This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Gitantham. A warning before we start today's show, this episode includes accounts of sexual assault and may not be suitable for all listeners. In 2016, Maya Armanson sat down at her laptop to write a Facebook post. It was about a famous playwright, Israel Horowitz.
She accused him of serious sexual misconduct. He put this anger in me that I didn't have before and that wasn't going away. And I couldn't let it rest. Within months, other women stepped forward with similar stories.
But yeah, no, he just locked the door and then nobody was there and it was... And then he just... I never thought it would go this far. I went to the managing director and said I was quitting.
The theater world was quick to censure the playwright. Several companies dropped productions of his plays. He quickly resigned from the board of the theater company that he founded. Israel Horowitz was disgraced.
His career, in tatters. But here's the twist. 24 years earlier, another group of women had made nearly identical accusations. And nothing happened.
This week on Hidden Brain, we ask, why now? Why have so many women stepped forward to make accusations about sexual harassment and assault? And why is the world finally taking them seriously? In the mid-1980s, Jocelyn Meinhardt was a high school student in New York City.
She was known for her sense of humor and her oversized vintage clothes. She was dating Adam Horowitz, a teenage musician from the band The Beastie Boys. I went out with him from the time I was 15 to 17. After high school, Jocelyn enrolled in New York University to pursue a degree in dramatic writing.
One day in 1989, she got a call. It was Adam's father, the 49-year-old playwright, Israel Horowitz. Israel was like, I have a play and two tickets, you know, come to see it. I was like, this is weird.
And I don't even think before then I'd seen any of his plays. Like, I just had no relation. He was just like my boyfriend's father. Jocelyn went to see the play with her new boyfriend.
Sometime later, she says, Israel invited her to have coffee. She told him she was selling at NYU. And then, you know, he was like, oh, you're in dramatic writing school. That's silly.
He created a position for me where he was like, you can come up and be like the Samuel Beckett fellow. And get a stipend. Yeah. It was really the first time I was going to be away from home.
Like, even summer camp up till then had been like two weeks, you know. I mean, I remember like not knowing how to feed myself. Like, I ate a lot of cereal that summer and candy bars, so. At the end of May, Jocelyn packed her stuff and headed up to the blue-collar fishing town of Gloucester.
The theater company had rented a room for her. With this really cool senior citizen fisherman's wife who was really awesome. Jocelyn started settling in. The next day, Israel showed up and was like, hop in my car and drive up to my house.
I remember so clearly because it was a really foggy day so just everything about it was just creepy and it wasn't late in the evening. It was just like dinner time. They drove through the fog to Israel's house. They went inside.
And that door, the one she thought would lead to endless possibility, slammed shut. We just locked the door and then immediately suck his tongue down my mouth. And I remember just feeling so trapped and I remember looking out the window and thinking, can I run? If I left, would anybody help me?
And wouldn't I look ridiculous because I'd walked into this house and Israel could just say, oh, she's mentally unstable or whatever. Remember, this was before cell phones, Ubers, and Google Maps. Instead of running, Jocelyn froze. I felt like I was in shock.
It was so shocking. It was so shocking. This is my ex-boyfriend's father. But then I said, I am not here for this.
I don't want to do this. And he said, this was inevitable. And I realized that he wasn't viewing it and I started to cry. And I think clearly you shouldn't have sex with somebody unless they're crying for joy.
So I do feel like on some level he knew what he was doing. But yeah, he led me upstairs and I was crying. And remember, kind of seeing it from an aerial perspective. While I wasn't grabbed by my hair and dragged through a park in the middle of the night, could I describe it as rape?
Like, could I, you know, because I wasn't screaming and saying no, no, no, no, was that rape? Jocelyn didn't say a word to anyone. I just thought, if I tell people and deal with this, I will have to go home and lose this opportunity. And it felt, I would have to deal with all the shame and embarrassment over what happened because then I know that this would happen.
