Guest Post: On the Cowardice of the Atlantic Magazine in the Celeste Marcus/Yascha Mounk Matter

Noam Dworman, owner of NYC's Comedy Cellar and host of "Live from the Table" says the Atlantic's response should've been straightforward: "We are a magazine, not the police or an investigatory body."

“I just finished the Yascha podcast,” Noam Dworman texted two days ago, regarding the episode where Sarah Hepola and I discussed the rape allegations against Atlantic contributor Yascha Mounk by writer Celeste Marcus (“The Curious #MeToo Case of Yascha Mounk.”) Noam was particularly incensed by the response from Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, which was to publicly separate from Mounk, against whom Marcus had never filed charges, choosing instead, it seemed, to make Goldberg judge and executioner.

“Throwing an employee under the bus is never good for morale,” texted Noam, who, as the owner of NYC’s Comedy Cellar, oversees the livelihoods of dozens of employees.

He’d also written an essay about his thoughts, which he tweeted today and which he has given me permission to run in full here - NR

On the Cowardice of the Atlantic Magazine in the Celeste Marcus/Yascha Mounk Matter, by Noam Dworman

Let me preface:  if you’re poised to attack me as somehow being soft on rape, you’re wrong -  that couldn’t be further from the truth. Criminals (even our friends) belong in jail.  In fact, I think we often under-punish violent crime.

If you think people shouldn’t be able to freely discuss, and disagree on complex issues like this, I’ll put it bluntly: You are ruining America,  In fact, that attitude (and the tactics of intimidation often associated with it) is likely at the root the Atlantic’s spineless capitulation here.

A few things are obvious:

• Just like an allegation of murder, an allegation of rape cannot be properly investigated by a private employer.  

• Only in a dystopian country are people accused of crimes on Twitter, and then employers are expected to punish them.

• We have institutions (the envy of the world) specifically created to investigate and decide criminal matters.  They are empowered to take testimony, punish perjury, subpoena cell phones & emails, call upon psychiatric expertise, and maybe most importantly, allow for cross-examination.  All the basic necessities of a fair process. Indeed, cross-examination is so important to our traditions, it was enshrined as a fundamental right in the “Confrontation Clause” of the 6th Amendment to the Constitution.

The Atlantic holds none of the authority to fairly investigate a crime. Nor is Jeffrey Goldberg trained in criminal investigations.  (And one only has to read the Atlantic to learn that inadequate training is a major cause of societal injustice.) 

But, though it cannot properly investigate, in our dystopia an employer like the Atlantic can hand out punishment on par with many courts.  The man accused here stands to lose everything. Every job. Every teaching position. Even the ability to exist in polite company. And there’s no half-life to this stuff. The internet ensures that the scarlet letter never ever fades. Goldberg is fully aware of the downstream effects of his decision. 

It must be noted that Goldberg and the Atlantic make their living in no small part by pointing a judgmental finger at politicians and others who make feckless decisions, who throw the greater good under the bus for self-preservation and self-interest. (I’m not generally judgmental, but I’m very judgmental of the judgmental).

I will touch on some specifics, but they are a distraction. Principles must guide the matter.  As Leon Wieseltier (Marcus’s boss) has written: “... due process is not a legal formality, a procedural exercise that slows the way to a satisfying climax; it is the very honor of a liberal society.” 

Celeste Marcus says she was raped. The Atlantic’s answer should have been straightforward:  We are a magazine, not the police or an investigatory body.  These are serious charges. Please, take this matter to one of the institutions created to handle it.  We will act swiftly in accordance with the results. 

But why go to court if you can accomplish the same thing with an email to Jeffrey Goldberg?

In the instant-gratification world that Marcus and the Atlantic want for us, anybody can ruin anybody. Our livelihoods and lives survive on the honor system. And only a troglodyte resorts to the false god of procedure and due process. If you're accused, be gone. (And don't get any clever ideas, we have ways of dealing with your defenders too.)

But untried accusations are not facts (as the Atlantic discovered when it wrote respectfully of Michael Avenatti’s claims in the Julie Swetnick case. (Avenatti, currently in prison, could not be reached for comment.)

Without due process, it’s a dangerous delusion to imagine we know anything. It’s reckless to skip the fact-finding because you’ve decided you already know the facts. 

Haven’t we learned this by now?

