Who determines what you are?

In the podcast Episode 345: Naughty List (Patreon), Brace and Liz called Kevin Spacey a “child rapist”, then an “alleged child rapist” and finally settled on “ex-alleged child rapist”. Just using the epithet “child rapist” suggests that Spacey preyed on very young children, when the only accusations that actually went to trial were from someone who claimed that they’d been assaulted when they were 14 years old.

That would have been awful (had it happened), but it’s somehow less awful than if they’d been 5 years old. I’m not sure the law makes a distinction, but terminology does, as someone who assaults a 5-year-old is a pedophile whereas the term for someone who assaults someone who is post-pubescent, but still under the age of consent is ephebophile. Using other terminology imbues descriptions with implicit judgments. It’s like deciding whether to call someone “president” or “ex-president” or “mister” when speaking about someone who’s been President of the United States.

Trial by social mediaSpacey’s since been exonerated. It took a decade. It’s accurate that both Liz and Brace eventually landed on “ex-alleged child rapist”, because it’s technically true. But with those rules, someone could accuse someone else of being a child rapist, stop doing that, and then technically still be able to call that person an “ex-alleged child rapist” for the rest of their lives. You get to continue to cram the words “child rapist” into every sentence mentioning that person’s name without running the risk of slander. A neat trick.

Is there a point at which it’s no longer still ok to call Kevin Spacey a child rapist? I think that point is when it becomes obvious that there is no evidence whatsoever for an accusation, but I’m a justice extremist. At the very latest, people should stop associating people with crimes they’ve not done when they’ve been exonerated by the justice system.

You can say that the justice system is corrupt, that Spacey could have simply purchased his exoneration. Let’s examine that. If it’s true that a relatively modestly fortuned movie star can purchase exoneration from a judgment that pretty much everyone in the world wants to see go the other way, then we have to also conclude that anyone of that stature can purchase their way out of conviction of pretty much anything. While it’s true that the wealthy exercise outsized influence, it’s not true that they can get away with literally anything.

If it were true, then we would have lost all faith in our justice system. We would have to conclude that we’re living in a completely arbitrary society with no rules, other than the golden rule: he who has the gold rules. While true to a degree, it’s not absolutely true. Let’s assume that even money is not enough, that one also needs the favor of the elites in order to avoid justice. But that’s not what happened with Spacey. Ten years later, he’d completely lost the favor of the elites. He was being tried in a country where he doesn’t even live. He was never charged in the U.S. He was charged in the UK. He won anyway, on all counts, after only a few minutes of jury deliberation. And still, people will not stop calling him a child rapist.

From Spacey’s Wikipedia entry:

“In his first British court appearance, on June 16, Spacey denied the allegations against him.[184] On July 14, he pleaded not guilty to the charges in London.[185][186] On November 16, the CPS authorized an additional seven charges against Spacey, all related to a single complainant arising from incidents alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2004.[187][188] Three charges were dismissed before or during the trial, which began on June 28, 2023, and, on July 26, 2023, a jury found Spacey not guilty of the remaining nine charges.[4][5]”

If none of that matters—if the outcomes of trials don’t matter—then people just don’t believe in the rule of law anymore. They believe in their gut feelings more. If society allows people to slander other people based on their gut feelings, then we have chaos.

There seems to be no mechanism for lowering the relevance of an accusation from the public record if there are enough people interested in maintaining it because (A) there is no drawback to doing so and (B) people love dunking on other people. Once you’re accused of something, you’re that thing for as long as people say you are. Where relevant, it’s the only thing you’ll ever be, whether you did it or not, whether it could be proven or not.

This obviously opens the door to completely fantastical character-assassination, but people seem to enjoy doing it so much that they don’t care. Most people also know that it will never happen to them. I wonder what engenders such an instinct for injustice? Is it mean-spiritedness? Spitefulness? Or is it a subconscious awareness of injustice in their own lives that makes them lash out at those wildly more successful? Is this one of the few weapons that people have against the obscenely wealthy and successful? You know, because we’ve utterly failed to put a check on amassing stupid amounts of wealth and the gap between the top 1% and the rest of us continues to grow?

