The other part is simply fear. Canceled people aren’t usually afraid of being attacked or accosted if they are spotted in public. The fear is simply of being seen and recognized.

That’s the essence of public humiliation: your identity is your greatest liability. The whole world has already decided you’re the worst person ever. Just because they’ve moved on to their next target and forgotten about you (“I have moved on,” he said. “I don’t want to get back involved in it.”), doesn’t mean your slate is clean. Even if you don’t internalize the humiliation and convert it to shame and guilt, you still don’t want to be seen. You don’t want to be recognized. You don’t want to be.

Fear layered on top of freezing secures the win for the mob. Whether the target leaves the country or never leaves their house without their spin on Unabomber chic, they have been purged from their communities.

After some combination of time and treatment, the freeze thaws and the fear fades enough that they start venturing out more often, going a bit further, and not activating incognito mode. It’s almost inevitable that at some point they’ll encounter someone who recognizes them from Before.

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At the end of our presentation at the Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing, Dr. Christine Marie noted that it had been the first time Michael Capiraso and Dave Scott-Thomas spoke publicly and in-person about their cancelations. That didn’t fully land for me at the time. The significance really hit when each of them told me about being recognized just a few weeks on either side of the conference. These two interactions are at opposite poles, and say so much about first conversations with the canceled.

Small-town America, aka, Manhattan

Capiraso spent most of 2020–23 bunkered in his apartment. If he left, he would usually only venture a few blocks west to the coffee shop where he’d meet his few stalwart friends, or the oddly curious and persistent writer passing through town.

He practically had to be dragged to go east: east took you to Central Park, 843 acres of post-cancelation triggers, flashbacks, and well-founded fear of being recognized.

The Park wasn’t Capiraso’s “third place” or a home away from home. As the center of New York City’s running community, it was an extension of his home, an expression of his life. He logged dozens of miles each month commuting through it, and closer to a hundred miles each month running its trails. It’s where he took his daughters to the playgrounds over almost every day after school, held business meetings (often while logging some of those miles), had work events.

Not everyone, but many people there did know his name. No fence or wall could have more effectively kept him away.

Central Park wasn’t as much of a no-go zone for the latter three years of his cancelation, but it still offered more tension than enjoyment. He had a few encounters with people he knew from New York Road Runners in the Park, and those didn’t exactly encourage him to spend more time there. West was still best.

After six years of cancelation, in August, all of those fears were validated—ironically, not in the Park. Michael was walking down Columbus Avenue in New York City when some guy approached him and said, “Hey, you used to be in charge at New York Road Runners, right?”

Michael didn’t freeze, but he definitely pulled up short and tensed.

“I just noticed your face as you were walking by. I remember people,” the stranger said. His daughter used to compete in youth running events at the New York City Armory, and he recognized Capiraso from those. “I knew you from all of your years there. I really admired what you did.”

“I didn’t have such a good exit,” Capiraso said, testing the waters a bit, as well as this rando’s knowledge of the NYC running scene.

“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry about that,” the other guy said.

After a short conversation, they exchanged contact information, and a few days later went for a run.

“You can’t make this up,” Capiraso accurately recounted. “And now I have a new friend, it seems.”

More pages from the Playbook

That’s one extreme: complete stranger, positive interaction, pleasant IRL follow-up.

Strangers carry the threat of the unknown: “What might they say?” That’s a much different question than the one that hangs over the first post-cancelation interaction with someone you knew Before. That question is: What could they say? What could they possibly say to excuse or justify joining up with the mob, or silently standing by while the mob did its thing?

Dave Scott-Thomas, as he usually does, figured out the pattern in these interactions, which led to him crafting a rule.

The first interaction is always going to be about you, the participant or bystander. That conversation is your chance to express how sorry you are for what the canceled person went through, how rough it must have been for them, and maybe offer up why you would have said something but didn’t because you couldn’t because reasons.

Dave will let you have your moment. He won’t give you anything to make you feel better, or assuage your guilt. He’s not going to be an accomplice in anyone’s self-soothing. He’ll just sit there and listen and let you go on your way.

The test is the second conversation, assuming there is one. If you were genuinely trying to make amends and want the door open for some ongoing relationship, the second conversation will be about the canceled person. But if you’re just trying to convince yourself that they are OK, and therefore you are free of any guilt or responsibility, then the second conversation will rehash the first and will be about you.

With the exception of the few people who really did him in, actively or passively, he’s almost universally willing to put the past behind, provided it stays there. Every interaction can’t be an occasion for guilt, penitence, or self-gratification. After all the negativity, you need to bring something positive to his future if he’s going to bring something to yours. That’s not transactional. It’s being real.

Seven years post-cancelation, he had a chance to give this rule the ultimate real world stress test.

Small-town (actually) Canada

“Same address, same phone number, same Gmail.”

If you knew Dave Scott-Thomas pre-cancelation, you knew what you needed to know to check in with him or see how he was doing post-cancelation.

If you tried to get information from someone in his family, or asked someone that you knew stayed in touch with him for an update, they would direct you to your own contact list: same address, same phone number, same Gmail. The people who stayed close to Dave are not interested in making things easy for the people who didn’t. If you felt guilty or ashamed, if you were afraid of what he might say or what you might hear, well that’s on you. If you were looking for an “Oh, he’s fine” so you could palliate your conscience, they weren’t supplying the hit.

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Like Michael and Central Park, there was little physical distance between Dave’s house and the university he worked at.

Quick aside: very few canceled people I talk to move. There are lots of reasons for this: if you’re too frozen with depression to leave your house, house hunting and the logistics of moving are not in the cards. There is also the financial toll of being canceled in lawyers, mental health, loss of job, and the rest. And it’s not like Google results won’t follow you to a new town and pop up whenever people look up their new neighbors. But even so, I and I suspect a lot of normies would expect that getting out of there would be a high priority.

Instead, canceled people often disappear in plain sight, which, again, is kind of the point.

But despite being right where he’d always been in a small college town, Dave somehow went seven years without encountering one of the people whose fearful complicity as the mob went about its work secured a place amongst the frozen heads of the ninth circle. We’ll call him Ben.

“I was coming back to my car after playing with Chewie”—a very large, very gentle Rottweiler—“at some local rec fields and heard ‘Hi, Dave.’ Ben was waiting in his car, saw me approaching, and got out. I was caught off guard and I didn’t recognize him at first. He said, ‘It’s been a long time. It’s really good to see you,’ and held out his hand. We shook. He said, ‘It’s really good to see you’ again. I said ‘OK,’ and got in my car.”

Dave described this to wife and two close friends, who all know Ben and—because they’ve been with Dave this whole time—know The Playbook. They agreed that Ben “rehearsed that meeting dozens of times in his head, and that first one is about him, not me. Ben goes home thinking there’s some resolution and that it’s fine if he sees you about town now. I go home revisiting all the betrayal with no forward motion.”

Dave then told it to a group of friends who have mostly coalesced post-cancelation, so they don’t know Ben and don’t know the extent of the betrayal.

Their reaction was less nuanced.

“Fuck that guy. You shook his hand?”

One of them asked Dave, “How did you feel in the moment?”

“Part of me wanted to hug Ben and part of me wanted to punch him in the face.”

“That just tells you how complicated it all is.”

Fear, then loathing

Three years ago, I was the guy who approached Michael Capiraso out of nowhere and said “Hey, you used to run the New York Road Runners. Can I ask you a few questions?” I was also the guy who popped up in Dave’s inbox saying, “Remember me from back in the day? Last time we talked was 2017…” I had no idea what I was walking into, and none of us could have foreseen any of the three years since. But at those moments of first contact, first conversation, and then follow-up emails and calls, I was part of a process: attenuating the fear of strangers, and establishing the pattern of familiars.

Time and treatment help reframe the original breaches and betrayals. As the canceled person’s understanding changes, so does their reaction to seeing someone from the past evade them—or, more precisely, evade their own conscience—now.

Fear and shame give way to dismay. The canceled person is not so much hurt as surprised, not in a passive-aggressive “My only mistake was thinking better of you” kind of way, but in a baffled, “Are you kidding me?” kind of way. From there it’s a very short step to bilious and justified contempt.

Whereas before the target would think “I’m as low as they all say,” now they say “I spent years hiding in fear. But that person is the coward.”

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Photo credit: Tyler Merbler / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

The Atlantic provides a perfect example. It sets TCaP in the context of “the excesses and cruelties of the George W. Bush era, particularly on television… [t]he overarching theme was exposure, followed by ensuing cycles of shame, recrimination, and (often) profit.” Describing her experience watching Predators, author Sophie Gilbert offers: “We’re led to wonder what it means to capture the worst day of someone’s life on camera, how banal the preparation is, and how guilty [Predators director David] Osit is himself in re-airing the show’s footage.”

Reading that, you’d think Gilbert hasn’t spend any time on social media, digital media, or even print media in the last 10 years—maybe not since TCaP itself went off the air. Even more so when, in the final paragraph, she writes that Predator’s “presumption that the footage will land very differently than it did in 2004 [seems] to suggest progress.” But no, she is aware of what’s been going on, because later in that same paragraph she muses if the woman on “Coldplay’s kiss cam might have a very different read on how far we’ve actually come.”

I humbly offer this site, 5–6 notebooks, a couple external drives, and about 10% of the contacts in my phone as rebuttal to the suggestion that we’ve progressed beyond excesses and cruelties; that ordinary people are no longer subjected to cycles of exposure, shame, and recrimination for profit; and that there is any wonder on any side about capturing the worst day of someone’s life and broadcasting it.

What’s changed since 2007 are the details, not the base phenomenon: the means, not the ends.

It’s almost too on-the-nose that TCaP aired its final episode in the closing days of the year in which the iPhone launched (six months to the day earlier, in fact) and Twitter had its breakthrough at South by Southwest.

Smartphones and social media democratized public humiliation rituals, just as they did most other media output. You no longer needed the resources of NBC and a recurring spot on a weekly news magazine to vest yourself as society’s purifier, nor did you need to wait until the next segment to gratify your righteous voyeurism.

Daniel LaChance and Paul Kaplan recognize the key context to understand To Catch a Predator:

“In the 1980s and early 1990s, statistically rare instances of strangers abducting white children from public spaces and murdering them became highly publicized. This helped fuel a moral panic about the vulnerability of children, particularly as mothers were increasingly working outside of the home.

“The emergence of the internet generated a new kind of stranger danger: Now, online predators could reach through fiber-optic cables and groom children in their own homes.”

I’ve written several times here and said countless times elsewhere that 2020 was the peak year for cancelations because there were three overlapping moral panics: COVID, Black Lives Matter, and MeToo. To Catch a Predator was a product of its time because it perfectly capitalized on the overlap between two eras of moral panic, as LaChance and Kaplan explain. But there is nothing unique about public humiliation rising to meet the dominant moral panic (or three). That’s just supply and demand.

The Americans who made TCaP a ratings hit and proto-viral phenomenon (back when virality meant having IRL conversations in the subsequent days) weren’t any more cruel, prone to excess, or pro-vigilantism than Americans in other eras. They were just playing their role in surrendering to a moral panic. TCaP filled the need.

The narrative structure of each TCaP segment was, well, a bit perverted.

The cinematic climax of each episode ostensibly was the “takedown” and arrest outside the house. But the dramatic climax of each episode occurred around the halfway point, when Hansen emerges and the target goes through a rapid-fire sequence of facial expressions and verbal responses. That’s when you can almost hear the big musical cue—bum ba ba baaaaaaaaaa—and the viewers at home nearly spill their drinks and popcorn as they lurch forward in their seats “Gotcha!” “Oh that dog is going down!!!”

But the story was already over at those points. The deed as soon as the camera put the face to the name of the target. That’s when it was over for the target—they just didn’t know it yet. Like little kids, the audience liked knowing something that the other person didn’t for a few minutes, but they absolutely reveled in gloating that they knew the secret all along. Hansen’s entrance provided all sorts of release.

The denouement on the driveway wasn’t there to bring closure to the story. Dateline provided it to salve the audience, to reassure them that they were amongst the good guys. It wasn’t really vigilantism-cum-voyeurism. Dateline and Hansen were just helping the Boys in Blue take a monster-freak off the streets.

Rather than the dramatic confrontation, a more honest show would have Hansen striding into the room bedecked in flair, with a casino’s worth of lights and sounds going off as he says with a Shatner-level of over-the-top stage presence “And now let’s meet our tribute.” Think Stanley Tucci in The Hunger Games.

But a more honest Hansen would channel Russell Crowe turning to the audience, sword in hand, demanding “Are you not entertained?”

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Remember the context of that scene in Gladiator, not just the meme. Maximus gave the audience more than they were used to. He made it too clear, too honest, and for a few seconds, it was too much. He challenged them to confront what they were all there for, and they responded by taking the one easy way out: cheering more lustily than ever, and they made him a star.

Digital and social media has removed the gatekeepers and middlemen, but the showmanship and theatrics are still there. Legacy media produce staid pieces eliminating people in service of the current moral panic(s), as do NGOs with their watchlists and dossiers. Their blades are still sharp and swinging, but their gravitas makes them seem surgical rather than medieval.

The entertainment is front and center, though, for Hansen’s prolific offspring. I saw an example of that this week, as an influencer literally danced as he digitally assassinated a young athlete. The influencer looks nothing like Hansen, but I have trouble telling them apart. I won’t link to the video, but if you know a little about me you’ll probably be able to figure out the situation and find it. If you see it, look at the comments, interactions, and articles written about it and ask yourself: Are they not entertained?

Just of the cancelations I’ve tracked, I can list about a half-dozen suicides and about an equal number of deaths of despair. Then there are the men and women who came close, and the years taken off lives due to the physical and mental ill health as a result of public humiliation and exile.

To Catch a Predator resulted in one man’s suicide. NBC still aired that episode—as a two-parter, in fact. The scandal and the subsequent lawsuit by the target’s sister contributed to the show ending, but not for a full year. Ruling on a pretrial motion, US District Court Judge Denny Chin wrote: “NBC created a substantial risk of suicide or other harm, and that it engaged in conduct so outrageous and extreme that no civilized society should tolerate it.”

Since To Catch a Predator has gone off the air, our society has turned public humiliation vigilantism into a mass participation sport. If we’re looking for an era to compare ourselves to, the “excesses and cruelties” of the mid-00s are too civilized. We’d do better to look to the era of Maximus and Commodus. The show is less bloody, but it’s always on and the body count is comparable. Are we not entertained?

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Despite his arrest in 2023 and subsequent three years of criminal investigation and proceedings, Campos-Hurtado was not banned from sport and publicly listed as such by the US Center for SafeSport, the national sport safe guarding organization. But there is evidence the Center and US Soccer were aware of the allegations against Campos-Hurtado, and opted not to take action.

A spreadsheet maintained by US Soccer and made available to some constituent associations shows that the Center placed Campos-Hurtado’s case on an “administrative hold” in July 2023. An “administrative hold” is an option the Center may exercise when there “insufficient information to proceed with an investigation.” The Center retains the right to “re-open them at any time when sufficient information is made available.”

This is curious for several reasons. First, a criminal charge is a de facto violation of the SafeSport Code. There were multiple public documents, starting with the arrest record, that would constitute “sufficient information” that Campos-Hurtado was facing a criminal charge. Campos-Hurtado could have been permanently banned and publicly listed within days of his July 2023 arrest.

Second, “administrative holds” were not an option in the version of the SafeSport Code that was in effect when Campos-Hurtado was arrested and listed in the spreadsheet. “Administrative closures” were an option, and the wording was similar to that of “administrative holds,” which first appeared in the revision that took effect a full year later.

The Center did not respond to my request for comment. I will update this article if they respond after publication.

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The Campos-Hurtado case exemplifies why the Center takes fire from all sides. Other cases that have come before the Center make their handling of the Campos-Hurtado case even more startling.

Among the other “administrative holds” listed on the US Soccer spreadsheet are three girls who were 10-years old when the Center received a complaint against them; five other minors; a Women’s World Cup winner; a former Commissioner of the National Women’s Soccer League; a high-level executive at US Soccer; and a former president of US Soccer.

The Center can issue a “temporary sanction” on the basis of a single accusation that is “sufficiently serious that the Respondent’s continued participation in the sport could be detrimental to the best interest of sport and those who participate in it.” That is an understatement given the charges against Campos-Hurtado. And again, there was more than just an accusation: there were criminal charges, followed by an indictment, a guilty plea in 2025, and sentencing in 2026.

By contrast, a notable name appeared on the Center’s Centralized Disciplinary Database on July 29: Batarti Gabbard, the brother of former Director of National Intelligence and Senator Tulsi Gabbard. Batarti Gabbard had been arrested 12 days earlier on the misdemeanor charge of second-degree custodial interference. Gabbard appears to be an avid tennis player, like the rest of his family. But unlike Campos-Hurtado, Gabbard does not appear to have been a coach nor have any custodial or protective interactions with youth athletes.

The Center is designed to move quickly to remove accused individuals from sporting contexts. The Center frequently suspends and publicly blacklists sportspeople based on a single unvetted accusation. Due process is minimal, and the damage to one’s career and reputation is permanent.

