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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Hello, it's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. And today on the Saturday show, I'm going to give you a live a substack live that I did live, but.
- [00:33]
Kat Rosenfield
Now it's on tape.
- [00:34]
Mike Pesca
And I talked to Kat Rosenfield on Thursday.
- [00:37]
Kat Rosenfield
We really talked about two things. And Cat's a great writer for the.
- [00:40]
Mike Pesca
Free Press, although I think she says.
- [00:42]
Kat Rosenfield
At one point in the conversation the.
- [00:43]
Mike Pesca
Free Press, which is weird.
- [00:45]
Kat Rosenfield
It's like an Empire State Building.
- [00:46]
Mike Pesca
Empire State Building type of thing.
- [00:49]
Kat Rosenfield
We're talking mostly about Harvey Weinstein. And then a little bit we get.
- [00:52]
Mike Pesca
Into the journalist Wesley Lowery.
- [00:54]
Kat Rosenfield
All very interesting. So I will say I'm doing a.
- [00:58]
Mike Pesca
Lot more of these substack live conversations. And if you want to hear them live, uh, you should, you should join my substack.
- [01:06]
Kat Rosenfield
I don't know, should I say community?
- [01:07]
Mike Pesca
Just go to Mike pesca.substack.com and every day we put together the gist list. That's five to seven stories that have my commentary. They often echo things I say on the show.
- [01:17]
Kat Rosenfield
They often preview things I say on the show.
- [01:19]
Mike Pesca
They often flesh out things I say on the show. But the other great thing about substack is I often do long written commentaries. That is the Pesca profundities portion of the Mike pesca.substack.com dealio.
- [01:31]
Kat Rosenfield
But it's the live conversations I'm getting.
- [01:33]
Mike Pesca
More and more into. Kat Rosen Field is a great interlocutor.
- [01:37]
Kat Rosenfield
But you know who else will be? Nate Silver.
- [01:39]
Mike Pesca
He's coming up next week. And then I also got one with.
- [01:42]
Kat Rosenfield
John McWhorter if you want to hear them live and if you want to.
- [01:45]
Mike Pesca
Hear them in full because we only play parts of them here on the Saturday show. When we play parts of them, do subscribe at Mike pesca.substack.com Father's Day gifts. I don't know, maybe there's a sameness to it. Socks, grills, tools. Repeat the year. I wanted to do better, so I quinced it up. Quince makes buying a thoughtful gift easy. They have all the pieces. Dads, I'm one wanna wear organic cotton silk polos. I have to say, did I know I wanted that? I didn't. And Then it touched my skin and my skin thanked myself. It was a little, you know, self dealing, as they say.
- [02:28]
Kat Rosenfield
Say.
- [02:28]
Mike Pesca
But they also have European linen beach shorts and awesome pants. And quince is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find with similar brands. It is the whole cutting out the middleman, but it really works. They work with top artisans. They don't hit you with the crazy markups. They hit you with the delightful fabrics and these factories that are safe and ethical and responsible. And for Father's Day, I gotta say I got it for me and then I gave it to my dad. The shirts that I'm talking about, the polo shirts, they were amazing. I didn't want to give them up.
- [03:05]
Kat Rosenfield
I had two.
- [03:06]
Mike Pesca
One for me, one for dad. I chose the color that I wanted and they're amazing shirts. And I made my dad love me more. I made him. For the dad who deserves better than basic, Quince has you covered. Go to Quince.com the gist for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com the gist to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com the gist hi guys. Is Ed getting you down? Do you not if literally here imagine the crude crescendo of the slide whistle. You know the one. Let's get other things like your confidence back up with hims. HIMS provides you access to treatments that could help you last longer. So you can be ready whenever the mood strikes if you're feeling stalled out in the bedroom. HIMS is the solution. It's changing men's health. By providing you access with affordable sexual health treatments from the comfort of your couch, HIMS provides an access to a range of doctor trusted ed treatments like here are some you may have heard of. Viagra Cialis. So this isn't some weird off brand version of Cialis. This is the Cialis, the one with the tubs on tv. And you get it from hims. You fill out a form. A medical provider determines the right treatment for you. Your medication ships directly, shipping's free. No insurance is needed. That's really important. Hims has been doing this for a long, long time. They're very trusted. Is very important area for men, from what I understand. And HIMS is the one who can help. Start your free online Visit today at hims.com/the gist. That's H I M S.com the gist for your personalized ED treatment options. Hims.com the gist. Now here's the part I speak fast. Kat Rosenfield and I talked about, like I said, where the MeToo movement is headed, where it went. And we talked in the beginning about Harvey Weinstein. Let me set legally what happened to Weinstein. He was retried in New York. He was convicted on one of the charges of rape. He was sexual assault. He was found not guilty on another and then the jury hung on the third. Weinstein is in jail, will still be in jail. He has a California jail sentence hanging over him. But we should just establish why we're talking about this again. And remember he's already guilty in California. The question I begin, as you will hear with Kat, is is it better for someone like her who is a critic of the MeToo movement? Not all of it, but some of the excesses.
- [05:59]
Kat Rosenfield
Is it better when you're the critic of a movement for the most prominent.
- [06:04]
Mike Pesca
Example of that movement or what caused that movement to come into existence and to gain momentum? The most prominent example to have been legitimate or illegitimate.
- [06:15]
Kat Rosenfield
And I thought of the McMartin preschool.
