Last year I was charged with, as the unscrupulous website which attacked me put it, “questionable behavior toward women.”
This led to later charges of sexual harassment, and heavy damage to my professional career. I have written very little about this.
Frankly, I was caught in a cyclone, and did not know how to address this; proving a negative is virtually impossible – especially when you have already been tried and convicted in the media.
But I have decided to write about it now, largely for this reason:
Sexual harassment has become the one offense where neither the press nor the public afford the accused anything like due process or fairness. Instead, a mere accusation is almost always enough to destroy someone.
What we have done is create an atmosphere where those accused of this are treated remarkably like suspected Communists in the “Red Scare” era of Joe McCarthy.
As with Communism then, any mere allegation of sexual harassment can be and is sometimes used to destroy people someone has some other grudge against.
This is very dangerous for democracy, and justice. This has an importance way beyond myself or what happened to me.
As for me – I do not believe that I have ever sexually harassed anyone, though I have certainly made mistakes in relationships and dealing with people. I have, I know, hurt people, through mistakes and misunderstandings, and I am deeply sorry.
However, I have never damaged anyone’s career for personal reasons. I have, indeed, been stern with people who quit jobs without notice, failed to show up or got in trouble for poor performance.
I saw my main mission as a teacher as preparing students for the harsh realities of the private sector workforce, where not showing up or not showing up on time were wholly unacceptable.
I see now that this, indeed, caused some hard feelings and grudges.
But that’s not the main reason why I am writing this now, nearly a year after these events. I have no intention of providing a detailed account of every relationship, sexual or otherwise, in my life. Nor do I intend to go through every accusation, except to note that none of my accusers said that I actually had sex with them (they were right about that) and only one claimed I suggested such a thing.
For me, addressing any of this is very painful; I have never been very interested in writing about myself.
What I have always tried to do over my many years as a journalist is learn interesting and important things about the world and its history and how things work, and tell people about them.
That’s what I have done since the 1970s, that is what I intend to keep doing as long as anyone wants to read and hear me.
However, I have decided I do need to put myself on the record about some of this, partly for this reason: Today, nobody dares defend anyone accused of sexual harassment. Nor will almost anyone publish what those accused of sexual harassment have to say. Editors have been viciously attacked, even fired, for doing so.
This is the real and most alarming issue here — coupled with the fact that accusations of this sort are, as I’ve noted, commonly treated by the press and the public as proof of guilt.
**
Sexual harassment is, indeed, a terrible thing, something that for too long wasn’t taken seriously by those in authority.
Many, many people, most of them women, suffered professionally and personally from it.
Nobody should tolerate this behavior, and there should be stern penalties for it, especially in severe cases.
But we are living in a climate where anybody accused of sexual harassment is automatically assumed to be guilty, period.
We are in a climate where past instances of office banter — in an era when standards were different — can be resurrected and judged according to the more Puritanical standards now in fashion.
Additionally, when it comes to this issue, no nuances are evidently allowed; accusations of leering or unwanted comments are seen as the social and moral equivalent of rape.
I found that out with brutal swiftness last year.
Within hours after the website Deadline Detroit published a piece accusing me of a long history of “questionable behavior towards women,” as I said above, my life swiftly changed.
Never mind that many of the things in their “report” were demonstrably false or irrelevant. Forget due process; employers for whom I had worked for decades canceled my columns.
The editor of the Metro Times, a publication for which I had written a column every week for 25 years, and had won the top national award for alternative column writing four times, immediately announced, without asking me any questions, that he was suspending me.
I felt I had no choice but to resign.
When, in late April, Deadline Detroit told me they were going to do a story about me and these accusations, they gave me a list of things people had supposedly said about me.
Being a loyal employee, I immediately informed Wayne State University about all of this, which directed me to meet with Linda Galante, a staff attorney who specializes in Title IX issues.
She told me that none of the accusations, even if true, rose to the level of sexual harassment, and said that since no complaints had been filed, she saw no grounds for an investigation.
My teaching evaluations had been higher than average. Nobody in the quarter-century I had taught there had ever filed a formal complaint against me, until Deadline Detroit began their smear campaign. One of the writers then claimed, according to another WSU attorney, that I had accidentally touched her breast ten years before. The attorney, who was chuckling when she called to tell me about this, told me there were no plans to investigate this.
