the circumstances are rarely simple, and the rush to survivorship or guilt is a road to absolute moral ruin. The one thing our justice system mostly gets right is the idea of a jury, and a judge who knows how to run one. It's not only that twelve people see the evidence, but that they do so in a quiet, orderly courtroom. They see and hear both victim and accused. They have a judge who insists the room moves at its own pace, not the mob's, and instructs the jury on how to weigh what they've heard. The jury alone must decide that

    Nothing More, But Everything Else

  6. Aug 26

    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 friends, and admirers. Whatever else this is, it is also tragic by any measure. Now, I’m always looking through the lens of what happened to me, what I went through after I was accused, to see if I can spot the signs of this media machinery elsewhere. It’s my project to uncover and understand the way these things grow and gain. What happened to Arday and what happened to me are not morally equivalent, but they expose the same flaw in the media, in culture. I became an instant villain, an invention, served to the media, which turned me into a monstrous rapist, predator, claims that were never tested in the slightest. They weren’t true in any way. Of course, my life was upended, instantly. Arday was first hailed as a hero on the strength of an extraordinary story, much of which is in question now, because it was never properly tested either. Arday seems to have conjured his own mythology. I had nothing to do with the construction of my story. Morally, the difference matters an awful lot, but the media’s role in both is worth acknowledging. In one case, they constructed, story by story, the narrative of a heroic protagonist, a brilliant man of color whose preternatural rise in academia was historic. He was the holiest of holy, a genteel academic who wore eye makeup, a professor with dreads, a welcoming smile, amiable and good. In the other, they constructed a storyline of sexual harassment, predatory behavior and horrific violence. Unlike Arday, whose many friends and colleagues defended him, and * thousands showed up in Trafalgar Square in London to decry the attacks on his life, I was attacked by the very people I worked with and served for decades, even former friends joined in the celebration of my destruction. In one case, ample evidence existed that something was amiss, but it was ignored. In another, undeniable evidence existed that it was b******t, but it too was overlooked. What is similar, follow me here, is that in both cases, the media manifests a hero or a villain, and once that is done it feasts on its destruction. I don’t believe that’s the way they think, nor that journalists generally are aware of the kind of curse they put upon a subject. Either way, the damage and the undoing become fuel for the clicks, the hits, and the headlines. In both my case, and Arday’s, the manifest character is more important than the human being behind it. I know the challenges this presents journalists, because isn’t it their job to report on what’s happening? Are they responsible for how a subject reacts to their reporting? I think, in some cases, they are. This is violence in the form of media. It chums the waters and then reports on the ugly details of the shark devouring the subject alive. The Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, who wrote the defining study of crowd psychology back in 1960, called it a public execution conducted through the newspapers. We all take part in this from the comfort of our home, choosing which grim detail to linger over, and maybe even applauding the blood sport, feeling none of the guilty complicity that would come from standing in the actual crowd killing a person. This is not determined by what’s true, as I’ve written before, truth is too often slow and plodding. I think, as cynical as this is, it’s determined by what sells. It doesn’t matter if the subject is ruined or maimed, it’s a story, it’s the news. What does the media, journalists, owe a human being when that person, his or her life, becomes a very good story? What restraints do they owe to the soul caught in a scandal, a lie, or a crime, or an innocent who has been wrongfully accused? In the wake of Arday’s apparent suicide, a petition was launched in the U.K. that I truly sympathize with. Rather than not reporting the details surrounding an alleged crime, the petition suggests that reports be limited for a time, meaning, there would be an imposed limit, a metering system, that would squelch the number of stories, particularly at the beginning. This might, as some believe, give the subject time to catch up with the momentum, offer some relief from the brutalizing effects of these ugly stories. I know it’s a problematic idea, but I’m here for it, I’m all for it. After all, if you’ve never been the subject of brutal media coverage, you can’t imagine how terrifying it is. There were days I thought I would suffocate from the anxiety of these articles, like dragging me across cut glass, who can breathe when you’re bleeding out. The accusation was horrible enough, but it was the media coverage that threw me into the ugly spiral of suicidal ideation. Arday’s mourners gather in London’s Trafalgar Square I’m not a fan of public punishment of any kind. Mobs, whether online, by the press, or in political protest, rarely move in a kind and just manner. That isn’t always true. Estonia’s Laulev revolutsioon, the Singing Revolution, saw several hundred thousand people gather to sing, a peaceful protest that helped win their independence from a crumbling Soviet empire. Kindness is the choice not to harm, to embrace non-violence. By that measure, our media usually fails. Tacitly or deliberately fanning the flames encourages the