- [06:17]
Mike Pesca
Case where there was a lot of.
- [06:19]
Kat Rosenfield
Satanic panic 20 years ago and the.
- [06:21]
Mike Pesca
McMartin's did not abuse kids in the name of Satan. Then I thought about stranger danger panic.
- [06:27]
Kat Rosenfield
Now that's a real thing.
- [06:28]
Mike Pesca
And the err case there was Adam Walsh and Adam Walsh was kidnapped. So again the question, we have a movement. The movement raised awareness. It at least reflected society's rethinking of some aspects of sexual assault.
- [06:45]
Kat Rosenfield
But what do you, Kat Rosenfield, as someone who is a critic in the.
- [06:49]
Mike Pesca
Best senses of such movements and who thinks about them critically, what do you think about what we'll call the ur text?
- [06:57]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, that you know, it's difficult. People like Harvey Weinstein ended up caught in this moment where the paradigm shifted and you know, things that were maybe distasteful but still legal back in one moment became illegal prosecutable offenses in the next. And you know, I do think that you're seeing as opposed to somebody like Bill Cosby who was straightforwardly committing crimes, you have the Weinstein cases, at least the ones that I'm familiar with are a, a little bit murkier in terms of how much agency did these women have. Was it, you know, were they physically forced or was it just coercion? Did they feel they could leave? Some of them were engaged in a relationship with him like sometime after the, you know, it's, it's complicated and like it's difficult whenever we start talking about stuff like this, like, I'm not here to cast aspersions on whether anybody. Like, I don't want to adjudicate whether anybody was or wasn't raped. I have no desire to do that. That's not what I'm here for. But understanding how the contours of the discussions surround rape and sexual assault has changed, I think is important to understanding what is the. You know, how do we think about the MeToo movement now, just a few years after its peak? And how are we going to think about it down the line? How is it going to be remembered? And I suspect it's going to be remembered as something that was, on the whole, kind of uncontrolled, kind of characterized more by its excesses than its legitimate victories. And that's just because you have. For every Harvey Weinstein who is, you know. Yeah. Like a legit witch who was caught up in the witch hunt, you also have, like, I don't know, 10 Aziz Ansari types who did what, you know.
- [08:47]
Kat Rosenfield
That bad date, you know, give wine to someone who wanted white when she got red. All of this. Yeah, yeah. But also, you know, excellent for the circulation of babe.net. so I'll give them that.
- [08:59]
Wesley Lowery
I think they're dead.
- [09:01]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah. And to me, it's not just the Aziz Ansari example. It's the hundreds of college students who weren't up against criminal charges, but were up against the standard of proof that was just. It wasn't reasonable doubt. It was a preponderance of the evidence doubt, which is just to say if there is more evidence that exists or not. And in some cases, some of the standards of proof of some of these adjudication panels under Title 9 were de facto even less than that. And I suppose an adherent of the MeToo movement would say this was the necessary corrective and this was justice. But it's not how. I'm not even. Just like, you're not here to adjudicate rape victims. I'm not here to say fair or unfair. I will just point out it is not how Americans have defined justice and have always defined justice. And the reason there was a backlash wasn't just the manosphere or their moms getting mad at it is I think, that there were fundamental, fundamental breaks with traditional American definitions of justice. And the MeToo movement embraced that. And now what you're putting your finger on is maybe history will remember that embrace as shameful rather than salutary.
- [10:18]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah. I mean, you won't say fair or unfair, but when it comes to the way that college campuses decided to structure these. I mean, they were basically kangaroo courts. I will just say straightforwardly, I think it was unfair. I think it was one of the few good things that Donald Trump's first administration accomplished to try and roll back some of those missteps that were actually instituted during the Obama era. And one of the reasons that I think this is because I don't think that the new paradigm that was installed there was particularly good for women. It's not just about young men getting railroaded. There was this one. Well, not one, but there were many cases centered on this. This one particular idea of consent is something that had to be sober. So, like, if people were engaged in drunken sex, then it was understood that it wasn't consensual, but only for the woman. Like, you know, it was like, oh, these two people were drunk and hooked up. The next day the guy was charged with rape. This was a poster, by the way, that I'm quoting from. But this was like, this was the way that it was set up. This was the understanding, the new understanding in the kind of like, yes means yes, enthusiastic consent era of like, what did it take to consent? She had to be sober. She has to be enthusiastic the entire time, which is just say, like, if you're having sex and if for any moment you feel uncomfortable or unsure or nervous about what you're doing, which you often do when you're having sex, especially if you're inexperienced and doing it for like one of the first few times, that means that probably you're being raped or something non consensual is happening. That's really like a. It's not just that this is unfair to men, it's that it's a terrible thing to tell women. It's a terrible thing to tell women to tell them that they're always like one step away from being raped. And like, if you lose focus in this game for one second, you're gonna end up traumatized for life. I really, I strongly disapprove of that, as you can probably tell.
- [12:12]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah, so it's a cherry picking of a combination of really antiquated Victorian ideals. Like, only the women, the woman, if she's had a drink, only she can claim sexual assault and extreme progressive, pointy, edge of the spear, supposed advances. So we are going to marry the Victorian era definition of women as permanently vulnerable creatures with the idea that we're going to have prosecutions that throw away due process and standards of proof and evidence. I will say that I remember when I went to college in Georgia, they told Us that Georgia has a state law that says if two people have sex and one of them is drunk, the man is responsible for rape. And I said, oh, well, that makes sense. Georgia is one of these backward states that doesn't sell beer on Sundays. So that backward state of Georgia in the 1990s, we took that and applied it to, you know, all of progressivism.
