About three weeks ago, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, I reached out to a good friend, veteran journalist and feminist media scholar, Tracy Everbach, to see if she’d be willing to help me make sense of how this was all being covered in the media.
Given her expertise (and the insane amount of work professors like her have to deal with), her answer was about what I would have expected:
Yes I will. I am really slammed but will make time for this because it’s important. When do you need it?
My response was both honest, and unfortunately, prescient:
Thanks! As for “when” (and I hate saying this because it’s bad and yet I know it’s true) I’d be fine any time in the next week or so as I can’t imagine we’ve heard the last big “Famous person X is now accused of XYZ despicable sexual acts.”
In the time between that post and now, we’ve seen a number of sexual assault, sexual misconduct and other “what the heck is wrong with you?” situations among men of power being revealed. We even now have a case in which a woman tried to “catfish” the Washington Post into running a false allegation against Senate candidate Roy Moore. Today’s firing of morning show host Matt Lauer had me thinking, that it’s probably a good idea to shine a spotlight back on Tracy’s wise words.