So it just seemed wiser to just soldier on. So that's what she did. In the weeks that followed, Jocelyn tried to avoid Israel's advances. Sometimes she succeeded.
But she says, not always. One of the times was in the room I was staying where I was also having a computer set up to write and he came over to help me with my play and then put the moves on me. And it was sort of like, we have to have sex before I'm going to sit down and help you with your play. And that's exactly what happened.
The other time, he was like, oh, my office in town is a mess. Come help me clean it up. And then we're there. So it was essentially like if he was alone with me in a place other than the theater and other than his house, which now had his kids and his twins and his nanny, like if he could get me into a place and he was able to do that twice and both times I didn't fight him off.
And I did feel like I had made that decision. Like, I'm just not going to tell anyone ever and I don't want to ruin this opportunity. So, you know, I thought, I remember thinking at that time that you could absolutely forget things. I was like, I'm going to block this.
I'm not going to think about it and I'll be fine. You know, like I didn't understand that that's not how the brain works. For Jocelyn, the summer became something to endure. It was all made worse by the fact that the Gloucester Stage Company was producing a searing play about the trauma of rape.
It was called The Widow's Blind Date. The playwright, Israel Horowitz. The play tells the story of Margie, a woman in her 30s. Back when she was 17, Margie was gang raped by seven young men, including her high school classmates, George and Archie.
She's now returned to her hometown in Massachusetts to confront those two men. Much of the play depicts a world where men casually demean women. In one scene, Margie describes what it feels like to be endlessly objectified by men. She counts off the many that may not be appropriate for all listeners.
You're thinking it over, Archie and George. I will gladly give my breasts over to you for whatever purpose you choose. George, you and where I'm on the odd days, Archie, on the events, and I'd be free to get back to work, to get back to sleep at night, to end the constant and unrelenting fondling. I saw that play like 500 times because that was the play that was being produced the summer I was there, like the worst summer of my life.
And so it was really, no, it's just so complicated and ridiculous because I basically had to watch a play about a woman who was raped confronting her rapist. And that's what part of, you know, I remember Israel saying to me at one point, like, can you imagine hurting somebody, like what that would do, like how ridiculous that is. And I was just like, you have hurt me. Like, it just was such a mind bender.
We repeatedly reached out to Israel Horowitz via phone, email, and letters. We asked him about the allegations that Jocelyn and other women have made against him and the apparent contradiction between the message of his play and his alleged behavior. He declined an interview saying, I'm recovering from two major cancer surgeries. My play, The Widow's Blind Date, states clearly my feeling about sexual violence against women, which I find to be abhorrent and intolerable.
When we come back, we look at the psychology of when people stay silent and when they speak up. This is NPR. At D.I.D. Electrical, we know getting a new appliance is genuinely exciting.
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Electrical, for everything new. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. People often stay silent even when they want to speak up. We may think something in private but say nothing in public.
This happens to individuals who suffered abuse. This happens with entire nations. Duke University political scientist Timur Koran says that people pay close attention to public opinion and figure out that sometimes it's wiser to shut up. The punishments for expressing a controversial view cover a wide range.
At one extreme, there can be a knock on your door at 4 o'clock in the morning and you can be dragged to prison, you can be taken to a concentration camp. There are societies where that happens. But there are much milder forms of punishment. You can be ostracized from a community, you can be rebuked, your career can be placed in danger.
And so people say one thing publicly and believe another thing privately. Timur Koran calls this preference falsification. When our views clash with what we perceive to be the prevailing currents, we realize it's dangerous to openly express ourselves. A good example is East Germany during Soviet control.
For decades, communism survived by making the populations it ruled afraid to express opposition to the principles of communism and express opposition to the dictatorships that were running the Soviet bloc countries. The silence around Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct operated in the same way. It was an open secret for decades, we've learned in Hollywood and in circles that Harvey Weinstein traveled in, that he was a predator of young women, but also that if anybody called him out on this, he would ruin their careers. There are ways to talk about our secrets, ways to voice our truths while maintaining plausible deniability.