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Mike Pesca
I.
- [13:16]
Kat Rosenfield
Think, however, that, you know, the Weinstein case is interesting because it's so hard to disaggregate and disentangle the normal progress that society makes on understanding issues of sexual assault. The de facto. Do you believe women or do you disbelieve women? I think that 30 years ago, there was a de facto, from what I understand, disbelief of women. And now I think that that has. That has changed. That has changed enormously. The Me Too movement will say, ah, it was we who changed it. But I think that the change was in the air. Society was changing, and the Me Too movement jumped on, changing definitions of what actually is assault, and probably in many cases, went too far.
- [14:10]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah. I mean, the other thing that it did by way of doing that was change the notion of women's agency and women's ability to consent. One of the. Sorry. Katie Herzog is asking to see my dog, who I think is behind me.
- [14:28]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah. And she's also claiming that I'm in front of my shower curtain, which is why I pivoted. I'm not. I'm in front of my. I'm in my kind of messy recording studio. But this is. This is what we chose to be the good background, just so you know.
- [14:40]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah.
- [14:41]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah.
- [14:41]
Wesley Lowery
Actually, Winston. Winston's over there. Sorry, but I'm not picking my phone up. Anyway, what were we talking about? Oh, right. Changing ideas of women's agency. I mean, I was raised in the school of feminism as the radical notion that women are people. And the Me Too kind of concept of women is women are people until or unless they get drunk or experience some kind of social pressure, at which point they become more like large children who are just, like, you know, their agency just crumbles underneath any kind of pressure. And so, like, they're socialized to be people pleasers. They're socialized to say yes when they really want to say no. And so you can't trust them. I don't really like this casting of women as society's unreliable narrators. And that, unfortunately, has been intrinsic not just to what's happening on college campuses when it comes to adjudicating complaints of sexual misconduct, but also intrinsic to a Lot of the gray area, MeToo cases where we're not talking about women in professional circumstances, we're talking about, like, women being interpersonally disappointed by a man they were dating. That kind of thing.
- [15:54]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah, yeah, I remember. So on the issue of did the MeToo movement foster this change, absent me too, would we have had these changing societal values about, you know, consent and. And if it was okay to pressure women, if not to actually physically hold them down, if that is some version of sexual assault, you know, it's hard to ever know. But I do remember a couple of years ago, I interviewed a former prosecutor from Philadelphia, and he. He was telling me that it was extremely hard to bring sexual assault cases that are, he said, she said, because the law says that juries should default to not guilty verdicts. And I didn't. I saw the difficulty there, but I didn't see anything that we could do about it or that was wrong with it. And then he said that what prosecutors have to do is take more of these cases if they thought that they could prove them. And this would require maybe using some circumstantial evidence, maybe using some persuasion to juries. But the big thing that changed when I followed up with him years later was that juries just got on board with the idea that, you know, maybe the he said, she said we should default to the she part of the she said. Juries, especially in Philadelphia, just became more con. More willing to convict. Is that progress? I don't know. I would say on a case by case basis, if it was. If it was apartment if it fits the facts, it's some version of progress. I don't think it was progress when prosecutors just wouldn't bring a case for the 10% fear that they would lose. But I also definitely don't know if we should credit me, too, with creating the progress or MeToo was a beneficiary or a symptom of the progress of, you know, not automatically disbelieving women.
- [17:56]
Wesley Lowery
I mean, all of this stuff has to be understood as happening in the context of whatever the culture is of the moment. And I don't think that you can divorce things from that. So I don't know. I'm just trying to think of what good analogy would be like. If you have a moment where everybody is culturally, like, there's a consensus that we are now taking witchcraft very, very seriously. And then all of a sudden, juries become that much more willing to convict people of being witches than they used to be. They used to be skeptical about the witchcraft trials. Now they're like, no, throw them on the pyre. Is that progress?
- [18:36]
Kat Rosenfield
No, I would say unfair analogy, because my Wiccan friends accepted there is no such thing as witchcraft. Maybe something like insider trading. Right. Which is very hard to prove.
- [18:47]
Wesley Lowery
But.
- [18:47]
Kat Rosenfield
But also, it is a thing. It is a legal thing. There's an analogy. Do you think.
- [18:54]
Wesley Lowery
Okay, it's hard. It's hard because, like, I mean, I suppose we could say, what, theft? Like, you know, I got a paper.
- [19:02]
Kat Rosenfield
I got a good one. I got a very good analogy. Juries were almost more than unwilling, almost never convicted a cop who was accused of murder or a bad shooting. And they've become much more willing to do so. So. So that's like they. It's now possible to get these convictions. I'm sure. By the way, I'm sure the BLM movement would say, thanks. That's thanks to us. Or I think probably the movement is more the symptom of the societal change than the other way around. Yeah, yeah. And right now with cops, I think it's probably true in the criminal system with accused rapists, but with cops, it's still very, very hard to get a conviction. It's just possible, I think that. Well, you know, I always said about the. This is kind of a different thought, but I always said about the MeToo movement. Believe women is a terrible motto. Maybe you think it works for you in the short term, but believe women, except when they shouldn't be believed or maybe when they're making an accusation that isn't true or unless you really, really remember they're humans and humans lie. So I always thought that Believe women was bad. The real motto that they were trying to. If they were being responsible, they were trying to get across was don't disbelieve women. But I admit that's a bad motto. It's got double negatives.