Michael Jackson and Woody Allen fall into this category as well. Nothing was ever proven, with every case involving a large number of self-interested parties muddying the waters to the point where you can barely tell what is legitimate and what is an allegation. Journalists piled on for the delicious feeling of destroying a person’s reputation, while media-company C-suites dined out on the increase in advertising revenue. It’s a win-win. All it requires is an inconsequential sacrifice. It doesn’t matter whether they did anything wrong. They will have retroactively done something wrong, else why would they have been accused? Lurid “facts” stick in the mind that have no basis in reality, but come to define what everyone “knows” about what happened.

On this topic, I recently watched the video LIVE at The People’s Forum: Katie Halper, Rania Khalek, Abby Martin & Claudia De la Cruz. It’s a good conversation with three extremely good people, who are fighting the good fight against propaganda and war crimes.

At about 16:00 or so, Abby Martin led the charge on Woody Allen, just dropping jokes about how much he loves abusing children and that he could only like a movie if it involved abusing a 15-year-old. From Sexual abuse allegation of Woody Allen’s Wikipedia page:

“According to court testimony, on August 4, 1992, Allen visited the children at Mia Farrow’s home in Bridgewater, Connecticut, while she was shopping with a friend.[316] The next day, that friend’s babysitter told her employer that she had seen that “Dylan was sitting on the sofa, and Woody was kneeling on the floor, facing her, with his head in her lap”.[327][328] When Farrow asked Dylan about it, Dylan allegedly said that Allen had touched Dylan’s “private part” while they were alone together in the attic.[316] Allen strongly denied the allegation, calling it “an unconscionable and gruesomely damaging manipulation of innocent children for vindictive and self-serving motives”.[329] He then began proceedings in New York Supreme Court for sole custody of his and Farrow’s son Satchel, as well as Dylan and Moses, their two adopted children.[330] In March 1993, a six-month investigation by the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital concluded that Dylan had not been sexually abused.[331][332]”

The case was settled in 1993. It doesn’t mention that Farrow and Allen were going through a pretty ugly separation, during which Farrow used the allegations against Allen as a lever. That context cannot be ignored, but it’s absolutely not part of the conversation about Allen’s supposed predilections. No-one cares. They just love to call people pedophiles. They just seem to relish it so much.

“In June 1993, Judge Elliott Wilk rejected Allen’s bid for custody and rejected the allegation of sexual abuse. Wilk said he was less certain than the Yale-New Haven team that there was conclusive evidence that there was no sexual abuse and called Allen’s conduct with Dylan “grossly inappropriate”,[333][334][335] although not sexual.”

So, thirty years later, Woody Allen is still known to otherwise-intelligent people as a child-molester. It’s honestly f&@king incredible. These three ladies are literally having a two-hour discussion about Israeli Hasbara, about their completely evidence-free and unsubstantiated propaganda, but yet here they are, blithely spouting completely slanderous untruths that have been proven untrue for three decades—and patting each other on the back for it.

If you’d mention to them that the case had been thrown out, they’d probably dismiss it because they know better. Even though the prime proponent of the allegation is Dylan Farrow, who’s made a lovely career out of it writing for every large NYC publication. They will dismiss everything the NYT says about U.S. foreign policy—they’ve built their admirable careers on doing so—but go just one centimeter out of their bailiwick and they’re right there, spouting other NYT propaganda.

About an hour into it, they were going a bit nuts about listing all of the things that Israelis steal, including Palestinian skin, apparently. I don’t believe any of this, really, and I very much believe that this type of demonization is unfair and counterproductive—and is basically what the worst of the propaganda does in the other direction. It’s just so stupid to cheer on Lebanese warriors on Instagram while swallowing every online rumor about the Israeli people (not Jews!).

Cool, so you’re not antisemitic, but now you’re anti-Israeli, as if all of them are actually evil. I’ve made this argument too many times, but somehow people can get all swept up in demonizing all Israelis, but somehow not see themselves—as Americans—as part of the problem. It’s unjust, unproductive, and stupid. Just stick to the facts about the Israeli government. Most of its people are no more deluded or ethically bankrupt than the people of any other part of the empire.