The best way? Humor. This is from the sitcom 30 Rock. Don't do it, J-Mo.
You don't want to miss what we're doing. Oh, please. I'm not afraid of anyone in show business. I turned down intercourse with Harvey Weinstein on no less than three occasions.
I'm fine. And several years ago at an Oscar nomination ceremony, Seth MacFarlane told this joke. The 2012 nominees for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role are Sally Field in Lincoln, Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables, Jackie Weaver in Silver Linings Playbook, Helen Hunt in The Sessions, and Amy Adams in The Master. Congratulations, you five ladies no longer have to pretend to be attracted to Harvey Weinstein.
Did you hear that laughter? Everyone got it. Timor says when the Soviet Union tightly controlled East Germany, jokes were common there too. Jokes about the aging Soviet leaders, jokes about how inefficient the Soviet economy was, jokes about how hollow Marxism was, but when the information about all of these deficiencies of the system were put in jokes, the person telling the joke did not have to take ownership of the claims.
Where they drew the line is with writing an article that would go into a newspaper that would put in words backed up by facts the deficiencies of the system that you were joking about. There is power in the written word. Sometimes it takes a news article to turn whispered injustices into public outrage. But this is where the story of Israel Horowitz gets complicated.
Preference falsification was certainly at play in keeping women like Jocelyn Meinhardt silent. But it doesn't explain everything. In 1993, an envelope showed up in a Boston newsroom in the mailbox of a theater critic. A sort of plain white envelope addressed to me.
This is Bill Marks. He now teaches at Boston University. But back in the early 90s, he was writing for the Boston Phoenix. Which is part of what was then a very proud tradition of alternative presses.
Bill wrote theater reviews. So when he tore open the envelope in his mailbox, he was expecting what he usually received, a hate note from an angry actor. That is not what he found. This was a different kind of note.
And it essentially was a plea from an anonymous woman at the Gloucester Stage Company saying that they were being molested, that they were being sexually harassed by the artistic director. I remember that in the note it mentioned that they created a buddy system to protect each other. And they wanted some help. And it was really, to me when I read it, it was a cry for help.
Bill was stunned. He wasn't really a reporter, let alone an investigative reporter. And yet he says, it felt like he'd been singled out to do something, that he was being tested. I wanted to check it out.
I didn't immediately go, oh, this must be true. But I felt, well, I'm hearing this note, it sounded authentic to me, at least enough to where I wanted to start going out and talking to actresses to see whether it was true or not. He started reaching out to women he knew had worked at the Gloucester Stage Company. Sometimes I would have to call two or three times.
At times they were reluctant. They would say, well, I'd like to talk, but I can't talk now. Or let me think about this. But slowly, women began to tell him their stories.
There was a tremendous amount of feeling, particularly among the actresses, that if this came out, they would not get jobs. They'd be labeled as being very difficult to work with. So that they were putting a lot on the line when they were doing this. It's important to note that at this time, Israel Horowitz was a big fish in a small pond.
He was an internationally known playwright running a powerhouse theater in an old, gritty fishing town. He had a bit of celebrity star power and used to drive around Gloucester in a little sports car with a license plate that had author in capital letters and used to wear sort of a beret. Laura Crook remembers that Lana declared. She's one of the women who reached out to Bill with a story to share.
They agreed to meet in his apartment. We went in and sat down and gave him a glass of water and had his little tape recorder. And he said, you know, we'll start when you're ready. In the summer of 1989, she said she attended the Gloucester Stage Company's production of The Widow's Blind Date.
She told Bill she fell in love with a small black box theater and jumped at an opportunity to audition for Israel the following year. And I went in and I think I asked him what he wanted or he said, you know, okay, do the monologue and I want you to. cry three times. And I said, okay.
And I did the monologue and I cried three times. And then a couple days later, they asked me if I would understudy. And I said, yes, absolutely. But even before she started the new gig, a friend in the Boston theater world told her, hey, try not to be alone with him.
