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. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. Aug 6

    Fauci Was Right. About What?

    “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”—Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science” Last week, scrolling Facebook as part of my morning routine, I saw a post from a friend of mine, a retired nurse who was on the front line of the Covid nightmare. She saw, first hand, the ravages of that fast-burning disease, and how unprepared we were. I remember her posts from the middle of it: the people who weren’t taking Covid seriously, the front line workers who rarely rested. She’s earned the right to comment. So last week, after Anthony Fauci pleaded the fifth one hundred and eleven times in a senate hearing, some are calling it a show trial, she posted: “Fauci was right!” A friend of hers asked, “About what?” She answered, “Don’t be ridiculous.” Then the pile-on. Against the question. Against the questioner. About. What. That’s the question we should all be asking, isn’t it? I take Feynman’s line to mean the worry isn’t about being wrong. It’s when you stop looking once you’ve decided you’re right. I think Fauci was doing his best in a moment of extraordinary chaos. Trump was deeply unpopular. Distrust in our institutions was spiking like the virus itself. Fauci was, for most of us, the adult in the room. But in retrospect, some of what he said was wrong. And in retrospect, a lot of what he said was right. We will never get a real accounting of the failures, on any side, until the next pandemic shows up, and it will. If we can’t question the scientists, we’re doomed to repeat. It occurred to me that believing something as a matter of faith isn’t a sign of healthy skepticism. Take an accusation: a woman who says she was assaulted should be believed. That’s a complete thought. But it isn’t a full stop. Believe, then examine. Ask the questions. Investigate. All of it starts with that first word, believe, and through the process we move from believe to confirmed. Right? Now take Mr. Fauci. I’m not going to wrap myself around the cultural critique of him, that’s not my point here. I’m going to start with believing him, and just as we do with an accusation, we question, we evaluate the evidence, we determine the facts. In Fauci’s case, we’re screwed, because the politicians have turned him into the Covid monster, hanging every mistake made anywhere on him. I’d plead the fifth too, considering the pitchforks lined up against him. My objection isn't to women, or witnesses, or scientists, or expertise itself. It's not that we believe first, we do, and we should. It's when belief is the only move, when examination never comes. "Believe all women" and "believe the science" get twisted into stopping points instead of starting points, ways to skip the part where evidence gets checked. A woman can be telling the truth and still face cross-examination. Fauci can be brilliant and still be wrong. Scrutiny is good and it's necessary. But in our current politics, questioning Fauci, or questioning the science, has become a loyalty test. Doubting my accuser makes you a rape apologist. It's the same move religion makes for a god, or a coach makes for "the system," or a company makes for "leadership." That's what faith is for: a way of holding a claim that doesn't need evidence to stand. Say "have faith in science" and any scientist worth her degree will likely correct you. Science doesn't run on faith. It runs on testing, measuring, questioning, and all the friction that faith has no patience for. The law works the same way. Imagine a courtroom: “Your honor, Mr. Hagerman is accused of rape, and while we’d love to show you the evidence, we have none. But we have faith that she’s telling the truth.” We shouldn’t replace facts with faith. I’m on the side of the scientific method. I’m also a skeptic. I don’t think Fauci is Jonas Salk. He’s an institutional scientist, a bureaucrat, and he’s been in public office for as long as I’ve been alive. We should acknowledge his contributions, and he should answer every question we have of him, until we’re done. And the grandstanding politicians should be focused on what matters to the public: what did we do wrong, what did we do right, what did we learn, how can we do it better next time. It was the same with my accuser. Answer the questions. Show the evidence. Prove your case. It’s the least we should expect. Science is supposed to be self-correcting. The law runs on evidence and proof. The trouble starts when correcting the scientist gets treated as an attack on science itself, or asking an accuser for evidence gets treated as calling her a liar. Nope. It’s a process for grown-ups, and it really is life and death. And none of us, scientists or not, should put up with this childish b******t. Fact over faith. Evidence over authority. Anything else is just s****y theater. 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

    Fauci Was Right. About What?

  5. Aug 3

    She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. He said.

