Paying for their therapy is the best of the bunch. And nonprofits of course.
He already publicly admitted what he did wrong. Any apology policing on top of that seems like an overreach.
I can only imagine that these women wouldn’t want any professional help from him. Fuck that!
I don’t know about financial compensation for work they didn’t get (unless there are clear examples they can point to) but he should definitely pay them for having to be permanently attached to this crap forever. Either that or stay silent. Talk about a predicament, Louis!
The cynic in me wonders if other women would step forward if victims started getting paid so that’s why he can’t start doing it.
"A janitor at a Fortune 500 company was caught coercing women to watch him masterbate in the copy room. He left the company after other people found out, publicly admitted that he did what he did and that it was wrong, but didn’t actually apologize to the women he traumatized.
9 months later he shows back up at that company and starts cleaning the place again without any invitation. What an overreach to now expect him to apologize! Just let him clean!"
This is also the problem with “social justice” rather than legal justice. It’s not at all clear that everyone shares the same values, the same perspectives or the same view on punishments when people do things that are wrong from some moral perspective but not illegal (or are saved from legal consequences due to technicalities).
It’s all very passive aggressive, and passive aggressive doesn’t work when the perpetrator doesn’t care. “Shaming” or “cancelling” doesn’t matter if the perpetrator doesn’t care.
So the NYT article says what he should do. But why should he? If his fans love him and there is no recourse past public shaming, what else can be done? That’s the real limitation of metoo.
I would fire him if he were my employee and never let him on the premises again. If a homeless person did that to a random person they would be incarcerated. That his fans can contextualize and normalize his behavior away shows the limitations of relying on public shaming.
This is where, i dunno how to put this, we need to educate / train / have a different standard for women. Take your pick. Ultimately if a woman feels threatened but doesn’t come forward it’s extrmely hard to receive justice so much later after the fact. Yes we know the reasons why but it doesn’t revoke the problem either.
Because women feel threatened by and are subject to and have difficulty standing up to the power structures run by men, we probably should have a different standard. Quite a lot of metoo and women’s right in the last couple of years is essentially been angling for a second standard without outright saying so (because women feel uncomfortable actually saying or believing they want a second standard), by pointing out all these power imbalances and problems and then saying, in essence, “somebody fix this!”
Your point about the limits of public shaming is a good one but I don’t understand this part. Contextualizing, sure, if you mean putting it in perspective with other crimes so we can work on a just response. But normalizing? Who is doing that? You think if he’s allowed back in the spotlight it would normalize what he did? Guess I don’t see it that way.
I dunno, Nesrie. When someone says they have remorse, they cannot forgive themselves and they acknowledge that they have caused hurt and anguish… that’s a long and introspective apology, isn’t it?
You can question whether it represents sincere introspection and regret, or whether it’s just a PR step on the road to fixing his career. Perhaps the ending phrase, “… take a long time to listen” seems dishonest now, as not many of us consider nine months away to be a long time.
I would have expected any such apology to have been given directly to those people, and not in the public.
For a public statement, what he did is pretty much exactly what someone should do. He made no excuses, admitted fault, and expressed his regret. And he went further, to express that he actually understood why it was wrong, and explained such things in detail.
Yeah scratch out long time and replace it with less than a year and then I’ll test the waters by just showing up and not giving anyone a choice as whether or not they want to see my spiel.
He admitted fault, sure, and then spent a lot of time talking about himself. That’s the problem many of these aritcles are talking about. He does it. He steps away. He chooses. It’s all about his choices and when he wants it and a completely self-centered approach, all on his terms which is no different from most the crimes, legal or social, these men committed. Their apologies often reflect the same thing.
That’s required by a good apology. It’s about what he did that was wrong, and why.
Also, 9 months is a long time. Any kind of reflection is gonna be done in that amount of time. Suggesting it needed to be longer is a totally arbitrary requirement.
Well then you go ahead and send a young daughter into a room with him, test things out. I’m sure there is no risk there because he’s sorry but never actually says he’s sorry. It’ll be fine… probably.