After the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics in the mid-2010s, Congress empowered the US Center for SafeSport with jurisdiction over the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and each sport’s national governing body “with regard to safeguarding amateur athletes against abuse, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, in sports.” Congress expanded the Center’s power in 2020 by requiring it to “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of adults who are barred by the Center”—a requirement that comes with immunity for defamation, libel, or slander if the Center wrongfully tars someone by listing them alongside Nassar and other convicted criminals.

Over 13 million Americans are under the Center’s authority, from Team USA Olympians to youth and “weekend warrior” recreational athletes.

As in the Gabbard case, the Center’s remit is not confined to abuse that occurs in athletic environments, like gyms, locker rooms, or team road trips. The SafeSport Code establishes the requirements, prohibitions, sanctions, and procedures that the Center has developed to carry out its mission. The Code is more than an internal policy document. The Center’s authorizing legislation states that the Code “shall apply as though [it] were incorporated in and made a part of” the law, a controversial clause at the center of several federal lawsuits regarding state action and non-delegation.

Two federal lawsuits currently in progress highlight how tenacious the Center can be over a criminal charge.

Metry McGaughey was a gymnastics coach in Mississippi. He was acquitted of all charges by a jury in 2023, and the judge subsequently ordered all records of the charges and the case expunged. Nevertheless, the Center persisted in investigating and blacklisting McGaughey from 2024–2026.

According to McGaughey’s lawsuit, the Center’s investigator recognized the weakness of her case absent the court records, but still concluded that McGaughey had committed sexual assault and therefore recommended his permanent ban and blacklisting. An independent arbitrator described the Center’s investigation as “lackluster” and “minimal effort.” The arbitrator reversed the Center’s finding, clearing the way for McGaughey to sue the Center and the investigator for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and other counts related to the loss of business opportunities McGaughey suffered.

Likewise, the Center banned and blacklisted Christian Heineking, a horse trainer and rider near Fort Worth, TX, in 2023 due to “pending criminal charges” related to incidents that allegedly occurred between 2010–14. Remember that the Center only received federal recognition in 2017. That notwithstanding, the Center grants itself full retrospective authority, explicitly renouncing any statutes of limitations or time-bars.

In 2024, the charges were reduced to a single misdemeanor—unlawful restraint—to which Heineking pleaded guilty. The formal finding of guilt was deferred and all charges were ultimately dismissed. Heineking has no criminal record.

But as with McGaughey, the Center would not allow Heineking to reclaim his career or reputation. Heineking’s federal lawsuit details dozens of inconsistencies and errors in the Center’s investigation of him, which is now in its third year.

Finally, the Campos-Hurtado case is a companion case to one that brought a lot of criticism to the Center from its strongest defenders last year.

The Center “temporarily suspended” gymnastics coach Sean Gardner in July 2022. He remained “temporarily suspended” until he was arrested in August 2025 on child pornography charges.

Gardner’s story surfaced because of lawsuits filed by former gymnasts alleging that USA Gymnastics, the US Center for SafeSport, and their gym knew of accusations against Gardner as early as 2018, but failed to act until 2022 and did not fulfill their duty as mandatory reporters to take the complaints to law enforcement. The plaintiffs fault these sports organizations for not informing law enforcement about Gardner, which implicitly damns everyone—including the plaintiffs themselves and their families—for not doing so themselves.

In both the Campos-Hurtado and Gardner cases, the criminal justice system worked as designed. Both men were taken off the streets once law enforcement had sufficient evidence to make arrests. Campos-Hurtado was in police custody from the day of his arrest in July 2023 until his sentencing.

These two cases highlight different shortcomings of the sport safe guarding system.

The Gardner case shows the false sense of security that a ban from sport will protect society at large (Gardner could have been preying on other people in other contexts while banned from sport); and the moral hazard of outsourcing the responsibility to report an offender to law enforcement to “mandatory reporters.”

The Campos-Hurtado case exemplifies the inconsistency and opacity of the Center’s operations.

Here, the Center had what appears to be a slam dunk case for banning someone—the kind of case that could pad their stats, let them pat themselves on the back for taking quick and decisive action, and try to shush critics.

Instead, he ended up with the same administrative probation as a handful of kids who will be looking over their shoulder for the Center whenever they sign up for a sport, apply for college or a job, or have a routine conflict or dispute with a neighbor, classmate, or coworker. Meanwhile, exonerees from our not-exactly-defendant-friendly criminal justice system are spending years and small fortunes in civil court trying to get some restitution from the Center’s destruction of their careers, reputations, and lives. And then there are all the others—this site will never be more than the tip of the iceberg—who lost all of that on the basis of a single complaint that they did far less than Campos-Hurtado did.

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Related:

• Soccer blacklist exposed info about teens, pros, execs

• Temporary punishments permanently damage athletes’ careers

• Gymnasts’ Lawsuits Show That Safeguarding Protocols Are No Substitute for Justice (The American Spectator)

Photo credit: waferboard / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

Last week, a real-life federal courtroom in Alabama was the scene of a historic underdog victory that combines sport and law.

Former University of Alabama basketball player Kai Spears broke The New York Times’ 50-year win streak of defending defamation cases, in a case stemming from an NYT article in 2023 that falsely placed Spears at the scene of a fatal shooting.

On top of the massive advantages in financial and legal resources that The New York Times brought into the courtroom, they have the prestige of being the “newspaper of record,” the “Gray Lady.” They are also “synonymous with the standard for proving defamation”: the “actual malice” standard and all that goes with it from the Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan.

I’m at The Federalist today with an article that puts The Times’ loss at trial in the Spears case in the context of the swelling arguments for the Supreme Court to overturn Sullivan:

“The actual malice standard incentivizes negligence. ‘Actual malice’ requires plaintiffs to prove that the media knew the defamatory statement was false, or that the media published it with ‘reckless disregard’ for its veracity. Law professor David Logan identifies ‘the safest legal route’ for the media: ‘publishing without verification… [D]o little or no fact-checking, confident that the more slipshod their investigation, the less likely they are to be guilty of “actual malice.”’

[...]

“The New York Times themselves may have fallen into this trap. At trial, The Times ‘argued that [reporter Billy Witz] had taken reasonable steps to corroborate his source’s information, including approaching Mr. Spears in person.’ A spokesman for The Times said that Witz made an ‘honest mistake,’ which the jury may have felt as a matter of common sense.

“Witz may have shown just enough scrupulosity in his attempt to fact-check to bring the ‘actual malice’ doctrine home to roost.”

One of the most noteworthy and relevant aspects of the case is that Spears managed to evade the tag of “public figure” or “limited-purpose public figure.” Either would have led the court to dismiss his suit under Sullivan’s progeny, Gertz v. Welch.

Spears was a walk-on freshman at the time of the article: he wasn’t a five-star recruit on a six-figure NIL deal whom everyone expected would be a one-and-done player for Bama before entering the NBA draft. But he was a Division I college athlete. An SEC athlete, to be more precise. In a “revenue sport.”

Many courts would have deemed that sufficiently public to stamp out Spears’ suit. Over the weekend, for example, I read a state court ruling that the former general counsel of US Badminton—the head lawyer for a national governing body of 3,200 members and $1.3 million revenue in 2023—was a limited public figure, and thereby dismissed his defamation suit.

If the concept of “public figure” had any validity for the first 20 years after Gertz, it ended with the emergence of the Internet in the 1990s, and is absurd in the age of social media.

“[P]rivate citizens can become ‘public figures’ on social media overnight. Individuals can be deemed ‘famous’ because of their notoriety in certain channels of our now-highly segmented media even as they remain unknown in most… [some] courts have even said that an individual can become a limited purpose public figure simply by defending himself from a defamatory statement,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in Berisha v. Lawson.

Part of what makes a right a right is that the government cannot abridge it without just cause and due process. Under Sullivan and Gertz, you can go to bed—or, in the case of Justine Sacco, board a plane—with your right, and then wake up or disembark without it.

The court in Spears’ case gave him the most backhanded favorable ruling of all time, consistent with Sullivan and Gertz. He maintained his right to reputation because he wasn’t a good enough basketball player or a sufficiently attractive or charismatic social media star to have unwillingly surrendered that right by becoming a “public figure.”

Sullivan diminished the value of every American’s right to reputation by turning it into a highly-conditional privilege for some. How can we take something seriously as a right if the highest court says that any individual’s defense of that right depends on how popular they are at any given moment, in any to-be-determined context?

The combination of Gertz and social media made every American’s right to reputation a function of chance: how viral was your last post?

Assuming, that is, that you hadn’t already unknowingly waived that right by working a job that attracts enough attention.

How much is enough? You’ll find out when you’re defamed.

“The New York Times v. Sullivan decision was a product of its time. The prestige and concentration of corporate media was near its peak, license was replacing liberty in many aspects of society, and the Supreme Court was routinely vying with Congress for the title of ‘legislative branch.’

“As a matter of First Amendment or libel law—or, more broadly, speech rights and the right to reputation—Sullivan was wholly unprecedented and ahistorical.”

Head over to The Federalist to read the whole thing.

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NB: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click a link to buy a book.

Photo credit: The Redstone Rocket / Flickr.

“Drug deal gone wrong!” “Revenge!” “Hatred for women!” “Violent video games and rap music” (OK, boomer) “Physically-emotionally-sexually insecure male facing midlife crisis!” “Structural inequalities leading to socioeconomic immobility” (we all have that friend)

If you want to end the game—or maybe the party—say “Making false accusations.”

People can divine motivations, rationalizations, and justifications for almost anything. Part of the allure of the true crime genre is taking the audience “inside the head” of notorious criminals, whether white collar or violent. Some wrongdoings (crimes or otherwise) have deep roots in the offender’s psyche or personal history. Other times, the motivation for malfeasance is as simple as the person wanting the end state that the act brought about. They wanted that car. They wanted to do their coworker. They wanted some guy gone.

Yet floating the idea of a false accusation prompts two standard reactions. One is denying that they ever really happen. The other is asking with condescending earnestness, “Why would someone do that? What would they have to gain?” What is there to gain from any crime? “But they would invite such negative attention upon themselves!” Ever hear of Sam Bankman-Fried?

These two reactions make up a cycle. People can’t ascribe a motive so they assume that it never happens, and since it never happens there’s no basis for contemplating why someone would do it.

Why would someone make a false accusation? I told you a few paragraphs ago: they wanted someone gone. Oh, you thought that was about murder? Funny, that. Or if not gone, at least badly hurt.

More eloquently, “a person, knowing the charge to be false, adopts that method of gratifying his personal ill will against the object of his malice.”

The 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times v. Sullivan is enshrined in culture and popular understanding as a First Amendment case buttressing the freedom of the press. But it is just as much—and, in terms of its consequences, more so—a tort case, restricting libel and defamation. Going deeper into the realm of rights, the Sullivan decision all but erased Americans’ right to reputation.

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The Sullivan case is best known for the “actual malice” doctrine. This says that a public official (later expanded to “public figures”) can only prevail in a defamation case against the media if they can prove that the press made the defamatory statement with “‘actual malice’—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

Among the many inventions of the Sullivan decision, this is an inversion.

For most of American history, the plaintiff did not have to prove malice. The defendant had to prove that they did not act with malice. They were presumed to have acted with malice. This “presumption of malice [was] drawn from the fact” that the defendant published the defamatory claim. Courts “presumed the existence of such an intent from the mere act of publishing a defamatory report. If you printed a claim about someone that everybody would understand to be damaging to his reputation, then the law would assume that you must have (maliciously) intended that effect.”

Whereas people today can think of multiple reasons why someone would commit various crimes yet can’t fathom any for why they would make a false accusation, for hundreds of years pre-1964 people had a default explanation for why someone would make a false accusation: malice. Actual malice, in fact, in the original sense of the term.

This presumption of malice and the presumption of innocence travel together in law and culture. Respect for the right to reputation binds them together.

When a jury or judge pronounces someone guilty, the first liberty the newly convicted loses is their right to reputation. Before they are sentenced, even before the gavel comes down, their reputation bears the mark of their offense. They are a thief, an embezzler, a fraudster, an abuser. Society considers these offenses so serious that people who commit them go to prison, pay large fines, and lose other rights. The effect on their reputation is similarly large, and extends long after their incarceration.

Weakening or dismissing the presumption of innocence puts the loss of reputation at the beginning of the process rather than the end. It puts punishment before conviction—often before the first bit of evidence is even brought forward, let alone an adversarial process of fact-finding and evaluation.

Why would someone wish to impose a harm so severe that it is properly reserved for the suite of consequences of being convicted? A harm and a deprivation of rights so significant that, in societies with a strong presumption of innocence, it is one of the tools ceded by the governed to the state in order to have ordered liberty, i.e., not be in a state of anarchy, violence, and vigilantism?

Malice is a good starting point, until proven otherwise.

Follow the incentives

George Will was nearly canceled in 2014 for giving a specific example of the maxim that you get more of what you reward.

“When [colleges and universities] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.” He was referring to “ubiquitous” “campus victimizations [and] ‘micro-aggressions,’ often not discernible to the untutored eye.” He then used “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, aka ‘sexual assault’” to develop his point for the rest of the article.

The misrepresentations across the media were prolific, the most common being that he was saying that people wanted to be victims of sexual assault.

If I may be so presumptuous as to critique Mr. Will’s rhetorical precision (while I’m at it, I have some pointers for Cristiano Ronaldo’s strength training), he could have more clearly brought forward from the first clause of his sentence that the “status” of victimhood—not the fact of victimhood—brings rewards, and is therefore desirable. No one wants to be a victim. But having the status of a victim brings some indulgences that many people crave, such as sympathy, attention, ironclad believability, absolution, and license. He could have locked down his point by saying that “self-proclaimed victims” or “alleged victims” proliferate.

Will wrote that article before the moral panics that I believe fueled the last decade of cancelation really took off. Two of those, Black Lives Matter and MeToo, were explicitly framed in the language of power.

In a moral panic, everyone is either good or evil. Offenders are bad, so victims become the good.

We can all agree that offenders are bad. But that doesn’t mean that victims are good—they just are.

In a moral panic (or two) fueled by power dynamics, anyone in power or seen as taking the side of power was either an offender, an offender-in-waiting, or an accomplice (remember “silence is compliance?”): bad guys. Anyone out of power was a victim or a victim-in-waiting: good guys. If you want to be among the good guys, align your self with the out-of-power victims. Be an ally. If you want to rise in the hierarchy of the good guys, you have to get closer to the struggle: claim the status of victim.

With the attention economy and content machine in hyperdrive, and with even powerful people fawning to be among the good guys, the status of victim carried more rewards than ever before: book deals, podcasts, major media interviews, creator fame. All were carefully designed to provide sympathy, comfort, social status, agreement, validation, and, of course, attention, lest the (powerful) platforms be seen as the bad guys.

Cultures that prize achievement or bravery guard against stolen valor. Cultures like ours that elevate victimhood must be on guard for stolen sympathy.

The All-American Way

Sometimes it’s even simpler—and more crass—than that. The United States is a great place to be a plaintiff or claimant. It’s an even better place to be their lawyers. Forget about chasing ambulances. The real money is in institutional shakedowns.

John Ziegler’s “With the Benefit of Hindsight” podcast is about 50 hours of deep detail about the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State (if you really want to rattle what you think you know, listen with an open mind). Many of the episodes dissect the evidence presented against Sandusky: the statements of the alleged victims, witnesses, and forensic evidence presented at trial. Ziegler examines the exculpatory evidence that was not presented for one reason or another, as well as the inculpatory evidence against a cadre of opportunists and invertebrates.

Several episodes cover the settlements that Penn State University paid to the alleged victims.

One of the clearest patterns that Ziegler establishes is that after the first few claimants and, importantly, after it was clear that Penn State was going to settle with claimants with few questions asked, each successive claimant’s allegations got more extreme, less believable, and less provable. Yet they all got paid. Ziegler interviewed family members and acquaintances of claimants who basically said, “Yeah, he made it up for the money, and now he’s got his dream cars.”

Ziegler also draws out the small network of lawyers and advocates who got in on the game early and knew how to play it, enriching themselves with their cut of each check that Penn State signed in lieu of asking even the most elementary questions of the claimants.

Going dark

A false accusation can destroy someone’s life, maybe someone that you held a grudge or some animus against. It can also be a shortcut to getting people to notice you more benevolently or to listen to you for the first time. Those two factors take on extra salience during moral panics, especially those that try to upend societal relations. And, of course, there might be some 6-, 7-, or 8-figure payouts on offer.

So, to recap why someone might make a false accusation: money, power, respect.

But I want to close by returning to malice.

I was having this conversation with someone recently, and I was being unusually delicate. I said to her, “You don’t understand why someone would do this because you’re a good person.” I quickly regretted the soft-pedalling. What I meant to say was, “You don’t understand why someone would do this because you’re not a fucking psychopath.”

I had never heard of the “dark triad”—narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy—until I started learning about and researching cancelation. Now I can barely get through an initial conversation with a canceled person without one of us bringing it up.

