Out Of The Blue Podcast

In 2018, I was wrongfully accused of rape. The accusation was false. I had no criminal record, no history of violence. But the moment I was arrested, my career vanished, my savings were destroyed, and I became a pariah.For four years, I fought the charges. In 2022, a jury deliberated for only minutes before finding me not guilty. But by then, the damage was catastrophic and irreversible.This Substack chronicles my story: the false accusation, the legal battle, the media frenzy, and the devastating consequences of being publicly condemned before being proven innocent. I’ll share the full account that was never heard outside the courtroom, examine how accusations become convictions in the court of public opinion, and explore what happens when that slippery word “alleged” gets lost in the hysteria.I spent 45 years at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, rising from teenage performer to Artistic Director. I built a career as a consultant, speaker, and writer. And in an instant, all of it was gone. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

It is raining in Minneapolis today. A cold, all day rain, the kind that arrives as a rebuke after a few days of seductive spring temperatures that had people believing the nice was here to stay. Even my big expensive water dogs don’t like the pouring cold, but they like to s**t in the neighbors yard, so we walk.The streets are full of earthworms. Thousands of them crossing the sidewalks, slithering the edge of driveways, each a meandering migrant from here to there, or blithely stretched along curbs and drainage easements. They’ve spent the winter deep below the god forsaken frozen crust of ice and snow, waiting, in the dark, until the conditions changed. I can’t blame them for wanting to move.The rain didn’t create them. They’re always there, just a few feet below every frozen step, or tangled in the garden trowel of summer’s malleable soil. It’s the natural structure in the cycle that draws them out, creating the conditions by which they respond, knowing they’re safe, that they won’t freeze. The worm doesn’t need the rain to exist. It needs the rain to move.In the landscape of human political engagement, permission structures work the same way, giving hatred and radicalism the ability to move. They don’t generate hatred, anymore than rain makes the worm. That’s the misunderstanding in how people talk about mobs, about the specific social weather that produces ugly rhetoric and violence. We want there to be a source, an origin, a bad actor, a nut job, who manufactured the thing. It’s cleaner that way. It assigns responsibility in a generalized direction, over there somewhere. Close enough.Many of our fellow citizens harbor low-grade hatreds the way soil holds worms. Quietly, usually inert in the rumble of ordinary life, remaining in the subcutaneous layer, rarely emerging, except at family dinners or over drinks with that a*****e that voted for that a*****e. But bigger passions come out with enough rain, and movement feels not just possible but logical, necessary, and righteous.What changes the conditions for the worm is rain and warmth. For the radical it’s permission. This doesn’t require authority, or a written note style of permission. It’s the permission of agreement, of company.Consider Me Too. The proposition was time’s up for predators and harassers, for the patriarchy and the powerful to be brought to heel for their sexist barbarism. Though rape and sexual violence were already criminal offenses, the cultural conversation created a permission structure for women to safely come forward with their own stories, to tell their truth, to put the powerful in check.No one I know thought this was a bad thing. But underneath the accountability mechanism was something more primal. The declaration itself, the act of mass, public, named identification of a target class, functioned as rain. It dissolved the barrier between impulse and action for so many women who had been carrying something and waiting.Some of what emerged was legitimate. Some of the justice was well served. But the structure didn’t distinguish. Once the rain comes the soil releases everything it has been holding, and there are few mechanisms inside it that separate the warranted from the unwarranted. The conditions don’t know the difference. And critically, the people doing the emerging rarely know the difference either. They feel the rain. They move. They experience the movement as justice because the weather tells them it is. Everywhere and everyone all at once looks like an unimpeachable reality. But it’s not reality. It’s why some shooters claim their actions just made sense, that someone had to do it, as if the impulse to kill was universally felt and they were simply the one willing to act on it. An unreasonable action that looks entirely reasonable from inside the weather system these people have been soaking in.Now the rain has a new name. The target is different. The platforms that function as soil, warming, concentrating, making the dark wet and inviting, are doing what soil does. X. Blue Sky. Truth. The comment sections and the group threads and the dinner tables where a certain kind of contempt has become not just acceptable but socially required. You demonstrate your values by the temperature of your hatred. Hating Trump correctly has become a credential. A fashion. An identity for the left, and now in some factions of the right as well.The zealot who takes it further is not an aberration. They are the logical product of saturation. They emerge because the conditions are right, because the rain has been falling long enough and hard enough that movement feels not just permitted but ordained. The millions who performed the right contempt, said the right things, cheered from the right angle, they are the worms who didn’t make it quite that far. Not more virtuous. Just not quite as wet.The structure doesn’t require them to know what they’re participating in. It only requires the rain.None of this is an argument for diminished responsibility. The people who threaten, who harass, who pull triggers, they own what they do. The rain doesn’t absolve the worm that crosses the road and gets crushed under a tire. The permission structure explains the conditions that made action feel rational. It doesn’t transfer the moral weight of that action onto the culture, the platforms, the rhetoric, or the rain. Mangione chose. The people who came for me chose. Understanding why the conditions were right is not the same as excusing what people did inside them.Luigi Mangione didn’t emerge from nowhere. He emerged from years of saturated soil. The logic was simple: insurance companies kill people, the courts protect them, the system is captured, and therefore. The “therefore” is where vigilantism lives. It doesn’t require psychosis. It requires convincing enough people that official mechanisms of accountability have failed, that the target class has earned what’s coming, that action outside the law is not crime but correction. Mangione pulled a trigger. Millions of people felt the rain and didn’t. That’s not a moral distinction. That’s a matter of degree.The same structure produces political assassination attempts. The same structure produces coordinated harassment campaigns. The same structure produced the people who wanted me dead.I know this from the inside.In 2018 I was accused. It started with Weinstein. Arguably it started with Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, and the misogynists who needed to be felled. The rhetorical rain had been falling long enough to lubricate the passions, to warm the soil. People who had known me for decades discovered a strange new certainty about me, nearly overnight. People who had never questioned anything I’d done found it not just possible but necessary and even natural to piss on my name. They weren’t manufacturing hatred. They were responding to the downpour. The mechanism told them it was righteous, that the courts wouldn’t be enough to overcome a powerful man at some dinky arts festival in a Minnesota cornfield. Some of them said so directly.I am not Donald Trump. Neither are most targets of these structures. It doesn’t require a president or a celebrity or a traditional villain of national proportion. It requires a profile high enough to serve as a focal point. The actors experience it as conscience. That is what makes it so effective and so dangerous. When you’re committing violence out of conscience, misplaced or otherwise, strictly speaking, you don’t need to be a lunatic to take action.These days you don’t need to be guilty of any sin to be the target of violent rhetoric, or violence itself. Last August I visited the Renaissance Festival for the first time since my acquittal, nearly three years after the fact and nearly seven years after my arrest. I became a target once again. The dumb and the damned pitched a fit that I would be allowed entry. Social media roiled. People threatened. Luckily I was only there for a few hours before I went home, unscathed.Given what I’ve been through, you might forgive me for raging against those who perpetrated this, the cast of characters so deeply dishonest, the painter, the prince, the king, the courtly fool, the peasant, and the moron. But it was never an option for me to step on the worms and bait my hook with them. These days I pick up hundreds of worms caught in the rain, stranded by clearing skies and sunshine, and throw them back into the moistened grass.That’s what you do with the worms when they come out. You save them, and set them free. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

Today in my Google Alerts is a story from Cleveland.com (The Plain Dealer) written by attorney Eric Foster, whose bio says he’s a lawyer in private practice from Atlanta, who has “tried 10 felony murder jury trials and argued more than two dozen felony appeals.” The title sounded promising.“False sexual assault allegations may be rare, but will that matter if you’re the one accused?”It piqued my interest because grappling with the often complicated realities of false allegations is far too rare in modern media. These days, accusations of any kind of sexual violence or predation are a near automatic death sentence to the accused’s livelihood, community standing, and reputation and few people seem to care. In this piece, Foster doesn’t dismiss the wrongfully accused, but acknowledges as I do that most accusations are true. But most isn’t all, and my position is that these contradictions provide camouflage for media coverage to tar and feather the subjects long before there has been any evidence sorting, motions, or anything resembling a jury trial.Foster starts off in the right direction, with a story about a high school friend, a basketball player he knew, who was wrongfully accused but “was later found innocent by a jury.” That’s the first flag. Mr. Foster is a lawyer with criminal trial experience so he should know there is no such verdict. The accused enters the courtroom presumed innocent. After considering the evidence and the witnesses, the jury finds defendants guilty or not guilty. Not guilty only means the prosecution failed to prove its case, and the defendant leaves the courtroom as they entered: innocent. That distinction is the entire architecture of due process, you can’t skip pass it.Foster covers the usual dusty statistics on rape, citing that only 5.9% of accusations are false, so they’re rare. That figure comes from one study, one university, over ten years. More importantly, what’s the denominator of that 5.9%? It’s not hard to find. That study only counted cases where investigators affirmatively determined falsity, meaning she admitted to lying, or there was unimpeachable evidence she was elsewhere. Cases that were dropped, unresolved, or marked unsubstantiated don’t enter the false report column at all. Foster, like many others in the press, presents this as settled science. It isn’t.He then mentions the famous 2% number, pulled from the musty closet of worn out data. As far as anyone can establish, it originated in a single speech in 1974 and has never been peer reviewed.Whenever you see a rape statistic cited, ask what that data is standing on. What counted as a report? What counted as false? Who decided, and how? Strip that away and you don’t have useful data, just inference.After citing these questionable statistics, Foster suggests that if 10 men were accused of sexual assault, at most only one of them would be falsely accused. That’s wrong. The number represents false reports out of reported cases. Not every accusation becomes a police report. Not every accused man is in that denominator. He’s applying a rate built from a narrow sample to a universe of accusations far larger than that sample ever captured.Objection, counselor.The math only works if you assume the only accusations that matter are the ones that reached police at a northeastern university between 1998 and 2007.The Lisak study, which Foster’s statistics rest on, shows that 44.9% of those 136 cases were classified as “Case Did Not Proceed.” Unresolved. Not exonerated, not cleared, just gone. His claim that at most one in ten treats nearly half the data as if it doesn’t exist. (The Lisak study has been mostly denounced)I’ll give the man a break because he’s not a statistician. Neither am I. But when my life was set on fire by the machinery of accusation, I got educated fast. We shouldn’t use a partial denominator to make a universal claim about accused men whose entire lives are in the balance. Rhetoric is not an argument. It’s the costume of one.And finally, Foster closes with this:“If, my fellow men, you need any further evidence of the frailty of our reasonable concern about false sexual assault allegations, consider this scenario: Your daughter or sister or mother comes to you claiming she was raped. Is your first instinct to doubt her? Or would it be to go find her rapist?”What he’s really saying is that these statistics, which he doesn’t fully understand, prove that false accusations are so rare that due process is an inconvenience. Follow that logic and my accuser could just as well have had me shot for what the statistics declared I must have done. This isn’t a stretch. After I was arrested the online rhetoric was terrifying. Statistics don’t just mislead. In the wrong hands, they become a noose.I’d challenge Mr. Foster by turning his proclamation around. Your son, your husband, your brother is accused of rape. Is your first instinct to doubt him? Foster doesn’t answer that question. He never asks it.There's a term from psychology; Perseverative Cognition. Repetitive, negative, circular thinking that's hard to disengage from. I have struggled with this myself. But I also see it in conversations about rape statistics, where numbers get cited, repeated ad infinitum, and we nod along. Round and round the numbers go, where they come from nobody knows! But few stop to ask what these numbers are standing on or where they came from, because asking would require taking your own argument seriously. After all, if a statistic is confirming your priors, you're less likely to argue with it.Turns out, nearly 80% of trial lawyers who pass the bar can’t understand basic statistics. That’s a fact. I can’t prove it.A note about this episode: I recognize that many of the statistics surrounding rape, even when imprecise or poorly sourced, point toward a real and serious problem. Rape remains too common. Many women never see their attacker brought to justice. Rape kits are still backlogged in far too many cities. False allegations are rare by comparison to all of that. My argument is not with those realities. My argument is with how we count, measure, and report the numbers we use to describe them. We have a long way to go on that too.Eric Foster Opinion https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2026/04/false-sexual-assault-allegations-may-be-rare-but-will-that-matter-if-youre-the-one-accused-eric-foster.htmlThe Lisak study (the 5.9% source) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21164210/The 44.9% “Case Did Not Proceed” problem / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rapeThe 2% origin, traced to Brownmiller and a judge’s casual remark The 2% figure appears in Susan Brownmiller’s book, but was refuted when it was revealed the statistic was based on a casual comment made by a judge at a bar association meeting. Ballard Brief Best source for this is the Center for Prosecutor Integrity piece and the Loyola Law Review article by Edward Greer: https://www.prosecutorintegrity.org/pr/one-third-of-sexual-assault-allegations-in-the-criminal-setting-are-unfounded-call-for-renewed-focus-on-fairness-and-due-process/https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2216&context=llrThe Slate piece / balanced, acknowledges the methodological mess from both directions https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/false-rape-accusations-why-must-we-pretend-they-never-happen.html This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

