Cancelling A Cancel-Culture Cancellation · The Unabomber · Martha Stewart
Plus Showtime recs and revenge-porn revenge
the true crime that's worth your time
I don’t need to relitigate the drubbing Elizabeth Weil and New York Magazine have taken for the mag’s “Canceled at 17” cover story over the last few days. I assume you’ve seen various references to it on social media (here’s just one Twitter thread, from a personal-injury lawyer specializing in revenge-porn cases; CW for assault and bullying). I don’t disagree with much of the negative reaction. The framing of “Diego” as a victim, the perpetuation of the term “cancel culture” as a means of both-sidesing (if not outright dismissing) the very real issues surrounding consent, the indifferent copy-editing…it’s at best a mess, and one that I suspect came from a “there’s no such thing as bad clicks” place. The piece is content to name-check the legitimate issues that might have justified its choice of viewpoint — a disproportionate response to assault/abuse accusations made against young men of color, for one; the challenges facing educators as the country tries to negotiate a mental-health crisis among teens and tweens, for another — but, in the print version, puts its weak attempt to engage with the lived experience of a teenage girl in an increasingly Handmaid’s-ian landscape after the jump.
…Guess I’m relitigating this after all. Well, it’s what we do here. Anyway — meanwhile, “Fiona,” the young woman whose nude photo “Diego” shared while drunk at a party, is initially described as possessing such otherworldly beauty that said beauty acts as a mitigating factor re: “Diego”’s behavior or something? Later, she’s cast as an easily-led scold. I don’t think it’s a pointless exercise to case-study the aftermath of non-fully-formed teenage brains doing regrettable shit that they do in fact regret sincerely, or the subsequent formation of nuance-free social herds, but maybe do it without a bunch of lookist nonsense up top, is A, and B, actions have consequences, and this is about consent, period. If “Diego” is old enough to drive and fuck, he’s old enough to keep his girlfriend’s breasts to himself after a few beers. He didn’t. He also didn’t end up in jail, or get his college admission pulled, or face any vigilante repercussions. I’m just saying.
And “Diego” is probably not a bad person. He’s probably a pretty average person, and what’s notable isn’t that he got gigged so thoroughly for treating a girl carelessly. It’s that that almost never fucking happens in the first place, and that casting “Diego” as the protagonist in a rogue-nudes story obscures the fact that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s the woman who ends up paying a price — as ably and infuriatingly recounted in Sheelah Kolhatkar’s “The Perils of Pornhub” for the June 20 New Yorker. Kolhatkar is in much darker and more legibly felonious territory — the piece is about women and minor children whose “performances” end up on “one of the largest pornography sites on the Internet” without their consent, which in the case of kids is not an option anyway; it also touches on the uneasy alliance between activists who want Pornhub and sites like it to enforce affirmative consent and age/ID checks, and those whose anti-porn ideology comes from a QAnon-conspiracy place with decidedly less respect for official channels.
And on the one hand, the New Yorker investigation focuses on clearer-cut and blacker black hats, but on the other hand, you don’t get the feeling the editors took inspiration from the NYT pitchbot Twitter account the way you might about the New York article. And they’re both worth reading — only one of them is probably worth having run, but it too adds to the conversation about how we talk about and report sexual misconduct, even if that conversation is this reviewer grunting, “FOH.” — SDB
Not unrelated to these concepts — consent; privacy; revenge porn — is Anna Merlan’s piece for Vice on the women who teamed up to fight an online stalker/con artist, one whose various harassment campaigns spanned nearly two decades. “These Women Say One Man Terrorized Them Online for Years. Then, They Decided to Band Together.” dropped last week, and it sent a chill up my spine early on, right around the time the Sarah of the lede (note: not me) thinks to herself that “He’s probably OK.” The response to Merlan’s article that I saw felt just as exhausted by dickheadery as the response to Weil’s — but also a lot more positive and heartened, with shared stories of spurned readers/followers turning scary on a dime, and staying that way.
I’ve got more than a handful of my own from Television Without Pity days, including a disbarred attorney threatening me with, among other negative outcomes, federal litigation for punting him from the Gilmore Girls forums — a proceeding that would have gotten bounced immediately as frivolous, but which I still had to spend thousands of dollars parrying and which kept me up nights. And boy, did I recognize that time and those feelings in Merlan’s piece.
Some [victims], like Sarah, have had to take extreme measures for their safety: moving, changing their phone numbers, getting off social media. Others have had to have excruciating conversations with their families, co-workers, and bosses after, they say, Bell threatened to send explicit photos or explicit conversations to their employers or attempt to have them fired. (Nearly every state has a law against posting revenge porn, and these would seemingly cover at least some of Bell’s alleged behavior. Those laws virtually all make such behavior a misdemeanor, though, rather than anything more serious, and revenge porn experts say the laws are inconsistently applied.)