Canceled coaches, in particular, know exactly what the dark triad is even if they are hearing the term for the first time.

Especially in sport, we celebrate people who are laser-focused on their goals, who go to great lengths and give up so much in order to achieve their ambition. That’s because we assume their goals are benign. But the same attributes that can get you far in sport (or life) can be applied in the other direction. This is obvious in politics and often in business. Less so in sport, but sport creates contexts and relationships that can be manipulated for pure malice.

For many people, it’s easier to understand why someone would do something wrong—even commit a serious crime—than why someone would make a false accusation of wrongdoing.

Maybe we underestimate the depths of everyday treachery, or we’re only comfortable thinking about a subset of offenses committed by people that fit a narrow mold. We can offer explanations for violence more readily than reputation assassination. More than that, we can accept that some people will do violent things, with all the consequences that come with it, more easily than accepting that some people will take a small hit to their own name in order to ruin another’s life with a few words.

You’d think that it would be easier to understand the motivation behind the little things than the really bad things.

Maybe it is.

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Photo credit: Hartwig HKD / Flickr, under CC BY-ND 2.0.

For most of American history, my right to say—and, more importantly, publish—whatever I want ended where the other guy’s reputation began.

Benjamin Franklin recognized that if the law and society do not protect reputation, then there will be a lot more fists taking aim at noses.

“In the rude state of society prior to the existence of laws, if one man gave another ill language, the affronted person would return it by a box on the ear, and, if repeated, by a good drubbing; and this without offending against any law. But now the right of making such returns is denied, and they are punished as breaches of the peace; while the right of abusing seems to remain in full force, the laws made against it being rendered ineffectual by the liberty of the press.”

Rather than abandoning reputation as a right, or leaving it up to each person to defend their reputation with their fists or with pistols at dawn, Franklin “humbly recommend[s]” that lawmakers recognize

“both liberties, that of the press, and that of the cudgel, and by an explicit law mark their extent and limits; and, at the same time that they secure the person of a citizen from assaults, they would likewise provide for the security of his reputation.”

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Defamatory statements didn’t conflict with the First Amendment, nor occasion exceptions or carve-outs to our speech and press rights. Because citizens were understood to have a right to their reputation on par with their right to free speech, statements that injured another person’s reputation were separate from the speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

To break it down into even more fundamental terms, you only have a right to do that which does not harm others. Defamation is a harm inflicted by speech. Therefore, you do not have a right to that speech.

The way Supreme Court justices, state court judges, and legal commentators wrote about such matters—without outcry or complaint—reveals what a no-brainer this was for nearly 200 years.

And then New York Times v. Sullivan rolled around.

I’m in The American Spectator today, writing about how Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch might convince two of their colleagues to join them on an upcoming certiorari petition to revisit New York Times v. Sullivan. Such a review would hopefully overturn the “actual malice” standard and the “public official” (now “public figure”) exemption. The article builds on Carson Holloway’s new book, “No Liberty to Libel: The Constitutional Case against New York Times v. Sullivan.”

An excerpt from the article:

With reputation and interpersonal charity receding as values in American culture, more licentious strains of libertarianism took hold, including the idea of free speech absolutism. That set the immediate context of New York Times v. Sullivan.

Holloway thinks that Justice William Brennan, who wrote the majority opinion, was a “political liberal of that generation. He probably sincerely thought that the First Amendment requires a lot more protection for individual freedom of speech than what people thought in the past.” Which is to say, Brennan might have been a thoughtful and astute legislator. Unfortunately, he performed that role while wearing a black robe.

Justice Thomas wants to revisit New York Times v. Sullivan for precisely this reason: it’s among the most flagrant examples of legislating from the bench. Holloway’s book provides the history to support that claim...

Justice Gorsuch is more concerned that the actual malice standard and the notion of “public figures” are wildly outdated in the digital age. The standards in Sullivan have “evolved into a subsidy for published falsehoods on a scale no one could have foreseen, [and] has come to leave far more people without redress than anyone could have predicted.”

I’d love to find a constitutional law scholar or Brennan aficionado who can help me square Brennan’s seeming disdain for reputation in Sullivan with his defense of reputation in Paul v. Davis, another case I’ve written about quite a bit, including at The American Spectator. If you know a Brennan-ologist, send them my way!

But until then, please head over to The American Spectator to read the whole thing.

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Photo credit: Mark Stebnicki via Pexels.

Jonah Arnold: “It’s a setup right from the beginning.”

“Most workplace harassment systems are built around a very simple structure. A complainant reports harm, an employer investigates, and the person accused is treated as a respondent. It’s a setup right from the beginning. As a lawyer, I would argue that the structure is necessary because employers have to identify genuine harassment and have to do so in an environment without retaliation. But the system has, by nature, some serious blind spots.

“One of those is that the person who files a complaint may not be a victim. The complaint itself may be an instrument of harassment. And this is what I deal with very commonly.

“This is a very important point. The complainant should not be presumed to be legally truthful. The descriptor of ‘complainant’ and ‘respondent’ should be a procedural description, but oftentimes what comes with that description are biases and prejudgment. That’s more than unfortunate… By the time the investigation has started, there are grumblings behind the scenes. Rumors start and and there is a casting of judgment outside of the official process.

“What I would call a procedural mobbing ensues. So while it’s workplace or employment mobbing, I would call it procedural mobbing as well.”

Dave Scott-Thomas: “You’re there one day, then you’re gone.”

“The institutional clampdown in my case started with a no contact directive. I was working one afternoon and then I was sent home. I was told that I couldn’t talk to anybody, anywhere, anytime. They couldn’t talk to me. If I ran into them to the grocery store, I was supposed to head the other direction.

“That just got the rumor mill going. You’re there one day, then you’re gone. So rumors start.

“Then there’s the escape velocity that happens when it gets out in public. A rumor goes out on social, and then it just goes like that, like wildfire. The institution loses jurisdiction. Whatever they had, is gone.

“In my case and many others, mainstream media grabbed it and distorted it. One outlet for me just added an ‘S.’ Things became multiples and it was like a whack a mole. I had a lawyer and I said, they can’t do that. They could publish a retraction, but that would cost a few thousand dollars in legal work and it would get buried in the news media. People don’t remember any of that stuff. So it goes on and on and on.”

Dr. Christine Marie: “Forward facing for the rest of your life.”

“You’re powerless in a workplace mobbing setting. It seems as if there are opportunities for you to go to an influential person and stop the process in some situations.

“But when it jumps from a contained environment into the entire world [via the media], you are left without any way to change the narrative. It could impact your entire life—not just your reputation, but your ability to have relationships in the future. Your friends, your sense of safety.

“Sometimes people in the public are psychologically unwell and they dox you, they post your private information online, and the false story about you continues.

“Then you have the narrative identity. The stories that you’ve told yourself your whole life about who you are are now being sabotaged by a new narrative that is not who you are. It’s very difficult for that kind of trauma to not leak through to your sense of self. You’re being told that you intentionally ran over a dog with puppies. You know you never did that! But when you’re hearing it 20,000 times repeated online and that’s what people think about you, you start saying, ‘what is wrong with me?’”

Michael Capiraso: “They just disappear.”

“When a workplace mobbing starts, an organization just tends to abandon the targeted people. When someone is brought up, what you need most is the organization: support from the organization that has trusted you, the organization that has hired you, that has celebrated you. They just disappear. The mobbing then seems to get more impetus when that happens because everyone sees that happening and it erodes any kind of trust that you have.

“Whether it’s your board, your coworkers, your colleagues... all of a sudden you feel like they’re on with the mob and then it just seems to, again, explode.

“One of the things I heard earlier is the real importance for organizations to understand the severity of this and the lack of humanity that sometimes is shown to someone from their organization.

“When the mob comes, they tend to take the organization down, too. That is destructive across the board. Whereas the organization should rightfully pause and look at things differently… The organization should take on the mob, stop the mob, and try to cause some redirection. That’s one of the things that we really need to bring to organizations, as well.”

George Perry: “When is a workplace mobbing newsworthy?”

“A profession that hasn’t come up as much so far is the media now. Michael was the CEO of a major sports and entertainment company. Dave was a very successful head coach. When they get relieved or fired from their jobs, that could be newsworthy. But when we report on it, we make it something different.

“When is a workplace mobbing newsworthy? It is an event that may be affecting a university, or a major non-profit. But it’s kind of like Schrodinger’s Cat. The workplace mobbing is there. But once we notice that it’s there, those of us in the media who have a public platform, well, now it’s no longer a workplace mobbing. It’s a cancellation.

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“There is that element of recognizing when is it newsworthy. But by making it news, we make it something different. And then we create the scenarios that we’re talking about right now.”

Dave Scott-Thomas: “The truth doesn’t matter.”

“I had a very good defamation lawyer during my stuff, and at one point I said, ‘Let’s just tell the truth. I’m not afraid of that. I can be accountable for the truth.’ And he said, ‘I want you to listen very carefully. I’m here to protect you. The truth doesn’t matter.’

“You want to talk about an existential crisis!

“My lawyer was a good guy, and he did what a good lawyer does, too. He was psychologically protective. He said to me, ‘If you want me to file a defamation suit, I will, and we will win. But here’s why you shouldn’t do it. One, you’re just not tough enough.’

“He was right. He said it would be a slugfest for a couple of years. What are you going to get out of it? Great, real world advice.”

Jonah Arnold: “Treat those that are innocent as innocent.”

“The difficulty is when multiple complainants link up their stories, and whether they do that purposely or they do that inadvertently. It is incumbent on whoever is investigating to recognize that just because you have multiple complainants that may have similar stories does not mean that there is actually evidence that can be relied upon. Ultimately it’s about conducting an investigation that understands, frankly, the rules of evidence.

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“When institutions conduct investigations, they should be getting legal assistance. They should be treating those that are innocent as innocent, and the parties should be on equal footing. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t happen in my experience.”

Because I don’t know if this was a “no-attribution” or Chatham House rules conference, I’m going to play it safe and not identify any speakers.

Protected is privileged (but not really protected)

“F—k you, Dennis.”

That’s how one presenter’s workplace mobbing got started. A single co-worker, for no reason, taking every opportunity to say “F—k you, Dennis.” Passing each other in the hall: “F—k you, Dennis.” Seeing each other in the break room: “F—k you, Dennis.” If Dennis had his door open and the co-worker walked by… you guessed it: “F—k you, Dennis.”

Things escalated and expanded from there, but that was the seed.

Dennis reported this harassment to his human resources rep. Dennis told the conference what HR told him: had the co-worker said “F—k you, Jew-boy” or “F—k you, queer,” that would be harassment on the basis of a protected category, and they could swoop into action.

But Dennis is not a protected category. He’s merely an individual human being, so there’s nothing they could do.

The other most memorable single sentence from the conference came from a distinguished—in every sense of the word—academic who, during a post-presentation Q&A, said “I have a penis.”

He let that statement hang in the air for a second. “That probably doesn’t surprise any of you to hear that,” he added. He then made a brilliantly lucid exposition, as heartfelt as it was intellectual, on why identitarian constructs are a detriment to understanding individual workplace mobbings and to establishing a rigorous and credible academic discipline to study workplace mobbing.

He was addressing a tension that ran through the conference. On one side were the participants who framed workplace mobbings strongly, if not exclusively, with the concepts and dynamics of identity, intersectionality, and power. On the other were participants who, whatever they may think of such concepts, could not escape the empirical observations that workplace mobbings are among the least discriminatory phenomena in society. No one is safe from the mob, and no identity characteristics confer immunity from cancelation.

Our panel alone offered two refutations of the former group’s approach: we had two straight white heterosexual men who were in positions of authority when they were mobbed and canceled.

Where was their privilege when they most needed to cash in on it?

The thread connecting Dennis’ experience and the academic’s comment is that protecting groups ultimately leaves individuals vulnerable and without recourse. Protected category legislation is “nothing but trouble,” one speaker said. Status-blind protections, which assess the actions rather than targets, are a better avenue.

Moreover, as one presenter convincingly argued, homogeneity is no protection. Within any group, there will always be sufficient differences to identify, isolate, attack, and exile someone who thought they were fully in with the in-group.

Every law is a weapon if you wield it right

Several presentations examined attempts to create administrative, civil, or criminal laws to address workplace mobbing. One talked about lobbying strategies, based on efforts to get a workplace mobbing law through a state legislature. Another looked for lessons from the histories of whistleblower protection laws and domestic violence statutes.

One speaker expressed significant concern about one of the most fundamental laws of nature: the law of unintended consequences. Even the most well-intentioned, diligently crafted, and openly debated laws can end up being counter-productive in any number of ways.

He, too, leaned on whistleblower laws, but this time as a cautionary tale. (Workplace mobbing and whistleblower studies have developed together over decades. Check out the work of Brian Martin if you’re interested.). The term whistleblower, he said, tilts the conversation against the respondent or target of the claim. It presumes and implies that wrong-doing is afoot. Maybe there is. But the claim could just as likely be malicious, vindictive, or spurious, and the claimant is launching an attack from behind the legal protections of whistleblower laws and the elevated cultural status of being a whistleblower.

Overall, the participants were remarkably forthright about the prevalence of false accusations as the sparks for workplace mobbings. This cut across all identity groups and intersections. False accusations don’t discriminate any more than workplace mobbings do.

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An interesting corollary to those conversations was a pretty widespread aversion to anonymous reporting. Many participants spoke from experience when they said that anonymous reporting mechanisms don’t need to be “weaponized”—they simply are weapons.

And this is all from people who had never heard of the US Center for SafeSport! (But they have now…)

Sports are an enigma in plain sight

One participant was genuinely surprised to hear that workplace mobbings and cancelations occur in the sports industry. Sports are, well, a team sport. Everyone is working together towards the common goal of victory. Whether you look at it from the perspective of team camaraderie or the fact that division within a team is fatal for success, he thought sports would be a refuge.

Throughout the conference, “tall poppy syndrome” kept coming up as a motivation behind many workplace mobbings.

Being different and standing out for any reason makes you a target. People who outperform expectations or, worse, outperform their co-workers walk around wearing bull’s-eyes. So are people who attempt to change an institution, even if they were specifically—in some cases, publicly—hired to reform the organization.

Two asides. First, this can be a bit self-serving. “I was targeted because I’m exceptionally excellent” is an attractive narrative for anyone, let alone someone trying to understand and rebuild after this sort of experience. Second, even the participants who argued that differences in identity characteristics were sufficient and maybe necessary to trigger a mobbing ultimately talked their way to superior performance—excellence—as the most significant difference between the individual and the mob.

The person who thought he wouldn’t encounter any sports people at a workplace mobbing conference was perhaps a bit naive.

Another person approached me from a perspective of hard-bitten puzzlement. She asked point blank what I could possibly enjoy or find fulfilling about coaching. She thought I was too smart, creative, decent, or monotony-averse to be a coach. Her last and only experience with a coach was in middle school, where coaching entailed telling the athletes to run another lap, yelling at them to work harder or run faster, and to do more (MOAR!) push-ups or sprints or whatever.

The first person needed to hear about some of the darker aspects of competitive sport: athletes who are unwilling to adapt to the higher demands of a higher level of sport, perhaps after having their whole identity wrapped around being the big fish in the small pond; athletes who are searching for anyone to blame to avoid taking responsibility; athletes who feel cheated out of the accolades they thought they were entitled to; athletes who meet the criteria of the dark triad; and any combination of the foregoing.

If some athletes will cheat or dope to get ahead, why wouldn’t others mob and cancel when they fall short?

The second person needed to hear about the problem-solving challenges of human performance, and the rewards of being a part of someone’s improvement, development and success. We introduced her to the warm aspects of sport: the long hours spent together, the inside jokes that last a lifetime, attending weddings and receiving birth announcements years later, driving home from training with five pounds of tomatoes or a couple dozen eggs from an athlete’s backyard farm, the shared journey that ultimately has nothing to do with the athlete’s 1500m PR or Division I scholarship. Everything I talked about in “Three safeguarding violations a day.”

Underlying both conversations are the vulnerabilities that we all carry in this line of work. Going along with the “envy of excellence” theme, I’m increasingly thinking that the better a coach is, the more likely they will be the target of a mobbing or cancelation, and the harder it will hit them.

I try to keep the two sides of my work separate. But one time I was doing a training session with three athletes, and I gently tossed into conversation the situation of a coach whom we all knew who had been canceled. “What do you think about what happened to him?” I asked, and then just stood back and observed.

Maria kept falling back on “Well there must have been something to what people were saying!” She also repeatedly referred back to the many negative things she experienced from a different coach several years earlier. One of the other athletes kept calling her out on this bait-and-switch, pointing out that the canceled coach had never done anything like that: he was a great guy that they all respected, liked working with, and greatly benefited from.

As they wound down a debate that was accentuated by the medicine ball and jump work I had them doing, I said to Maria, “More coaches get taken out for the good things they do than the bad things they do. Think about it. The guy we know and love is cooked. The jerk you’re talking about is still employed.” That’s anecdata, but it’s highly representative anecdata.