- [20:23]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, yeah. People will be confused by that.
- [20:25]
Kat Rosenfield
But that's what they were trying to say, right? I mean, to think of them very generously. Isn't that really what they were trying to say? It's just that it's harder to get people to absorb, don't disbelieve women. Whereas believe women is this great slogan, slash asked hashtag.
- [20:41]
Wesley Lowery
Okay, some people probably. Probably deserve that generosity, but certainly not all of them. And the reason I'm saying this is because it was ubiquitous in the. For people to go online and say, I totally realize that some innocent men are being railroaded are, you know, being, like, having court cases brought against them falsely, or are just having their Lives wrecked, are having their professional reputations destroyed or losing their livelihoods over stuff that is either overblown or just straightforwardly false. And you know what? I don't care. I am willing to throw them on the pyre for the sake of making this social progress. And you know, I, I am going to just take these people at their word that they really were okay with the idea of, of destroying a handful or more of innocent lives for the sake of changing the culture.
- [21:35]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah, the shitty media men list I think had a lot of justification around it that pretty much echoes what you just said.
- [21:42]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, yeah. And I think the shitty media men list was an act of great evil. So.
- [21:48]
Kat Rosenfield
Well, because. And I come back to. I don't know that America mostly gets it right, but here we are 250 years later. We had a shared set of rules and beliefs and there were things like innocent until proven guilty and due process and the presentation of evidence. And when all these movements violate those precepts, we don't like it. Is it that we're conditioned or habituated to, to demand those things? I mean, maybe it doesn't even matter when the movements violate these basic ideals of America. Americans don't like it. Another really good example of this, a little more subtle. In the Amber Heard Johnny Depp case, Amber Heard was proved to have lied not about everything, but there were elements of her story that were lies. She exaggerated or she reported things that didn't happen. And even minor, maybe you remember some of the detail, but minor things about what she said to publicists using makeup to show that she was beaten up when she wasn't. So what the law says is when you're trying to find fact, think about a witness who has lied and let that guide you into your characterization of all the truth statements that that witness would say and more or less, and I don't think this has been a flaw of the criminal justice system. We default to that. That is what juries are instructed. How do you ascertain the truthfulness of a witness? Look to other areas. If the witness has lied in other areas, infer from that that the witness may be lying. Now, feminism of 2020, whatever says there should be exceptions to that, or maybe there's a wholesale rejection of it. Right. Feminism will say, well, there are reasons why such a person would lie or you know, even liars can get raped and are interesting things to consider, but they do and is my thesis, they do rebut how Americans have always thought about the ideal of the law. And I think it's okay. That I think it's good that the jury, you know, rejected Amber, all of Amber Heard's claims, because otherwise you'd get a total upending of what the law has always said and what the law has always said for good reason.
- [24:13]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, I think I'm going to. Yes. And you on this one, because I think that's a good point. The other thing is that we go through these spasms, and I think that we were just in one of people kind of discovering and rediscovering that our justice system is not designed to provide maximum satisfaction to victims. And it's, you know, there's a reason for that. You can't have a truly effective and dispassionate system of criminal justice if you're going to be, like, offering victims the maximum emotional satisfaction, the maximum sense of retribution. That's not. But that's not how we operate. We operate to preserve the rights of the accused, and that's really the most important thing. And one of the things about the MeToo movement where I think it started to go off the rails and where I certainly stopped supporting it wholesale, was there was this very palpable sense amongst some of the people who were sort of like most at the forefront of the movement that due process was a drag. It was a pain, pain in the ass. And they're, you know, we needed a more satisfying and exciting way to do it. And, you know, and so we were going to just do an end run around the systems that we already have in place for good reason. And instead, we were going to take everything to the court of public opinion, and we were going to just set about, like, extracting consequences from people for their bad or disappointing acts in the court of public opinion, and that that was going to be where we, like, found our satisfaction. And the problem with that is that it chips away at all of the things that we had already put in place, again, for good reason, to try and keep the system fair, dispassionate, and as centered on actual justice as possible.
- [26:05]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah. Okay. So for me, you're in a different place. And you've looked at this more and more in depth. And for whatever reason, I think you're able to say, I look at the MeToo movement, I don't. You tell me what your exact thesis statement is. And it got so much wrong that, what, it's discredited or it's less than useful or, you know, what's your ultimate conclusion about it?
- [26:31]
Wesley Lowery
Oh, I'm not here to make normative judgments about the MeToo. Movement. I mean, I think I have my suspicions about how it will be remembered as far as, you know, as a movement. I mean, there was a moment where I thought that it was bringing up something important, which was the fact that women have the specter of sexuality looming over their professional lives in a way that men don't, and in a way that is not necessarily fair. But the thing is that, like, you know, you can be aware of that, you can raise awareness about it, but I'm not sure that you can actually solve that problem. You know, you would have to, like, strip the humanity out of human beings in order to make them stop, like, seeing each other as. As sexually attractive, you know, in the wrong context. And, you know, you can establish, like, you can make rules, you can have norms, you can have good manners and bad manners when it comes to that stuff. But the idea that, like, we're gonna stop noticing attractive people around us just because we're at work, for instance, you know, there was a point at which the ideals being pushed there were t over into sort of impossible utopianism. And so what I would say is, again, I'm not saying like, oh, the movie was good or bad. I think it was in some senses unrealistic, impractical, ultimately self defeating because of the direction it decided to take.