And I said, okay. You know, that's going to be just like, just try not to be alone with him. When she got to Gloucester, another actress issued the very same warning. Try not to be alone with him.
Rehearsals began. One day, as other actors worked on a scene, Israel called Laura over. And Israel said, hey, why don't we go into the green room so we can work on your monologue? And I said, okay, because that's totally normal.
There's nothing at all that's absolutely normal to do. So we went into the green room and we sat down on the couch. And I said, let's just read through the monologue. And I started to read through it.
And then he just was on me. And he had his tongue in my mouth and his hand down my shirt. And I jumped up and made a joke. I said, ha ha, that's not in the script.
Ha ha ha. He came at me again when I pushed him away. And I don't know what I said then. I think it's a lot of bloodbushes to your ears in situations like that.
And just kind of figure out how the hell to get out of there. Laura says she wasn't the only one in the theater fending off Israel's advances. So she walked out of body system with another woman. Israel didn't like lipstick.
They didn't like red lipstick. And so we had a tube of lipstick. I had it in my box on my dressing table. So we would always put on lipstick when he was around.
Another time, Israel asked Laura to come into the shop to hand her some notes. Laura caught the eye of her friend. I mean, in true black comedy, she was the technical director. But she kept announcing that she was coming into the shop to get a tool of some sort of comedy and a hammer.
And then she'd go in and she'd get the shop back and walk out. Like she would not get what she was talking about. And then he would try to kiss me and then she would come back in and interrupt us again. It was a kind of job a person would want to quit as fast as possible.
And yet, when Laura was asked back for another summer of work, she said yes. You know, I've been thinking a lot about that. A lot recently. But I think over the years, I think about it.
I wanted to work. There's just not a lot of work out there. I mean, it's a hard job. It's a hard career.
And he wasn't always assaulting you. Sometimes you have these really great conversations about show business and theater and being creative and the art that we all make. And so I just I wanted to believe otherwise. It's just trying to make sense of it so that you can live in this world.
Bill Marks understood the dilemma Laura and the other women faced. I mean, their careers were on the line. They felt their careers were on the line that they would be labeled as difficult. They'd be labeled as man haters.
They'd be labeled as, you know, somehow making things up about Horatis, who apparently was telling everyone that this is just part of his sort of, you know, theater slash Hollywood kissy kissy huggy huggy demeanor. Two of the women told Bill they complained to the stage company's board of directors, but to their knowledge, nothing had been done. When Bill reached out to the board president, he was told the women's stories didn't fit the legal definition of sexual harassment. On August 6, 1993, the Boston Phoenix published Bill's article.
It included the stories of six women. They chose to remain anonymous, but said they would identify themselves if the paper was sued. A week later, the Phoenix published a follow-up story after four more women came forward. Three were nannies, who'd worked in Israel's house.
To me, I absolutely proved what was going on, given the number of women in the activities. Then, you know, when the second article came out and I was called, all the nannies had called me and suddenly I had, you know, some other women contacting me, then I felt that, hey, I've opened the floodgates. Now they're definitely going to have to do something. How can they ignore this?
But it was ignored. Officials at the theater recently said that in 1993, they conducted an investigation and crafted a new sexual harassment policy. The theater said Israel flatly denied the charges and that the women who spoke to Bill did not come forward to identify themselves. But in Bill's article, the board president is also quoted as characterizing the women as tightly wound.
Laura Crook remembers being really angry and really sad. But mostly like, okay. That's it. Okay.
I mean, we were two years out of Anita Hill, so we saw how that went. It wasn't much of a surprise. It was just, I hadn't thought about how much it hurt until now, until all of it resurfacing again, what it is to be, to know you're telling the truth and to be summarily dismissed. Laura and Jocelyn's stories help us understand why the Me Too movement didn't take off 25 years ago.