Sports are ubiquitous and pervasive in our culture. “Sports are not simply something Americans do: they shape Americans’ thinking,” Bruce Berglund wrote.

Yet most people’s understanding of them is superficial. They have memories of the lowest, most slapdash levels of sport in school or youth clubs; and they see the ultimate refined end-product on TV or social media.

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Everything in between is a black box. Inside that box are the ingredients and the playbooks for some of the highest realms of human performance, and for some of the darkest malice that one person can inflict on another.

The former is why I’m a coach. The latter is why I was moderating a panel at a conference on workplace mobbing.

George Carlin exposed my mistake.

“American English is loaded with euphemism, because Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth. So they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it.”

He talks about a well-known condition among soldiers, “when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to its absolute peak and maximum. The nervous system has either snapped or is about to snap.”

“In the first world war, that condition was called ‘shell shock.’ Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables. Shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns itself.”

In World War II, he tells us, it was battle fatigue. “Four syllables. Takes a little longer to say, doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than ‘shock.’”

Korea: “The very same combat condition was called ‘operational exhaustion.’ We’re up to eight syllables now and the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now—it sounds like something that might happen to your car!”

Finally, a term that has held on for 50 years. “Thanks to the lies and deceit surrounding [Vietnam], I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder,” Carlin says, making each word as ponderous as possible. “Still eight syllables—but we added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon.”

Finishing with a twist of the knife, he says “I betcha if we had still been calling it ‘shell shock,’ some of those veterans would have gotten the help they needed at the time.”

Canceled.

Two syllables. Like a judge’s gavel, the first syllable hits hard and crisp. The second hangs briefly in the air before shutting the door. When we hear it, we can see it stamped in red, bold, capitalized letters diagonally over an event poster. You may have seen the poster so many times that it’s faded into the background, but now there’s no overlooking it. It grabs your attention anew—not because of the headline act, but because it was canceled.

The articles that cancel people work the same way.

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Maybe it’s a section of the news you don’t normally read, or an industry or organization you don’t care about, and it’s a person you’ve never heard of. But you know that those words alongside that name and maybe a photo put you on notice: this person is now canceled. The articles don’t use that word and nothing is in red, bold, all caps. But the meaning is unequivocal, and because our evolutionary psychology is easily hacked and hijacked, every reader knows what to do.

Many canceled people have all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, but they don’t have the official diagnosis. Under the DSM-V, being canceled is not one of the approved causes of PTSD (what would Carlin say about further diminishing the experience by reducing the words to an acronym?).

PTSD works as a diagnosis, but it fails as a description. My partner once met a well-known combat veteran. The first thing she said about him when she got home was, “He’s tense as a piano wire.”

I wrote recently about how we need a culture of the presumption of innocence, akin to a culture of the First Amendment, and that we cannot rely on the law to protect those values for us in the last resort. PTSD vs. shell shock is similar. Psychiatrists and mental health practitioners can use PTSD as a diagnosis, billing code, and starting point for their treatment. But in our culture and society, we need to think in terms of shell shock and canceled.

“At what point are we going to know how to treat this?” Michael Capiraso recently asked.

Three years after being canceled, Capiraso “had such severe depression for so long that we couldn’t even peel back to the PTSD. I didn’t want to be on the earth. No job, identity ruined, depressed, physical health and mental health just deteriorating. The depression was so severe that we couldn’t get at the initial hit job that caused it all because the collateral damage was happening every day in real time.”

Anti-depressants, cognitive behavioral therapy, exposure therapy, neurofeedback, and other traditional modalities delivered spurts of partial relief, but nothing sustained—and certainly nothing approaching a way out.

Looking back at the parade of SSRIs he was on, he says, “You’re only supposed to be on these for two years, not for your life. But no one goes by that.” The pharmaceutical industry is notorious for providing relief, not cures, for treating symptoms and not causes. The upshot for the industry is that few prescriptions come with an exit strategy. But people with severe depression and PTSD often are contemplating a different kind of exit strategy.

When I first contacted Capiraso in 2023, he was around to receive my email because about two months earlier he had decided that however he got himself out of the abyss, he would take the “alive” option to do it. And he was barely willing to speak with me because he had recently completed a course of ketamine-assisted therapy.

Ketamine “lifted the lid just enough to let something else in,” he says. He regularly borrows a metaphor from the psychiatrist who oversaw the ketamine treatment: “It’s like you’re skiing and there’s only one rut in the snow. You’re stuck in there and you can only go where it’s going to take you. The ketamine is like fresh powder: you can see in every direction, you can decide to go in any direction, and then you can go that way.”

The ketamine treatment loosened up the depression enough for his practitioners to finally approach the root cause of the depression and the PTSD: the cancelation. His psychologist recalls: “Michael did not ever fully benefit from [psychiatric] medication alone until he started the ketamine. But then, as his mood started to lift somewhat, you could get in there a little bit and start thinking about the world in different ways.”

Sometimes you don’t fully appreciate how hard a problem is until you try to solve it, or you hear about the lengths that someone at the top of their field took to solve it.

The consequences of being canceled, the day-to-day experience and the symptoms that clinicians log in their notes can give you the scale and scope. But they don’t convey a sense of the hardness. Think of it this way: if you’re drilling a well, are you shoveling through sand and dirt, or do you need a motorized diamond drill bit to cut through granite? Capiraso’s mental health after being canceled was the latter. Three years of every conventional treatment produced a barely tolerable steady state and the occasional blip of light.

It took ketamine just to get him to where he “was not willing to settle” for how things had been for the last three years. From there, he could explore the boundaries of medicine and healing to find an actual answer. Another year later, four years post-cancelation, he could start a counter-offensive to reclaim his identity and his future.

He sometimes wonders how things might have been different if someone had recommended ketamine to him a year earlier. How much would he and his family have been spared? How much good could he have done in that year?

He is full of appreciation and respect for the practitioners that did their best to help him—and did help him—through those years. But the limitations that run through our medical system as a whole are even more constraining when it comes to mental health. And when professionals and laypeople don’t even know what they are dealing with, that the person in front of them has been canceled and everything is downstream of that, treatment barely gets off the ground.

Capiraso was very close to not being there to answer my email. Many canceled people I’ve spoken to came just as close. And I know the stories of a few canceled people with whom I will not be talking. Delays in recognition, understanding, and treatment weigh heavily.

No mess, no fuss, no muss

Seventy years passed between troops coming home with shell shock and Carlin mocking society’s retreat behind post-traumatic stress disorder.

Everything is faster in the digital era. Twenty years into cancelation, and a wall of cancel culture think-pieces protects most people from having to think much or at all about actual canceled people.

Cancelation is the contemporary version of public humiliation and banishment. Maybe we were able to fast-track our way into soft unknowing because being canceled doesn’t leave an obvious physical mark or disfigurement.

Canceled people don’t have a letter branded somewhere on their body, although many feel like they do every time they go out in public. Nor does one’s banishment from their social and professional circles start with them cutting off part of their finger. The people in the digital town square don’t throw physical stones, light physical pyres, nor line the street leading out of town into a wilderness, where everyone knows that a solitary individual has little chance of survival.

Cancelations are much gentler on the mob: minimal barriers to entry, no messy violence, no icky manifestations and reminders of what they did. Worst case scenario: a passing mention in someone’s abstract musing about cancel culture. If you see a canceled person out in public a few years later, that’s just proof that it wasn’t all that bad.

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“I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality,” Carlin said.

If “canceled” had the meaning it deserves, if we hadn’t allowed ourselves to be tranquilized by the extra lilting syllables of “cancel culture,” if “canceled” could punch the listener right in the attention span the way “shell shock” did, I betcha some canceled people would have gotten the help they needed at the time—and some would still be alive today.

Photo credit: Eric Huybrechts via Flickr, under CC BY-ND 2.0.

I’ve been asked some version of that question by lawyers, athletes, coaches, parents, authors, journalists, men, women, Americans, Germans, Moroccans, Canadians… The most recent was someone I talked to within a few hours of him receiving his notice of “temporary” sanction and pending investigation from the US Center for SafeSport. After reading the letter, his thoughts did not drift towards the writings of Franz Kafka, as they should have. He thought of the United States Constitution, and the principles that ostensibly run through both our culture and our law. And so he asked not “Is this for real?” but “How is this legal?”

Over the next week or so, I’m going to publish two articles about the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision in Navarro et al. v. US Center for SafeSport et al. One will pound the law and the other will pound the facts around some of the legal and constitutional issues.

This article is like The Hobbit for those two: a standalone prequel. If this is all you read, great. But if you read the other two, this one lays some solid groundwork.

It will stay in the realm of Kafka: things too absurd to believe they are true, but they are. The first one, in particular, like the proverbial whack-a-mole, will keep popping up to pound in the context of the Navarro ruling.

Anti-social distancing

Among the sanctions the Center can impose upon a sports person per the SafeSport Code are “no contact directives.” Several “Notices of Decision” that I have reviewed use the following (NB: in SafeSportSpeak, “respondent” is the accused and “claimant” is the accuser):

Respondent is prohibited from communicating in any way with Claimant. Communication includes, but is not limited to: contact by phone, through email or text message, via any social media application or other electronic medium, in-person interactions (verbal and non-verbal), or contact facilitated through a third party. Should Respondent and Claimant happen to be in the same place at the same time, in addition to refraining from any form of communication, Respondent should make reasonable efforts to keep their distance avoid getting too close to Claimant.

It’s essentially a restraining order. “No contact directives” can be part of temporary or permanent sanctions, which means a person could be prohibited from communicating with the other person for life.

On July 7, 2026, 285 individuals listed on the Centralized Disciplinary Database were under a no contact directive.

Turning paddocks into prison yards

Fun fact: Equestrian is both the name of the sport and the word for people who compete in the sport. Equestrians compete in equestrian. Equestrian is full of equestrians. Uma, Oprah…

Grim fact: When the US Center for SafeSport sanctions someone in that sport, the sins of the equestrian fall upon the equine.

Log in to the US Equestrian Federation’s website and select “Ineligibility List,” and then you can select “Individuals / Organizations” or “Horses.” Obviously, the banned horses did nothing wrong (they’re good horses, Brent). They are on the list because of their owners or trainers. Some are there because their owners or trainers doped them, or violated other rules relating to performance-enhancement. In those cases, we can understand why the horse is banned on the basis of competitive fairness.

But some horses—like Casablanca, Gianna, Je Ne Sais Pas, and Quick Step—are banned because their owners have been banned by the US Center for SafeSport.

To minimize abuse, black market transactions and trafficking (seriously—if anyone can get me in touch with Mariana van Zeller, I’ve got a tip for her), and various forms of cheating, equestrians maintain a continuous chain of ownership and custodial paperwork. A key component of these transactions is a microchip in each horse’s neck, similar to the ones every responsible dog owner should have in their dog.

If an equestrian in USEF is interested in buying a horse, the basic due diligence is looking up the horse on the USEF’s registry. If the horse is suspended, the registry puts a solid vertical red bar next to the horse’s profile. From there, they can look up the owner to see if he or she is banned. Once the prospective buyer has that information, if they conduct the transaction and buy the horse from the banned individual, they have committed “Aiding and Abetting” per the SafeSport Code. Given the strict record-keeping involved, they would be creating the paper trail that unequivocally establishes their violation of the Code.

Alternatively, they could buy the horse and not change its formal registration with the federation and on the microchip, but then they wouldn’t be able to enter the horse into any sanctioned competition (which is pretty much all of them, and all the ones with decent money). Moreover, even if they drew up a contract for the sale, they’d be setting themselves up for ownership disputes down the road.

And if you transfer the horse to your spouse’s name, that will result in your spouse joining you and the horse in the ol’ Gray Bar Stables.

The chilling effect of getting caught is as powerful as the administrative checks that impede such sales.

Equestrians, therefore, essentially have their assets frozen through the US Center for SafeSport.

Equestrians that I’ve spoken to have had individual horses worth $15,000–$250,000. The total value of the horses in their stable can quickly enter seven figures. And while they may be getting the Russian oligarch treatment, these aren’t rich people. These are small business owners who, like any small business owner, are relatively cash poor because they have all of their wealth and assets tied up in their business.

Upon being banned, the equestrians can’t make money from their horses by entering them into shows and competitions, nor can they convert these assets into cash by selling them. But they obviously have to take care of them. The downward financial spiral of this “irreversible business death sentence” is staggering. It’s compounded by the emotional toll of the bond these equestrians have with their horses. They don’t want to part with their horses, but they want what’s best for them. Yet they are prohibited from taking the difficult but necessary step of selling them in anything other than a back alley transaction—one that will still leave the horse a toxic asset.

Non-membership has its privileges

You don’t need to be a member of USA Swimming to attend the national championship swim meet each year, nor do you need to be a member of USA Track & Field to get a few laps in on the indoor track at the Armory in New York City’s Washington Heights during it’s public-use hours. You don’t need to show your US Equestrian Federation card to enjoy an Aperol Spritz at the Winter Equestrian Festival at Wellington International. And you definitely don’t need to be a member of US Soccer or US Hockey to watch your kid’s league games in your own town.

But if you have been banned by the US Center for SafeSport, you are not allowed to be at any of those events or places, and—if spotted by the wrong kind of person—you may be asked to leave.

A ban from the US Center for SafeSport means you cannot “participate until further notice, in any capacity, in any program, activity, Event, or competition sponsored by, organized by, or under the auspices of the USOPC, any NGB, or any LAO, or at a facility under the jurisdiction of the same.”

“[A]ny capacity” includes spectator, even when your function at that event is “Mom.” Technically, you shouldn’t even be watching national championships and other covered events on TV or livestream.

With an eye to the upcoming articles, let’s make this asymmetry explicit. You don’t need to be a member to enter these public places and take part in public events, many of which don’t require tickets and don’t even have doors. But if you are “ineligible” per the Center, you cannot.

Herd immunity

Now you call me “amoral,”
A “dangerous disgrace,”
If you’ve got something to say
Name a time and place
Face to face

- Hamilton: An American Musical

Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr met at Weehawken because Charles Cooper wrote in a private letter that was later published that Hamilton held “a still more despicable opinion” of Burr than what was already in the public sphere.

Jump forward to 1971, when the Supreme Court held that the state of Wisconsin branding Norma Constantineau as, basically, an irresponsible, kinda trashy drunk was a constitutionally actionable “stigma or badge of disgrace.” The Supreme Court affirmed the state court’s ruling that “[i]t would be naive not to recognize that such ‘posting’ or characterization of an individual will expose him to public embarrassment and ridicule.” The Court spent very little time on the question of whether publicly listing Constantineau as a suboptimally functioning alcoholic violated her interest in her “good name, reputation, honor, or integrity.” It was just that obvious.

Jump once more to last month, when a federal judge in Illinois determined that there is an “innocent construction”—a term of art in defamation law that I’ve written about here—to calling someone a pedophile.

She cites Wikipedia’s characterization of the “popular usage” of the term in support of that conclusion.

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Not every litigant will have a judge who is so very online that she groks “whatevs pedo” and “ok groomer” are nbd. Except out here IRL, calling someone a pedophile is career- and life-ruining, particularly in certain lines of work (like my other one). In the post-Larry Nassar, post-MeToo, post-Epstein world, it’s hard to think of any worse epithet to attach to a man: not in a shit-posting 8chan way, but in a serious, sober, public way.

If reputation has any meaning, no, I don’t condone duels, “But your man has to answer for his words, Burr.”

But let’s give the judge the benefit of the doubt, on the grounds that our civic discourse is as degraded as our right to reputation: you can call someone a pedophile and it doesn’t really mean anything, but even if it did, who cares, good luck with your defamation suit, pedo.

Instead, we’ll change the accusation to: “You did the same thing as convicted child sex offender Larry Nassar.”

Larry Nassar’s entry on the US Center for SafeSport’s Centralized Disciplinary Database says “Criminal disposition – involving a minor.”

A criminal disposition per the SafeSport Code is “any disposition or resolution of a criminal proceeding, other than an adjudication of not guilty[.]” The Code has a separate violation for “Criminal Charge.” However, not a single person is currently on the Centralized Disciplinary Database for having a “Criminal Charge.”

Many who are listed under “Criminal disposition,” though, have only been charged. Some of them have since had their charges dismissed, but remain on the list.

Nor does it specify the nature of the offense. Some of the people listed as “Criminal disposition – involving a minor” are there because they were charged with DUI with a minor in the car. And yet that person is branded in the exact same way as the man convicted of and serving the rest of his life in prison for hundreds of sexual assaults against minors.

The Centralized Disciplinary Database is inescapably defamatory.

No normal 501(c)3 would be so brazen, stupid, or self-destructive to bill themselves as a sexual abuse watchdog and then publish a list of offenders that applies the same classification to someone with a charge of a DUI with a minor in the vehicle and one of the most notorious sex offenders in American history.

The US Center for SafeSport is not a normal 501(c)3.

The 2018 version of the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act confers immunity upon “an applicable entity… for damages in any civil action for defamation, libel, slander, or damage to reputation arising out of any action or communication, if the action arises from the execution of the [prescribed] responsibilities or functions.” The exception to the immunity is if an applicable entity acted with actual malice, or provided information or took action not “pursuant to this section.”

