Kat Rosenfield

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, we've never really been very good at giving people a fair trial in the court of public opinion, which is one reason why the rise of the internet as a medium for spreading rumors has been so destructive and so toxic.

I mean...

This is a difficult question.

I think, unfortunately, and this is probably true of many movements, the Me Too movement started from a place that was legitimate.

We wanted to talk about how the specter of sexuality looms over women in their professional lives in a way that it shouldn't.

It was very, very quickly dragged out of that narrow and useful context and weaponized by people who just had been disappointed by a man in some context and wanted revenge or wanted to see something done about it or wanted the cachet that comes with announcing oneself as a victim.

And it very quickly went off the rails.

Well, I mean, ideally we would stop using social media as this sort of extra legal workaround for adjudicating offenses that are not criminal, you know, for adjudicating our disappointments with people.

And then we wouldn't have to worry about that.

But I don't think that is going to happen, unfortunately.

I don't think that is going back in the bag.

But then the main thing here, and this is a media failure, is a failure to investigate

and instead to just run with the information provided.

In this case, SCBWI's executive director, Lynn Oliver, made this announcement to the press that she had investigated, found responsible, and expelled Jay Asher for harassment.

And that was a lie.

And everybody printed it, and then nobody ever investigated it.

Nobody ever went back to say, wait, did we get this wrong?

Many people embellished it or were sloppy in the way that they talked about it.

People said he was accused of harassment.