- [28:04]
Kat Rosenfield
Me to. Movement. Okay, you talked about the scalps that it claimed and that some of it's their adherence excused. Can you cite examples of. Without the MeToo movement, maybe we wouldn't have gotten these actual cases of justice.
- [28:23]
Wesley Lowery
Well, I think Weinstein. I think Weinstein is the big one. The other one, Danny. Danny Masterson. Is that. Is that a person?
- [28:36]
Kat Rosenfield
Yes, that's a person who's also not just a person, but a Scientologist, which I think. Which I think came into play.
- [28:44]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, I had to reach for that name. But this is like. I mean, just. I think within the past week or so, there's been this other trial in the. In the courts, the onetaste trial, which is being covered really, really well by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason magazine. And that is a very interesting example of. It's not, you know, we're not really in the MeToo movement anymore. And the people who are on trial there, I think are actually at least one of them is a woman. But it's a forced labor trial that centers on the idea that women are, like, so coercible that they can't be expected to assert themselves in a professional setting. And this, like, I look at this and I say, that's right there. That is the legacy of the MeToo movement. Like, you normalize looking at women in a certain way, thinking about them in a certain way, thinking of them as victims in a certain way. And to do that, you know, you've institutionalized certain things that we're now going to have to, like, I don't know, work really hard to move away from.
- [29:46]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah, I remember I was talking to someone who looked deep into the Danny Masterson trial and this person's thesis was there was a lot of railroading, if not full on railroading. But I definitely know that if my theme is whenever we violate our ideals of justice, Americans don't like it. I remember that what's the name of Ashton Kutcher, who's a friend of Masterson, filed a filing to the court which essentially said, take pity on the guy, which we should, as progressive people or whatever your label is, if you're a decent human being on earth, we should have, we should allow for people to expressions of forgiveness, especially in the criminal justice system. And Kutcher was descended upon. And of course, he had to back off it. So it's another example of your second example or your other example other than Weinstein of the MeToo movement, maybe doing something good had an attendant terrible antisocial anti ideal of American jurisprudent thing attached to it.
- [30:55]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, I mean, I think I said this at the time. This is one of these cases and there were so many of them, just so many instances as this whole kind of train was running off the rails where people would get very upset about like, long standing, not, not traditions, like moving parts in the criminal justice system, including things like. Yeah, the part where after you're convicted of a crime, people who know you are encouraged and allowed to submit statements asking for like a certain amount of leniency on your behalf, speaking to your character. You were still allowed this last moment to be humanized before you're sentenced to some period of time in prison. And people were like, this is disgusting. It's disgusting that somebody would do this. And all I could ever say at moments like this was if you or somebody you love is ever unlucky enough to get caught up in the wheels of the criminal justice system and to be convicted of a crime, you are going to want these protections. You're going to want these protections for yourself. You're going to want them for your loved ones. Like, be careful about the fences that you're kicking down because someday you may actually find that you find them useful.
- [32:13]
Mike Pesca
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- [34:24]
Kat Rosenfield
We're back with Kat Rosenfield, who writes.
- [34:27]
Mike Pesca
For the Free Press and co host the Feminine Chaos podcast. We're back with Katie talking more about issues of MeToo.
- [34:36]
Kat Rosenfield
Here's a rule of thumb. If a person like myself is trying to orient themselves into in the face of new movements or new claims of movements, and some of them definitely seem like excesses and you're trying to say, all right, but what about the counter argument that we need? We've lagged so far that we need to excuse maybe going overboard in some cases, right? Ask yourself how many fundamental precepts of justice? It doesn't have to be the criminal justice system, but how many things is this new movement asking you to throw overboard in the Name of the righteousness of the movement. And once they ask you to throw overboard all these ideals that you really thought of as ideal things like free speech, due process, the entire concept of forgiveness, maybe that movement is a lot more radical than the. Than the simple asks of, oh, all we're trying to do is to get a justice that was long delayed. I mean, that's, you know, some philosopher will say, will be able to point out what's wrong with my reasoning. But I think it's pretty good. Once I've gotten to the third fundamental core belief that I'm asked to violate in the name of the righteousness of the movement. Maybe the movement's not that righteous.
- [35:54]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah. And philosophers, I think there's a good reason why they used to be confined to, like, little caves or little towers to do their philosophy. One of the worst things that we've done in the modern.
- [36:06]
Kat Rosenfield
Let the philosophers out of caves.
- [36:08]
Wesley Lowery
We allowed them to escape containment onto social media where ordinary people can see what they're saying and thinking, like, go back. And.
- [36:18]
Kat Rosenfield
We'Ve allowed gain of function with philosophers. Oh, my God. I want to talk about. And this is interesting. And you've talked about it. Well, in a way that I wasn't thinking about. There's a journalist, a prominent journalist, Wesley Lowry, and he. Recently there was an investigation creative piece in the Columbia Journalism Review that pointed to, well, we can say for sure that he had sex with a lot of women he was involved with professionally who resented that fact. There was also the very. And you're a, you're a crime writer, so you know how to do this. There was the very purposeful and skillful intimation of being roofied.