I will be writing a lot in the coming months about the actual malice doctrine, so let’s put several pins in that phrase.

The Center can annihilate reputations at will because they are protected from consequence by federal law.

Immunity breeds impunity. That one’s for you, Johnnie Cochran.

Size matters

Over 13 million Americans are under the Center’s jurisdiction. If the Center’s jurisdiction was a state (Sportopia? New Sportdonia? East Germany?), it would be the sixth most-populous state.

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Don’t let anyone try to downplay this as a niche concern, one that affects just Olympians or a handful of hobbyists.

Before England played Ghana last week, Spence did not shake hands with Ghanaian midfielder Thomas Partey.

Partey is charged with rape and sexual assault in London. He pled not guilty, and will stand trial in June 2027. Ahead of England’s game against Ghana, English commentators, journalists, and politicians called for the English Football Association to direct or encourage players to not acknowledge Partey pre- or post-game; or, failing that, for the English players to snub him on their own.

Alicia Kearns, a Conservative member of Parliament, posted on X: “Good on Djed Spence for refusing to shake [Partey’s] hand - that showed conviction and recognises the seriousness of the charges.” It’s ironic that she chose the word “conviction” to describe Spence, when a conviction is precisely what Partey has not had.

Partey was the second professional athlete denied his presumption of innocence on his sport’s largest stage in June.

During the Stanley Cup finals, Carolina Hurricanes fans booed and chanted “no means no” at Las Vegas Golden Knight’s goaltender Carter Hart. Hart was one of five Canadian hockey players acquitted of sexual assault last summer.

If it was just the opposing team’s fans doing this, we could chalk it up to the beer-and-banter that fuels most fandoms. But in the run-up to the finals, The Athletic put the trial back in the headlines by asking Hart about it at his media availability. The Golden Knight’s press officer ended the press conference there, giving The Athletic their dream story about how the “shield stopping [Hart] from answering questions — not just about his past, but his present and future — is likely to stay in place.”

A headline from the Canadian Broadcasting Company the same week set a new standard for non sequitirs: “1 year after acquittal in Hockey Canada sexual assault trial, Carter Hart could win Stanley Cup.” A broadcast from the CBC laundered the Carolina fans’ taunts into a triumph of allyship: “Carolina Hurricanes fans expressing what many survivors of sexual assault say they’re feeling watching goaltender Carter Hart.” They then cut to an activist lamenting that the NHL is “not holding anyone accountable” in the wake of a judicial exoneration. The name of that activist’s organization says it all: “Beyond the Verdict.”

We can only wonder how the CBC would retcon Boston Red Sox fans chanting “Darrrrrrrr-yl” at the Mets’ Darryl Strawberry.

Strangers on a Team Bus

The Athletic’s antics at the Stanley Cup were just their warm-up, though. The Athletic dispatched a reporter to Ghana’s training camp at Bryant University in Rhode Island. Jordan Campbell’s description of Ghana’s team bus arriving for their first training session establishes Campbell as the leading light of moral panic noir.

Cue the tenor saxophone’s slouching arpeggio:

“It was a silent cavalcade. The siren lights were on but no alarm sounded. Meanwhile, a teenage girl passed by, seemingly oblivious to the new guests as she walked across the car park towards the Track and Turf Complex to a hockey event.”

Campbell reports that “Partey came into close contact with several children during a ‘Community Day’” event open to the public. He substantiates that statement with a photo of Partey, two other players, and a staff member interacting with a group of children. Also in the photo: a uniformed police officer staring directly at the group.

Campbell cites Bryant University’s failure to enforce Ghana’s “private and secure area,” relaying how “dozens of school girls [walked] unattended across the car park area, including a section inside the off-limits area.” To illustrate the apparent danger, The Athletic included a satellite photo of the campus showing the “off-limits areas” and the athletics facilities being used by unsuspecting youth and collegiate athletes.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a swipe at Campbell, The Athletic, and its parent company The New York Times by noting that Bryant University is 73% white. If we wanted to be as ungenerous as Campbell, we could place this article in the context of the United States’ desultory and sometimes horrific history of sexualized fear-mongering about black men preying on white women.

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That aside, Campbell’s over-stylized prose exemplifies the extent to which both sides of the Anglo-American tradition have come to despise the presumption of innocence. Campbell almost explicitly says as much. He describes the relative normalcy of Partey’s participation in his national team’s activities as “a jarring juxtaposition that highlights how complicated safeguarding decisions can be in situations such as Partey’s where he has not been convicted of anything and strongly insists he is innocent.”

It’s actually straight-forward and simple: Partey has not been convicted of anything, whether he strongly insists on it or stays mum. It’s not up to him to say, let alone prove, anything.

Culture should protect the law

The online discourse against Partey and Hart has degraded a principle that has spanned millennia into the new “just asking questions.” Anyone trying to temper the rush to condemn these men will be preempted by shrill sneering: “Oh let me guess: innocent until proven guilty. You know that’s just in the courtroom, right?” Or “not guilty doesn’t mean innocent!”

Similar to the First Amendment, the presumption of innocence is being reduced to a matter of “black letter law.” It applies only in the courtroom, where it increasingly is seen as a technicality—an obstacle towards someone’s desired outcome rather than a fundamental of everyone’s rights and liberty.

Restricting the presumption of innocence to the courtroom and dismissing it in society “is more than a departure from the Anglo-American tradition,” François Quintard-Morenas wrote. “It challenges the very foundation of a social contract in which society… acknowledges that there is a time for innocence and a time for guilt.”

Those are the only two choices. If the accused is not found guilty, the only other state they could be is their baseline, natural, presumed state: innocent.

We are not the first society to smear the binary of innocence-or-guilt into a spectrum. Discussing pre-revolutionary France, Quintard-Morenas describes how accused individuals denied their presumption of innocence lived in a purgatory closer to hell than to earth. “Neither perfectly innocent nor entirely guilty, they suffered the stigma reserved to convicted criminals.”

The presumption of innocence does not mean we suppress or abdicate our individual judgment and wait for the courts to make up our minds for us.

Like any well-formed right, the presumption of innocence imposes a responsibility. In a culture of the First Amendment, for example, we do not try to shut (or shout, or shoot) down speech we don’t like. We engage when we want to, and tune out when we don’t, but we leave each speaker and listener free to be.

In a culture of the presumption of innocence we demand and respect evidence. Each person must evaluate the evidence offered in support of the accusations before deciding—and maybe publicly declaring—that the accused is guilty.

Hence, I can write about the presumption of innocence and the judicial system as the gold standard, and still say, “O.J. did it.”

But we have to know what to evaluate, and how.

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Notice what Alicia Kearns, MP, said in her X post above. Spence “recognises the seriousness of the charges” (emphasis added). Not the strength of the evidence, but the seriousness of the charges.

Similarly, The Athletic’s Campbell and others use the number of accusers and charges against Partey as evidence of wrongdoing or the danger he poses. The Athletic’s Dan Sheldon relies on “multiple reports” to execute the same playbook against Cape Verde’s team captain, Ryan Mendes. None of them weigh the credibility of the accusations nor the validity of any of the evidence presented. They conflate repetition with evidence.

But accusations are not evidence. Accusers are not evidence. Reports in foreign media are not evidence. No matter how many there are, they do not prove one another.

Quintard-Morenas cites a French legal text from the mid-eighteenth century: “Public opinion forms a considerable part of the punishment. It prolongs its duration, [and] renders the reparation of the innocent almost impossible.” If that was true then, think about how much worse it is today in our era of instant, worldwide communication. Every digital space is a global town square. Every post is a pillory. Every insult is preserved until it becomes an epitaph.

Carter Hart was acquitted. Partey has been charged but not tried. Mendes is accused but not charged. They and others like them span the spectrum of ways in which one’s presumption of innocence remains intact—that is, they are innocent because they have not been proven guilty. For them as well as those who were targeted by a mob for transgressions far below the criminal threshold, public opinion is the punishment.

Principles only last for 4,000 years if they benefit individuals and society. Hammurabi put the presumption of innocence into his Code, so it predates even him. It will sometimes be dormant, but never dead.

We should not wait for history to cycle through a round of tragedies before we reclaim what we surrendered. Regardless of jerseys or flags, we should strive to shake hands on that.

Photo credit: frankieleon / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

Two canceled coaches I’ve spoken to are the type who will pull over to the side of the road if they see a wounded animal or a lost dog. One told me that he ran over a bird the morning we spoke and he felt terrible about it. Then his voice started shaking as he told me about how he tries to live his life as a Christian—and how crucial his faith was in getting him through and keeping him alive during his cancelation—yet he can’t shake the violent thoughts he still has about his canceler. The other coach said he’s at peace regarding the athlete who first made claims about him. But he doesn’t know what the limits of his reaction would be if he ever encountered the writer who used those claims as the starting point for a now-discredited (not that it does the coach much good) national news front page article.

Some canceled people don’t even know whom they would forgive. They were taken out by the mob. They know which of their bosses caved to the mob’s demands and fired them, and they can see the bylines of whoever laundered the mob’s accusations into the media. But they often don’t know who started it, and who accelerated it.

They do know—acutely—who did nothing to stand up for them, but that’s a different article.

Michael Capiraso’s cancelation took off in the summer of 2020 when an anonymous Instagram account became a burn book for a handful of current and former employees. Then a change.org petition went up using the same handle. Two years later, Capiraso filed a defamation suit against the “John Doe” behind those accounts. Over nearly a year of litigation, Capiraso subpoenaed Meta (parent company of Instagram), change.org, Google, and Verizon in order to ascertain the instigator’s identity.

Maybe it’s because Capiraso was one of the first canceled people I spoke to and therefore set all those first impressions and precedents, or because he did what I would do, but his effort to learn who took him out seems like the logical, in fact, obvious thing to do.

I was at least two dozen cancelations into my research when “Carmen” was canceled on the basis of an anonymous, decades-old accusation. In our early conversations, Carmen provided a few thoughts about who might know some of the back story behind the cancelation, and told me what to watch for to see who might benefit from the situation. I tried to follow those leads, and periodically looped back to run some ideas past Carmen or ask for a bit more direct help.

Then Carmen staked out a unique place in my work: they are the only person to explicitly tell me that they have put the cancelation behind them, are not interested in talking about it, so basically, stop texting.

Serendipity worked wonders for Carmen: an incredible opportunity arose almost concurrent with the cancelation, and it was of a nature that they really could move on.

I would never say to Carmen or anyone else, “You owe it to other canceled people to speak up and fight for the truth.” Small-o objectivist that I am, no one owes anyone any such debt (I have mixed feelings about that final scene between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in “Good Will Hunting”).

But I cannot understand at all not wanting to know, slightly out of curiosity but mostly so I could decide freely and clearly what, if anything, I wished to do about it: lawsuit, confrontation, “gaucking” them to their social circles and professional colleagues… What if the canceler was someone socially or professionally close to them? Might they still be in a position to hurt them? Might they still be interacting with, maybe confiding in, their Personal Judas? Would you want someone who did this to you to be part of your life in any way? For your own safety and the sake of those around you, wouldn’t you want to purge them for at least several degrees of separation?

Wouldn’t you want to just really f—k them up??

Michael Malice and Peter Boghossian approached these questions on an episode of Malice’s podcast, “Your Welcome.” Their conversation is the first time I heard about the book, The File.

Disclosure days

When Germany unified in 1990, the new government created the Federal Authority for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic. That is, the records of the secret police of East Germany, the Stasi. This became known as the “Gauck Authority,” after its first commissioner, Joachim Gauck.

The agency allowed citizens and non-citizens to view the file that the Stasi had on them. The records would include the names of everyone who reported on you as an informal informant, or as an agent or operative of the Stasi.

Timothy Garton Ash was a British student journalist in East Germany from 1979–1982. British, student, journalist: three reasons for the Stasi to have a file on him. In the 1990s, he went to the Gauck Authority to view his file. After seeing who provided information on him, he traveled around Germany to confront them about it. The File is his memoir of that endeavor.

Amongst his own story, he tells us to “imagine conversations like this taking place every evening, in kitchens and sitting rooms all over Germany. Painful encounters, truth-telling, friendship-demolishing, life-haunting.”

Vera Wollenberger “discovered from reading her file that her husband, Knud, has been informing on her ever since they met. They would go for a walk with the children on Sunday, and on Monday Knud would pour it all out to his Stasi case officer.” A writer learned that his older brother informed on him. Another woman had been imprisoned for five years for attempting to escape East Germany. “[S]he found out, by reading her file, that it was the man she was living with who had denounced her to the Stasi. They still lived together. Only that morning he had wished her a good day in the archive.” (emphasis added)

We don’t know if those people approached their files with a sense of suspicion, perhaps trying to confirm a grim hunch; or if their worlds shattered with the turn of a page.

“Had the files not been opened, they might still be brother and brother, man and wife—their love enduring, a fortress sure upon the rock of lies.”

Malice and Boghossian were on different sides of “Would you want to know?”

Malice “couldn’t handle the trauma of knowing someone who has been a great friend to me, but has also done something which has caused me no negative consequences and now has been resolved. And I don’t know why [they did it], I don’t know what pressures they were facing.”

Boghossian replied: “I guess my orientation to truth is very different. My orientation to vengeance is probably different than yours as well. I would want to know as much as I can. I wouldn’t want to know everything.”

“But what would you do with that information?”

“I would completely excise people from my life.”

Maybe forgive, definitely don’t forget

Growing up Catholic, the concept of forgiveness was wrapped up in God and penance: a few sets and reps of Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s in the pews upon exiting the confessional. Occasionally, the priest would have you do something beyond prayer, like helping out around the house without being asked. The whole thing seemed hollow to me. There was little in it for anyone that you actually harmed, you didn’t have any skin in the game, and God did the heavy lifting of forgiveness—whatever that even meant—instead of the person you wronged. As long as you felt bad and pledged to go forth and sin no more (an impossibility since we’re all “fallen creatures,” but that’s another digression), you’re good to go.

The contrition-forgiveness-absolution axis was one of many things I happily dropped when I walked away from Catholicism / Christianity.

Forgiveness in a secular, practical, or tangible sense wasn’t any more apparent to me. And I never really saw a need for it. To borrow a phrase, I was quite content to completely excise people from my life for far less than ratting me out to the Stasi.

During a re-read of Atlas Shrugged a few months after following, from a distance, in silence, the first cancellation of somebody I knew, this exchange overtook my thoughts for the following weeks.

Mrs. Rearden: “Are you really incapable of forgiveness?”
Henry Rearden: “No, Mother. I’m not. I would have forgiven the past—if, today, you had urged me to quit and disappear.”

Forgiveness is not exactly part of Ayn Rand’s brand. But even in a 1,000+-page book, she’s parsimonious with her words and exacting with her concepts. She wouldn’t toss “forgiveness” into a couple throwaway lines between two morally opposite characters whose relationship throughout the book shapes one of the most important character arcs.

What does Ayn Rand, of all people, have to say about forgiveness?

I asked this question in 2020 on a podcast AMA with the chair of the Ayn Rand Institute, Yaron Brook.

“Forgiveness depends on the context. There’s not one form of forgiveness,” Brook said. “You can imagine forgiveness being a second chance, giving somebody another chance at a relationship with you, or an opportunity to trade or engage with you in some kind of activity.”

“Forgiveness in Rearden’s context would mean ‘I won’t think ill of you. I’ll drop it.’ But I don’t think Rearden can have a relationship with his mother moving forward. She would have to do a lot more than encourage him to leave.”

If the harm is severe enough, there is no possibility of forgiveness.

“I find it horrific when someone murdered a child and then the parents forgive him. There’s no second chance! I’m going to hate your guts for the rest of my life, forever, and hope that you rot in whatever hell of existence you’re going to have on earth.”

For lesser offenses, “they would have to admit [them]. They would have to ask for forgiveness and express explicitly that it won’t happen again. I’d be willing to not think ill of them and maybe even have a relationship with them if I believed that they would not do it again. “

I revisited the question this year with cancelled author and fellow “small-o” objectivist, Christina Dalcher. She doesn’t need subpoenas or a government disclosure to know who cancelled her. They are the signatories—“We the undersigned”—to an English cosplay of a yakuza banning order, a hamon-jo.

“There has to be some kind of an exchange. It’s just not enough to say ‘I’m sorry,’ and then I go ‘Oh, I forgive you,’” Dalcher said.

“I don’t need them to kowtow. I want them to take their name off the letter, even if they don’t publicly apologize. Just remove your name from the letter. They don’t have to say anything about it, because I’ll know that they went and put their money where their mouth is. They can do it completely quietly.”

Like Brook, Dalcher expects recognition, action, apology, and the assurance that it won’t happen again—the latter being the tripwire for whatever relationship they have going forward.

Often the ones you most expect

Malice and Boghossian get stuck in the specific context of The File: citizens informing on family, friends, neighbors, and others in a totalitarian dictatorship controlled by a pervasive secret police. Malice, in particular, repeats that he would not want to know who informed on him and could not pass judgment on anyone who did (with a big caveat that we’ll get to shortly) because “it’s very different for us in a relatively free country. When you have these totalitarian dictatorships, everyone has to be part of the problem. You can’t have clean hands and live.”