Subscribers: As my writing has grown, so has the time it takes to produce it, and I don't post as much as I'd like. I'm using a few tools to free up more writing time. For some shorter pieces, you'll hear an AI voice narrator. For the longer work, you'll still hear me. When you hear that a false accusation can ruin someone’s life, most people think of the obvious losses — career, reputation, income. What they don’t account for is what happens to the people closest to you. Accusation triggers something tribal. Some friends step forward into the fire, picking sides, rewriting history, emerging covered in war paint. Some disappear. And a few, a few, publicly stand with you. My good friend Scotty Roberts was quite vociferous in his support and said he didn’t care what the agitators had to say about me, about him, about his tiny manhood. Yes. Glass blower Steve Weagel was ardently out with his outrage, knowing me since I was a young’n. Penn and Teller made sure I would attend their 50th Anniversary show at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, any complainers be damned.What drives most people from not speaking up isn’t that they lack conviction. It’s the real fear of being associated with the stain of the accused, and having their own lives attacked. I don’t blame anyone for protecting themselves and I understand it.One of the ugliest parts about being accused of a crime, well, of a sex crime, is how deadly the reaction is to the charges. I can’t overstate how agitated and threatening that crowd was. In a matter of hours, I went from being an esteemed member of the cast, a long time manager and performer, to an outcast, a demon that had to be expelled, or for some, bloodied and broken.A former close friend of ours, who lived with us for a couple of years when she needed a place to crash, and who was in the room when my mother was dying, seemed to take special joy in the media beating. I was told she didn’t believe I raped anyone, but she was happy to see me burn. She wrote “I’m so here for this!” Several years ago I asked her to take a step back from her work as my production assistant at the festival because it was clear she was struggling with some mental health issues. I would have done almost anything for her, but somehow she decided I did it for other reasons. I didn’t share in the animosity and had always hoped we would talk again. She passed away not long ago. Death makes final any hope of renewal.After I was arrested, the prosecution planned to present Spreigl Evidence, a legal procedure in the State of Minnesota that allows the prosecution to introduce allegations of prior bad acts, not to prove the charged offense, but to tell the jury there is a pattern to the allegedly bad behavior. The reality is that it imports your entire alleged life history into a trial that was supposed to be about one thing.The list of people subpoenaed to testify for the Spreigl was a rogues gallery of former friends, each with some complaint about my behavior. I told my attorney when I read some of the statements given to the prosecutors, “These people are not just full of s**t, they’re suffering from brain damage.” I won’t go into the details — the motion was dropped. Some of the people on the list never responded to their subpoena. Others didn’t want to be part of it anymore. Maybe the thought of cross examination was a bit too much for these charlatans.One of the women included in the Spreigl was a high-profile performer at the Festival, someone we welcomed into our home for months at a time. She was a traveling performer who wanted to live with us when she was in town. She had her own wing, a bedroom and shower, and regularly had her boyfriend over. Depending on which article you read, she either had to show me her breasts, or have sex with me, in lieu of rent. Neither version is based in reality.She was just one of several women, each with their own saddle to ride, riding one after the other, bound and determined to take the stand and mule kick the s**t out of my reputation. And in all the news stories it sounded like there were all these women, when in fact it was really only three who were given out of court settlements.When I thought the Spreigl was going to happen, and saw the small group set to testify, I wondered what had I missed, what hadn’t I seen? I was a fool. How did I get it so wrong?Or maybe I hadn’t.I’m not responsible for their accusations, nor am I accountable for their animosity. I didn’t hurt anyone, either deliberately or unintentionally. I loved and cared for these people because I did. I’m not responsible for what was done to me.A couple years ago, I posted an image from one of the parties we held at the Big House. Everyone is happy, smiling, having a great time, some of the same people who were going to torch me in court. The caption read “I love everyone in this image.” I meant it then. I mean it now. It was never past tense.AI Voicing / Eleven Labs This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

When allegations of sexual misconduct surface against a public figure, the machinery moves fast. A name. A story. A cascade. Endorsements collapse within hours. A career ends before a single charge is filed. I’ve been watching the Eric Swalwell story unfold this week, and I recognize every piece of it.I don’t know what Eric Swalwell did. Neither do you. Neither does anyone reporting on it. That’s not a defense of him. That’s an indictment of the process.It starts with one person. Then, as the story gains traction in the press, or in what’s called a whisper network — the informal, private channels through which allegations circulate within communities long before they ever become public — more voices come forward. That’s sometimes how buried truth surfaces. It’s also how a stream gets contaminated. False or distorted claims find cover in the cascade. Journalists have no reliable method for distinguishing one from the other, and almost none of them slow down long enough to try. Time constraints, institutional bias, and the simple fact that no one wants to defend a person who is, at that moment, a pariah.I know this because I was run through the same machinery.In 2018, Minnesota Public Radio ran a story about my alleged decades of bad behavior. One voice belonged to a woman who called herself T. Lake. She claimed I threatened her when she told me her dance troupe wouldn’t be returning to the festival. Her story was provably false. But she could make the claims under the safety and cover of moral panic and a journalist who gave her a pass. The allegation itself came out of a closed community, led at the start by one performer who was overheard, literally whispering, that she was building a list of women willing to antagonize management with claims. That’s not a whisper network surfacing truth. That’s a whisper network manufacturing it.The Swalwell case raises questions I can’t answer. There are gaps in the timeline. There are political motivations worth scrutinizing. There are statements suggesting his behavior was the worst kept secret in Washington — and if that’s true, who knew and said nothing? These are legitimate questions. A jury may eventually have to answer them. But a jury hasn’t. And in the meantime, his career in politics appears to be over.That’s the problem I keep coming back to. Not whether he’s guilty. Whether the process that’s already punished him is capable of distinguishing guilt from accusation.I’m interested in due process as a journalistic standard, not purely a legal one. Whether journalism has any obligation to apply a presumption of innocence before the courts do. I’m interested in the period between accusation and charge, where the damage is done and no institution is accountable for it.Here’s the thing about defamation. I’m free to plant a yard sign that reads MY NEIGHBOR IS A FASCIST. My neighbor is also free to sue me for defamation. Unlike my neighbor, I have no equivalent remedy when a journalist or a whisper network defaces my life with a false accusation. There is no lawsuit that restores what was taken. There is no correction that reaches everyone who saw the original.Everything else flows from that. The cascade dynamics. The force multiplier problem. The contaminated accusation stream. The zero verification threshold. Those are all mechanisms. The question underneath all of them is: does journalism owe the accused anything? And if so, what?I believe it does. I believe the period between accusation and verdict is where journalism does its most consequential and least accountable work. And I believe that until we treat due process as a journalistic standard and not just a legal one, we will keep watching the machinery do what it does, fast, loud, and final, long before anyone has proven a thing.CNN report https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/10/us/eric-swalwell-sexual-misconduct-allegations-invsCorroborating coverage of the four accusers https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/ex-staffer-accuses-eric-swalwell-sexual-assault-california-governor-rcna273731 https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/10/former-swalwell-staffer-accuses-governor-candidate-sexual-assault-reportThe political motivations of Katie Porter and Cheyenne Hunt - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/katie-porter-influencer-cheyenne-hunt-eric-swalwell-allegationshttps://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/4522426/influencer-eric-swalwell-allegations-ties-katie-porterThe cascade in real time, endorsements collapsing within hours https://calmatters.org/politics/2026/04/california-governor-race-swalwell-allegations https://abc7chicago.com/post/eric-swalwell-endorsements-withdrawn-california-governor-race-sf-chronicle-report-sexual-assault-allegations/18870861The accusations circulating online before charges, the whisper network going publichttps://www.foxnews.com/politics/misconduct-allegations-dog-swalwell-dem-rivals-seize-opening-california-governors-race This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