    Well, he won an Oscar, and now Jared Leto joins the cancel club amid “fresh claims” from ten women, some of whom say they were teenagers when the alleged conduct occurred — four of them alleging criminal sexual conduct, including one account involving California’s statutory age of consent. Again and again, the headlines hang the accused while the accusers are treated with dignity and presumptive credibility. The Hollywood Reporter uses the formal language of “allegation,” but the article’s tone assumes the credibility of the claims, not further questions, at least not yet. Its ugly headline pairs Leto’s denial with “bombshell BBC doc” before we are given even a glimpse of the supposed evidence. Given ten accusers, statistically, some of these claims are probably true. Even writing that feels presumptuous, because statistics don’t prove any individual case, and I know that better than most. I know, all the usual caveats apply, women do not generally invent accusations of sexual assault. But I know from reality that sometimes women do make false accusations. Both propositions can be true at once. We need to wait and wait and wait, before we kill a person’s career. Oh, too late. Now we have ten women, some of whom say they were minors, making claims against the same man. The sheer number makes the accusations appear more likely to be true. But does it? This is the part of the story that really sucks. If human nature wasn’t so flawed, or, to quote the Jesus people, “full of sin,” and a few women didn’t make ugly false claims, then there wouldn’t be a reason to doubt. Also, if men didn’t lie about attacking women. If juries weren’t swayed by the media. If investigators weren’t lazy. I digress. Let me offer a few questions in light of these caveats. These claims come to us through a BBC documentary, not a court of law. It’s entertainment. We have become accustomed to treating documentaries as faithful records of reality, but they are edited media products, seeking an audience, and to get and keep the audience, the tawdry and taboo are salient activators. A director will select, arrange and frame the evidence. They may be accurate. They may even be scrupulous. But they are not subject to the rules of evidence, cross-examination, or the adversarial testing required in any courtroom. Perhaps we should withhold a verdict. Oh, too late. Were the women’s accounts genuinely independent of one another? Did they know about the other accusations before telling their stories? Were any reports made at or near the time of the alleged conduct? What exactly did friends and family “corroborate”? Did they witness anything, see messages, or receive contemporaneous disclosures, or did they simply hear the accusations later? Are there police reports, medical records, photographs, emails, texts, or other evidence? Were inconsistencies identified and examined? Were any of the women also included in the earlier Air Mail article? How did Leto answer the individual allegations rather than merely issuing a general denial? The Hollywood Reporter doesn’t ask these questions. All it says is that the BBC “corroborated” some accounts with friends and family, but it does not explain what was corroborated or how. Corroborated could mean a friend who saw a text the next morning. It could mean a friend who heard the story a decade later, over drinks, after the story had already taken shape in the telling. The word is doing a lot of work for something the article never unpacks. I remember reading headlines and hearing stories and feeling as though my head might explode, because I knew what was true, and so did a great many other people. But because accusations of sexual misconduct are ordinarily treated as credible, and they should be, the accused person’s knowledge of his own innocence counts for almost nothing in public. Accusers should be treated with dignity. Their claims should be taken seriously. But taking an accusation seriously is not the same thing as treating it as established fact. And for what it’s worth, because this s**t is so serious, the accused should also be treated with some basic dignity. Right? The number of accusers featured in a documentary is not a verdict. A documentary is a constructed narrative made for an audience, and this one is sticky and popular, which is exactly the problem. All of these accusers deserve their day in court, as does Mr. Leto. It should bother everyone that his career is likely destroyed before he’s had a chance to protect his innocence in a courtroom, which is where this belongs. The article uses the rhetoric of due process, but abandons its spirit. It repeatedly says “alleged,” while framing, accumulating, and amplifying the accusations as though their essential truth has already been established. I know this. I was accused of rape, featured over and over again in the local press, and it was not true. The grammar says allegation. The headlines declare guilt. So where does that leave us? I don’t know if Jared Leto is guilty. I don’t know if these women are telling the truth, or all of it, or some of it shaped by each other’s telling. I hold that uncertainty honestly, and I’d ask you to hold it too. But I’m less uncertain about the mechanism. I’m of a mind that accusations this serious, rape, sexual violence against minors, should be tested in a court of law before they’re allowed to define a person in the media. I understand the free speech complications with that position, and I’m not pretending they don’t exist. But as long as production companies and civil attorneys, or activists can leverage the systems for profit, for clicks, for revenge, before any of it is tested, innocent people will keep getting hung before they’re heard. That’s true whether or not Leto turns out to be one of them. I’ll take up that argument in more depth in an upcoming podcast. For now, hold the doubt. Don’t let the grammar fool you into a verdict. 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