- [36:59]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [36:59]
Kat Rosenfield
That was, that was part of what was written about Wesley Lowery. I thought that was all interesting. I, I think on first read, didn't even realize it was an intimation of roofied. I thought, oh, they're just saying that these women were drugged. But they never really say that. So that's all interesting. And then who Wesley Lowry was is he was at the vanguard, in the forefront of doing away with objectivity and having a moral clarity lens to do journalism, which I absolutely hated. And I definitely. Here's another one of the precepts that I hold on to. Objectivity, though imperfect and in fact impossible, is definitely a good way to orient yourself if you're involved in truth seeking. So your. I want to get this right. Your analysis of it was this, this story, these stories of women assaulted. So me too, there is a movement, but the Metoo movement Ness of accountability for Wesley Lowry, for many years, was overwhelmed by the racial justice component of what he was saying. Is that right? Me, too. Justice for these women lost out to the fact that he was doing, quote, unquote, good things on the name of black journalists and black people everywhere, sort of.
- [38:13]
Wesley Lowery
I just think that for this story to even come out now indicates that the benefits associated with being Wesley Lowery are no longer what they once were. I think that not that long ago, an editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, where this story was originally published, would have looked at the contours of it, at the allegations, would have looked at who Wesley Lowery was. You know, rising star black journalist, big into activism. I mean, he's referred to in the piece as Mr. BLM, as in black Lives Matter, which was like, shocking to me just because it kind of impugned his credentials in a certain way. It suggested that he only got where he was because he was, like, metaphorically in bed with the right people.
- [39:01]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah. But also, that's an insult to us, the more objective journalistic type people, maybe to someone who believes in moral clarity journalism. It's not an insult. It's a point of pride. It's not diminishing. Yeah.
- [39:13]
Wesley Lowery
And I think somebody would have looked at that. They would have looked at the fact that his accusers, at least one of them is white, and would have said, I'm not touching this with, this is not the time. This is not the time for us to be accusing this man of having done bad sex things. And the fact that this story is now out, I think basically just speaks to the fact that, you know, being Mr. Black Lives Matter is not the bulletproof vest that it once was. It's not taken as seriously as it once was. And, you know, this is true in terms of making it possible for a piece like this, kind of smearing Lowry as a sex criminal, although it's very, very careful to only insinuate it, which is one of my. I'm just going to derail really quickly. This is one of my problems with this piece, is it kind of hangs these women out to dry. It gives them the responsibility of calling him a sex criminal, but it doesn't actually provide evidence of sex crimes. It does all this fade to black stuff where it insinuates it. You know, it implies a drink was.
- [40:19]
Kat Rosenfield
Waiting for her when she met him at the bar. It's like, oh, except in 99 out of 100 cases, like, oh, that was nice of him.
- [40:27]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, and then it's like. And the next thing you cut to a woman being like wasted, blackout drunk. And of course what you're supposed to think is, what was in that drink? Like, give her. What did he give her? But anyway, just to return to the. The initial question from which I've gotten kind of far away, I think that, you know, the, I mean, maybe it's really just that, like, being the top, most, most sympathetic victim is a hat that black men can wear or that white women can wear, but nobody can wear it at the same time. I mean, that's probably an oversimplification, but I do think that it's.
- [41:13]
Kat Rosenfield
So this is intersectional haberdashery theory.
- [41:16]
Wesley Lowery
A little bit. A little bit. I mean, just consider, you know, five years ago a woman was like, had to change her name and leave the country because she called the police on a black man who threatened her at a public park.
- [41:30]
Kat Rosenfield
Like, yes. See, then again, he also did get into other fights with other people, with dogs. He will always stick up for the birds. Christian Cooper.
- [41:40]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [41:40]
Kat Rosenfield
From. And. And the thing of that was front page of the New York Times. Yeah. So I can't prove you. I can't prove that a couple years ago, if all the facts were in that, there wouldn't have been a story about Larry, you know, you can't prove that. I think it's a pretty plausible statement. I do know in that story, one of the victims did say that she, black victim, said she used to believe that black men had it so hard in the criminal justice system. She wasn't going to contribute to, but she's done with that. And part of the reason she came forward was she had a rethinking of that. So I thought that was interesting. That does go towards your theory a little bit. What was very interesting and fascinating to me is that at first I wanted to say I want to be very intellectually consistent. I 100% reject what Wesley Lowery's prescriptions were for journalism. He's got it totally wrong. And I know most of the people reacting to the story who stare at that point of view or even an uglier version of it. We're kind of dancing on the guy's grave. Haha. Moral.
- [42:48]
Wesley Lowery
He was a little placed on his own petard.
- [42:51]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But like, hey, moral clarity, guy, how's your morality? Now we got clarity. So I wanted to be very intellectually consistent and I wanted to say I don't care what Wesley Lowery ever proposed. That entire way of doing journalism should change. And he was feted in all the journalistic schools for saying this. If he was falsely accused or stupidly accused or accused in a way that doesn't add up, I'm going to say that. But I did, I think, wisely withhold my opinion until this latest piece because I think in March. The piece came out in May. In March, there was an initial wave of reporting. And this reporting did note the fact that Lowry was now out at or had a Title 9 complaint at American University. University. But the details of what he did wrong or what was known at the time were laughable, were so incredibly weak. There was this one part where he was said to. Let me. Let me get this quote right. Another student alleged that he compared the process of making interview subjects comfortable to asking for consent during sex the record show. While a third alleged he lit a candle and sat next to her on the couch, making her uncomfortable. I almost lost my mind that these were the allegations taking down anyone, even someone who I 1000% disagree with. And then there was another named accuser, a senior at the University of Michigan who filed a Title 9 complaint who said her problem was she's. She was triggered by his language. And his language was he made an analogy to him as a journalistic professor trying to explain to her how to get a source to talk. And Lowery said, well, Sophia, when you go on a date, you don't just ask them, do you want to fuck? You build up to it. So this was the bill of goods against him. And my question to you is, why even. Why even commit the journalistic act of putting these in the Washington Post? What is if the point of putting all the hazy fade to black. Maybe he roofied someone in cjr. We understand that, but what is the point of even these ridiculous examples as the only specifics we have about him in the first spate of articles?