Tomorrow, Koran would call it preference falsification. Princeton psychology professor Betsy Pollack cites a complementary idea known as social proof. When people are deciding whether to step forward and say something, they look at what happened to others who stepped forward before them. It's social proof at its most basic.
We want to know, we wonder how we'll be treated if we step forward to blow the whistle on a certain kind of behavior. And we need sometimes to watch someone else do it and to see what realistically are the consequences. When Laura and other actors revealed their stories and found it made no difference, other women received a clear message. Shut up.
Stay silent. Women especially used to watch other women report and maybe lose their jobs or just not be heard at all or be disparate. So that is the kind of social proof that used to inform women's decisions about reporting sexual harassment. Another young woman said she met Israel Horowitz in 1994.
Yana Mastecchi was interning at a small theater in Paris where Israel was working. She says he tried to kiss her and once tried to pull her into his bedroom. When Yana discovered the Mastecchi stories, she received social proof about what would happen if she spoke up. I had case-based evidence from a 93 article that came out that nothing happened to Israel Horowitz or the company or the board or anybody else who was responsible for enabling and protecting that behavior.
I knew that you put yourself out there and there will be nothing done other than you lose your job and you leave and you're bullied out of it. You're listening to Hidden Gray. This is NPR. NPR.
NPR. NPR. NPR. This is Hidden Gray.
I'm Shankar Vedanta. We're talking this hour about why the Me Too revolution has caught fire at this particular moment even though both men and women have known about sexual harassment and assault for decades. We've seen how women were silenced and why it made sense for them to stay quiet. But the science of social norms and preference falsification also explains how a code of silence can abruptly crumble.
Again, this story includes descriptions of sexual assault and may not be appropriate for all listeners. The same year that Yana Mistake decided to remain quiet, Maya Hermansons was born at St. Vincent's Hospital across the street from Israel Horowitz's Brownstone in Greenwich Village. From an early age, she was drawn to the stage.
She started out dancing. It was Maya's dance teacher who recommended her for a role in one of Israel Horowitz's plays. She was 11 years old. Everything about the theater and the playwright delighted her.
Oh, I loved him. He was great. Yeah, I had so much fun with him. He was like a grandfather to me.
There was a running thing going on during the production. If anyone cursed in front of me, they had to buy me a Toblerone bar, so I got lots of chocolate off of him. Maya stayed close with Israel after the production. He made her feel special.
Well, he's just always really kind. He always responded to emails extremely quickly. Yeah, it was just this general sense of feeling that I wasn't just anybody else, that I was valued and respected. He wrote me recommendations for things.
He gave me monologues for auditions. He was great. He came to, at my request, was the speaker at graduation from my middle school at PPAS, the professional performing arts school. Fast forward a decade.
In 2016, when Maya was 21, she was going through a rough time and feeling lost. My cousin had died. My cat had died. I was going through relationship problems.
Just, it was this swirl of things that were just getting very difficult to know how to deal with. One day, Maya ran into Israel at a reading of one of his plays. She told him what was going on in her life. And he said to me, don't worry, I'm going to give you as many of my short plays as you want, and you can produce them.
And that's going to be your project. That's what's going to focus you. And it was really incredible. I thought that it was a beautiful offer, a very cool offer.
I'd never produced anything before. He was willing to help me. So it was really meaningful. Maya considered it carefully.
She had to conquer her own doubts about whether she was up to it, whether she could direct others, not just be directed. She decided she could. So I emailed him and I said that it would be great. And for the minutes, I got a response with attachments to a ton of his plays.
And so I began sifting through them to see which ones I wanted to do. Maya eventually chose five plays to work on. She recruited an actor who was also interested in producing, and they got to work. They changed language that felt dated.
They started working on casting. Maya wanted to get as much done as possible, so that when she met with Israel, I could show him that I was actually invested in this, and that I was putting the time in, and I wasn't just waiting for him to tell me what to do. Finally, Maya was ready. She wanted to talk production with Israel.