  6. Jul 30

    "Known ____"

    I spend more time than most looking at headlines and reading stories about men who are accused of sexual violence or harassment. It’s ugly reading. Based on statistics alone, most of those accusations are likely true, although until it’s gone through the courts and there is a trial verdict, the accused is still innocent. But the label of rapist, or predator, is attached to the accused from the moment the arrest is made public, long before there is a trial. Speaking from my own experience, the labels alone are enough to kill careers, destroy marriages, and ruin reputations. My life was flattened within hours of my arrest, and finding work is impossible, still. The jury took about an hour to acquit, not surprising, and I was free, but I was also damned forever. In a recent episode I wrote about the idea of being referred to as a “known predator,” of having been “credibly accused.” Admittedly, the number of people who use these terms against me is low. However, if my name comes up in some group discussion, it isn’t long before the heretics are out with branding irons and fire. That has led me to question the lexicography of ugly memes. If I’m a “known predator,” then why can’t I label my accuser a “known _ _ _ _”? I know, it could be very provocative, but no less so than calling me a predator. What is the equivalent of a “known predator”? I understand that sexual violence is about power, and men have the upper hand. History is replete with stories of women who have been abused, raped, used, preyed upon, and manipulated. Countless women reported crimes and were questioned about their motives, their dress, the “did you ask for it” sort of thing. Women were accused of lying, of covering up behavior that could be judged as “loose.” Some women have seen their attackers arrested only to see them acquitted for lack of evidence, or by a jury that simply didn’t believe her story. Many more women have lived in the shadows of guilt and fear, never reporting a crime, but living with the self inflicted shame. All true. All bad. But there are also those of us who have been falsely accused, and our lives ruined. By some estimates, six to eight thousand wrongful accusations are made per year, maybe more. And when we object to the moniker, our motives are questioned. If we ever dare say she, he, or they are lying, we risk more legal trouble. If we point to the lack of evidence, we’re quickly reminded that rape happens in private, and the absence of evidence proves nothing. We will never see our accusers brought to justice, acquitted or not. But we get labeled, in social and news media, and those labels stick. To give you a sense of the rhetorical challenge, here is a list of a few words used against men like me. It’s worth noting, nearly all of these were used to describe me, on social media, in legal documents, or in news stories: Rapist, sexual assailant, sex offender, perpetrator, attacker, assailant, abuser, sexual abuser, predator, sexual predator, exploiter, groomer, harasser, serial rapist, serial predator, monster, beast, deviant, pervert, creep, pig, menace, dangerous, accused, alleged rapist, suspected offender, defendant, respondent, the accused, accused abuser, known predator. So I went looking for a word that I could cast at the woman who accused me, something that might stick to her life like all of the words above have stuck to mine. There should be some equally charged words standing on the sidelines, just waiting to be put into this game of epithets. I need a big brute of a word, something with knuckles and jaw. I went looking because some nights I wanted a word that would follow her around. The first problem is, she’s never been publicly named. It’s ludicrous of course, so the first thing I would do is post her name. So, then what? I thought about liar. But that’s too small a word, as common as summer pollen. We all lie. Only a chosen few are predators. You can be a liar and still get invited to the party. You can lie routinely, as a brand, and get elected to the White House. I digress. Fabricator. Nope. Sounds like shop class, something knocked out of sheet metal. Serial accuser. Meh. Not a potboiler, and it doesn’t even fit my case. As far as I know I’m the only one she’s ever accused. Also, nobody’s making a monster movie about a serial accuser. Predator, obviously, doesn’t work. It’s been trademarked by the accusation industry to describe, almost exclusively, men. It simply doesn’t attach easily to women. Sorry, it’s true. More than half a million words in the English language, and not one of them is truly dressed up and suitable to hang on my accuser. We built an entire vocabulary, forty plus terms deep, for what a man might be capable of. Rapist. Predator. Monster. Beast. For her, there is nothing. It doesn’t feel like justice. It feels like being handed a knife with no blade. I spent a night trying to build the word out of spare parts, let’s see, there’s liar, slut, fraud, snake, and others that bubble out of the bilge of abhorrent language, but none of them held. Not because I’m a better man than the people who called me a predator. I’m not sure I am, some nights. They failed because the language just doesn’t fit the feeling, and it doesn’t belong in the room. The ugly words feel more comfortable in my presence when I’m acting small and petty. But then it hit me. While I don’t have a word for her, I have a better word for me, one that has weight. Innocent. And it wasn’t pulled from my stupid big dictionary set. It was a gift of sorts, given to me by twelve strangers who heard the testimony, saw the evidence, watched her testify, and took about an hour to decide none of it was enough. It’s real. It’s also not enough, most days, to fill the hole the other word left. I decided long ago I wasn’t going to say her name in my writing, I wasn’t going to give her some nasty honorific. I know exactly what a s****y name does once it’s loose in the world, I watched it happen to mine in real time. Using it on her wouldn’t be justice. It would just be me, finally, joining the mob. I’m not willing to become the thing I’m angry at, even on the nights I want to. I’ll never get over what happened to me, so I looked for the word. I wanted it so bad. I didn’t find one, and even if I had, I don’t think I’d have used it anyway. Some doors, once you go through them, don’t let you come back out the same size you went in. 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