- [45:16]
Wesley Lowery
I don't know, Mike. A candle.
- [45:19]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah, candle. Creepy, creepy candle.
- [45:21]
Wesley Lowery
I mean, that was, you know, he'd had, like, bad Mexican for lunch and was trying to match the smell.
- [45:28]
Kat Rosenfield
Well, that might be a Title IX complaint.
- [45:32]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, why not? But I think that the thing about those allegations which were reproduced in the Columbia Journalism Review article, is that when you put them together with the allegations of being a sex pest, maybe drugging women or getting them drunk, plying them with alcohol and then doing manipulative things to them, suddenly something like, he lit a candle and sat next to me on the sofa while he talked about my work becomes part of a pattern of behavior. And the thing is that this is a Very familiar type of journalism that became ubiquitous during the MeToo movement, but also in direct response to Lowery's push for more moral clarity and less objectivity. And this is why I think, think people were a little bit dancing around, like. And look, I'm not. I don't take any personal delight in seeing him become the victim of exactly the type of journalism that he advocated for. I understand why some people are. I just think it's ironic.
- [46:46]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah. Petard ism. By the way, do you know what a petard is? I always thought it was an article of clothing, but it's not.
- [46:53]
Wesley Lowery
No, it's something else. I.
- [46:55]
Kat Rosenfield
It's a. It's a small. It's a small bomb, you know, blown up by your own bomb. Yeah. I really want to do the intellectual exercise where I don't engage what you're saying is true and accurate, but I'm doing the intellectual exercise where I totally disassociate the fact that he is being undone by, quote, unquote, moral clarity. Why do the journalists who chronicle the candle and an analogy about you don't just fuck you lead up to it, it and this one accuser who, if you look at her writings elsewhere, it's all about her mental instability, do they think they're adding to the prosecutor's brief? Do they think that this is part of the indictment that would lead a viewer to think maybe he did it? Or do they think. Have they thought that when the chart. When these charges are so, to my mind, laughable, and I would think many people who read this would find them laughable, does it have the effect of undoing the underlying charges? What do you think they're thinking about these laughable charges? Do you think they think that they're not laughable? They're possibly very serious.
- [48:08]
Wesley Lowery
The candle, I think, okay, I am trying to create, like, an accurate mental model of the person who. Who brings forth a charge like a charge like that and considers it meaningful. And. And all I can say is that I think that it's much more about the fact that many journalists, and especially female journalists, have been convinced over the course of the past few years that the best story they can tell and the best way to be taken seriously as writers is to talk about being traumatized, to talk about being violated, to find whatever, like, harm and damage and, like, mental anguish they've experienced and just kind of like slice it down the belly and spill its guts all over the place, and that this is how you're going to, like, raise your profile as a writer and the thing is, they're not wrong to think this. There's this entire journalistic oeuvre and again, it's especially women who are not just encouraged but often expected to do this. You're supposed to just find whatever was the worst thing that ever happened to you, that's the story you're gonna tell. To be taken seriously as a writer. And resisting the incentive to do that, having the sort of more long term strategy or the self control of resisting the incentive to do that is not easy. Especially when it's like it's such a shortcut and it's so tantalizing in the moment. You're going to get all of this sympathetic attention, you know, that you could, if you just put that out there, that you could build a career on it. People are basically told that.
- [50:08]
Kat Rosenfield
So here's another question. When I read a list of charges and they include some laughable ones, like the candle, like an analogy about foreplay before sex. And then somewhere, and the timing was weird because this, and we should say this Washington Post article was written by Will Summer, so not a female journalist. But when that's all I have to go on, I'm supposed to, what I'm supposed to do is say, look, even if the charges against him or these three charges seem laughable, it doesn't mean he didn't do it. Or something like, even rapists can engage in behavior that gets exaggerated when all you really did was light a candle inadvisedly. Right? I'm supposed to not punish the weakness of the weakest set of charges. That's supposed to be my heuristic. On the other hand, when I think about Andrew Cuomo and his 11 or 12 accusers and God, I've read thoroughly about that and some of his accusers we can't discount. I'm not saying it definitely happened, but there's a woman who worked at his office who said he flat out groped me, put his hands on my breast, I didn't want it. Etc. There's a state trooper, state trooper who said like he used to run his finger up and down my spine. But then there are also accusers in there who said he traced a word on my shirt. And one was looking back years later, I realized that he just valued me for my prettiness. So here's the question. Is there a heuristic, is there a responsible heuristic for taking a whole bunch of really weak charges amongst a raft of some weak and some large charges? And should I use the weak charges to question the strong Charges, or should I say, you know, just because they're weak charges. Fine. I could mentally set them aside, only focus on the strongest of charges. What should I do? What do you do? What do humans do?