At the time, he was overseeing rehearsals at a theater in downtown Manhattan. He lives just a few blocks away from that theater, and I live further uptown. So I was saying I could go downtown to meet him. It's not a problem.
And he insisted on coming up to my house. He showed up a half hour earlier than they'd arranged. That threw me off a little bit. But when she met him in the lobby, everything seemed fine.
Very friendly. It was very nice. They went into her apartment. And then the second the door closed behind him, uh, he's just, it was like a switch.
He flipped. He came and tried to kiss me, and then he put his hands on my breasts, and he pulled me to the couch in the living room and had me sit on his lap. And then I got up, and then he pulled me down again, back onto his lap. And he stuck his tongue in my mouth, and I jerked away.
Then he did it again. He held my head in place, and I tried to get up again. And it was just sort of going around in circles like that. Maya grew up in New York, and she thought of herself as tough.
But in that moment, she didn't respond the way she would have expected. I felt very self-conscious and nervous of offending him, which is something, to this day, I can't believe that that's how I felt in the moment. But then he, I kept sort of trying to veer the conversation back to the plays, back to the work, back to the production. And he interrupted me, and he said, before we get started, I just have to say, I've known you since you were so young, and your breasts have just become so big and beautiful.
And, uh, it was just impossible to process what was happening, that he was talking to me that way. Um, and it was very strange that he acknowledged in the moment how, how long he's known me. But, you know, part of me was almost hoping, you know, he's approaching 80, senile, maybe he doesn't quite understand who I am. But in that sentence, in that line, that clearly wasn't the case.
Maya tried again to explain her ideas for the plays. He had no interest in what I had to say about them. He sort of had his game plan for how they should be done. And then she says he tried to kiss her again.
And I said, I have a boyfriend. And he said, so, I have a wife. And then he said, I'm doing this for you, Maya. You know, I'm doing this for you because I love you.
I love you. Do you know how much I love you? Do you love me? He needed to hear me say that I loved him back.
And then he told me, no great woman ever became great by being a good girl. Maya says she kept resisting. Eventually, Israel left. When the door closed behind him and he left, what was going through your head?
I punched the kitchen wall, and I sat down on the floor, and I was just shaking with rage. Rage that wasn't there when he was in the apartment. It was all very, I almost felt like my 11-year-old self dealing with him when we were face-to-face. And the second I didn't see him anymore, the second I got him out of the apartment, I just couldn't believe I had just let him leave and hadn't hit him.
It was a very, very strange, sad moment. For more than 25 years, Israel Horowitz was protected by silence. Women who tried to speak up were shut down. The Whisper Network had turned thready and faint.
Maya did not know about the accusations in Israel's past. But after the incident, she called her friends. She told her mother, who quickly tracked down the articles for the Boston Phoenix. And reading those articles changed something in me.
The description of what he did to them was exactly what he did to me. Maya wanted people to know what had happened. She called a prominent theater where Israel often worked. She says the director didn't call back.
It was radio silence for three months, and then one day I saw on Instagram actually a post of Israel in rehearsal on stage for the play they were working on, and it was captions, the man at work, with a bunch of hashtags like genius, love the theater. Maya burned with a white-hot fury. I got so livid. I couldn't believe it.
So she sat at her kitchen table and slammed out a post on Facebook. I asked her to read it for us. In the beginning of June, I had a meeting with a playwright in my home. He is my senior by several decades.
I've known him since I was 11. I regarded him as an honorary grandfather. Maya described in detail what Israel had done to her, but did not mention his name. She finished up the post this way.
And it hurts me that even though some people do know what he's done, it doesn't seem to matter. And there will be more women. And some of them may be a lot tougher than me, but some of them will surely be a lot less tough. We've got to protect each other, especially when it would be so easy for a woman to feel this was her fault.
That might have been where the story ended, but then news broke. A tape surface in which then-presidential candidate Donald Trump bragged about assaulting women. I'm going to use some pictures just in case I start kissing her. You know, I'm automatically attracted to people.