Consolidated edits and restructured narrative with sections removed“Plymouth, Massachusetts police officer Samantha Pelrine and husband arrested, charged with child rape”That’s the headline posted from the national CBS News website. Scroll down and there is a photo of a woman who looks terribly distressed, broken and afraid. I don’t know what she’s feeling, but I recognize that face. Given what she and her husband have been charged with, it’s the face of terrifying anxiety and heartbreak. I’m skeptical of this story. Not of the charges. Of how the story is being told. I’m not here to assess their guilt or innocence. That’s for a jury to decide. I’m here because the way this story was reported follows a pattern I’ve been documenting, and that pattern does damage regardless of how the trial ends.The story structure is one I recognize and have been writing about. Whether intentional or tacit, the piece is the latest example of a public shaming by media.Let’s start with the allegation, as reported by CBS.Samantha Pelrine faces four counts of child rape, and her husband Daniel Forand faces three for incidents that, according to the accuser, allegedly happened over seven years from 2018 to 2025. Forand is also charged with two counts of indecent assault and battery.“The allegations are that the sexual abuse started when he was 14-years-old and continued up until last year, another term for that is ‘grooming.’” The accuser, a 21-year-old male, lived with the couple during that time.Look at the CBS headline, which features Pelrine’s name and her status as a police officer in the same sentence as “child rape.” Forand, her husband, who is actually charged with additional counts, isn’t named. That’s an editorial choice, and it’s vicious. If the alleged crime doesn’t involve her official duties as a cop, her on-duty conduct, use of badge, squad, or authority, then “police officer” in the headline is sensationalizing and, of course, a near guarantee she won’t keep her job or ever work as a cop again (she’s already had her badge revoked), even if she’s acquitted. The published headline isn’t just about an accused person. It’s about a cop accused of child rape.The asymmetry matters. Forand is a relational appendage: “husband.” Pelrine carries the most damaging stain. He rides in attached to the scandal. That makes her the headline’s narrative engine. The reporters used her status as a recognizable public official, attached a morally radioactive accusation, and drove clicks to the story. Evidence? Nothing yet.The bail hearing is a procedural event, not a trial.It was the most humiliating experience of my life. The Monday morning after I’d spent the weekend locked in a tiny cell alone with my anxieties. Looking through the small window on my cell room door, I watched as other inmates were lined up to be taken to the hearing room. I waited. When it was my turn, I was taken alone because they were worried about my safety, or something. I was brought to a small room with a glass-paneled wall in front of the judge, the county prosecutor, my attorney, and a viewing area filled with strangers and the press. The prosecutor acted with the same indignation you can see in the WBZ video. I guess it’s his job to portray me as a “danger to the community” and argue that my bail ($100K!) should remain high. What an a*****e, I thought. There was no evidence, of course. But he had big, government balls, and had control over my life at that moment. To stand silently in front of strangers and the media, my name attached to a litany of appalling charges read aloud as if they were unquestionably true. And the idea that a trial would undo the damage from all the shitty press was a fool’s errand.If you watch the WBZ video, you can see Daniel Forand in the background, at one point barely shaking his head as the prosecutor reads the accusations. I’m sure he was told not to react, to stay still and silent. But I can tell you, that is the last thing you want to do. Your life is under attack, and contrary to every impulse to scream in outrage over the injustice, you have to keep your mouth shut.What I doubt these two really understand yet, is as bad as the arrest and bail hearing was, they have no idea how dark the nights ahead are, or how many they will have to endure before they have their day in court. It’s all torture and tension.Now, here’s the original headline again:Plymouth, Massachusetts police officer Samantha Pelrine and husband arrested, charged with child rape.CBS and other outlets apparently had information about the accuser’s history, prior false allegations, ongoing communication with the couple, a dispute over housing. None of that complexity made the headline. It didn’t fit the story they’d already decided to tell.Given what they knew, perhaps a better headline would have read:“Plymouth Officer Charged With Child Rape; Accuser’s Prior False Allegation Surfaces in Court.”I don’t know if Samantha Pelrine and Daniel Forand are guilty. Neither does CBS News. What I know is that CBS didn’t wait to find out. They had a headline, a photo, and a police officer’s name. That was enough. Whether this couple is ultimately convicted or acquitted, the press made its call before a single piece of evidence was heard in court. Their innocence or guilt isn’t my point. It’s that the media has made it theirs 3333 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

Perusing daily headlines is always a bit depressing. There rarely is a story about something good, someone doing good, or a good outcome. Instead, it’s a sharp needle looking to blow up whatever balloon of joy you might have picked up in your sleepy landscapes. Last week, I had a dream where I was flying over water, through the clouds, and came to land on a sailing vessel where all my friends were having a good time. Wake up and it’s war, famine, Trump, protests, guns, and the daily slop of outrage. So much for a good time. Oh Well.What stands out is that the entire world is now neatly divided between two groups. US. THEM. If you’re with US, we agree with you. If you’re with THEM, you’re an idiot. If you’re with US, you support survivors, you BELIEVE ALL WOMEN. If you’re with THEM, you’re a rape apologist, a misogynist, and WE SEE YOU.It doesn’t seem to matter what the issue is. Everything divides into groups, and those groups become something like an amoeba — a membrane thickens, keeping out anything that challenges the status belief of the group. Early in COVID, officials said everyone needed to wear a mask outdoors. The CDC later reversed that. People kept wearing masks outside anyway, alone in their cars. Facts don’t always change behavior. The membrane holds.I’ve really struggled with how group dynamics so adversely affected my experience after I was accused.How could so many people I respected and worked with turn on me, or at the very least remain silent in the face of evidence that clearly exonerates me? The same question can be asked about any issue where evidence changes the calculations — but the group refuses to change its formulations in response.In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch ran a simple experiment. He showed people two lines and asked which was longer. The answer was obvious. But Asch planted actors in the room who all confidently named the wrong line. One by one, real subjects went along with the wrong answer. Not all of them, but most. Not because they were stupid or spineless, but because the social cost of dissent is immediate and visceral, and the cost of being wrong about a line is abstract and distant. The math isn’t complicated. It just isn’t the math we like to think we’re doing.We tell ourselves we’re rational actors weighing evidence. What we’re actually doing, most of the time, is weighing belonging. The group is the variable that matters. The facts are secondary.Irving Janis gave this a name in 1972. Groupthink. He wasn’t describing fringe movements or mobs. He was describing rooms full of intelligent, credentialed people making catastrophic decisions. The Bay of Pigs. Pearl Harbor. The pattern was consistent across events, across decades, across administrations. Cohesive groups suppress internal doubt. They exclude information that challenges the consensus. They punish the person who raises a hand and says, wait.The need for unanimity overrides the need for accuracy. Every time.Janis wasn’t making a cynical argument. He was making a structural one. The same qualities that make a group functional, shared identity, mutual loyalty, common purpose, are the qualities that make it blind. You can’t have one without risking the other. Cohesion and correction are in permanent tension. Usually cohesion wins.Which brings us to the deviant.The deviant is the person holding the correct minority position. They have looked at the same evidence as everyone else and arrived somewhere different. In the room, in real time, they are not experienced as someone who might be right. They are experienced as a threat. To the narrative. To the solidarity. To the membrane itself.Because that’s exactly what they are. A threat to cohesion is a threat to the group. The group responds accordingly. The deviant gets managed, marginalized, expelled. The system isn’t malfunctioning when this happens. It’s working as designed. The group is protecting itself the only way it knows how.Being right is beside the point. Being right, in fact, makes it worse.Groups don’t typically correct from the inside. The pressure required to change a group’s position has to come from outside, and it has to be undeniable. An external event. A documented fact that the membrane simply cannot process and survive intact. Even then it takes time. Even then there are holdouts. This is the ordinary story of how groups eventually come around. Slowly, grudgingly, usually without acknowledging what they’re doing. The position shifts. The memory of the previous position fades. Nobody says they were wrong because the group, as an entity, doesn’t have a mechanism for that. It just moves.Here is where my case gets instructive, and inconvenient.I was acquitted. That is not an opinion or a characterization. It is an adjudicated fact, documented in a court of law, arrived at by people whose job was to weigh the evidence. A landmark UCL study analyzing nearly six million charges found that jury conviction rates for rape exceed those for attempted murder, manslaughter, and grievous bodily harm. This was not a system tilted in my favor.An acquittal is about as external and undeniable an event as the justice system produces. If you believed the accusation, the acquittal is the moment the calculation is supposed to change.For many people, it didn’t. The silence continued. The distance held. The membrane, already thick, simply absorbed the verdict and kept its shape. People who had known me for decades, who had worked alongside me, who had access to the same documented evidence, chose the group position over the factual record.That is not ordinary groupthink failing in the ordinary way. Ordinary groupthink at least updates when the external event is large enough. What I experienced was something more deliberate. A choice, made repeatedly, by individuals who knew better, to hold a position the evidence didn’t support.That has a different name. It isn’t confusion. It isn’t tribalism in the passive sense. It’s a decision.Being wrong is the ordinary condition of anyone paying attention. Being wrong is why we remain intellectually curious. The catastrophe isn’t being wrong. The catastrophe is knowing we were wrong and deciding silence is the right response.It isn’t. Solomon Asch — conformity experiments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.htmlIrving Janis — Groupthink https://archive.org/details/janis_groupthink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupthinkUCL / Professor Cheryl Thomas — jury conviction rates Criminal Law Review paper: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/feb/juries-convict-defendants-rape-more-often-acquit This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.comI spent 45 years at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, long enough to love it, and long enough to watch it calcify. When #MeToo arrived in 2017, it surfaced real grievances. But it didn't stop there. It found a community quietly hungry for something to feel strongly about. Were the activists right to be agitated? Perhaps, but also just as likely is th…

*Listener Note - This post describes the dark experience of suicidal ideation.What does a stranger’s grave have to do with surviving a wrongful accusation? More than you might think.In this episode, I write about working in a cemetery, the man buried there, and what his death stirred up in me — including nights when I considered ending my own life after I was falsely accused of a crime I didn’t commit. It’s a piece about suicide, shame, media bias, and two dogs who may have saved my life without knowing it.This is the kind of story Out of the Blue exists to tell. If you’re navigating false accusations, media pile-ons, or the quiet devastation of public shame, this one is for you.https://gofund.me/57d18916d This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

A mugshot contains no real information about the person in it. That didn't stop people from thinking they knew everything. This episode of Out of the Blue is about the right to be unknowable — and what it costs when that right disappears.A friend has generously offered to promote a GoFundMe on our behalf. The goal is straightforward: help retire the massive debt we accumulated as a result of a wrongful accusation and its aftermath between 2018 and 2022. We're grateful for anything you can offer. Click the QR below or follow this link https://gofund.me/74267aa5a This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

In July 2018, Carr Hagerman wrote in his journal: "Who am I now that all my work has been destroyed? I've disappeared." He didn't know yet how much worse it would get. In this episode of Out of the Blue, Carr takes you inside the bail hearing — the frozen clock, the indifferent prosecutor, the $100,000 that changed everything — and maps the financial and psychological wreckage that follows a wrongful accusation. Not the verdict. The accusation. This is an episode about how the system is designed, who it protects, and what it costs everyone else.https://gofund.me/d74cba5eb This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

Episode 4: The Arrest (Audio)On June 15th, 2018, two days before my 60th birthday party, I heard a loud pounding on my front door. I had been wrongfully accused of rape. This is the story of what happened next — the warrant, the drive, the darkest thoughts, and the moment the handcuffs went on in my own backyard. Read aloud by me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