Malice is an anarchist, so he might appreciate how America spawned individual initiative and countless little platoons over the last decade to see to the work of compelling “voluntary” betrayal, denunciation, pillory, and exile.

Many coaches are not surprised when they learn who is behind accusations to their athletic department, university administration, federation, or media. Do the job long enough and you develop a good sense for which athletes are toxic in the locker room, who sandbag their efforts, and blame their under-performance on everyone else.

Closing the trap, sometimes the media figures who write and promote these articles were those athletes. Whether it’s their former coach or another like him in the cross-hairs, they have their long-awaited prey.

Capiraso’s legal efforts revealed that a former employee, who had been furloughed when the reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic threatened the future of mass participation events (such as marathons), was behind the Instagram account and change.org petition. This individual was the first to comment on the change.org petition—the petition that he started anonymously.

Such double-dipping abounded. The first major media coverage of the effort to oust Capiraso was an article in Runner’s World in October 2020. That article relied heavily on the Instagram account as the source of the grievances to justify the mob’s actions. However, the article also quoted the instigator by name. He was one of only two people who spoke on the record. The author of that article, Sarah Lorge Butler, did not respond to my questions asking whether she knew that she was giving two voices to the same person.

With co-workers, peers, and media like these, who needs government?

Who knew what, when: Malice aforethought

By the time the Stasi started keeping a file on Timothy Garton Ash, the Germans had about a half-century of knowing what happens when somebody gets reported to the secret police.

There are no certainties: some people survive despite having a large file on them, others were taken away for relatively minor infractions (real or perceived). The informant doesn’t have any control or even influence over what happens after they make their report to the secret police. Some police official or bureaucrat up the chain of command decides who gets taken in the next round. The informant spins the cylinder, aims the gun, and pulls the trigger—with no way of knowing if the chamber is empty or loaded. The arbitrariness is part of the terror.

But there are also no surprises. If you denounce or inform on somebody, you can’t say you didn’t know when one day, well…

“I was not a victim of [my] informers, as many East Germans really were of theirs. They did me no serious damage. Yet, knowing how the system worked, I may fairly guess that they did harm others,” Garton Ash writes.

If Michael Malice was one of those who were harmed, he would want to read his file.

“If I got sent to jail, we have a different situation. Then I want to know because then I need to know who the rat is.”

Cancelations don’t have a middle man. Some participants do more harm than others, but everyone involved contributes directly.

Most people still don’t know what cancelation actually entails. They think it means getting fired, getting some bad press, and being cut down to size. Those are hopefully the goals of the people who instigate cancelations; and of the people who pile on, assuming they think about what’s down-range of their click or e-signature.

Hopefully, because the alternative is they knowingly drove their targets into depression, drug and alcohol abuse, professional ruin, social isolation, post-traumatic stress, flashbacks, suicidality.

The first canceled coach I spoke to told me about the “dark triad” personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathology. Whenever I, in turn, introduce a canceled coach to the concept, there’s always a cold silence before I hear “Oh my god.”

Christina Dalcher is willing to forgive a mistake, not malice. Some people probably signed the petition not knowing what it would do to her and her career. Others signed it hoping for exactly what happened, at least on the professional side of things.

“I don’t know whether they really bought into it or if it’s about fear of being ostracized,” Dalcher said. “I think they probably put things on the scale. ‘Who do I value more? Who could do me more damage? What would hurt my career or my reputation more?’

“On the one side of this, me, my feelings, damage to my career. On the other side, there are all of these people who are far more interesting, important, revered, and well-known.”

But if they go back and take their name off of the petition, “they would be saying, ‘I’m sorry, I wish I hadn’t signed it. I never would have signed it if I’d known what it was.’ Now that they know what it is, they’re doing something to rectify that.”

Four years after an article in The New York Times sealed Capiraso’s fate, The Athletic—owned by The New York Times—wrote an article that vindicated him. The Athletic contacted the former employee who instigated Capiraso’s cancelation. He provided one of the most callous statements of privilege I can imagine:

“I have moved on. I don’t want to get back involved in it.”

Canceled people consider, attempt, and sometimes commit suicide because they rarely have the choice to move on and not be involved. For all practical purposes, their story is over. When someone believes that, it’s a short step to making it true.

Now that they know, now what?

Freedom to choose

The similarities between cancelation and what Garton Ash describes in The File—both in the dynamics and in the consequences—are much closer than the average person might think. Even if you’re still not convinced, Garton Ash warns us about the trap of minimizing our own context by holding it up next to East Germany under the Stasi:

“[T]here is an opposite fallacy: to make our condition look better by contrasting it with something so much worse… If you wish to make gray look white, put it against black.”

Michael Malice could not condemn the East German informants because they may have been forced or coerced into informing, or because they saw it as their least bad option. He gives them that dispensation because they were so much less free than us.

Garton Ash agrees that “we, who never faced these choices, can never know how we would have acted in their position, or would act in another dictatorship.”

But we can come close. The moral panic mobs of the last decade gave us ample opportunities to pile on, speak out, or keep our head down hoping the mob would be too busy to notice us; to accept the mob’s judgment or to decide for ourselves; to believe the worst anyone could say about someone else or to stand by our own experiences with that person.

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Someone who did and said nothing publicly when their friend or coworker was cancelled would be no braver when faced with the choice of informing on that person in return for a travel visa (a common motivation that Garton Ash uncovered) or to try to keep themselves out of trouble with the secret police.

Moreover, the inverse of Malice’s argument is that someone who informs or denounces or goes along with the mob in a free society is starkly culpable. They have no secret police to hide behind. Their actions are their own, and they should be judged accordingly.

Not condemned, necessarily. Judged.

“Vast anthology of human weakness”

Yaron Brook “would be willing to give some people a second chance. Somebody’s done something that you believe is immoral. There’s tons of immorality out there! Immorality in objectivism means you evaded. I think a lot of people evade a lot of the time. I don’t think it’s unusual for someone to do something immoral.”

Dalcher speaks a lot about the rareness of integrity, and how its absence runs through everybody who contributed to her cancelation. Capiraso repeats the word cowardice every time we talk about the events of June to December 2020.

Garton Ash:

“What you find here, in the files, is how deeply our conduct is influenced by our circumstances. How large of all that human hearts endure, that part which laws or kings can cause or cure. What you find is less malice than human weakness, a vast anthology of human weakness. And when you talk to those involved, what you find is less deliberate dishonesty than our almost infinite capacity for self-deception.” (emphasis in original)

Malice (the attribute, not the podcaster) is the spark and the fuel for many cancellations, but weakness is the oxygen that keeps it going.

I don’t know if Carmen has given blanket amnesty to her cancelers. I don’t think she can forgive them without knowing who they are. As Yaron Brook said, you can’t forgive without knowing the context; and nothing is more important to the context than the person.

Similarly, only the canceled person can forgive. Garton Ash quotes from Zbigniew Herbert’s poem The Envoy of Mr. Cogito:

“do not forgive truly it is not in your power
to forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn”

A few lines earlier, Herbert has something for those us who are not in the position to forgive:

“your helpless Anger—may it be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
may you never be abandoned by your sister Scorn
for informers executioners cowards”

NB: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

This is about cancelation. Really.

Here’s a bit of what defied her expectations: manicured public gardens (one Japanese-inspired, one British-style: the latter with a vegetable section supporting local food banks), a neighborhood cluster of be-rainbowed gay bars, the casual diversity of the most ethnically, linguistically and (I would argue) culinarily diverse city in America, a farm-to-table co-op, the network of running / biking trails along the bayous.

It’s one thing to hear one person you know talk about these things. But he’s just the one person and, well, he’s been in Texas for a long time and maybe he went a bit, well, he’s always been a bit… but now, you know… I don’t think he voted for you know who, but maybe he did…? Even if he didn’t, look at everything else you hear and read and see about Texas.

“What’s going on in Texas and Florida is just so scary. Those two really seem like the worst,” she said, and then caught herself as she took in the incongruous scene around her. We were on the patio of a packed hookah cafe. If we weren’t the only people of pallor there, we were by far the most pallid. As English speakers, we were probably in the minority, and certainly so with our midwestern / mid-Atlantic accents.

“This is Houston,” my partner said.

“This is Texas,” I underlined.

Maybe if my friend had stayed more than a weekend she’d have witnessed some ICE raids, tiki torch marches, heavy-set white-haired men shooting revolvers into the air to celebrate a new oil well, women with downcast eyes in floor-length smocks tending crops, Elon personally bulldozing an historically black neighborhood to build a data center, or a guy blocking the sidewalk, wearing tactical sunglasses and head-to-toe Grunt Style clothing, demanding of dog walkers “What kind of American are you?”

By the same token, had I spent more than a weekend with her in Chicago last year perhaps I’d have seen (or been a victim of) violent crime on public transportation, looting of neighborhood shops and restaurants, police officers being mobbed and assaulted, young children being instructed in proper dildo usage at a public library, or any of the other things that the other half of the internet reliably informs me are near-daily occurrences in lib hellscapes like Chicago or Minnesota.

The mismatch between what the media tells us about a place and a culture mirrors the mismatch between the articles that cancel people and what I hear when I talk to their former athletes and co-workers.

When they read those articles, they wonder if it’s about the same person.

The allegations and insinuations are completely divorced from the person and environment they know.

As a former athlete of a canceled coach told me for an early article:

Is there a very good chance it’s not exactly as written? Absolutely. There’s some truth, and we’ll figure that out and reconcile it at some point. But it can’t be 100% correct, because I know this person. I’ve never seen anything like that in all the time that I have known him.

They often have to put themselves into a particular frame of mind just to see how someone could make the leap from an actual occurrence to the way the media or a tribunal presents it as something toxic or even criminal. After doing so, they frequently recoil at having engaged in that mindset, even if just for a moment, as they realize how poisonous, destructive, and a bit deranged it is.

Now imagine being someone who lives their life in such a state, and you start to understand the pathologies that underlie cancelations.

Similarly, the expectations that my friend brought with her are similar to what canceled people fear from every person they meet.

“I instantly think these people are googling me, and they’re going into this call thinking I’m the racist and sexist. That’s what’s happening. That’s what my life is. That’s the reality of it. That’s what I face with everything.”

When the media authoritatively tells you that a person, a people, or a place are the worst, you set your expectations and gird yourself appropriately. Giving them the benefit of the doubt is not an option because nothing you’ve seen, read, or heard admits even a sliver of doubt about the judgment.

Another former athlete of that canceled coach remembers her interactions with the writer of the most damaging article:

When people gave him positive feedback about the program, he ignored it. I don’t understand exactly how journalism works, but I know he was seeking a certain type of story, and he was going to ignore parts that didn’t fit his narrative.

My friend witnessed and experienced nothing that the media she consumes told her are regular features of life in Houston. Conversely, she was surprised at much of what she did see and do because at no point—particularly in the last two years—did anyone more reliable or credible than me tell her that those are parts of everyday life and long-established culture in Houston and Texas.

This is an important distinction from two people I talked about in a recent article:

[They both said to me,] “I’m sure these people you’re talking to are nice people. I’m sure it really sucked for the person that goes through it. I get that you have a lot in common with them. But...”

But it wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t done something.

But these things don’t just go down for no reason.

But you don’t get to that sort of position without doing, or at least tolerating, or at least benefiting from some pretty awful things.

Those two have not yet had their “zero to one” moment. They have not spoken with a canceled person, nor someone who could provide counter-evidence against the cancelation. And, thankfully, they have not been canceled themselves.

In the absence of any direct experience or evidence, they rely fully on the legitimacy they ascribe to the media and the mob.

Trust no one?*

The trick now is whether my friend’s two days of direct experience will be enough to create some doubt the next time her trusted media tells her what people or life are like in some foreign land, like a southern “red” state.

She doesn’t need to think that she was lied to or even misled: simply that they were demonstrably wrong that one time about that one thing, so maybe they’re wrong this next time about this other thing. Or maybe they were wrong before about that other thing. Like that author who they said is a transphobe, the coaches who they all said were assaulters or groomers, the CEO who was a racist and a sexist, the American student in Italy they said was a violent sex murderess…

We can’t go to all the places we hear about to verify if what we’ve heard is true. Nor can we all do background research on canceled people to determine if they really are the worst people ever.

We have to be able to trust some of what we read or hear. Unfortunately, our current environments for media and knowledge sharing are neither wide nor open.

Each side accuses the other of having a destructively narrow viewpoint, while doing everything possible to ensure that their side stays within just such a narrow range of knowledge and thought. Part of their extreme perniciousness is how they pretend toward diversity within their walls: “I get a variety of perspectives. Every day I read both [the Washington Post and the New York Times] / [Fox News and the Daily Wire].”

The advantage we have in this ontological Battle of the Narrows is how brittle those structures are. It doesn’t take much to first fracture and then blow them wide open.

These little crevices of distrust, however we can create them or help people find them, are two-way corridors. They give people a way out of their bubble (or cell, or cave) in search of new information; and they give new sources of information a way in.

Forward-facing and fighting for the future

Cancelations often lead to narrative foreclosure because they overwrite decades of someone’s life story.

We can date the trauma to the first instance of media humiliation and misrepresentation, but the identity annihilation can go back decades: “She was always a toxic racist bullying groomer. We’re just hearing about it now because silent no more something something.” From there, the forward-facing trauma takes over. The humiliation, identity annihilation, banishment, perhaps betrayal renew every day those articles, headlines, and posts are out there where somebody can see them.

It’s literally Orwellian: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

Counter-narratives are so important because they, too, are forward-facing. Correcting the record is only a small part of what they do. Their greater value is returning control over their identity to the canceled person. That allows them to start their future from where they are, post-cancelation, rather than engaging in an unwinnable battle for the past and how things “should have been.” The counter-narrative is the counterstrike in the daily, forward-facing battle for the future.

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I don’t expect everyone to believe everything I write about cancelations and canceled people, or life in Houston. As long as they recognize that everything they’ve read everywhere else might not be accurate, that’s all the chance the counter-narrative and I need. More importantly, that’s the chance canceled people are living for.

* I would have named that section or maybe the article “Trust Me,” but that title has been put to much better use:

This would be a disaster for Canadians’ civil liberties and for Canada’s sport culture, emulating a half-century of America codifying into law some of its worst tendencies.

Two threads of American history converged to spawn the Centralized Disciplinary Database.

During the mid-2010s, hundreds of American gymnasts came forward in the media, in court, and in testimony to the US Congress about the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of Larry Nassar, a doctor affiliated with USA Gymnastics. In response to the public’s outrage and demands to “do something,” Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed a federal law designating the US Center for SafeSport as the national sport safe guarding organization.

The Center is a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization, invested with nearly unlimited authority to craft, impose, and enforce its policies and punishments. The scope of its powers and the capriciousness with which it wields them have produced a growing stream of federal lawsuits. Active suits include claims of improper delegation of both executive and legislative authority; violation of substantive and procedural due process; defamation; tortious interference with contracts; violation of antitrust laws; and imposing contracts of adhesion.

Among the few specific requirements Congress placed on the Center, the Center must “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of adults who are barred by the Center.”

Anchoring this list is Larry Nassar himself, who was convicted of numerous crimes in a criminal court. But the Center does not require anything as substantial as even a criminal charge before listing a sports person alongside him and other convicted felons.

One does not need to be convicted in a criminal court, found liable in a civil court, nor even adjudicated by the Center’s behind-closed-doors, gag-order-in-place tribunals. An accusation is sufficient for a “temporary” suspension. The suspension may be temporary, but the punishment becomes permanent the moment the Center updates the Centralized Disciplinary Database.

If you don’t believe the internet is forever, ask someone on a publicly accessible digital blacklist.

America and civil rights: Is this what you want, Canada?

US Supreme Court Justice William Brennan wrote in his dissent in Paul v. Davis (1976), “The hardships resulting from this official stigmatization...will often be as severe as actual incarceration.”

Paul v. Davis cleared the ground for the United States’ increasing propensity for government defamation-by-blacklist. Ironically, the fiftieth anniversary of Paul v. Davis was the day before the Future of Sport in Canada Commission released its report.

Edward C. Davis was a newspaper photographer when he was arrested for shoplifting in 1971. A judge dismissed the charge. But over a year after his arrest, local law enforcement included his name and mug shot photo in a public listing of “Active Shoplifters.”

This caused “untold humiliation and embarrassment to me in front of my family, associates, and professional colleagues,” Davis later wrote. Under pressure from his supervisor and surrounded by coworkers who thought he—”the only black working in the department”—was an active shoplifter, Davis left his job, hoping “to regain my full sanity and keep what little self-respect I had left.” But he could not find work as a photographer nor in any other field, as the blacklist stood between him and employment.

The US Supreme Court acknowledged that Davis was neither tried nor convicted, and had suffered devastating effects as a result of being publicly branded an “Active Shoplifter.” Yet they ruled he could not sue the government for violating his civil rights.