I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. It was the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Just the casual nature of it is, like, how they, yeah, it's, he just, you know, he can grab women's bodies.
Israel grabbed my body. It wasn't mine. They didn't see, he didn't see it as mine. Trump doesn't see it as the woman's body.
Like, it's theirs. They have some ownership over it. And, and that really, really upset me. It's still- upset me.
Maya watched in disbelief as Donald Trump was elected president. I've just received a call from Secretary Clinton. She congratulated us, it's about us, on our victory. At that moment, something snapped.
The day after Trump's election, Maya reopened her Facebook post. I reposted the original thing, the original piece I wrote, and I just put something at the top saying that in light of the election, I'm ready to say the name. It was the clarinet Israel Horowitz. Maya also felt compelled to find other women who'd been through what she'd been through.
She had powerful tools at her disposal. Facebook, Twitter, Google. It was a whisper network, but on high octane. One of the first people she connected with was Yana Maseki, who had stayed silent about what happened after she met Israel in Paris in 1994.
When she heard Maya's story, Yana knew she had to speak up too. It made me mad that it was still happening and that maybe if I had said something, maybe it would make a difference. I don't know if it would make a difference then, but I'm raising two girls, and I couldn't look at myself if I didn't. Maya also did something else.
She contacted the New York Times. All over the country, powerful men were being toppled on charges of sexual harassment. In late November 2017, the Times published an article detailing the stories of nine women who publicly accused Israel Horowitz of harassment and abuse. In that article, the playwright apologized, but said he had a different memory of some of these events.
The reaction to this article was completely different than in 1993. The Glossosage Company quickly severed ties with Israel. Other companies canceled productions of his plays. His own son, Adam Horowitz, said he believed the accusations.
Not long ago, I was talking to my wife over dinner about this story. I was trying to understand, why now? Why are women being heard in a way they were not heard before? My wife, Ashwini Thambe, researches gender issues and recently wrote about this topic.
I'm an associate professor of women's studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. What she told me about was the theory of horizontal violence. Horizontal violence is when people turn on other people in their own lives when they are not able to actually effect change against more powerful targets. It's a term used by the 20th century psychiatrist and philosopher, Franz Fanon.
He wrote about how people living under brutal colonial rule dealt with oppression. Because it's so difficult to attack or target colonial rulers, what Fanon found was that people were lashing up against people in their own lives. Think about pressure building up in a container. The energy needs a way to escape.
If it can't blow the top off, it might explode sideways. I think that the election of Donald Trump has served as a trigger and it has provoked a great deal of fury and impatience because he represents for many people the ultimate unpunished predator. Fanon used the term horizontal violence to describe rage that was misdirected or misplaced. Ashwini says horizontal action is a better term to describe how many women have channeled their rage over Trump's election to call out the men in their own lives who sexually harass them.
It feels very, very important in this moment to topple those perpetrators who are within reach because at this moment, Trump remains unreachable, even though Trump shapes the context in which enormous anger against misogyny and sexual harassment has risen. Maya has the same take as Ashwini. I think it's Trump. I think that's what it is.
Clearly, there's been something building for a long time, but it's such a huge deal for your leader, the leader of the free world, to not care about women. It's so unbelievable. Laura Crook was one of the women who came forward to speak to the press in 1993. She did so again in 2017.
She's grateful that her allegations were taken seriously this time around. But when she thinks about what happened to Maya, she can't get over the terrible cost of the delay. I just wish I could have stopped it in 93. It breaks my heart.
It breaks my heart that so many women had to go through this when it was stoppable. It was absolutely stoppable. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, experts on both sides of the Atlantic were certain that the Soviet Union would endure for many decades. Preference falsification blinded regimes to their citizens growing dissatisfaction.
The pressure reached a breaking point in 1989. It took authorities by surprise. As protests at the Berlin Wall gained momentum, the regime that once looked invincible suddenly looked fragile. Preference falsification now started to work in the other direction.