Yesterday I walked the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, after the unseasonable warm weather collapsed into a wrenching cold that taunted muscle and bone. I frequently find refuge at the mall, enjoying the energy, the congregation of strangers. I go to walk, but also to watch the human parade as it passes, families trailing with children home from universities and high schools for the winter break, the friendly din of familial connection. It feels safe to me.As I walked, I felt a peculiar sadness descend, not the sadness of envy, I long ago reconciled with not being able to have a family with children, but the sadness of temporal dislocation, of finding myself much older than I ever imagined being. Does anyone in their fidgety twenties imagine the uncomfortable rigidity of age, seeing themselves as old? I had never envisioned a life beyond my career, never conceived of any other than constantly working, nor imagined that my life would be rendered into tatters by grotesques who sought, and succeeded, in dismantling everything I had built, to be exiled. I live now in a kind of no man’s land, suspended in the territory between the end of my career and the end of my life.I am animated, still, by relentless and often torturous creative impulses, and yet I am burdened, too, by the anxiety of oblivion, by the knowledge that the life I knew, the life I built, effectively ended on June 13th, 2018, and whatever this is, is merely an afterlife, a postscript to a story already concluded. I’m alive, but everything I did has died.There is a thing I am loath to speak of, even to my closest friends: how difficult it has been since the acquittal. One would think I should be rejoicing that I am not confined to the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud, that I walk free under the winter sky. And it is true, I am relieved, profoundly grateful even, but the struggle against invisibility and oblivion is of a different order than relief. I know we are all rendered into particles and dust barely remembered after we’re gone, it’s the stories that remain, but for those of us wrongfully accused, the ugly stories will be the only memory.This is not like losing employment, where one might secure another position, or losing a partner, where we might, in time, meet another. I have lost the accumulated work of nearly half my life, forty-some years of building and creating and collaborating, and there will be no other. That chapter is closed, the book sealed.In this version of death there are no memorials, no elegies composed, no kind words inscribed in some lovely obituary, no gatherings where people speak warmly of what was. The hardest truth of all: there is nothing to show for my decades of effort except these brutal false accusations. My life has become a haunted house, populated by ghosts of my own making, specters that rattle my confidence like chains in the night. I wonder, sometimes, if I will ever be free of the fear that stalks me.But I am not dead, not yet, and I remain resolved, or try to, to battle against the demons that hunt me in the small hours. Just last week I dreamed I was hiking across a prairie landscape, that great openness I love, when a wolf attacked and nearly severed my leg. It was a dream of being caught between two states: freedom and spaciousness and peace on one side, being hunted and attacked and wounded on the other. In another dream I was consumed alive by a pack of wild dogs. In yet another I was led to the gallows to be hanged. Each time I wake, gasping in the dark, I am grateful simply to be breathing, to have survived another night’s assault.As an autodidact I am never short of interests, project ideas, but I have few people with whom to collaborate, few companions for the work. In this afterlife, communication with the living has become nearly impossible. I am no Patrick Swayze, able to animate a penny through sheer force of will. The friends and collaborators who once sought my professional counsel, who valued my insight, who worked alongside me and compensated me for my experience, all of them have receded beyond my reach, as if I exist now on some other plane of being, visible but untouchable.I do not know if my pen is a shovel with which I might dig myself free. I do not know if what I write will reach anyone, or change anything, or matter at all in the great turning of the world. But I know this: when I am writing, I am not in the grave. I am not walking circles feeling exiled from my own species. I am making something, call it art if you must, though sometimes I do not know what it is, I know only that if I do not do this work, if I stop writing, I will drown in anxiety and sadness the way a moth drowns in summer oil.But it is not enough merely to have a daily practice, to move words around a page, as if a sentence alone can argue with this reality. I have become a kind of poltergeist, restless and agitated, wanting to move things, to throw things, to be obstinate and intrusive and loud and discomfiting. I want to rattle the chains not only for myself and my family but for all the others who are trapped in this same liminal space, this territory between one death and the next, including those who have truly been violated, truly harmed.In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Proctor is arrested for witchcraft. The court offers him a choice: confess to consorting with the devil and live, or refuse and die. When he agrees to confess, knowing it to be a lie, but wanting desperately to live, the court demands more. They want to post his signed confession on the church door, to display it as proof that the condemned are guilty and the court is righteous. But at this final humiliation, Proctor rebels, pleading to keep the only thing he has left, his name. This is from a production at the Globe Theater, in London.He cries out: “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”Proctor understood what I’ve learned: once your name is stained with an accusation like this, you face a stark choice, disappear quietly into the shadows, grateful you’re not in prison or refuse to let them have the final word. Of all the losses I have endured, of all the things that once seemed trivial, it is this stain upon my name that makes the afterlife so unendurable.Once you are dead in this way, the stain remains. Words alone cannot rewrite the ending that has already been written, cannot restore what has been taken. But what else do I have? What else is left to me but words? In the end, we’re all the dust and particles of history, but while I’m still here I write. I must write. Not because it will restore my name, not because it will resurrect my reputation or rebuild what was destroyed, but because refusing to be silent is the fight that remains. The poltergeist does not haunt in hope of forgiveness or redemption. It haunts because it is still here, refusing to dissolve into the darkness. And so I write, and walk, and breathe, and rattle. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

I write a lot about narrative, especially the ways it gets distorted in news and social media. After my ordeal and the ensuing distortions of my story featured in local media, I began looking at how the outlets got everything so wrong. In short, their narrative was corrupt because the inputs were corrupt.The facts of my case were simple: I was charged and arrested for an alleged in 2018, the case was dismissed in 2020, recharged in 2021, and I was acquitted in 2022. Those are the facts without shine or opinion. Everything beyond the basics is story and narrative. My writing on Out Of The Blue is my story about those years under the thumb of prosecutors who were seeking to put me in prison and what they did to me. But it’s also a guide for reading news narratives more critically—learning to distinguish fact from story, status from proof, and recognizing where credibility breaks down.Facts alone can be compelling, but the narrative around those facts is how we make sense of the story, what it means. University of Southern California Professor Walter Fisher, who wrote extensively about narrative and communication at USC, calls the tests we instinctively use coherence and fidelity. Coherence asks, does this story hold together on its own terms? Fidelity asks, does it ring true against what we can check—history, character, evidence, lived experience? Meaning, he says, sits in that narrative context.Consider: “A man was seen leaving a building at midnight.” That’s a fact. But wrap it in narrative—”He was fleeing the scene” versus “He was working late”—and suddenly the same fact points to guilt or innocence. The story we build around that single moment determines what we believe happened.The media does something similar to any storyteller. Start with facts (ideally), build a story around those facts to create context so readers can understand what’s happening. But the moment they launch off the facts, assuming those are knowable, the story is vulnerable to bias, invention, and slant because no one outside the story—in my case, my accuser or me—can truly know what happened.My accuser knows. I know. You don’t, and neither does anyone in the media. Her best friends don’t know. Mine don’t either. My wife believes me, but she cannot know with absolute certainty because she wasn’t wherever my accuser claimed I was. By Fisher’s test, that uncertainty is fine as long as the story stays as close to what is known as possible, keeps the timeline straight, and aligns with the best available record. When it doesn’t, coherence and fidelity break.That sounds like a useful frame, but man, it’s not as simple as it sounds. Because as hard as I worked to be as unvarnished, clear, and true as I can, there are challenges. First, my emotions cannot be sidelined when I’m writing or presenting my case. These emotions certainly harbor my anxieties, my anger and outrage over what my accuser did to me. Secondly, I cannot know why my accuser did what she did or why some came to believe her so adamantly. I know one thing: I didn’t do this. It is up to storytelling to carry the water, to make a coherent and honest case for my innocence. You can ask, does my story ring true, does it match the facts as they are known, and does my character and history reasonably support what I’m presenting? In other words, coherence.My accuser’s story, given to the police and presented in news media, contained the kinds of inconsistencies I’ve documented in earlier episodes—shifting timelines, contradictory details, claims that didn’t align with physical evidence. Facts are solid; stories are fluid, and opinions about a thing are editorial.When you read a news story, you can be pulled by what I call narrative capture. That’s when you’ve been presented with a ready-made plot that, essentially, seduces or persuades, sometimes without the anchor of evidence. The frame arrives first (hero or villain, motive, moral), and you likely will follow the plot laid out by the author instead of the facts. Strong language, good writing, and a tight arc pull you forward. The facts slide behind the scrim.In earlier episodes, I argued that while the media often got many small facts right about my case, it ornamented those details and repeated unverified claims without due skepticism. Inference layered upon inference until the story outpaced the record—or, to put it another way, false statements gained credibility through repetition alone.Those violent headlines and tawdry subtexts find purchase far quicker than anything as pedestrian as the truth. We would like to think we are not susceptible to predation by narrative, but of course we are.The problem is exacerbated when a story aligns with a set of beliefs. If you believe corporations are corrupt, any story about corporate malfeasance feels true. If you believe the justice system is broken, any story about wrongful prosecution feels true—including, perhaps, mine. What’s stunning about our current cultural moment is how few of us actually take the time to check the narrative, to test the story against available fact-checking resources. If we did that as a habit, we would likely find that much of what we believe is true is a mixture of fact and fiction.So, my little project is to focus on the habits of media consumption, rather than media reporting, to cultivate skeptical views of information and ideas.In my case, time and again, I came across people who believed the stories about me simply because they appeared in the news. The outlet’s reputation lent the stories credibility. But reputation isn’t proof, and institutional trust can’t replace critical reading. Readers need to verify claims, check timelines, and ask whether the narrative fits the available evidence.I’ve learned to start with a simple act of self-protection: name the frame. Before I let a headline, a lede, or a quote settle into me, I pause and ask, “What is this reporter setting up? What are they asking me to believe, and why?” I’ll even say it out loud: “This story wants me to believe X about Y because Z.” That little sentence has saved me from a lot of confusion. It’s a habit now.The second practice is humbler than it sounds: I invest in my knowledge, but I’m most cautious, not about what I consume, but about what I believe after I consume it. I try to notice what hardens, the conclusions I leap to, because once it hardens, for me at least, it’s harder to let go.We don’t just process facts; we live by coherent stories that we believe are true. But we might be wrong. Feeling strongly isn’t the same as proof. So, here are three rules for reading news narratives.I’m quoting specific words and phrases from the 2018 Star Tribune article, printed the day after my arrest. I’m not quoting the entire article here, if you’re interested in reading it first, you’ll find the link in this episodes text. Rule 1: Check the verbs; locate the status.The Tribune article states that I had “been charged with two counts.” That verb, “charged,” describes a status, not a proof. It tells you where the legal process stood that day; it does not tell you anything about what actually happened. The date matters because narratives flow in time, and early stories are often snapshots taken in motion, and often turn out to be wrong.It goes on to say that I was “being held without bail.” Again, a status. Custody is not evidence. It is a condition of a system that, at its best, is still sorting claims from truth.This is what I mean by checking the verbs: distinguish status from proof, process from fact.Rule 2: Flag hedge words; ask for receipts.The Tribune article is full of examples. The county attorney says, “We believe there are other people that can come forward” and describes “a pretty bad alleged abuse of power.” Notice “believe” and “alleged”—these are hedges. If you can’t see the evidence behind them, lower your confidence.Festival management called the allegations “abhorrent.” That’s moral language, not proof.I’m quoted denying the assault. Then: “Attorney could not be reached for comment.” My denial gets two lines; the accusations got paragraphs. That imbalance doesn’t prove guilt—it shows who answered the phone.“Medical records confirm that her wrist was placed in a splint.” “Confirm” means a record exists, not how the injury happened.Another passage: a witness heard noises that “sounded like banging.” Perception words signal distance—how something seemed, not what was proven.Rule 3: Test for narrative coherence and fidelity.Coherence asks: Do the claims fit together without bending time or memory? Fidelity asks: Does this square with the public record and how people actually behave under scrutiny?Across the coverage of my case, claims shifted, timelines flexed, details contradicted each other. Much of what stayed loud in print didn’t match the court record or real-world patterns. That mattered because it was my life.Listening to this, perhaps it’s too much, too many steps, to slow for fast news. But, I won’t let go of the idea that we, all of us, can do better in how we read the world, how we grapple with complexity. I’m hoping, that by taking what happened to me, and so many others, I can present an example of what happens when breaking news is ingested without the proper enzymes to break it down. This approach to reading and thinking should make room for our compassion, and every filter of kindness we can apply. Listening to this, perhaps it sounds like too much—too many steps, too slow for a world that moves at the speed of breaking news. But I refuse to let go of the idea that we can do better in how we read the world, how we meet its complexity. What happened to me, what has happened to so many of us, stands as proof of what breaks when we swallow the news whole, without the time or tools to digest it. We deserve a better way forward. One that makes room for our compassion. One that reaches for every filter of kindness we possess—and holds them there, stubbornly, in the face of everything that tells us to move faster, react harder, feel less. This is the work. It’s my work. And it matters. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