I had thought the university would feel some loyalty to me. Beyond teaching there for many years, I had done a lot for Wayne State in general and the journalism program in particular.
I had placed hundreds of students in internships; helped many find jobs, and served on every committee I was ever asked to join.
I taught year-round, including courses I didn’t need to teach and was not paid extra for. When another instructor suddenly left town because of family illness, I scrambled the weekend before classes began to find someone to teach for her.
Whenever I was asked to speak for Wayne State I did; including giving a major address to the university’s freshman convocation in August 2017. I wrote a well-received book that was published by their University Press. I raised money for the university, found them top-notch national speakers for their annual diversity event, and both taught more than full-time and handled administrative work.
All of which, evidently, counted for nothing.
The Deadline Detroit story was anything but fair and balanced, even by Fox News standards. The one woman quoted who said anything favorable about me, wrote to say that she had been much more forceful in my defense, but her comments were distorted.
Within a day after the Deadline Detroit story, I was asked to “step aside” from my teaching duties while an investigation was launched. The dean of the college of Fine, Performing and Communication Arts then had a counselor send a message inviting any student, present or past, who had anything bad to say about me to come forward and do so anonymously.
This, I instantly realized, meant I was to be a sacrificial piñata; under those conditions, no one could survive.
This was particularly ironic, given that this dean had repeatedly complained to me about a married, but tenured faculty member who was in the habit of seducing his doctoral advisees.
On at least one occasion, the dean complained that he had to intervene to take over supervision of one of those students. But that faculty member had tenure, and had not been attacked in the press.
So nothing was ever done in that case.
I, however, was not tenured, and was a much more high-profile target because of my media career. And as an administrator later told me off the record, doing me in was an easy way to prove Wayne State was not like Michigan State, which had tolerated Larry Nassar.
It was soon clear the university had no intention of treating me fairly. Both my present and former secretaries, strong, no-nonsense women who I deeply respected, and whose offices were next to mine, asked to be interviewed; they were not.
My attorney advised me against allowing their investigator to interview me, saying that this would be used to trap me with my own words. But well before that could happen, I became a symbol, and a “spontaneous demonstration” against me was held, led, I was told, by a male student who I had indeed “harassed,” by flunking him more than once for not doing his homework.
With that, I did not see how I could possibly continue to teach in that environment, and so I decided to leave.
I thought that would make sense for all concerned, and told the university that I wanted to retire; I was old enough and had been there more than long enough to do so.
However, I was told that even though there was as yet no finding against me – the investigation hadn’t even started — I would not be allowed to retire. If I wanted to leave, I’d have to resign.
Unwilling to stick around for the Stalinist show trial and public hanging, I did. Later, they released a report to the media detailing all sorts of nastiness about me, most of which were clearly lies or distortions. I assumed that their findings would be treated as an internal human resources report. What I missed was that they needed a human sacrifice. Fairness was not on the agenda.
Nobody, indeed, had the slightest intention of taking anything like a balanced approach. I received a lot of unsolicited letters from former female students from around the world expressing shock, disbelief, and support for me. Nobody had any interest in those.
**
What was also morbidly interesting was the herd mentality other media displayed. Once I had been attacked in Deadline Detroit, I was an automatic pariah, and it was open season for anyone to say anything they wanted about me, no matter how outrageous.
Steve Schram, who is in charge of Michigan Radio, where I had done daily commentary since 2005, asked me to lunch two months before the Deadline story was published.
He told me that the two women who were doing the Deadline report had repeatedly called women at Michigan Radio, asking if I had sexually harassed people there.
Nobody had any complaints about me; for the last seven or eight years, I had worked largely remotely, though I was in the office for a few years before that. One of them then called back and said “you better come clean, because we’re working with a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter, and we are going to bring him down.”
This turned out to be someone I barely knew, but who apparently was coaching the two “reporters,” whose bylines appeared on the stories. Michigan Radio was clearly uneasy.
Once Deadline Detroit published their attack, Michigan Radio clearly wanted me gone, though they had no grounds for dismissing me. Days later, an anonymous person began posting and tweeting emails she claimed I had sent her many years ago when she was a teenager. I was baffled by this; I had no memory of them.
