June 7th, 2022
(I took that self portrait the day I was acquitted. I wanted to remember what I looked like after the weight had been lifted. )
It was four years ago today that a jury of twelve unanimously acquitted me of rape. The verdict came swiftly, in a courtroom filled with friends. Shortly after the acquittal, I started thinking about what happened and what I was going to do with all of these feelings I had but could never talk about. More important that that, were the questions, how did this happen?
For the past two years, I’ve been writing, producing a podcast, working on a book, and now preparing to launch a larger initiative this summer. At the heart of this project I want to grapple with the systems—media, legal, and cultural—that have the power to turn accusation into truth. I want to consider and write how these institutions operate, and how absolutely devastating they can be to anyone caught in their paragraphs.
Since my acquittal, I’ve tried to stay optimistic, always watching for signs of creeping cynicism. I don’t want to steep in bitterness, let it infect my art, or be crippled by self-pity or righteous anger. Yes, I got screwed. But so what? The real question is: What am I going to do with that? How do I take something ugly and convert it into something useful, good, and yes, something beautiful?
Having been a headline casualty, I’ve changed how I consume news. I used to take on faith that what the press reported was true. Now, I focus less on what I’m reading and more on how I’m reading it—not just the content of the article, but what I’m being asked to believe, what’s being implied, and what assumptions are doing the heavy lifting.
Nowadays, I don’t even know if what I’m reading was written by a real human being, and yet, it seems as real as anything else.
Recently, in the journal NOEMA, I came across an article on the “Death Of The Author.” The idea seems pretty simple, it’s the reader who finishes the text, who decides what it means, who it implicates, and why it matters. I guess this has always been true, but I casually thought that the writer defined what it meant, and the reader is supposed to get it, to figure it out through language. It’s paradigm shift, because so much of what we “take away” from a story, especially stories about other people, aren’t fact, they’re more of a projection. We invent our own version of the narrative within ourselves.
My name, my face, the violent accusation were powerful cues in a narrative that didn’t really need me to be a real person. In reality, nothing in the news stories about the wrongful attack was true at all because it didn’t happen. The other stories written about my supposed bad behavior were boorish cartoons. That didn’t matter, because I’d become a representation of a thing, an archetype in someone else’s moral framework. People didn’t need facts because they knew the genre, they’d seen this before. And once people recognize the genre, “abuse,” “power,” “#MeToo,” “reckoning,” “white affluent man” blah blah blah, they think they know the ending, they can shuttle the video forward. Guilty!
It didn’t matter that I was found not guilty. That truth was not the point. The meaning had already been fixed by the audience.
As Gunkel puts it:
“The meaning of a piece of writing is not something that can be guaranteed by the authentic voice of the person who is said to have written it.”
People don't just read—they rewrite. They decide.
This is what happens when we read with certainty instead of curiosity. We slot people into stupid little categories and avoid the harder work of grappling with ambiguity, we just skip on the blind assumptions that our trustworthy news outlet isn’t jiving us. But journalists are sloppy, lazy and opinionated and just as vulnerable to cognitive shortcuts as the rest of us. In my case they literally didn’t report on what happened, they simply reported what someone said about something that happened. Or worse, they reported what someone said about what someone else said about what happened. See how this can go wrong?
The reporters became the authors of my public identity.
And here’s the twist: Their authority wasn’t earned. It was assumed because of their association with a big news company. So, if we believe the byline, and trust the masthead, the truth has been confirmed.
So who was the real author of my story?
The reporter? The police press release? The editor?
The reader who clicked and judged?
No, none of them alone. The system was the author.
A distributed network of institutions, assumptions, and incentives tacitly collaborated to invent the rapist me, the monster man me, the ‘open secret” sexual abuser me. That’s not me they wrote about, it’s the squishy and obtuse writers, editors and producers that created me. I was a media Frankenstein
We don’t have the bandwidth to carefuy consider every story. So we use cutouts, finding patterns, relying on cultural scripts. But these mental shortcuts that help us manage the volume of shit coming out of the information pipeline can become dangerous when we mistake them for truth, or insight. And when the story is about someone’s life, someone’s reputation, someone’s future like mine, those shortcuts have consequences.
I’ve changed how I read. I consume less, and interpret more slowly. I just assume it’s all wrong, and whatever strong opinion I have about a thing is little more than mind clutter. I use LLM tools to help me find my blindspots, and resist the urge to immediately decide what’s true and what’s garbage.
Now I ask myself: Who benefits from me reading this story this way? What am I being invited to feel? And who’s missing from this that might change everything about it? What do I want to do with this? Is it worth my time?
I can’t change what happened to me. But just as DNA has rewritten courtroom outcomes once thought final, we now have tools to reexamine the media’s role in those outcomes, and countless other stories like mine. We can revisit, retest and review them. We could update old stories with new evidence, fresh context, and a sharper lens for damaging bias.
It used to be true that if a news organization published libelous stories they could be sued. It’s not as easy as you might think, because these days, they aren’t small town news outlets, they’re massive, well funded and they don’t cotton to someone pointing out their fallibility. But, with the onslaught of AI, conceivably every story buried in the past can be exhumed and reviewed, if not to correct for factual error, then reframe bias. This new dynamism will challenge the traditional authority of newsmaking, and the idea that a crappy headline, once published, defines reality. Nope, it doesn’t. Which gives people like myself, and millions of others, hope that their stories will be corrected, not in small print, but where everyone can see it. Not deletion, but revision. Not erasure, but correction.
The past, like the present, has become unstable and that instability may well be an opportunity where truth finally finds room to breathe.
This is my project now, I was built for this.
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