It was a cool afternoon in late September, 2016, when Jason and I sat down at a picnic table to talk. Jason, not his real name, was a handsome and talented kid, an aspiring actor in his mid-twenties whose character work was impeccable. Though he was hardworking and sincere, some of his peers thought him arrogant or aloof. I saw something different, someone reserved, myopically focused on his craft, confident in his abilities, and admired by audiences.Once he sat down, he seemed uncertain, distracted in a way I hadn’t seen before. He told me quietly that he and his girlfriend had broken up some time ago and that he was dating someone new. The ex, he said, was now calling him a predator and claiming psychological abuse. She had told people she had a restraining order against him. He said none of it was true, but he wanted me to hear it from him first and even offered to quit the show to avoid distraction.I told him to continue performing at the show, and if something changed, or new information came to light, we’d talk again. Maybe I was wrong, maybe he should have been fired, or suspended, but without more information it just wasn’t my place to pass judgement. Of course, I didn’t know what was true. I barely knew him, and I saw seemed to me a young guy daunted by accusations that could end his career before it began. Little did I know, that a year or so later, I would be accused, and judgement would be rendered quickly.In the pantheon of #MeToo, any man accused casually, officially, or by rumor, s guilty until proven guilty. Why? Because, as Jessica Clarke of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law argues in The Rules of #MeToo, in the absence of effective legal procedures, a set of “ad hoc processes” has emerged to handle such claims. Journalists, she says, now expose misconduct through “rigorous investigations” and “editorial oversight,” audiences demand removal, and employers comply. Clarke insists these “informal systems” offer fair safeguards, that the accused are given a chance to respond, and that consequences are proportionate.What a laughable load of b******t. Clarke’s argument is a case against due process, replacing it with the assumption that journalists can be trusted to operate at the highest level of professionalism. Why wait for courts, she implies, when we can adjudicate swiftly and efficiently through public opinion?Crazy. And yet, it became the MeToo modus operandi.When Minnesota Public Radio’s Maryann Combs reported on the accusations brought against me, she demonstrated why Clarke’s model of “justice journalism” is so dangerous. Nearly a year before the story ran, a former festival performer and producer at MPR had posted that he was working on a story about what it was like to work at the festival, about sexual harassment. During that year, it appeared that Ms. Combs had talked to a handful of women, some of whom had agreed to be interviewed for a story. None of these women provided Ms. Combs with any evidence—just statements. As a journalist, you have to be aware of your susceptibility to pressure, bias, and narrative distortion. But Ms. Combs had nothing—no documents reviewed, no public records examined. I was never given the full claims in advance, only a perfunctory phone call asking for comment.Clarke’s imagined standard of fairness, the opportunity to respond—which I couldn’t do—and fact-checking the statements of all the women featured in the story, was nowhere in sight. The story aired anyway. When the charges fell apart in court, and they did, and I was acquitted, MPR didn’t run any kind of follow-up story, no correction, no acknowledgment of harm.Clarke says this little system is “designed” to repair the failures of law. Who the f**k designed this? What right do journalists have to repair failures of the law by going around it? What I personally experienced was a trial by private media, administered by people who bore none of the legal or ethical burdens of their authority.Clarke further claims that #MeToo’s punishments were proportional to the severity of the supposed misconduct. I can’t make this stuff up. This from a law professor at a school of law! Media exposure leads only to reasonable accountability? Laughable and absurd.In the Star Tribune, reporter Liz Sawyer published a long article that was breathtaking in its fundamental lack of fairness to me or the festival enterprise. Again, she was offered the same line-up of women, who repeated the same unverified claims and deftly omitted exculpatory testimony. What she wrote presented me as factually guilty. Even after my acquittal, no correction appeared, no acknowledgment that the central claims were completely disproven. The stories remain online, untouched, algorithmically immortal.The asymmetry is staggering: the falsely accused lose everything, while those who err in the act of accusation face no reckoning at all.Clarke imagines a new order where power is accountable—but by whom? Her silly model doesn’t equalize power; it redistributes it to journalists and platforms that act as prosecutors without courts, judges without rules, executioners without consequence.The problem is not confined to local media or my personal experience. As recently as October 2025, The Washington Post chronicled how principal oboist Katherine Needleman of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra led what the paper called a “#MeToo vigilante” campaign—identifying men, publishing their alleged misconduct on social media, tagging their employers, and effectively securing their removal, all before any formal adjudication of the claims. The article notes explicitly that this method bypassed traditional verification—no multiple independent sources, no transparent right of reply—and yet achieved rapid professional consequences. In other words, the very “ad hoc” process that Clarke treats as a new system of fairness is being applied again, without the safeguards she laughably imagines will magically appear.These new procedural norms reward journalists for creating tension and controversy, institutions for self-protection rather than courage, and audiences for indulging thoughtless outrage without consequence. My experience demonstrates how quickly this ad hoc justice slides into something indistinguishable from vengeance—all with the help of the media.The question is not whether victims deserve to be heard; of course they do, and no one is arguing they should be ignored. The question is whether hearing them requires silencing someone else. Due process is the only firewall when you’re the target of group animus.I keep writing about this because the problem is no longer marginal to #MeToo stories; it has metastasized. Clarke’s ad hoc logic is not being applied selectively or sparingly. It has become a default mode of judgment across civic life. In public life we seem less interested in the hard work of argument than in the spectacle of denunciation and demonstration. Nuance is treated as cowardice, complexity as complicity, and we have outsourced moral judgment to whoever can shout the loudest.Real justice would begin with courage: reporters who publish only what they can reasonably prove, institutions that prize fairness over optics, and citizens who pause before joining the mob.The lofty promise of #MeToo was to hold powerful men, and some women, accountable for their bad behavior; its tragedy has been certainty. Between those two lies the work ahead, cultivating fairness, restraint, and moral imagination. Without that, Clarke’s revolution is not a correction of injustice but its continuation, dressed in the language of good. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