    "Known ____"

  7. Jul 27

    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 Landing Marian 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 remember them now, and don’t need to. They don’t animate my heart, they aren’t navigational charts. Murphy’s Landing / 2023 In the dark days after my arrest Marian took on the unenviable task of keeping me from disappearing into depression and suicide while simultaneously becoming something like a paralegal, organizing every detail of the case, making sure nothing was left out. She was also attacked online, accused of aiding in my sexual harassment or rape and should be thrown in prison with me. But, she never flinched from defending me or our marriage, or her assessment of those involved, one of whom was once her closest friend. Right before our first court date, at the very beginning, her employer let her go without warning. She told me how she fell to her knees in the hallway outside her boss’s door, sobbing, begging them not to do this. Because my career was destroyed, hers was now the only income we had, it was our health insurance, and everything else we needed to pay for, including escalating legal costs. It took her months to find a new job, and during that time she never wavered, she kept our home emotionally stable, all the while I was flailing. I was so broken and weak, and if she was anything other than strong, kind and generous, she never let on. I used to think saving someone’s life was an episodic moment when a person intervened, heroically sometimes, like pulling someone from a burning home, a car wreck, administer CPR, save a drowning person from a raging river. But, Marian saved my life countless times, over four years. It was these small things — wanting to go for walks with me, to walk the dogs together, have a picnic to get me away from the darkness that had enveloped our home. She encouraged some friends to build a studio space for me. Telling friends to call, encouraging people to visit. I was so down, but she was always there to remind me of what good there was in my life, again and again. She told me about the evidence, how solid our case was, working with my attorney so closely, and a million times “We’re going to be okay.” And a million more, “I love you.” One of the darkest days of my life was the day the Minnesota Department of Human Rights put out a press release that declared me guilty of rape. I knew there was an investigation happening, but I was completely blindsided by the report. Standing in our living room, reading it, I started to scream something I said frequently whenever some ugly new twist emerged. “They aren’t going to stop until I’m in prison or they kill me!” Marian held me until I calmed down, and repeated her mantra, “We’ll be alright. You’ll be okay. They have nothing.” If not for her I might have succumbed to the overwhelming desire to relieve the churn of pain and fear I was caught in. I’m not entirely without inner strength and resolve, but we pulled together. She never wavered, she never doubted, even when I was close to the edges of a horrible darkness. Shakespeare wrote that love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, that it bears out even to the edge of doom. That’s a popular vow, and certainly better written than the one we said at the altar. I guess what I’m saying is words, however well written, are still just words on a page. It’s a mild late spring evening, the windows are open and the song of crickets is tumbling with a slight breeze. I’m looking at her again, still on that couch. Thirty-five years since a church, since a passage from a prayer book, since vows we wrote ourselves and can’t recall a word of now. What I remember is her sense of humor, her fearlessness and resolve. But it’s the dark passages I recall most vividly: her hand on my back while I raged, her calm assurances when the nightmares came. “We’re going to be okay,” she said, over and over, “it’s alright.” We never spoke of the vows. We didn’t need to. They were already our marriage. 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