How many stories has the press gotten wrong?  Why would their internal investigations be any more reliable than their public ones? A short list of false allegations includes UVA/”A Rape on Campus,” Mike Tunison, Duke Lacrosse, Hofstra, Jussie, Juanita (it works both ways!), Tawana, even Russiagate and OJ. (Due process is not perfect!).

The Atlantic could have looked to itself for guidance here:  “[D]eclining to reach a conclusion about an allegation [of sexual assault] isn’t the same as sweeping it aside, erasing it, or ignoring, impugning, or silencing the accuser. One can listen, assess, and still conclude that one knows too little to judge.” 

But there’s a bigger problem.  Can you imagine being investigated by someone whose own livelihood will be impacted by the outcome?  Who are we kidding here?  The Atlantic doesn’t give a shit about the accusations against its contributors. If it did, it wouldn’t still be publishing Bill Clinton.  The Atlantic is worried about fall-out and ass-covering.  Jeffrey Goldberg is weighing his decision solely against the consequences to him and his organization. He’s worried about a mutiny on the Left and his own position in polite company. And he’s worried about the opinions of his friends in this incestuous everyone-knows-everyone universe of journalism.  It’s chilling to imagine that a man’s future could be decided by such an inherently corrupt process.

I’ve been in touch with a few Atlantic journalists. The general answer was, “Goldberg is in an impossible situation.”  Not one of these people thought to say, “What he [the accused] did here was terrible!”  It was all about the predicament. They understood instinctively that the decision was a political/diplomatic one. 

And what is it that makes his situation “impossible”?  It’s that only the “right” answer will be acceptable to the mob.  (A mob that includes the most sophisticated believers in liberal democracy on Earth, LOL).

It’s true that the Constitution does not restrict the actions of a private employer.  But when faced with a transparent attempt to crash through the public protections we all cherish, the default position of the Atlantic magazine (of all places) should be to embrace the wisdom and spirit of the Bill of Rights (just as the Atlantic once stood up for free speech when it stood by Kevin Williamson’s right to his pro-life position), not to look for technicalities. 

(It’s also ironic to see the liberal Atlantic embracing the arguments of the people who oppose worker protections [no union employee could be fired this way], and those who use the “gig economy” and “at-will” doctrine as an excuse to trample on the fair treatment of workers.)

The distilled essence of all this elite hypocrisy emits the stench that Trump supporters smell when they fall in behind him. (You know who watches this and doesn’t want to live this way?  The deplorables.)

And now, let’s bring in a specific or two.  “I will not be raped with impunity,” Marcus wrote.  Think about the chutzpah of that statement: I will not go to the police.  I will not file a legal action.  Jeffrey Goldberg (who I don’t even work for) must stand between me and "impunity." And if he doesn’t act satisfactorily, I will shame him on Twitter until he does.  

This is nonsense.  The potential impunity is 100% her choice. Her unhidden intention is to avoid due process and pressure Goldberg into granting summary judgment. How efficient. 

She has made her strategy clear: “He should have some part of his life ruined. I don't think he should be dead, but he should be punished. He committed a crime.” Marcus said in a recent interview.

And who should punish the crime?  Jeffrey Goldberg. That’s the only possible interpretation that can be synthesized.  

Again, let me be clear: I don’t know what happened. I’m not doubting her. My or anyone’s personal beliefs must be beside the point.

You might be tempted to say: But the accused can sue!  That Mounk or anyone has the right to hire a lawyer, and spend years and a million dollars, saddled with the burden of proof of showing that he didn’t do something.  Reminder: Negatives can’t be proved.  And, the stigma of even a wrongful accusation can never be completely cleansed. That’s why in a just society, the accuser does the proving. Period.

In the Atlantic, Emily Yoffe once wrote: “The best reporting of the #MeToo movement has shown that when journalists examine all the possible holes in an accuser’s account, find corroborating witnesses and documentary evidence, and give the accused the opportunity to respond, they make the victim’s story more powerful.”

There is no evidence that this was done in this case.

Journalism on the Left is incestuous.  They all know each other, and believe me, no one’s publicly looking for holes in Marcus’s story. (Privately btw, they speak and telegraph differently.) 

There are potential holes in plain sight. For instance, by Marcus’s own account, when she told the story to her close friend, her friend did not think that what Marcus described was a rape.