I opened the large envelope from Instacart, inside was my career kit to become a professional shopper. Inside was a manual outlining my benefits, a laminated badge I would wear while shopping, and a debit card for my earnings. Not a job I had ever imagined doing at my age, but I needed the money, and at least it got me out of the house.It did not last. Within days, I received a letter rescinding the offer. It included copies of the lurid headlines about me, the rape accusation, and a thumbnail of my mugshot. Nice. All fiction, of course, but how would they have known? Where there is smoke, right? They gave me an opportunity to clarify, but that was never going to help. “Oh no, none of it’s true!” Sure, that will get me the gig.My wife told me to reapply or find another company that would take me. I tried a few applications, and each time the same response. They could run a background check, and I was clean, but the digital record deformed my name and history. No one looks beyond “festival director raped photographer.” As if that were not damage enough, reckless articles in the Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, and elsewhere had rendered me into something closer to Mephistopheles. It was foolish to think otherwise. There was no way to recover—not just hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the possibility of ever working again, certainly not for someone else.Over time, I learned that working for myself was all I could do, and even that would take years to rebuild. It was unlikely I would ever make enough to pay off the debt. Losing my ability to provide for our family made me hate myself. I spent years confronting the internal thugs of fear, anxiety, and depression that were always ready to beat the hell out of me. I could not fix this. It was exhausting, demoralizing, and endless.In a 2011 article in Academic Matters, Catherine Burr, a Canadian conflict and investigation specialist with more than thirty years of experience examining workplace harassment, writes about how institutions label things. When an accusation cannot be proven, they call it unsubstantiated. It sounds neutral, almost merciful, but it is anything but. My accusation was unsubstantiated, but my ruin was not. The jobs that vanished, the lost income, the silence that followed my name—all of it is substantiated. It exists in emails, in records, in the refusals that close every door. The only thing unsubstantiated was the truth.When systems retreat to words like “unsubstantiated,” they sound judicious, but for the accused it becomes a life sentence of ambiguity. Institutions survive by suspending judgment; people do not.Burr distinguishes lies from false allegations by intent, calling a claim false only if the accuser knows it is untrue. But intent is a weak compass. It may be unknowable, but consequence is not. Falsehoods born of delusion, therapy-induced recovered memories, or social contagion still wreck lives. Intent does not feed a family, restore a name, or repay a loss. The law can afford to care about intent; real life lives in aftermath.Her analysis is procedural, focused on what counts as evidence and what a “reasonable person” might conclude, but she ignores what happens next. The aftermath is where the truth of harm lives: the empty inboxes, the rescinded job offers, the silence from people who once called you friend. When institutions refuse to name a falsehood, they outsource punishment to rumor and to search engines. That is what “unsubstantiated” really means—the bureaucracy saves face, and the accused loses theirs.Burr goes further, suggesting that facts themselves are socially constructed, that what counts as harassment or harm depends on who is watching and when. Maybe that is true in theory. But in my world, the facts were not abstract. They were written, cached, and indexed. They lived in the servers of Google and the archives of local news. My destruction was not a social construction; it was a measurable event. The panic of virtue does not need proof; it only needs belief.Legal scholars like Jessica A. Clarke, in The Rules of #MeToo, describe #MeToo as an ad hoc system of justice, a way to fill the vacuum where courts failed survivors. She says journalists did the vetting, editors checked the facts, and consequences were proportional. Maybe that is true in theory. But in practice, it is a fantasy. There was no investigation, no editor, no proportion—only replication, each story copying the last until it became its own truth. What Clarke calls a new form of accountability was, in my life, a contagion of righteousness, a collective unreason powered by the illusion of certainty.Burr and Clarke both describe systems that claim to manage truth. But systems do not manage truth; they manage risk. And that difference is everything. Burr’s world is procedural, guided by evidence thresholds and labels like unsubstantiated. Clarke’s world is moral, built around exposure and public consequence. Both assume that institutions act in good faith, that if the facts are clear enough, justice will follow.But that is not how it works. Institutions do not usually seek something like truth; they seek cover. They survive by being cautious, not courageous. And nowhere was that clearer than at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, where their image replaced their integrity and clever silence became a sort of policy.I had worked at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival for 45 years, as both performer and Artistic Director. I had a long-term relationship with the owner and his staff. The festival management did not believe the accusations. I know that and they said as much in private. For nearly a year they kept me on contract, though I was not allowed to work, which was understandable considering the seriousness of the charges. So close were we with them, that our attorneys worked together, which told me they knew the accusation was, as much as anyone can actually know, false.But after I was acquitted, they offered nothing. No statement, no restoration, no gesture of courage. They said nothing because silence is cheap. In their calculus, the risk of looking bad to a few mattered more than integrity. They were not guarding against guilt; they were guarding against proximity, against perception. While they were privately happy I was acquitted, none of them showed up to my trial at any time. I suppose they didn’t want to appear biased, or have anyone in the jury think there was interference. There’s an unspoken rule in reputational management and PR: don’t stand too close to the fire.The festival became the perfect example of what happens when the procedural world of Burr meets the moral theater of Clarke. Bureaucratic neutrality met performative virtue, and the result was not fairness but paralysis. They did not need to believe the lie to obey it. They only had to fear the optics of defending me.What made it worse was what followed. The same enterprise that once hired me for my imagination and voice not only didn’t make any statement about my acquittal, they continue to contract the very people who helped destroy me—the gossipers, the opportunists, the ones who cost the festival thousands in legal fees. They are back at work, smiling in the lanes, performing for crowds. Meanwhile, I remain the ghost of a story they were too afraid to correct. This is another moral failure on their part: the inability to distinguish between legal caution and ethical responsibility.The festival’s promotional imagery celebrates valor and honor, such as the courage of jousters featured in all of their advertisement. But courage in costume is not courage in practice. While I could hardly blame the company for staying mute as the case made its way through the courts, my acquittal gave them an opportunity to make a statement of support that could have helped restore some part of my reputation, and even their own.When the festival stayed on the sidelines, others did not. It took the moral courage of two magicians, Penn & Teller, to get me back on site for their anniversary show. The management did not want me there, even though my name had been cleared and I had been swiftly acquitted. They worried that my presence might make someone uncomfortable, or as one manager said, “I don’t want all that stuff to come up again.”Penn and Teller did not flinch. They told the festival plainly that if I was not allowed on the grounds, they would not perform. It should not have taken that kind of leverage to do the right thing, but it did. Their position was simple: if the truth no longer carried weight inside the institution, they would carry it themselves.The contrast was absolute. The festival managed risk; Penn and Teller practiced conscience. One acted from fear of optics; the other from moral clarity. They did not convene a committee or issue a statement—they simply stood where decency required them to stand. That is what courage looks like when it is stripped of theater.Penn and Teller did not fix anything material. They did not erase the headlines or restore my career, but they did something better: they restored proportion. Courage is not abstract; it is specific. It is not what you believe—it is what you do, and sometimes there is a cost to it. Moral courage does not need applause or acknowledgment; it is not policy but conviction, action, and word.On the day Penn and Teller performed, my wife and I walked the lanes between their shows. The air was humid and familiar, filled with laughter, music, and applause. For the first time in years, I wasn’t hiding, or performing either. I was struck by how little I cared, and what a tiny little thing it is.For a long time, I thought recovery meant getting back to where I was, but it does not. Recovery is not restoration. A man might recover after losing a leg, but it will not restore his limb.The company’s official word for the accusation against me would probably be unsubstantiated. It is a tidy technical term, easy to hide behind. It sounds responsible, impartial, even fair. But my life, and what happened, do not fit inside that word. The accusation was unsubstantiated. The wreckage was not.Every lost job, every friend who went quiet, every moment of exile is proven. My ruin is documented. The truth is not. And that is what the company, the festival, and so many others never understood. Neutrality is not justice; what’s more, justice cannot survive neutrality. Silence is not decency when what needs to be said can save the life of another. And that is what remains substantiated.The history of the #MeToo movement will certainly be remembered for how it knocked down some mighty big names, rewrote the language of corporate culture, and redrew the moral and legal boundaries of acceptable behavior, mostly in the way men treated women in professional environments.But MeToo was also something of a ghost story. In the drama and passions of that reckoning, it opened the gates of hell too, unleashing the animal spirits of the wounded and the vengeful. With help from the media, opportunistic attorneys, and corrupt political institutions, the rules of common decency fell away.What began as an exigent movement for accountability became theater and thievery. The stories of real harm and long-overdue justice mingled with invention, criminality, confusion, ghosts, until few could tell the difference. Once the apparitions were set loose, they would be hard to contain.Every company thinks it can manage the big moral fires; few ever do. It is a messy thing, and people get hurt. In retrospect, it is through individual moral courage that we rescue the moment of confusion. Courage matters. Institutions protect themselves; people redeem each other. Justice isn’t a policy or a press release, but in the private act of standing with someone, next to them and meeting the truth as we know it. It’s the willingness to risk the demands that come with moral fortitude, and seeing it through thick and thin.This essay is part of a continuing series examining moral courage, the failures of modern media, and the human consequences of public outrage and narrative distortion. Coming soon, the complete podcast series, OUT OF THE BLUE that traces the long road from a false accusation to understanding, and from harm to human repair.This is a listener supported podcast. *Authors Note: I use AI to assist in editing and clarity. The words are my own. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

Several years ago, I began working on a book about the street performers of the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. Inspired by Richard Avedon’s famous photo series In The American West, my goal was to replicate his simple format, where performers would stand in front of a plain white backdrop during daylight, wearing their festival costumes.© Richard Avedon - In The American WestOver the course of a couple of years, I shot and edited hundreds of images that revealed the humor, humility, and humanity of these walk-about performers, many of whom are paid a stipend to spend their days working in the hot, dusty, sometimes rainy tumult of the lanes during a show day.Most of the images were shot at the festival, either during a show day or a preseason media event. I also photographed performers at my suburban home if they were unable to schedule a time at the festival.As the work began to take shape, I started writing the text that would accompany these images. I wanted to include some of the festival’s history, performer anecdotes, and photographs from behind the scenes. I captured private spaces, craft booths, and other corners of the festival grounds that most of the public, and even many participants, have never seen. This book was to be my valentine to a place I loved, and to the performers themselves.In 2015, I began discussions with an agent about representing a tabletop monograph that would combine large color plates with lyrical writing. My goal was to secure a publisher and ultimately stage a gallery showcase featuring a curated selection of matted and framed prints. It was the most exciting and creatively rewarding project of my life, and that I got to do it with and for walk-about street characters, as I once was, was thrilling. However, the attack of 2018 killed the project, just one of many creative pursuits lost in the immediate aftermath.At the time, I was also studying and deeply immersed in fine art photography. It was a new form of photographic work for me. I collaborated with other talented photographers in town and partnered with nearly two dozen men and women, many of them professional models. My approach reflected the traditions of photographers I deeply admire: Edward Steichen, Richard Avedon, Peter Lindbergh, Irving Penn, and Patrick Demarchelier, among others, whose monographs line my studio shelves. I never came close to the kind of work those artists achieved, because, like everything else, my photography became a target of ire from the agitated, and all of my clients disappeared and never returned.It is hard for most people to understand what happens when you are accused of such things, particularly when it is in the press. It is not just that you get dinged for something bad; everything in your life becomes saturated. It is not only that you cannot be successful again, all your past successes are corrupted. It is as if all you have ever been known for is this accusation. And that is the point, because everything you have achieved is deliberately tainted by the energumen and their legal shakari.So here is what I know: if you are hit hard and beaten up, do something good. Make something with the energy that rises out of frustration, anger, and bone-deep pain. From my experience, sitting in the squalor of self-doubt, fear, disappointment, and heartbreak did nothing, accomplished nothing, meant nothing. I had succumbed to numbness and ugly nihilism because I thought nothing mattered, everything was ruined.What made things worse at the time was that I had to stay underground until the case was completed. My attorney had to speak for me, and with respect, she was an amazing attorney, but she was insufficient to the cause of my personal expression and to the deep animus I held toward the petty liars, thieves, cowards, and crooks who did this to me.But through the hundreds of hours I spent walking and reflecting, and the long years of waiting, I came to understand that the best answer to the jejune dullards and their small cruelties was not vengeance, but creation. To make again. To speak again. To give shape to something living out of what was broken. To write, to photograph, to record, to call forward a circle of readers and listeners who might find, in the wreckage, a faint pattern of beauty. Because that is what art often does, it can restore order to the disordered, shape meaning to the meaningless. Each sentence, each image, is an act of recovery, a small defiance against erasure. The more I write, the more I create, the more I insist upon my own presence. And that, I have learned, is a kind of salvation no court, no coward, no lie can take away.But that was then, and this is now. My photography studio is undergoing a remodel, and when it is finished, I will return to the performer series, not at the same scale but with the same devotion. If all goes well, by next summer I will finally have a book to offer. I do not expect it to be the same book I once imagined. Too much has changed. I have changed. And that is okay. I am still here, and I’ll be here again, and again, until I’m not. *This was the working title of the table top book I began working on in 2014 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