Davis’s experience left him “broke, without employment, emotionally sick and in a state of anxiety… I have neither the financial nor the emotional drive to continue fighting with this system any longer.”

His words echo in many of the coaches and athletes listed on the US Center for SafeSport’s Centralized Disciplinary Database.

Their reputations are destroyed. They cannot find work in, and often out of, sport. They are socially and professionally exiled. Legal fees start around $10,000. They wonder how this could happen to them as Americans. Several listed individuals have committed suicide, others have died deaths of despair. Others still have thoughts of self-harm and struggle with substance abuse. Many more deal with depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms from the forward-facing effects of having their listing and the media articles written about it occupying the top search results for their name.

In a dark echo of Davis’ case, one coach remains on the list despite the charges against him being dropped… in 2023.

Some cross-border trade really is zero sum

This is what the Future of Sport in Canada Commission wants to import from down south.

And it will be worse in Canada. While the US darkens new roads for punishment and harm, Canada is the innovator when it comes to new offenses.

In 2023, the Honourable Hugh Fraser, O.C., a globally respected sports arbitrator, released his report into allegations against a collegiate coach in Saskatchewan.

Fraser wrote there was “no evidence before me to suggest that [the coach’s] behaviour had involved sexual misconduct.” But his actions “[had] potential to cross into sexual behaviour.”

Fraser’s basis for that conclusion included the coach showing “preferential treatment” towards a group of athletes, such as “becoming close with their families and visiting their homes for meals.” Note that the coach was going to the athletes’ houses, in the presence of the athletes’ parents, presumably at their invitation. It’s doubtful he was crashing dinner. But Fraser could not rule out that the coach was playing the long game. Fraser cited a definition of grooming as “a slow, gradual and escalating process of building trust and comfort with a young person.”

Word for word, that describes coaching. Indeed, many of the behaviours Fraser cited could be lauded as best practice.

Dr. Paul Gamble is a coach and sport development expert in British Columbia.

“The notion that showing favour or forging a relationship with an athlete’s family is construed as ‘preferential treatment’ and implied to constitute grooming behaviour is emblematic of this [problem]. In talent development and youth development, the coach-athlete-parent axis is critical. In other words, the coach should invest in building a relationship with the parent and family of the young athlete,” Gamble says.

Yet Fraser used these actions to justify an “indefinite” suspension.

Proving there is no trade deficit in bad ideas, Fraser’s expansive conception of grooming is taking hold at the US Center for SafeSport. The Center’s recently-released National Coaches Survey classifies many of these same actions as “Boundary Violating Coaching Behaviors.”

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The most common such behavior was “initiating a hug with an athlete.” Meanwhile, a former collegiate and Olympic coach in Canada said one of the most common bits of feedback the coaching staff would hear from the graduating women athletes was, “more hugs.” The athletes thought the head coach sometimes was too stand-offish and not recognizing that they needed that extra sign of reassurance and support.

Gamble says that coaches have a “duty of care to recognize these individual needs and do our best to serve them in the most appropriate way. Yet according to the SafeSport report, ‘giving special attention to an athlete’ is a boundary violating behaviour. Any gesture or interaction that indicates ‘preferential treatment’ is a potential red flag.

“What constitutes preferential treatment is open to interpretation, but essentially any example of individual attention is a potential violation as it is unequal. Again, this entirely contradicts the premise that we should attend to each athlete as an individual and conduct ourselves accordingly.”

The former coach sums up the lose-lose situation: “If you hug an athlete, someone will think you’re a groomer. If you don’t, someone else will think you’re a cold incel type.”

Canadian athletes appreciate the danger, too. In an open letter to the leadership of Rowing Canada Aviron (RCA), the International Consortium on Female Sport shared “the feelings of defeat and helplessness” of a female Canadian rower trying to navigate the dueling subjectivisms of RCA’s gender inclusion policies and its “Safe Sport Policy”:

“I’ve read through the Safe Sport policy many times, and fear that it’d be weaponized against me if I complained about men in my sport/change room. A man’s gender identity always trumps a woman’s in this topsy turvy world. I can argue [many personal things], but that will be dismissed because a man with a gender identity would be upset.”

Future without sport in Canada

Both Canada’s and the United States’ experiences with implementing their respective safe sport regimes are at odds with optimal athlete development. That disparity will widen as both countries adopt the worst of the other.

An American criminal defense attorney now working in sport law said these systems are “driving out any coach who is conscientious. The coaches we are going to lose are the ones who say ‘If I can’t take care of my athlete, I don’t want to coach. And I’m not going to coach if doing so puts me at risk.’”

The Future of Sport in Canada Commission’s two mandates were improving safe sport in Canada, and improving the sport system in Canada.

The Commission’s mandates are not mutually exclusive. However, the second goal includes improving the competitiveness of Canadian athletes and teams, which will require developing and retaining high caliber coaches. But coaches don’t like losing and they don’t like rigged games. They are taking Fraser seriously when he wrote that his “findings should serve as another cautionary tale about the risk that coaches run when they become too close to their athletes.”

In addition to the coaches who have been banned without due process, for normal and often positive interactions with their athletes, or on the basis of malicious or spurious accusations, many others are quitting while they still have something to protect.

“The consequences are profound. The risk / reward calculus no longer makes sense. We can expect more and more coaches to walk away rather than risk their reputation, career, and life for the sake of coaching sport,” Dr. Gamble said.

Former Athletics Canada head coach Peter Eriksson dissuades young aspirants from the profession.

“I wouldn’t recommend anybody be a coach in today’s environment. As a coach you are at risk all the time. You’re subject to everything and anything. If somebody young, with a family and a mortgage, said to me, ‘I want to be a coach,’ I would say, ‘No. Go find something else to do.’”

Eventually, the only coaches left to ban will be those not worth having.

Extra-judicial is unjust

The United States and Canada have well-functioning judicial systems. Neither are perfect, but both are far better than their domestic detractors would have you believe.

Emotionally charged and controversial cases will always leave a segment of the population angry and aggrieved.

Justice William Brennan, in his dissent in Davis:

“It is not difficult to conceive of a police department, dissatisfied with what it perceives to be the dilatory nature or lack of efficacy of the judicial system in dealing with criminal defendants, publishing periodic lists of ‘active rapists,’ ‘active larcenists,’ or other ‘known criminals.’”

Substitute “activists and outraged citizens” into the quote above, and you have the mindset that advocated for the creation and continual expansion of the US Center for SafeSport. The feeling is similarly feverish in Canada in light of the Hockey Canada verdicts last year.

For many safe guarding advocates, this is the promise and not the peril of the registries. Vigilantism re-branded as a safety net.

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There are many areas in which the United States and Canada should work together and play to their respective strengths. Safe guarding one-upmanship is not one of them. One side must stop it for the sake of sport and citizens on both sides of the border.

Related:

• The Tyranny of Safe Guarding in Sport (Informed Practitioner in Sport)

• Three safe guarding violations a day (Abuse of Process)

• Unsafe in Any Sport: The Constitutional and Structural Failure of the U.S. Center for SafeSport (Colorado Law Student Scholars)

• No innocent construction (Abuse of Process)
  

Photo credit: Michael Swan / Flickr, under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Knowing he is a bit of a Japan-ophile, back in December I had mentioned to him my research into the yakuza banishment ritual, hamon-jo. He asked me what became of that. When I told him that I had published the article not long after we talked about it, he asked me to send it to him. The next time I saw him, he brought it up and it led to me talking about my work on cancellation, something that we hadn’t previously discussed.

I don’t remember exactly what I said as I gave him my overview of cancellation, what I’ve learned, and what I’m doing. But he cautioned me about my word choice: “You shouldn’t use the word ‘hung’ about this, because a lot of black people actually were publicly hung in this country.”

I wasn’t in a position to go Full George and say “Well, I’d say they’re being burned at the stake in a witch hunt, but I don’t want to alienate the feminists. I can’t afford to lose my Catholic readers, else I’d say they were crucified. I know I have some adulteresses in my audience, so I can’t say cancellation targets were victims of a stoning…”

Instead, I just sat with the recognition that six years later, we’re not that far from 2020.

And this was before two sitting Congressmen, two college coaches, and Cesar Chavez (d. 1993) were all taken out via the same playbook that’s ravaged our culture and society for a decade.

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Our conversation continued. For the second time in the last few months, I described my work on cancellation to someone completely on the outside, a true normie. Each time, I used some specifics to highlight my points, along with the general overview of what I’ve learned and some of the common experiences—like the prevalence of suicidality, and the ease with which canceled people talk to me about it.

Both times, the other person has said: “I’m sure these people you’re talking to are nice people. I’m sure it really sucked for the person that goes through it. I get that you have a lot in common with them. But...”

But it wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t done something.

But these things don’t just go down for no reason.

But you don’t get to that sort of position without doing, or at least tolerating, or at least benefiting from some pretty awful things.

To summarize their positions: where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and if you lay down with dogs, you’re gonna get fleas.

These conversations clarified for me that we are still in the moral panics of 2020, the zenith of the Age of Cancellation. Despite all the purges and so-called reckonings, the same hatreds are searching for a target, and the same guilts seek expiation.

For the last year, I’ve been working under the assumption that the steepest challenge I face is establishing that cancellation is a legitimate form of trauma. I would have to show the wreckage that I’ve seen and heard in so many canceled people, relaying the gut punches that I feel when they tell me their stories, and somehow adequately conveying the whole-of-existence damage that they continue to experience, years later—and back it up with neuroscience, several sub-disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, history, literature, evolutionary biology, and more.

I’m realizing now that those are down-the-road topics.

Actually, it’s worse than that.

Describing the trauma is a trap, because a good number of people will read it and say what my acquaintances said above. Or, worse, they’ll say “Good!” and I’ll have inadvertently delivered cancel culture snuff. Moral panic porno.

If showing the individual costs and consequences of cancellation risks backfiring, what needs to come first?

Soon after the collapse of East Germany in late 1989, the Stasi—the East German secret police—began burning as many of their files as they could. Citizens and governments stepped in to stop the destruction, knowing that these were important historical records and would be necessary for national reconciliation and integration. After East and West Germany unified in 1990, the German government established the Stasi Records Agency to reconstruct and preserve as much of the Stasi’s documents as possible.

East German pastor, activist, and politician Joachim Gauck was appointed the first Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, and the agency became known as the Gauck Authority.

The Gauck Authority permitted German citizens—from both East and West—and foreigners to view their Stasi file, subject to pretty minimal redactions. People would then find out who informed on them, for how long, on what topics, what operations the Stasi may have planned or carried out against them, how high up their case went, and so on.

Germans learned that siblings, spouses, and best friends were informing on them. “The effect of reading a file can be terrible,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote.

Garton Ash is a British journalist and historian who moved to West Berlin in 1978, and spent considerable time in East Berlin and the rest of East Germany through 1982. He wrote The File in 1998 about his experience viewing his Stasi file, and then confronting the former friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who informed on him.

“Painful encounters, truth-telling, friendship-demolishing, life-haunting,” is how he described the effects of reading one’s file and then facing one’s informants.

“Hundreds, thousands of such encounters, as the awful power of knowledge is slowly passed down from the Stasi to the employees of the Gauck Authority, and from the employees of the Gauck Authority to individuals like me, who then hold the lives of other people in our hands, in a way that most of us would never otherwise do.”

Being publicly outed as a Stasi informer carried significant social and professional consequences post-unification. Someone who was “gaucked” or found to be “gauck-positive” could be denied or stripped of employment in academia, the government, or other high profile jobs, in addition to public disgrace.

Rightly so, many would argue. Being informed upon was not a trivial matter. The information provided to the Stasi could lead to prison, torture, and execution. “I was not a victim of these informers, as many East Germans really were of theirs. They did me no serious damage. Yet, knowing how the system worked, I may fairly guess that they did harm others.”

Given the opportunity to gauck one of his informers, Garton Ash wrote “What a responsibility!… I can, if I choose, ruin a man’s career, perhaps even his life. For [being an informant] is the kiss of death. What earthly right have I to play judge and hangman?”

After showing a former friend the proof of what she had done to him, he wrote “[T]his will haunt her. Not, I think, because of the mere fact of collaboration—she was, after all, a communist in a communist state—but because working with the secret police, being down in the files as an informer, is low and mean.”

Reading accounts of cancellations, or going back and reading the articles, petitions, and social media posts that cancelled people, exposes just how low and mean they were. The accusations range from the frivolous to the delusional, unfounded and suffused with malice…

• “It’s like they were complaining about their Thanksgiving dinner,” a well-placed passive participant in Michael Capiraso’s cancellation told him five years later.

• I’m still fuzzy on the forensics of “neon lit white savioury fuckery,” but I do know that phrase figured prominently in Kate Clanchy’s cancellation.

• Three years after Ed Roos’ cancellation, an independent investigation found that not only did he not “cage” a student in a school gymnasium big enough to hold a basketball court, but the accuser who took her story to NPR and The New York Time was, under basic questioning, “unable to recall specific dates, times, or details to support that the incidents occurred or to support a finding of discrimination... The investigator was unable to find any supporting evidence for those allegations.”

• Teenage athletes were reported to the national sport safe guarding agency because they spoke up for their coach, whom they knew to be the subject of malicious accusations by the same accusers.

• The people in charge of a local theatre awards show in Chicago are being canceled because the awards didn’t sufficiently cancel some members of the local theatre community.

• I could go on.

…and yet the consequences are gravely serious. Many canceled people are still deep in despair, suicidal, abusing drugs and alcohol, un- or under-employed, selling assets and draining accounts just to get by. Others are already prematurely deceased.

It would be a pretty easy coding gig for a freelancer on Upwork or Claude the AI to generate a spreadsheet of everyone who wrote the articles for national or local media, filed official reports, signed the petitions, or shared the social media posts that contributed to someone’s cancellation.

But another cycle of cancellations—“gaucking” everyone who played any role—won’t get us anywhere. Cancellations are intrinsically wrong because they emerge from and are a tool of the mob, usually during a moral panic. Well-vetted targets and good aim do not legitimize cancellations.

Cancelers need to recognize how low and mean their actions were. They need to be haunted by how low and mean they themselves were. The passive participants, those who are going on several years of choosing not to say anything when they could have (the second-best time is now), should similarly feel their lack of integrity.

The non-canceled, the neutrals, the normies, like the two I started this article with, need to feel relief. Yes, that they weren’t themselves canceled, but more so that they didn’t participate, such would be their shame.

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The cancel mobs cannot coast into myth.

The cancellers are not—and never were—crusaders or avenging angels.

They are not Robin Hood, the MacManus Brothers, or Dexter Morgan. If nothing else, those characters were meticulous in their target selection and clinical in their, well, execution.

Cancellations did not right any wrongs or hold anyone accountable (remember the risible “It’s not cancel culture, it’s accountability culture”?).

Cancellations were not vehicles of justice precisely because they were so indiscriminate and random. The post hoc justifications of my acquaintances are just that. These rationalizations go even further than Laurenty Beria: find me the CEO or head coach, and I’ll find you the social transgression and skeletons in their closet. If we can’t find any, we’ll attach someone else’s to them. Whose? Anyone’s. Close enough.

Once we’re on the same page about the lowness of the means, then we can talk about consequences, trauma, and the more interesting stuff.

Photo credit: Arild Vågen / Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Millions of Americans who participate in sport—particularly coaches—are facing up to the fact that, in addition to their unavoidable daily felonies, they now commit at least three “safe guarding” violations a day. The sanctions for being accused of a single safe guarding violation can include being banned from working or operating your business, and being placed on a public blacklist alongside convicted sex offenders.

The US Center for SafeSport is the national sport safe guarding organization under the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act. This legislation emerged from the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal at USA Gymnastics in the mid-2010s. President Trump signed it into law during his first term. Nominally a 501(c)3, the Center has broad, unreviewable authority to write and enforce policies that apply to over 11 million American sportspeople.

The Center recently released the results of its first National Coaches Survey. The section on “Boundary Violating Coach Behavior” shows how far the Center has deviated from its original mandate to protect youth athletes from sexual predators, and how untethered it is from the actual practice of coaching and the coach-athlete relationship.

The most common “boundary violating” behavior is “[i]nitiating a hug with an athlete.” The third-most common is “[b]ecoming close with a youth athlete’s family (if no previous friendship existed).” Further down the list are “[t]ouching an athlete’s body to adjust their athletic stance or position without asking permission,” “[g]iving gifts or special attention to an athlete,” and communicating with an athlete—youth or adult—”outside of official team channels.”

In short, coaching is a boundary violating behavior for coaches.

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Dr. Paul Gamble is a coach and specialist in athlete development. His most recent book is titled Sport Parenting. He says that some of these “boundary crossing” behaviors are not just normal and mundane, but “could equally be considered best practice.”

“In youth development, we speak about the coach-athlete-parent axis as being critical. The coach should invest in building a relationship with the parents and family of the young athlete. Yet according to these guidelines, such practices are a red flag.”

Throughout Three Felonies a Day, Silverglate shows how wire fraud, mail fraud, and making a false statement to a federal official are the catch-all offenses that ensure prosecutors can conjure three felonies from anyone’s daily activities.