At 21:46, Marcus says, “…he [the accuser] doesn't consider what he did rape um I assume I don't know because I've never asked him but this mutual friend of ours didn't and that was part of what was so upsetting for me…”

Perhaps there is a perfectly reasonable explanation to this.  Maybe she misspoke.  Maybe, hearing this - if they did hear it - a logical response from the Atlantic might have been, “If your own friend, hearing only your version, did not think you were raped, then this sort of ambiguity is beyond our ability to untangle.”

Maybe journalists need to do their jobs and ask her.

Helen Lewis once wrote, also in the Atlantic: “Now you’re a journalist. A woman has just come to you alleging that she was sexually assaulted by a public figure. Your response here is the opposite of a friend’s reaction. You ask about corroboration: letters, answering-machine messages, witnesses, emails, photographs, dates, times. You look for the weaknesses in the story, the omissions, the contradictions. You remember the journalist’s maxim If your mother says she loves you, make her prove it. You do not simply ‘believe women.’”

As far as I can tell, no one’s asking the most basic questions every journalist is surely thinking*: Did they have an existing relationship? How did her clothes come off?  How does one initiate sex when a woman is sleeping? Were they drinking? When she banged your head against a stone wall “until you fell down,” did she injure herself?  What was the reason her friend gave for concluding she was not raped? What is the “similar case” she alluded to? Who was the friend? [Insert the question that came to your mind that you would never share publicly because it might ruin you…]

Marcus, a journalist, is certainly aware of these natural questions.  After all, she knew just what to ask Leon Weiseltier about the sexual accusations against him (her conclusion: he got a bum rap) before she took the job at Liberties. Yet she’s determined to let her story out one drip at a time. Why?  

When Tara Reade accused Joe Biden, many, including a New York Times columnist, argued that Reade’s expressed admiration for Vladamir Putin was a sign of mental instability significant enough to justify skepticism.

But here, there has been no mention that Marcus wrote an essay about her psychological “demons” that led her to almost starve herself to death as a way of dealing with the fact that she sexually aroused men (and she almost succeeded). 

I make people think of sex. Among the long-skirted mothers who kept watch over the sacred plot of earth surrounding our synagogue, there developed the suspicion that something filthy had been smuggled in and let loose. The women intuited this, they detected it, long before I knew what that thing was. Since I was a little girl, a creature in me — the highest, dirtiest iteration of me — has emanated a kind of intense awareness, an energy that induces others to feel like they are being seduced and stripped. I wanted to excise this sexed thing who robbed me of any pretensions to modesty, sweetness, innocence, and purity — the certified conditions of proper girlhood. She is discomfiting, this daemon of mine. People, especially other girls, don’t like women at a high pitch. (Judging from the insecurities and the prejudices of the women I have encountered in adulthood, I gather that this initiation into girlhood is near-universal.) “Softer, gentler, calmer, please,” girls think, silently tensing their fragile bodies. When we are still toddlers, girls are taught to suspect womanly intensity, to fear it and abort it. “They can smell it on her,” one rabbi told my father when I was still in high school. I was a pathogen.

Purification is always an act of violence. Eventually, when all else failed, I tried to kill her.

And, she says, her “demons” have not been overcome.

My demons, like all people’s demons, cannot be disentangled from who I am. No precise surgical removal, leaving only the strengths, is possible. A part of my mind, a sphere within it, is governed by a bottomless compulsion to self-sabotage. That injurious dimension of me is fully the match of my better elements in strength and in cleverness, and is nourished by the same wealth of human experience, which means it can never be defeated or satisfied

(Note this essay of Marcus’s was beyond my ability to confidently understand. Read it for yourself and draw your own conclusions.)

These writings are not proof of a false accusation.  But isn’t it clear that ONLY a disinterested institution with the investigative authority of the state can handle this?  There are sympathetic scenarios that might pressure us to compromise our general principles. But this is not one.  This case is not old, and the victim is not shy.  We all understand the climate of intimidation we are living in.  We don’t have to live this way. 

The Atlantic had an opportunity to strike a blow for the very principles it claims to believe in.  There might be some short-term pain, but IMHO long-term pride would surely follow.

The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table podcast can be found on YouTube and Apple podcasts. Follow Noam on Twitter at @noam_dworman.

*Sarah Hepola and I, along with attorney Scott Greenfield, do wonder aloud about these questions and others on “The Curious #MeToo Case of Yascha Mounk.”