A few days ago, my wife Marian and I were taking one of our evening power walks on a quiet neighborhood street when a car passed by, driving too fast, and a half block in front of us ran over a gray squirrel that was crossing the street. It writhed for a few moments, and as the car sped on, the body stopped moving. It was dead.Gray Squirrel, struck by a car — June 2025I approached the poor thing expecting to see blood spilled onto the pavement, the crushed body, but there was no blood anywhere—its eyes open and clear, ears rigid as if still listening. I picked it up by the tail and set it in some brush just off the edge of the street. I would come back later to bury it.This is a thing I do: the animal undertaker, the guy who picks up dead animals and carries them away. A neighbor, who saw me scooping up a dead blackbird, assumed I put them in the garbage. I explained that I do just the opposite: I bury them, many in my backyard. If it’s winter, I’ll take the remains to a wooded area and place them off the path. I estimate I’ve picked up and buried dozens of animals over the past few years. Besides squirrels, I’ve picked up chipmunks, hawks, rabbits, opossums, a raccoon, blue jays, ducks and ducklings, blackbirds, robins, and finches, a Canadian goose, and more. Sometimes their bodies were mangled from being run over, entrails spilled across the pavement; others seemed to have died from unknown causes, intact but inanimate.Eastern Cottontail, struck by a utility truck — July 2025I began this ritual in the wake of being called a monster, arrested, and dragged through the press. It was my answer to the casualness of cruelty, the poisonous indifference to suffering. As a photographer, I began to photo capture some of the creatures I found, not out of some misplaced macabre fascination, but as a study of what is both beautiful and tragic, and as a way of remembering. In 2018, with no career left to pursue, I started walking—often ten miles a day. The fresh air steadied me against despair. But it was on these walks that I noticed the dead more than the living: sparrows on sidewalks, rabbits on the shoulder, squirrels twisted on the curb. I realized I had always looked away from these small deaths. Now I chose to stop, to see, and to respond with care. In the case of my neighborhood, I took more direct action: I picked up, moved, and buried the creatures with my highest regard, acknowledging their existence and recognizing their contribution to the ecosystemHouse Sparrow — found in a planter, May 2025There was one more thread I couldn’t ignore. Recognizing the ugly and often violent deaths of so many small creatures forced me to question my own commitment to non-violence. In the aftermath of my arrest, I was furious — consumed by how radically unfair it all was. How could this have happened, and how could those who spread lies walk away untouched? But death doesn’t care about fairness; it just is. Things die, they get run over, their offspring are eaten, drowned, poisoned, bludgeoned, or shot. Brutality is not an accident but a feature of the world. Learning to see it plainly helped me cope with the coil of anxieties and, in time, to place myself back in context.Every day I am surrounded by countless deaths, most of which I never really paid attention to — not because they were hidden, but because they didn’t seem to matter. I’m sure I’m not alone. We can all see the obvious roadkill in our periphery, casualties of cars, boats, lawn mowers, poisons. Sometimes we even feel bad for a brief moment. After all, we don’t mean to hit deer, run over rabbits, turtles, or frogs. They’re accidents. And then there are those that die by causes unknown. But in all of these instances, it seems to me, we are running a kind of calculation about the value of a particular life. The squirrel that scurried in front of the car was just trying to cross the street and was killed. The driver, as well as all of the people walking nearby, didn’t give much thought to that small life, and everyone went on their way. But I didn’t. I stopped and looked, quietly measured the moment, and felt a true sadness. This small body was in the midst of taking care of its life, its place and needs, not fully aware of the dangers between the curbs. Red-bellied Woodpecker — roadkill, September 2025These winged, finned, and furry neighbors live in trees, brush, rivers, and lakes. Some fly, some burrow, some hide under porches. They are abundant, ordinary, easy to dismiss. My uncle once said of field mice, “Even if you killed them all, that’s not all of them!” But as Barry Lopez wrote, “To consider that the honey bee and the wild horse have their own integrity and perhaps even their own aspirations, and can no longer be viewed as subjects, willing to participate in the construction of a world built to serve the needs and desires of human beings alone.”At the time I was also enduring my own disappearance. Relieved of a career, undone by falsities and lies, I knew what it meant to be treated as disposable. As Lopez observed, “Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend.” By paying attention to the overlooked, I was saving myself from oblivion. But, death is coming for all of us, and this little circus of temporary amusements will fade and all of us will decease. Blue Jay — killed by a Cooper’s Hawk, 2024Each burial feels like a correction to a larger miscalculation. We keep the wrong ledger. A squirrel has no price tag, so its death means nothing. A field mouse is common, so it is expendable. A robin is ordinary, so it slips past notice. But a world in which sparrows and chipmunks count for nothing is a world in which our own lives are cheapened too. By pausing, being cautious, patient and kind to every living creature, or noticing and paying respect to their dead I try, so hard I try, to balance the ledger, if only for a moment, to see with clarity the beautiful tragedy of this lift.Easter Gray Squirrel Burial - Run over by a speeding car - September 2025Acknowledging the death of something small drew me out of myself, beyond ego or injury. To respond with gentleness kept me from turning bitter, and taught me that the truest refusal is not hardness but compassion and kindness — a way of honoring every life that longs to flourish, including my own. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

*Listeners note, in this article I share some insights I recovered in the wake of Charlie Kirks murder. I’m not staking out positions on his views, nor dismissing the views of those who found some of his words troubling. Please listen for more.After the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the rhetorical shitstorm that followed, I took a break from posting. The world surely doesn’t need me to say anything. But writing is cathartic, a way to work out what’s happening, and this event hit me harder than I expected.The evening of Kirk’s murder, after I had inadvertently watched a video of his death, I started putting some thoughts together, but nothing felt right. Everything I wrote began with throat-clearing disclaimers like, “I wasn’t a follower of Mr. Kirk,” or “I didn’t share his opinions…” These weak waivers were just attempts to immunize myself from blowback. So stupid.But here’s where I come in, because there is something jarringly familiar between what I—and countless others—have endured and what happened to Mr. Kirk. While he was staggeringly successful and famous, I’m obscure, a pauper by comparison. His videos garnered billions of views; my podcast episodes got thousands of listens. The similarity isn’t in scale, it’s in the response to rhetoric.My podcast, Out Of The Blue, isn’t just the story of being wrongfully accused—it’s also about the environment in which it happened. The #MeToo movement, once rooted in legitimate grievances, mutated into a moral panic. The reaction to Kirk’s death carried the same shape. A moral panic is when a community becomes so consumed by fear or outrage that it exaggerates threats, abandons nuance, and punishes not only the guilty but often the innocent. It’s a dirty bomb: a few targets are hit, but the blast radius takes out bystanders as well. Worse still, those wounded—and anyone who dares defend them—are silenced and shamed. To speak up is to risk being branded a bigot, a racist, or, in my case, a rape apologist.Once I was seen through the distortions of a moral panic, people I had once trusted chose to believe a fiction. They didn’t weigh evidence; they surrendered to the comfort of outrage. In the vacuum of falsehoods and feelings, a villain feels like an answer, the devil they needed. That kind of thinking isn’t principled; it’s foolish. Stupidity in the service of cruelty is still cruelty, and it is wickedly dangerous. Because, once you dehumanize another, you create a permission structure for violence. In the days after Kirk’s murder, I watched people clip, quote, and circulate his words as if each fragment were the whole story. Stripped of context, every remark became a weapon, proof that he was the monster they already believed he was. Look, I didn’t follow him, but when I went back to the source, the actual videos, I saw how much had been misquoted, flattened, or simply invented. What circulated was not Kirk, but a caricature. I recognize that move. I lived it. The point is exactly the opposite of liking him or not: truth isn’t a courtesy we extend to friends; it’s the bare minimum of honesty in public life.Once I was reduced to a distortion, I no longer had a voice in my own story. The accusation spoke louder than I ever could. People didn’t ask whether the evidence matched the charges; the charges became the evidence. In Kirk’s case, too, I saw friends posting with caustic certainty—not because they knew what he had said, but because misrepresentation had done its work. That’s another feature of moral panic: the cascade of distortion, spreading like a swarm. Once the swarm has its version of you, pushing back is nearly impossible.To be certain of someone’s guilt without evidence is not simply a judgment, it’s a sentence, a severing. People who once laughed with me, trusted me, knew me, now looked as though I had crossed into another species. I wasn’t Carr anymore. I was “the accused.” A cautionary tale. And once you become that, you’re contagious, a virus. People scatter. Conversation ends.Living with that rupture has meant learning how to carry absence. I don’t mean forgiving in some saintly sense, or forgetting as if nothing happened. I mean accepting that some doors stay closed, and life has to keep moving without waiting for them to reopen. Certainty hardens people; it doesn’t just freeze their judgment, it freezes time. To them, I will always be who they believed I was in that moment.What I’ve come to see is that distortion feeds cruelty. Conviction—certainty without evidence—is the malware of our time. Once it installs itself, it rewrites everything: friendships, reputations, even whole communities. And the damage spreads faster than truth can catch it. To find joy in murder, or to have conviction that he deserved it a bullet in his neck, is sick and heartbreaking, whether we agreed on anything at all. The only real counterweight, as I see it, is kindness. Not as a strategy, not sentimental niceness, but kindness as a discipline, a verb. Asking: who are you being while you’re doing whatever you’re doing? Does this word, this gesture, this act, leave more harm or more care in its wake? Kindness doesn’t need agreement, and it doesn’t mean silence in the face of wrong. It’s treating others with familiarity, refusing to let certainty turn them into abstractions.I think of cruelty as malware, and kindness as the recovery program. It doesn’t mean the malware disappears; it means choosing to act rightly despite it. Being kind requires something from us.Finally, I think back to a short story I wrote years ago, before I was ever wrongfully accused. The Windmiller’s Tale, it follows a young man in middle management, unsettled about his future, who meets an older farmer by chance on the edge of town. He returns often, sensing the farm has lessons in resilience and cultivation. He learns the gentle care of livestock, the strength coaxed from crops, and the maintenance of tools that weather storms and yield abundance. But the deepest lesson comes when he and the farmer rebuild an old windmill.In the late 1800s, American windmills changed forever with one innovation: the blades and tail could pivot to follow the wind. No matter which way the weather turned, the mill would catch it, drawing water from the ground, sustaining life even in the middle of nowhere.In that mechanism, he saw a way of living. You cannot stop the winds of change, but you can pivot to meet them. You can convert what comes at you—fear, distortion, cruelty—into something that sustains. That windmill became an icon of resilience and conversion. Energy into water. Cruelty into kindness. Life into life, again and again.The winds will always come; the work is in how we turn them.*I use an AI editor to fix sentence structures, grammar and clarity. These are my words and ideas. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