Very quickly, defending the old regime became dangerous. In exactly the same way, many powerful men accused of sexual assault have found themselves without defenders, even amongst their own families. The social proof has changed. In Israel's play, The Widow's Blind Day, Margie goes back home 20 years after she was gang-raped.
She wants to confront her assailants to hear them say they did something wrong. 20 years after what she describes as the worst summer of her life, Jocelyn Meinhardt, the playwriting fellow who worked on that play in 1989, made an appointment to meet with Israel. He was just like, oh, it's so great to see you. We should have gotten together a lot.
It's been too long. And then when we sat down for coffee, I just said, you know, the reason, I have a reason for seeing you, and I just want to talk about what happened. And, and, um, I didn't say, um, rape. I think I, you know, I said, I talked about the trauma.
I was like, that was deeply traumatic. It affected my whole life. Um, and it's affected my romantic relationships, my relation, you know, just everything. Um, and he was like, what?
You know, just sort of taking it back. Jocelyn says Israel apologized. But in that non-apologetic way, when, you know, it's not, it wasn't anything that landed and that he took, really took responsibility for it. She says he suggested that what happened between them was not abusive.
At one point, he was just like, do you remember us? Like, as if it was a romantic thing that I was just remembering wrong, which was enraging. And, um, and the thing that really, really sticks with me and really also was angry. It was just that, you know, you weren't underage, like, because it wasn't, because I was 19, um, that made it okay.
Not long after Maya named Israel in her Facebook post, she received a voicemail. Maya, this is Israel calling. I'm so upset. I don't know what to say.
I had no idea. It's a terrible, terrible misunderstanding. It was a terrible mixed, mixed signal. And I didn't know you were upset.
And I love you, Maya. And I never, never would hurt you that way. Never, never, never. Please, you've got to believe me.
Oh my God, I'm just shaking. Somebody just wrote to me and told me about it. I don't know what to say. Hey, I'm so sorry.
And I love you. And I would never, never, never hurt you that way. That was such a missed signal and such a, oh my God. It is not to us, Israel said the widow's blind date, quote, states clearly my feeling about sexual violence against women, which I find to be abhorrent and intolerable.
We asked actors to read some lines from the end of Israel's play. In the scene, one of the men who raped Margie tries to explain why he did it. Nobody planned it, Margie. It just happened.
Honest to God. I mean, well, boys are always talking about wanting to do it with this one or that one. And everybody was always saying they'd love to do it with you because you were, well, beautiful. But nobody really meant it.
Jump in you. Huh? It's just when George here, well, started, everybody wanted to do it. Everybody liked you.
You liked me, Art? I did. A lot. And that's how you showed me you liked me?
I was tricked out at first. I was. Otherwise, Margie, the first words you would have whispered in your ear would have been, I love you. Because I did.
And I do. I do still, Mar. Something wicked. I love you would not have helped.
Since this episode first aired, several more women have publicly come forward to recuse Israel Horowitz of sexual misconduct. We reached out to him, but he declined to speak with us. This week's show was produced by Jenny Schmidt, Matthew Penman, and Parth Shah, and edited by Tara Boyle and Raina Cohen. Our team includes Thomas Liu and Laura Querelle.
Our intern is Kimita Vargas Restrepo. We had original music today from Ramteen Arab Louie. Laura C. Harris and Eric Messner performed the scenes from The Widow's Blind Date.
Special thanks to Patrice Howard, Ashley Messinger, Greg Lewis, Chris Turpin, Neil Carruth, Mark Mehmet, and I'm Nick Brunton. This week's unsung hero is Tarana Burke. In 1997, 20 years before the Me Too hashtag lit up social media, Tarana Burke started a movement to help victims of sexual harassment and assault. She called it Me Too.
While millions of people now know about this hashtag, far fewer know about the woman who created the term. I'm Chakrabit Lantham. See you next week. Starting a business is tough.
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