  7. Aug 19

    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 questions. I write in my own words, my own version. To do otherwise is to choke my creativity, to shortcut the journey through the thicket, to guarantee I learn nothing about my own thought process. I’m a hypocrite, of course. I use AI to create cover images for my podcast, because I don’t draw or do graphic design. I could learn. That’s too laborious. I could hire a designer. I can’t afford that. I use recipes to cook, rather than experiment or learn things the hard way, through years of trial and error. There are people “making music” with AI who can’t afford a band, who don’t write music, but who write lyrics. On and on. But what AI can’t do for me is think. It can’t think through my ideas, or shape them, or use them in a style anyone would recognize as mine. Because AI is always, and forever, must be right. Here’s a beautiful sentence written by Wendell Berry: Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone. Here’s how AI “fixed” it: Some nights, in that loneliness, I swung among the scattered stars, held by nothing but a thin thread of faith. Why the changes? “Some nights in the midst of this loneliness” is three separate ways of saying the same thing before the sentence even gets moving. “Some nights,” “in the midst of,” and “this loneliness” are all doing the same setup work, work that could collapse into one move. “Swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith” stacks a lot of clauses between the verb and its object. By the time you reach “faith alone,” you’ve had to hold “swung... among... at the end of... thin thread of” in your head the whole way. Spoken aloud, that’s a lot of suspension before the payoff word lands. And “faith alone.” Is “alone” modifying faith, meaning only faith, nothing else? Or is it echoing the loneliness from the top of the sentence? As written, it could be read either way, and the AI didn’t think you wanted that ambiguity. Well, yes. Berry wanted the ambiguity. That was the point. AI didn’t rewrite the line to be better. It rewrote it to be right. But the original, for anyone who knows his work the way I do, is unmistakably his. In a future where AI does all the writing and all the thinking, everything becomes derivative. Every voice sanded down to the same one. When I set out to write about what happened to me, my first words were little more than a hammer and a nail, bludgeoning the putridity of the claims against me. Anger given a pen, or a keyboard, will write reams of invective, crude and uncivil. Expletives as expression. Fire, and only fire. Running an AI engine through hundreds of pages of what I’d written was a lesson in humility and restraint. It kept pushing back, sanding down, clarifying, reducing my hostility. I hated it. But it gave me the most important insight I had about my own writing: that it would represent not just how I thought, but how I wanted to be perceived. I was angry, and had every reason to be, but that was skin, not bone. By writing angry, and seething with contempt it was predictable and banal. I might get across my rage for the wrongful and immoral things done to me, but that just feels good and goes nowhere, and it isn’t original. That’s the thing about AI. It can be a useful tool for reflection, for replaying a line back to you, for questioning a premise. But the moment it takes the pen from my hand and writes the perfect sentence for me, I’ve forfeited the journey, and will never paddle out to that unknown outer bank, the one that can only be reached by word, and by time. My journey, as painful as it was, as dark as anything I’ve lived through, was an invitation to create something beyond a description of events, what happened, when, where. It was a chance to transcribe not just what was wicked, but what was good, beautiful and kind. And to do it with some measure of my own hand toiling on the page. To be original, in a way my accuser and her handful of supporters never had to be, or maybe, they never could. 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

    To Be Original

  8. Aug 13

    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 someone took the effort to call a guard on my behalf, then I could certainly respond with something better than my own indifference. Being nice, or kind didn’t get me out of that cell any faster. Some years ago, my wife and I were in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. We’d come out of a rare, but particularly challenging, passage in our marriage. We were fine, but there was still a hangover of uncertainty, wounds from our mutual transgressions. After bad news and years of uncomfortable conversations, we took to the road to reconnect. One perfect afternoon, we hiked up an embankment trail in the park. In the late afternoon October sunshine we ended up on a quiet high point overlooking the vast, lunar-like landscape. We sat for a long time in the late afternoon sun, talking, not talking, just looking. Whatever noise there was in our hearts was gone. It’s easy to think we needed to be in a place like that to feel the way we did. A beautiful, relaxing setting may make it easier to hear and see something good. But nothing in me fundamentally changed on that ridge. The thing that generated my impatience, my judgment, my irritation, all of it, was still sitting right there with me. As the old saying goes, wherever you go, there you are. The ridge didn’t disarm me, it just made it easier to choose. Being in jail made it harder to choose something good, but it was a choice that was available to me. It wasn’t a beautiful setting. There were ugly walls, stainless steel toilets, and so much anxiety. It was unjust, but so what. This brings me back home, so to speak, to the world I live in. While things may be getting better all the time, it can still seem like everything is broken. While I was in jail I was able to refocus my attention on doing good things. I was still locked in jail, alone, and anxious. Choosing good may change the experience, but not the reality. I found three young birds these past few weeks, sick, seizing, unable to fly. I couldn’t save them. What I could do was move them, out of the glaring sun, off the pavement, into the shade under the rhubarb leaves in the yard, somewhere cool, peaceful and quiet. One died there in my hands. The other two died later, under the leaves. I didn’t fix anything. I knew they were going to die. I did it because gentleness was the only thing left available to give, and giving it was still mine to choose, same as it was with the guards, same as it was in that cell. Is everything broken? Maybe, honestly, my answer depends on the moment. Frankly, I don’t have much energy for pessimism, of seeing the bad everywhere I look. It’s short-sighted and depleting. But bad news and broken everything seems to play well in the press, it stalks our defenses, convincing too many that it’s all s**t. One more thing about those dying robins, and how few of them are in our garden this summer. We discovered that someone in the neighborhood has most likely left rat poison out, set thinking it only kills rats. Of course that’s wrong. It kills everything. The answer to the deaths, to finding the source of their misery, starts by noticing the suffering, by refusing to look away. My mother never went looking for what was wrong in the world. She let the news come to her, at six and at ten, and then she turned it off and made dinner. I used to think that was avoidance. Now I think it might have been the same thing I’m trying to do with a dying robin, or a guard, or a cell with no windows. Not looking away. Just refusing to let it be the only thing you see. From the poem A Brief For The Defense, by Jack Gilbert. “If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,we lessen the importance of their deprivation.We must risk delight.” ©Jack Gilbert 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

    Everything Is Broken
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out of 5
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About

I was arrested in 2017 and acquitted nearly four years later to the day. This is what happened in between. www.outofthebluepodcast.com

Information

  • Creator
    Accused - Acquitted - Ruined
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    26
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Carr Hagerman
  • Show Website
    Out Of The Blue Podcast Series

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