*A short piece about my return to the renaissance festival. I want to thank my friends who made it possible, and the many good people who greeted me so warmly throughout the day.It was 4:53 when I looked at the clock next to my bed. I had been awakened by the soft moan of thunder from an approaching storm. My dog Luka, a yellow lab bred to love all things water, hates thunder and lightening, and doesn’t like heavy rain. He stood at the bedroom door, waiting for me to open it, to bolt to the basement, away from the flashes and the noise.I looked out the window and the sky was a fusillade of lightening accented by thick cracks and growling rumbles of thunder. I went back to bed as the lightning strikes grew brighter, the thunder more ominous, and finally an unleashing of water and wind.. The streets were quickly flooded, lights flickered, the rain whipped against the windows sounding like wind in the trees. A deluge.A deluge is more than rain. It’s the feeling of being overtaken, engulfed by forces beyond your control. I’ve lived through a different kind of flood—the torrent of shame and hatred after the wrongful accusation in 2018. It nearly drowned me. At the time, it felt endless, like the waters would never recede.And even when storms do pass, the fear lingers. People who’ve lived through floods talk about never trusting the skies again. Every dark cloud carries the dread that the waters will return and sweep everything away. I know that feeling.This past weekend, for the first time since 2017, I returned to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival. Friends with a little leverage had invited me, assured me I was welcomed, and I agreed to go. I carried the old fear with me. Would whispers trail behind me? Would the shadows of the past reappear?But none of that happened. Instead, people I hadn’t seen in years came to greet me, smiling, glad to see me again. it was awesome, of course. There were a few who I knew hated that I was there, but their scorn doesn’t matter anymore. That’s their burden. They still cling to a phantom menace, a monster that never existed.Hume’s line has always stayed with me: “Truth is disputable; reason is not.” People will argue, distort, and reject what is true, but reality doesn’t bend to their wishes. A deluge doesn’t need your agreement to be real. It simply is.Being back at the festival was liberating. I realized I don’t love the place anymore, and haven’t for a long time. The romantic teenage ideal was gone long before my accuser showed up. I needed to return once, if only to confirm what I already knew, I moved on long ago.Sitting in the audience, watching my friends perform, I was struck by how old we all are now, how temporary it all is. The faces I saw this weekend will never all gather again. Time has its own current, and we’ll all be carried along.I’m okay now, I made it through the storm. I’m here, until the deluge returns, when the waters will inevitably rise, and I too will be swept away, off this mortal coil. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

I got in my car last Sunday evening and headed east out of Minneapolis, bound for New York. Hitched behind me was an Airstream—an expensive, aluminum-glam camper where I’d be living for the next three weeks, along with my two dogs. Part of my slow emergence from the fog bank of career and personal ruin that began in 2018.Looking back, I’m not sure why I believed a travel trailer could resolve my inner turmoil or chart a journey back from the personal hell I’d been thrust into. The idea first came to me in 2021, as a way to redirect my mind when I lay in bed each night. Instead of replaying scenes from the case—images of incarceration, legal purgatory—I tried to swap in visions of the Airstream. I’d imagine the model I wanted, the roads I’d travel, the feeling of freedom on the open highway. To be a wandering flaneur. Of course, buying an Airstream was financially foolish. Recovering what was lost in the landslide that followed the accusation has been nearly impossible. Few places will hire me, and those that might are too labor-intensive. I applied to be a dog sitter through an online platform for pet care. But I was declined. While I have no criminal record, I have a public one—manufactured by media. A quick search of my name pulls up a mugshot, the allegations, the headlines. Not surprising, I got a note saying “After reviewing your application, we have declined...” You know.So I drove across Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York along Interstate highways—the service corridors of America. Nothing of interest happens along them. Aside from the rolling hills in Pennsylvania and New York, every state looked like every other.Why, then, would I find this sort of inefficient travel—the long hours of going nowhere-not-so-fast—worthwhile? Because it’s boring, dull, and perfect. As the miles passed, my mind stopped thinking about much. Just the rumble, the hypnotic boom-ba boom-ba-boom of the tires over concrete seams. The slow unfurling of silence.It’s liberating to do nothing but drive, stopping occasionally to walk the dogs or take a piss. It’s just road, exit signs, and cruise control.It felt good not to be productive, to feel out of touch and disconnected. Out there, I’m more of a nobody than usual—just an old guy and a couple of dogs, pulling along toward some friends.I spent a couple nights at interstate truck stops, sandwiched between the rattle and thunder of big rigs. These truck stops look nothing like the ones that dotted the highways back when I was doing Renaissance festivals in the 1970s. Now they’re closer to mini-marts or micro-malls, with clean showers, well-lit parking, 24-hour fast food, and staffed by jovial attendants.At night, under the red glow of the semis’ clearance lights, weary drivers shuffled in and out—some ordering fast food by pointing at overhead pictures, their voices thick with fatigue and broken English. A tall Sikh man in a crisp black turban brushed his teeth in the restroom, while others shaved, s**t, and scrubbed the road off their faces.Wrapped in the soft white noise of the Airstream’s air conditioning, the dogs and I slept in our aluminum cocoon, parked on an asphalt lot and surrounded by the strange comfort of rolling commerce—the endless hum of goods in motion, flowing from somewhere to somewhere else. Whatever din of discord plagues our politics and culture, on the road there’s a steadying indifference to the stupid show playing on the main stage of the moment. These trucks are the tail end of a long chain of makers, shakers, buyers, and sellers—their existence is proof that life goes on. When they stop, that’s when you should worry.One morning, I opened the door to take the dogs out and found a rig parked so close there was barely two feet of clearance. Outside, the lot was overflowing—trucks lined up side by side, dwarfing a smattering of camper trailers. Along the edges, more trucks idled nose to tail, engines rumbling, cabins chilled, their masters sleeping inside the humThe daily drives were numbingly dull and mindlessly predictable. The pace was neither here nor there—fast, slow, and who cares. To drive across the country is to surrender to the what is of traffic, construction delays, and long stretches of silence. You’ll get there, wherever there is, eventually.For the first time in years, I felt anonymous—just another traveler in places that owed me nothing. Indifference felt good. It was freeing. The people I met along the way were kind in small, ordinary ways that gave me hope. Things are hard everywhere, but out there, in the middle of here and there, things keep moving. And they will, as long as we have wants and needs.When you spend enough time driving forward—just staying in motion—the past begins to loosen its grip. Maybe that’s all this trip was ever about: finding a little space in front of me, that I have somewhere to go. Whatever happens, I know the road will always be there—open, waiting—for me and my tiny tin dreams. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

To my readers:I recognize that I tread on sensitive ground when writing about victims of sexual assault. I’ve made it clear—both in my podcast and in my writing—that I am a lifelong and ardent supporter of survivors of sexual violence. I grew up in a household where my mother served women caught in domestic abuse, and that experience shaped my values.At the same time, I believe the #MeToo movement, while necessary, went too far in some instances—and in doing so, caused real harm to innocent people, myself included.I write about this as someone who has been both a victim of sexual violence and someone who was wrongfully accused. My intention is to speak honestly, not to offend. But if I have inadvertently hurt or offended anyone who has experienced sexual violence, please accept my sincere apology.Since releasing my podcast series, I’ve been surprised by the response from a few people I know, letters of apology for not being more supportive after I was arrested. They apologized for not reaching out privately or speaking up publicly. Given the political climate of 2017-2018, I wasn’t expecting much vocal support; people were afraid, so it wasn’t something I sought.To understand what happened, it is helpful to recall the cultural climate of the time. In the fall of 2017, actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to share their experiences of sexual harassment using the phrase “MeToo”—a term initially coined by activist Tarana Burke to spotlight survivors of color. The release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Donald Trump bragged about sexual assault, didn’t stop him from winning the presidency. The outrage that followed ignited a reckoning across media, entertainment, politics, and beyond. It was a chaotic and stressful time; as more stories were coming out about men who were accused of wrongdoing, it began to feel out of control. I never imagined I’d be accused of violent rape, let alone arrested, jailed, and humiliated in public, but that’s the nature of a moral panic, the rules change without notice, the “movement” grows, and more get taken, or at least that is how it felt for me.What made it worse was the randomness of it all. I was accused without evidence, and yet, other men with well-worn reputations for questionable behavior were untouched. That randomness was part of what kept most people quiet, lest you spook the agitated who would then come looking for you. Friends I thought might defend me didn’t, others claimed they were taking the high road: “Let the justice system sort it out.”, and a few quietly disappeared. Speaking out meant risking public condemnation as a misogynist or rape apologist. In that climate, defending me, or even calling for fairness, was an act of heresy. If there’s anything to carry forward, it’s the need for moral clarity when the next panic comes. Because it will come. And when it does, silence may feel safe, but it comes at a cost: to the culture, and the lives swept up in the moment. When we don’t speak, we cede the public square to the most contagious ideas, no matter how hollow. Moral panics don’t start with facts; they start with fear and spread through slogans. And once they take hold, the mob gains its strength not from certainty, but from herd immunity, protection by consensus, not by truth.In 1895, French psychologist and polymath Gustave Le Bon took up the study of crowds and wrote about the psychology of groups in his fascinating book “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” Although he wrote the book more than a century before the internet and social media, his insights into the behavior of crowds can also apply to online groups of like-minded believers. He wrote, “The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.” The larger the herd, the more irrational they become. Le Bon went on, “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error if error seduces them.” In 2017, seductions ran amuck.At its peak, one of the most misleading aspects of the #metoo movement was the idea that victims were acting courageously. Undoubtedly, that was true in some cases, but broadly speaking, the reason so many accusers spoke up was because they had incredible and unwavering support from activist cheerleaders, all of the media, and nearly every public institution. My accuser was given public accolades for her “profound bravery.” But what courage did it require to make a false accusation at a time when doing so nearly guaranteed absolute power over me and when it was unlikely that anyone would challenge the details of her claims?When you’re the accused, you are alone, the media hates you, you’re not welcomed in nearly every institution, and you are given nothing but scorn. You’ll lose your career too, not because you’re guilty, but because the activists want it; they need it to confirm their notion that the world is full of perverts that must be purged. We shouldn’t reflexively defend everyone who’s accused any more than we should declare someone is guilty purely because someone made an accusation.Speaking up may come at a cost, though mostly, it would be at the margins. Looking back, who should give a s**t if some social media minion calls you names? Eventually, like the crowd at a rave, they move on, leaving behind the messes they’ve made. Justice can’t survive in a culture where silence is safer than honesty, because, when fear keeps good people quiet, the loudest voices will write the story, and as I learned firsthand, truth isn’t their priority. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe

(This is an edited episode that originally streamed in March 2025, as episode 6.)In 2018, police arrived at my home with an arrest warrant for two counts of Federal Sexual Misconduct. The accusation was false. The evidence would eventually prove it. But none of that mattered as I was processed and locked in a concrete cell.This isn’t a story about heroic resilience or finding silver linings. It’s about the actual experience of wrongful incarceration: the panic attacks, the institutional indifference, the way time distorts in a windowless cage. About a kid covered in tattoos who s**t-talked by day and wept at night. About discovering that small acts of service—even cleaning a shower no one asked you to clean—can be a path back to yourself.I spent four days and three nights in Scott County Jail. I missed my 60th birthday party and saw our daughter through a video screen instead of in person. This episode is the beginning of a five-year legal ordeal that changed everything.. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/subscribe