This is kind of what I meant re: the “Diego” situation — that a boy or man’s “mistake” is in fact a mistake. A girl or a woman’s “mistake” is…existing, and trusting others’ intentions, and that gets punished every time.
“These Women Say” is maddening, but really well paced and process-y as well; I recommend it. And if a James Bell tries this shit with you, I recommend reminding yourself that you’re not the problem, and outing him immediately — to us, just for starters. B.E. smarties will make him rue the day. — SDB
Will Forte is hoping some of that Only Murders magic follows him to Ireland. Forte is set to play a true-crime podcaster in Bodkin, a Netflix dark comedy from the Obamas’ production house. Forte’s character, Gilbert, is one of a group of hosts
who set out to investigate the disappearance of three individuals from a tiny, coastal Irish town. But things start to get murky as, per the show’s official synopsis, “...they discover a story much bigger and weirder than they could have ever imagined.” The synopsis continues, “As our heroes try to discern fact from fiction—about the case, about their colleagues, and, most painfully, themselves—the series challenges our perception of truth and exposes the stories we tell ourselves to justify our beliefs or validate our fears.”
That sounds both more promising than Vengeance and more likely to fall into the trap of excessive sombriety (a red squiggle tells me that’s not a word but I’m not backing down). Generally speaking, dev execs should maybe consider a moratorium on scripted properties about true-crime podcasters learning valuable lessons, because if we’re not already in Friends-clone territory, you can see it from here, but we’ll see how this one turns out. — SDB
Our esteemed colleague Heather M. reached out yesterday to ask for Showtime doc recs. I’ve said for years now that the prestige-cable equivalent of the Second City should get more respect — not just for true-crime content in the non-fiction space, but for top-notch music and sports docs as well. So if you, like Heather, nabbed a 30-day trial of Showtime for Yellowjackets but want to maximize your freebie-ing by powering through some criminal-justice docs, here’s a list of the network’s offerings that I’ve seen, with links if I/we reviewed it. (My list is probably around half of what’s available, so there’s quantity and quality here. As well, I reviewed a handful of these for Previously.TV; one of these days I’ll get those archives in order and bring them over here.)
Documentary series
The Reagans (okay, this is a stretch, but the argument that they were cultural criminals is…made pretty well by the series, plus the attempted murderer of Ronnie has been in the news recently)
various Vice episodes
Documentary films
After Innocence
American Dream / American Knightmare
Dirty Tricks
The Family Business: Trump and Taxes
Prophet’s Prey
16 Shots
If you subscribe to Showtime and want to add to my list, mash that comments button
and don’t forget, we do take requests! Scroll down to the bottom for our contact info, and if you need a watch/skip list of DB Cooper properties or want an eighties sitcom star Bet-Crapped, we’re listening.
We’re also paying for a number of subscriptions to keep y’all up to date on the true crime that’s worth your time, so if you can kick loose $5 a month to support our research, we’d appreciate it! — SDB
A handful of major-case podcasts to consider if you’ve got an upcoming road trip…
Wondery’s The Execution Of Bonny Lee Bakley // “On May 4, 2001, Bonny Lee Bakley was found fatally shot in a car on a dark North Hollywood street. The prime suspect was her husband, famed actor Robert Blake. But Bonny, a longtime con artist, had plenty of enemies. She left behind a trail of men she’d scammed, and she had a volatile relationship with Christian Brando, the troubled son of movie star Marlon Brando. …Not since the O.J. Simpson case had the eyes of the nation been so fixated on a homicide.” [out now]
Apple’s Project Unabom // “Based on new original reporting, the podcast takes a look at what actually happened during those 18 years—what drove [Ted] Kaczynski to his dystopian vision of people overrun by technology and why does it feel so familiar? And why did it take nearly two decades to catch him?” [drops June 27]
BBC’s Lady Killers // “Lucy Worsley investigates the crimes of Victorian women from a contemporary, feminist perspective.” [out now, but seems to have stalled on Episode 1 back in April]
The Martha Stewart Podcast // h/t to Melissa Locker’s Pod People for mentioning the 19 Crimes Chardonnay with Martha on it; I have a bottle of it somewhere that I keep meaning to review for you guys. The crime connection here is somewhat tenuous, but Martha did do time, and her first guest, Snoop Dogg, did stand trial for murder, so… — SDB
Friday on Best Evidence: Even MORE podcasts!
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