I have never had a close relationship of any kind with a teenager. None of these emails were overtly sexual; some were clearly fabricated or doctored, and others contained the sort of advice I would give someone who wanted a career in journalism.
That gave Schram the excuse he clearly wanted to demand my resignation. For months, this person kept tweeting and sending out these alleged emails under the heading “Jack in his own words.”
Eventually, I found out that the author was a disturbed former student of my former wife Karen, who taught at Groves High School in Birmingham. Karen told me she had brought her to a speech I gave more than a dozen years ago, where I met her, though I did not remember it. I had never seen the student before, or since, but when I was publicly attacked, she evidently decided she would anonymously hitch her wagon to the “let’s destroy Jack” movement.
There was a lot more of this sort of thing. Former U.S. Congressman Joe Schwarz, a man whose integrity has never been questioned, teaches a class at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy every semester.
For years, I’ve spoken to his class in both the fall and winter semesters. After he asked me to do so last fall, he got a call from the Dean, who told him I shouldn’t be allowed to speak to the class.
I’m sure that if the congressman had asked a paroled murderer to speak about the corrections system, nobody would have raised an eyebrow. There was a comic element to some of it: I was dropped from a private dinner group from which I had been trying to find a graceful way to resign, since they had rejected an attempt by Lansing legend Rick Cole, which I supported, to admit women.
Suddenly, people who had been my friends for many years cut off contact, even people whose careers I had helped launch.
Particularly hypocritical was the deputy director of the ACLU, a brilliant young Arab-American woman.
Years ago, when she was graduating, the ACLU needed a press secretary, and I suggested she apply. The director told me she worried that she seemed too young. “Hire her,” I said.
“You’ll never regret it.” I was right about that, but after the allegations, she not only stopped talking to me, but refused to provide ACLU comment on issues when I was doing a radio show.
Well, yes, she told me, I had always been appropriate with her, but other people had told her bad things about me. I felt like reminding her that her organization defended the rights of admitted Nazis and NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association.
I didn’t bother. Nor did I renew my membership in the ACLU.
This is uncannily like what happened to people in the early 1950s who were accused of being Communists.
I fully expect that writing this will cause Deadline Detroit to launch another attempt to smear me; they seem to have an obsession with me that I don’t understand. They also have portable ethics.
For weeks after their initial attack, one of their editors tried to keep the story going and invited people to post attacks on me. This editor, curiously, was fired from the Detroit News some years ago for theft from the paper and public urination.
That, evidently, presented no problem for Deadline Detroit. Neither did the illegal behavior of another man who does a podcast for them; as another news outlet revealed last month, he was arrested in Grosse Pointe Park in November, speeding, and tailgating a police car while legally super-drunk with a bag of cocaine in his pocket.
Allan Lengel, the site’s overall editor, the man who had aggressively gone after me, called this “an unfortunate set of circumstances,” and said it wouldn’t impact the broadcaster’s job.
Never mind that he could easily have killed someone.
One might think Deadline Detroitmight ask, what would have happened to the broadcaster were he a young black man, not a middle-aged white media personality. Would he have been allowed to have his felony charge reduced and stay out of prison?
You know the answer.
I do not write this in the hope of getting anyone to change their minds about me. What I do hope is that, next time someone is accused in the media of sexual harassment, readers and viewers reserve judgment. We are now watching a version of what happened to me happen to the civil rights icon, Morris Dees, who is being attacked in the press with similar innuendo and anonymous complaints. All of which reminds me of this:
Years ago, when the USSR collapsed and Soviet Communism was revealed to be a ghastly fraud, a friend of mine who had been a longtime secret member of the Communist Party was outraged.
He realized he had been lied to for years. “But Al, how can you be surprised?” I asked him. “Didn’t you read the papers? Didn’t you pay attention to what they did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia?”
Yeah, Al said. He had read all that.
“But every time I read something in the papers about a labor situation I knew about, much of what I read wasn’t true, so I figured a lot about what they said about the Soviet Union wasn’t true either.”
It pains me as a journalist to say this. But don’t automatically believe everything you read.
