Now let’s all put our critical thinking hats on, think, and perhaps see things differently.
Is there a national database of complaints? No. So why do we hear only about certain ones? Show your work. Bonus points for multiple reasons!
Where do workplace settlements come from? Usually the employER, not the accused employEE. Why might that be?
In any case of 3rd party reporting like in this case, and with NDAs, sealed employment documents, etc, what is our probability of actually knowing what the fork really happened? Support your estimate.
Thank you for providing details about this case. Press articles often omit salient information. Unfortunately, with 400K settlement most will suspect some kind of wrong doing on part of Wallace.
@pmaroneyb 's response said most of what needed saying, but I wanted to specifically address the @tacoma 's very wrong suggestion that #metoo is about compensation.
The #metoo was a tag used by a huge number of women who only wanted to deliver a message along the lines of: Just because you haven’t heard a lot of complaints doesn’t mean sexual harrassment or abuse doesn’t happen a lot. It happened to me, and you probably didn’t know that it had.
The aim of #metoo is to break down the culture of tolerance for sexual harassment. It isn’t enough that a few really awful guys get caught (sometimes that takes a few decades) and punished. It is unfair and cruel to expect people (mostly women) to endure a barrage of small (and relatively harmless in isolation) incidents as the price of employment.
It is unfair to put people through the stress of having to figure out how to deal with what may have been unwelcome comments or unwelcome interest from someone who can affect their career. Was it intentional? Was it innocent? Will there be repercussions if I resist? If I talk about how their comments affected me, and ask for change, will they get mad and retaliate?
Without #metoo, people raising the issue were easily isolated, and ran the risk of looking like this:
After a year of on going MeToo cases adjudicated in the media, I do not believe anymore idealistic view that women only wanted to deliver a message against sexual harassment, that every accuser has no motive other than truth and every accusation is a settled fact. MeToo became an efficient tool for political assassination, settling scores, and creating job openings.
It sounds more like “MeToo” has become your convenient shorthand for any public accusation of harrassment against an individual famous enough to be fodder for cable news.
Imagine if we were to judge everything by the worst subset of results we could attach to the existence of that thing.
We are, aren’t we? Colorful accusations appear in the press, we believe, we judge and condemn. We feel righteous, virtuous in our demands to cast the perpetrator out. Who cares about the accused, who cares about the truth? This reminds me the the child care centers abuse frenzy in 80s, a terrible lie, that destroyed the lives of innocent people.
The most disgusting and horrible part is that HR offers anonymity under the fiction that the accuser needs protection. What it means in reality is that the accused is knee-capped in public while the accuser, whose motivation is unknown, is allowed to make the claim with NO consequences. We know that there are false accusations, and I am not really sure how many. But the ability to make the accusation without being known certainly increases the number.
It creates an amazing effect - that well-known persons are particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack. Keillor had been a well-known figure for 40 years. I am certainly aware that he had a number of incidents in his past. He dumped his first wife to marry his HS Danish exchange student. When that didn’t work out, he dumped her married someone else. In addition, he ran a weekly musical show for 40 years. During this time he certainly had to dump on people for not being prepared. When you are the maestro, you tell some of the acts that they are not ready and will be cut from the show. So, now some anonymous former colleague came out and made an allegation. We don’t know of what, but Keillor indicated that he patted someone on the back. Who knows? 40 years of working with artists means that you have had contact with 8000 performers, and probably 5 % of those are flak-a-ramas. The anonymous accusation badly damaged him, but did NOTHING against the accuser. That’s wrong.
I’m unsure what do think of this equivalency in your mind. I’m torn between several ways of viewing it.
Is it repugnant, for comparing adult women reporting incidents of harassment/abuse to preschool children making up stories to please eager investigators?
Is it ignorant for suggesting that there is as little behind the #metoo allegations as there was behind the stories of the children?
Or, is it profoundly tone deaf for suggesting that women should stop reporting abuse and harassment, because our for-profit, news-as-entertainment media jumps on the juiciest of the stories and some men who don’t deserve it end up getting abused or harassed?
#shutupandlivewithit isn’t good enough for me. My daughter will be out in that world in a few years. I’m looking for something better.