- [52:09]
Wesley Lowery
I mean, that's an interesting question, because what do we do now is we just throw them all into the same bag and we allow the stronger charges to elevate the weak ones into something more sinister than they used to be. It.
- [52:26]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah. Okay, so that's interesting. You've put your finger on something. What's going on is that probably for all these actually documentable monsters, where we know they did these four things and they should go to jail, there was probably a hundred candle lightings in their past also.
- [52:43]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [52:44]
Kat Rosenfield
There was also a whole bunch of weak things that didn't quite get there. And maybe 20 years ago, we just wouldn't have put those in the paper. But now you're saying it's. It's all legitimate. It all goes to a pattern. So we're now seeing. It's possible that we're seeing the elevation of more risible charges along with the real ones. And maybe what we should do is just discount the risible ones. They were always there. We just didn't know about them. It's interesting.
- [53:12]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah.
- [53:12]
Kat Rosenfield
Is that what you're saying?
- [53:14]
Wesley Lowery
It's partly that. And it's also that I do think that one of the things about this model of journalism is that it assumes that if you don't have, like, what you might lack in quality, you can make up for in quantity, if that makes sense. I mean, the. Even the Cuomo charges, like, if you had just taken the two or whatever it was that seemed the most legitimately, like, workplace.
- [53:44]
Kat Rosenfield
And by the way. Yeah, and by the way, they weren't the two that got the most attention. Those were.
- [53:48]
Wesley Lowery
Were.
- [53:49]
Kat Rosenfield
Those two were driven by people with more access to the media, like Lindsey Boylan and another worker in his office. And they wouldn't. They were def. Not sexual assault, but they might have added up to some version of sexual harassment. But. Sorry, sorry to interrupt. Go ahead.
- [54:03]
Wesley Lowery
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you see where I'm going with this, which is that, like, on their own, those things might not have been, like, taken all that seriously or, you know, there might have been room to, if you were just talking about those things, to start looking more deeply into them, to say, okay, well, like, what actually happened here? And then maybe the story you end up telling ends up being a little bit more nuanced than just this monster touched me. If you on the other hand are just trying to show a pattern of behavior and you have this grab bag of like as many bad or bad adjacent things as possible. Then you don't have to dive deeply into any of them. You're just like, look how big this bag is. Is.
- [54:47]
Kat Rosenfield
Yeah, right. And that's, you know, he uses that his defenders will say, oh, they always talk about the 11 accusers, the 12 accusers. And it's just to get the sheer tonnage, the effect of having some big number. But if you delve into them deeply, accuser 1, 2, 7, 5 and 11 are just something any reasonable person would. Would discount. So I'm sorry I took, I took a lot of your time, especially by having my phone overheat and having my headphones not work and all these other reasons. So I am going to let you go to be with your dogs.
- [55:22]
Wesley Lowery
With my barking dog. There he is.
- [55:24]
Kat Rosenfield
Oh, my God, there he is. And I also promised to show my hairless cats on so quite the opposite of Rasputin. Not nearly as well endowed. Did never. Neither of their bodies were thrown in the Volga river after being stabbed many times. These are all true about my hairless cats.
- [55:42]
Wesley Lowery
They are naked, though.
- [55:44]
Kat Rosenfield
They are naked cats. Yes.
- [55:46]
Wesley Lowery
I really liked meeting your hairless cats the one time that I did. I'd always wondered what they feel like and it was not as expected. They're like peaches, but with, yeah, they're skeletons.
- [55:58]
Kat Rosenfield
And people say, oh, this is good, I have allergies. I won't get an allergic attack. And I used to say, no, they still have dander. You will. But I just let the people go with that because I think allergies are like, you know, 50% self inflicted. I, I think the placebo effect of a hairless cat is a real thing.
- [56:14]
Wesley Lowery
That is the most cancelable thing that you've said during this entire conversation.
- [56:18]
Kat Rosenfield
I tried. I tried for a bunch. Cat, thank you so much. Thanks for doing this. Thanks for putting up with this. Thanks for dealing with my shower curtain. Thanks for it all.
- [56:26]
Wesley Lowery
Thanks for having me.
- [56:28]
Kat Rosenfield
All right, Kat Rosenfield, we'll talk to you. I'm doing a substack live with Nate silver. We got McWhorter on the menu. You got anything you want to plug?
- [56:36]
Wesley Lowery
Oh, let's see. Listen to the feminine chaos podcast@femkaospod.substack.com, find me at the Free Press, find me on Twitter, Rosenfield. And, well, you can't pre order my new book yet, but when you can, please do so. It comes out next March.
- [56:49]
Kat Rosenfield
What's the name?
- [56:50]
Wesley Lowery
How to Survive in the Woods.
- [56:52]
Kat Rosenfield
That's pretty good. All right. Thank you very much. Easier to survive in the woods if you are a hairful, not hairless. Cat. Bye, Cat.
- [57:00]
Wesley Lowery
Bye.
- [57:07]
Mike Pesca
And that's it for today's show. Corey Warren produces the Gist. Astrid Green does our socials. Kathleen Sykes, she's the editor of the Gist List. Ashley Khan is the production coordinator for the Gist. Michelle Pesca does all that she sees. She sits over that and calls the shots and moves the chess pieces. Leo Baums are in the turn. He's very good with coming up with databases. Data's base improve.
- [57:33]
Kat Rosenfield
Thanks for listening.