  8. Jul 22

    "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 that way, jumping on the bandwagon required no evidence at all. Nowhere is the mechanism clearer than Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Most of the country never read the testimony, never weighed the timeline, never sat with the specifics. They didn’t need to. Everyone around them already believed, or already didn’t, and that was enough. The hearing wasn’t really a fact-finding exercise for most of the people watching it. It was a referendum on which badge you were wearing, “I Believe Her,” “Believe Women,” Time’s Up. That’s the mechanism at national scale. What happened to me happened at festival scale, with the same parts. We should all be wary of mechanics this simple, the rush to label and condemn that’s become so common. I didn’t believe Christine Blasey Ford, not because I thought she was lying, or insincere. Quite the opposite. Let me be precise. I didn’t believe the evidence was sufficient to convict. In many progressive circles, Kavanaugh is a known rapist. On the right, he’s simply innocent. Both sides are certain. Neither side is working from more evidence than the other. I believe he’s innocent. But I don’t know. It never occurred to me that I’d end up on the wrong end of a #MeToo accusation, let alone one alleging rape. But the permission structure doesn’t just encourage accusation. It discourages the question. In 2017, more than a dozen women from the cast sent me screenshots and texts. They showed a small faction inside the performing community running on outright misandry. Several of those women had pushed back inside the group, only to be shunned or called rape apologists. Some left rather than keep fighting it. Calling me a known predator means nothing outside that group, because it’s been disproven, repeatedly, to everyone but the people who never needed proof in the first place. Inside the group, it isn’t treated as belief anymore. It’s treated as settled fact, without ever needing evidence to become one. The woman who called me a known predator isn’t unusual, and by her own colleagues’ account, not a popular figure. She found a pattern that she believed explained everything about men, power, predation, and then went looking for men to fit it. Once you have a pattern like that, you don’t need new evidence for each new case. You just need a name. The pattern does the rest. This is also, if we’re honest about it, the basic architecture of conspiracy thinking. A conspiracy theory doesn’t fail because it lacks a mechanism. It has a mechanism, and the mechanism is airtight. Every new fact either confirms the theory or gets explained away as part of the cover-up. Point to condensation trailing off a wing at altitude and the true believer doesn’t see water vapor, he sees the proof he was looking for. There is no piece of evidence capable of disproving the theory, because the theory was built to survive contact with evidence. That’s not a coincidence. That’s the design. Conspiracy theories make dumb people feel smart, because they’ve discovered the secret, untied the knot, found the hidden pattern everyone else missed. Her framework works the same way. Every man is either a confirmed predator or a predator who hasn’t been caught yet. My forty years without a single complaint isn’t evidence I’m not a predator. It’s evidence I’m good at hiding it, or that women were too afraid to come forward, or that the institution protected me. Whatever the story requires, the story provides. That’s the tell. A belief with an answer for every possible piece of counter-evidence isn’t a belief anymore. It’s a closed system. And closed systems don’t get corrected by facts, because they were never built to be falsifiable in the first place. The people most certain they’d never fall for a conspiracy theory are often running one. They just don’t call it that, because the targets feel righteous instead of shameful. Nobody thinks of themselves as the guy with the corkboard and the red string. But structurally, that’s what she is. She has her string, and I’m the pin at the end of it. She isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at the shape she already believes in, and I happen to be standing where that shape needed filling. It’s what makes moral panics durable instead of momentary. A liar knows she’s lying. She doesn’t. A lie requires knowing the truth and saying something else. She isn’t doing that. She’s saying what she’s certain is true. That’s the difference, and it’s the whole problem. Certainty doesn’t check its work. Only doubt does. The women who reached out to me in 2017 understood this before I did. They watched the group harden around a belief that didn’t have to answer to facts anymore, and they tried to push back from inside it. Some of them told me directly that it felt crazy, like watching a room agree the world was flat. The world isn’t flat. But inside that group, flat was in fashion, and questioning

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3 Ratings

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
    21
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Carr Hagerman
  • Show Website
    Out Of The Blue Podcast Series

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