“Grooming” plays that role in safe guarding. Boundary violating behaviors are just that because of their “grooming potential.”

The US Center for SafeSport says grooming is:

“the process whereby a person engages in a series or pattern of behaviors with a goal of engaging in sexual misconduct. Grooming is initiated when a person seeks out a minor or vulnerable person. Once selected, offenders will then earn the person’s trust, and potentially the trust of the person’s family, guardian(s), or close personal friends.”

Hence the imprecation not to develop a relationship with the families of youth athletes.

Gift-giving is a quintessential grooming behavior in the sport safe guarding literature. Coaches and athletes who work together for years will experience many birthdays, Christmases, and life milestones together. Being invited to a graduation party or wedding is a common experience as a coach.

At one of my athlete’s weddings, I was at the “coach’s table”: she invited one of her coaches from high school, one from college, and me, from her post-collegiate athletic career.

Each of those relationships would be suspect in the eyes of the US Center for SafeSport. The college coach, though, wouldn’t stand a chance in front of a safe guarding tribunal. Like many female athletes, she babysat her coach’s kids for years—they were actually the ring-bearers at her wedding. No matter: babysitting shows up repeatedly as a sanctionable offense in safe guarding investigations.

The safe guarding industry expects coaches to suppress basic human affection and squelch deeper relationships. “The underlying assumption is that every coach is a potential predator and should be treated as such. Beyond the lack of respect for coaches is a fundamental distrust,” Gamble said.

Even statements by athletes and parents in support of an accused coach have been wielded as evidence of a Svengali-like groomer.

Such definitions and examples of grooming infuriate a former federal criminal defense attorney who has represented clients on charges of child pornography and other sex-related offenses. This attorney requested anonymity because they are involved in sport law and fear professional repercussions for speaking against the safe guarding narrative.

“It’s so insulting to those who are actually being groomed. I’ve seen grooming behavior. Sadly, I know what child pornography actually looks like. To put the same sort of labels on this sort of sport behavior insults the victims of real crime,” they said.

“I find repulsive the way people use the word ‘grooming’ because it completely devalues the term. It has a real use, but we’re losing sight of it in this unwarranted application of it to everything.”

Silverglate includes a chapter on how prosecutors manipulate federal law to go after criminal defense attorneys zealously advocating for their clients. These situations squeeze attorneys between their ethical duty to their client and the threat of prison time. As one prosecution of a defense attorney played out, Silverglate writes, “Lawyers across the country had that sinking feeling: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’”

Many coaches, myself included, say the same thing and feel they are on borrowed time. Many others have already left the profession.

The safe guarding system is “driving out any coach who is conscientious,” the former defense attorney said. “They don’t want to put themselves at risk of a public accusation, investigation, and suspension for doing what they know to be the right thing to do. But they’re also not going to perform at a subpar level as a coach because of malformed rules.

“The coaches we are going to lose are the ones who say ‘If I can’t take care of my athlete, I don’t want to coach. And I’m not going to coach if doing so puts me at risk.’”

Gamble, the sport development expert, agrees. “The consequences are profound. The risk-reward calculus no longer makes sense for coaches. We can expect more to walk away rather than risk their reputation, career and life for the sake of coaching sport.”

Athletes, of all ages and competitive levels, will bear the consequences of this attrition.

Gamble cites research that concluded “closeness is one of four key pillars of a successful and healthy coach-athlete relationship.” What “closeness” means and what is appropriate differs between youth and adult athletes. But by conflating “innocuous interactions (that would equally be argued to be examples of best practice) alongside clearcut instances of abuse,” the US Center for SafeSport is not marking out boundaries as much as it is erecting barriers.

Silverglate recognizes that lawyers, in general, and criminal defense attorneys in particular are not the most sympathetic characters. Their work “is often derided by laymen, until they find themselves in trouble and suddenly need the advice of a lawyer upon whose loyalty they can count.”

Coaches don’t suffer from lawyers’ PR problem, yet—as Gamble notes, the safe guarding industry is doing us no favors. But most people don’t know the role that coaches can play, and should be allowed to play, in their athletes’ lives. Shared hours of physically and psychologically demanding work inspires a level of trust and openness that rarely happens in a classroom, work place, or social setting.

The anti-social policies enacted during COVID made clear to many coaches that sport training is only a small part of what we do. I realized that I was the only non-family adult that some of my youth athletes regularly interacted with.

That value only emerges from the little moments in the relationship, like giving the athlete a book he might like, and picking up breakfast while giving him a ride home after practice.

Forget the daily tally: that’s three safe guarding violations before 9am.

I’ll never forget where I was when the “three safe guarding violations a day” framing came to my mind. I was sitting at the top of the steps leading to the Santa Maria in Aracoeli Basilica in Rome, just behind the Victor Emmanuele II monument, looking out over the rooftops towards St. Peter’s in the moonlight.

Two of my teenage players were in front of the basilica, taking pictures, and one was FaceTiming a family friend.

About an hour earlier, around 9 pm, I was in the lobby of the hotel our team was staying at when one of those players asked if I would chaperone her to a newsstand so she could buy an Italian women’s soccer magazine. I told her of course, just find another player to go with us. She did, we went down the street, but the nearest tabacchi was closed. So we walked a bit to the next one, also closed. We kept walking, and before long we were within sight of the Vatican walls. I asked, “Have you guys seen St. Peter’s Square yet?” “No.” “Want to?” “YES!”

Four hours of walking, pictures, gelato, pastries, browsing stores, souvenir shopping, and countless civilizational treasures later, we returned to the hotel around 1am, without ever finding the magazine. While we were out, one of the player’s dad, back at the hotel, texted her: “Where are you?” “Out with [other player] and George” “Cool”

(continued below)

Sitting on those steps, I laughed at all the safe guarding rules and best practices I was violating on that trip. Not because I was violating them (well, a little), but because they—and the people who wrote them—are so insensible to the realities of coaching.

Of the two players on the late night walkabout, I had always had difficulty getting through to one of them. We didn’t conflict. We just didn’t click. Since that night, we are a team within the team.

As much as I fought this adage for much of my career, I can no longer discount it after that night: They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

More importantly, those players may not remember me a month after one of us leaves the club, and I can guarantee that years from now they won’t remember the games we played or the training sessions we had in Rome.

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But they will remember that night.

Gazing over Rome, I thought to myself: If I’m to be crucified, there’s no better place for it.

NB: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org and I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.

Cover photo: Minda Haas via Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

It would be like an expansion team signing a full squad of Hall of Famers, in their prime, as free agents.

My naivete / ignorance about cancellation led me to underestimate two things.

First, the enduring stigma of a moral panic (or three). One of my hoped-for BoD members told me that if I put this team together, it would ensure no one else would ever take my calls. He said that about two years ago. He recently had his first job interview since his cancellation over five years ago.

Second, the even-greater endurance of the trauma of cancellation. Looking back, none of them (of the ones I had direct contact with) were ready to get back in the game. Some were just getting out of the “leave their house and be seen in public” stage. As another prospective BoD member put it, “It’s been over seven years since my career ended publicly. Prior to that, I’d have thought you’d absorb the hit, reload and move on. If someone couldn’t do that, they probably had other issues or lacked inner strength. It couldn’t take that long. I understand things very differently now.”

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Even though I knew right from my first two phone calls with canceled people—the calls that started it all for me—the devastating effects of being canceled, I thought that, with time, they’d all get back to where they belong.

Probably in the back of my head somewhere was the idea that my Board of the Damned would be the Galt’s Gulch of sport. A refuge for those who had been rejected by and exiled from an irrational society. But instead of an autarky in a valley, where only the members would benefit from each other’s work, we’d be at the forefront of the sports industry, on both the business and performance sides of the house.

The idea of Galt’s Gulch in Atlas Shrugged entrances many idealistic young readers. It’s a beautiful and noble alternative to the standard binary of a struggling, starving, unappreciated-in-her-own-lifetime artisan and the popular, widely acclaimed, crassly commercialized sell-out. Only a few dozen people will ever see your work in the Gulch, but they truly value it, and you can truly value theirs.

I always thought of it as an inspiring plot device in an idealistic novel that offers a way to live in the real world—until a cancelled author of dystopian fiction told me: “It’s sweet, but it’s fantasy.”

She’s right, and I’d missed it in the decades I’ve been (re)reading that book.

Galt’s Gulch makes Atlas Shrugged a fantasy novel. Without this idea that all the prime movers and men of integrity are alive and whole somewhere the world cannot touch them, Atlas Shrugged would be dystopic. The lights would go out in New York City, trains would strand passengers in the desert when they weren’t colliding in tunnels, and society would collapse: everything that happens to the outside world in the book, but with no one spared the consequences.

But even that permits some hope: maybe a few of the heroes, or people like them, survived and they would be the forebears of civilization’s rebirth.

Perhaps inspired by my conversation with this author, a fully dystopic fan fic quickly came together in my head.

Instead of the men and women of the mind inexplicably abandoning their jobs and disappearing, they were all canceled—publicly, brutally, totally. In this version, there’s no mystery about why they disappeared. Dagny doesn’t need to find the mysterious “destroyer” who was snatching them away from their desks. We know who the destroyer is: a cancel mob. But she still needs to find them. Less “Who is John Galt?”, more “Whatever happened to...?” and “Where are they now?”

Her pursuit ends not in an idyllic Valhalla-in-a-valley, but at a mass grave: all the canceled people she had lost and sought had committed suicide or died deaths of despair. Instead of John Galt being the first person she sees when she opens her eyes in the valley, his is the bottom-most corpse, the first to go (or would it be more brutal if he was on top of the pile, and she missed her chance to save him by near minutes?).

Considering how regularly cancelled people talk to me about their thoughts of suicide, in addition to the suicides that I know of and the deaths of despair that I suspect, my dystopic version is closer to reality than Rand’s fantasy.

On the plus side, my version will end without a 100-page philosophical discourse thinly cloaked as a monologue.

Costs of cancelation still coming due for the rest of us

Galt’s Gulch is an effective plot device because it lets Rand show the world as it could be (life in the valley) contrasted to the world without the “good guys”; and how the gap between the two widens with each successive Atlas who shrugs, that is, each person of integrity who walks away. Rand patiently shows how the bridges don’t all collapse at once: the consequences of losing them build from daily inconveniences to national catastrophes. Instead of wrestling with the “seen and unseen,” she shows us both.

The Gulch is the common answer for two questions that create the mystery of the first two parts of the book: Why are all these people disappearing, and why is everything going to s—t?

Many people today are asking the second question. To be fair, every generation, upon reaching a certain age, feels compelled and qualified to ask that question. But rarely has there been such a cull of talent and ability as we’ve seen over the last 10–15 years of cancellations. When you start thinking of how many people we’ve lost to cancellations, that second question is much more justified and answerable.

By definition, you don’t get canceled based on performance. Quite the opposite: you get canceled for everything but.

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Talk about a widening gap between what could have been and what is. Someone gets to where they are based on ability. They get canceled because of a moral panic (or three, I can’t say that enough given the importance of the year 2020 to my work). Their successor is necessarily no better, and likely not as good.

This applies to everything from a middle manager to the CEO, a solopreneur or a head coach, which novelist gets a publishing deal and which artist gets a show.

It’s the broken window fallacy applied to jobs and lives. We’re not better off because now the replacement has those opportunities. We’re significantly worse off because we’ve destroyed one career and life, and they’re not coming back, and we’ve replaced them with less. A less capable coach, less enriching books on the shelves, more bland and blase shows to attend or stream.

We are all worse off because of cancelations.

I recognized this several years before I started researching and writing about cancellations. For some reason, one in particular—also from 2020—stood out to me as, my God, what a waste. What an absolute tragic waste. I thought the word “tragic” at the time not in reference to her, because I had no idea what cancellation actually did to the targets. I used it in reference to all of us as consumers and as society. Her company, her industry, and, at some level, all of us are poorer for having lost her.

She was also on my Board of the Damned, even though to this day I’ve not had any contact with her.

Lowering expectations in a canceled world

“Where are they now?” is another way of asking “What have we done?”

The resident heroes of Rand’s valley all have “day jobs” in the outside world, jobs outside of their real profession and well below their level of ability. Low skill, easily replaceable, often menial jobs. “[T]he kind of job that the world wishes me to hold,” Galt says.

Many canceled people are closer to the station in life that their cancellers wish them to hold than to where they were before—or where they should, and would otherwise, be. That’s true years after they were taken out.

Even today, I still sometimes find myself cheerleading a canceled person to get back in the game, whatever that might mean for them.

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Part of that is a sense of justice and rightness: they belong, at the very least, back where they were, if not a few steps ahead. I can’t stand the fact that each of their cancel mobs won. But just as much is pure self-interest: I want whatever it is they used to put out into the world. I want to watch top athletes and learn from their coaches, attend great events, read stimulating and creative books, watch shows that I actually remember a month later (and maybe even use as a starting point for an article).

Those creations and their creators were stolen and destroyed by the cancel mobs.

“They have no idea of the harm. They think I had a job for 20 years, and then I just didn’t have a job,” said the second prospective BoD member from earlier.

Most of what you’ll read at this site and in anything else I write will center on the question “What have we done to the canceled?” But a complete understanding of the consequences of cancellation and what cancellation can teach us about the human experience requires asking “What have we done to ourselves?” Cancellation is so deeply human because it entangles so many interactions between the individual and the social.

Answering that question is also essential for getting normies to care about this phenomenon enough to approach these stories with an open mind, and perhaps even read, subscribe, upgrade their subscription to paid, and buy anything that I produce in the coming years.

I no longer think about assembling my sports industry Board of the Damned. There are the two recognitions I wrote at the beginning. But it’s also because my work and ambitions in the realm of cancellation have supplanted many of my goals and plans in sports business (kinda taken over my life, tbqh).

Funnily enough, though, I’m still cold-contacting and talking to many of the same people; and, many times, connecting them with each other.

Only instead of coming together as a board, they’re my sources and subjects. And, for each other, support.

Walter Pichler has spent much of his life racing under the gun. Literally. He is an Olympic medalist in the biathlon, and won several national championships in the ski-and-shoot sport for his native country of West Germany (plus a few more in cross-country skiing). After retiring as an athlete, he coached the national biathlon teams for the United States and the United Kingdom, then coached at an elite Nordic sports center in Austria. He and his wife now live in Montana.

Today, he’s once again under the gun, in a race with much graver stakes than Olympic glory.

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In 2024, an Associated Press reporter confronted Pichler with allegations made by Joan Wilder, a Team USA biathlete from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Pichler unequivocally denied the accusation to the AP reporter. He knew something further was amiss when the AP article came out several weeks later.

The article cited Wilder’s complaint to the US Center for SafeSport that Pichler assaulted her after “the team went out one night” in 1990.

However, contrary to the AP’s reporting, the Center’s records reveal that Wilder could not pin down the incident to a single year. The Center investigated Wilder’s claim that Pichler entered her “hotel room uninvited and laid on top of [her] and told her he could help her win medals” in either November 1989 or November 1990.

“If there was a party, it wasn’t 1990,” Pichler recalls. “The party was only in 1989.”

How could he be so sure?

Like most Germans of his generation, Pichler knows where he was and what he was doing on November 9, 1989. That’s the day the Berlin Wall came down.

He was in the United States training with a group of American biathletes. One evening, after a day of training, “we were having dinner and suddenly on the news they were saying East Germany opened the borders, and people were coming into the West in a big party. The team and the coaches all said we have to celebrate this. So we celebrated it!”

Elite athletes at a training camp just a few months before their competitive season normally don’t party particularly hard. Needless to say, this was an exception, and the high spirits continued throughout the remainder of camp.

The following November, Pichler was again in the United States with the top American biathletes. But this time, he was their coach. History and geopolitics did not deliver any reasons for celebration, and the camp was much more workmanlike.

Several of the athletes the US Center for SafeSport interviewed as part of the investigation remembered participating in, or hearing about, the party on the night the Berlin Wall fell. None recalled a similar night of partying or drinking in November 1990. One said there is no way the coaching staff—with Pichler as head coach—would have allowed a party that year.

The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 2017 designated the Center as the national sport safeguarding organization. The Act gives the Center nearly total, unreviewable discretion to define its jurisdiction, set its policies, conduct its investigations, and impose and enforce sanctions. Over 11 million Americans are subject to the Center’s authority. But that is an undercount, partly because of a clause at work here. The Center explicitly rejects any statutes of limitations or time bars, which is how they could take jurisdiction over an event that allegedly occurred more than 25 years before its own existence.

Under the SafeSport Code, the Center applies a “preponderance of the evidence” standard—the “more likely than not,” 51% rule— to any allegation.

After an 11-month investigation, the Center found that there was insufficient evidence to support Wilder’s claim, and that Pichler did not violate the SafeSport Code or relevant law.

This is an exceedingly rare outcome. Since 2017, only 1.7% of the Center’s investigations have ended with a finding of “no violation.” By comparison, 17% of federal criminal defendants who choose to go to trial instead of taking a plea deal (a small minority, to be fair) are acquitted.

Pichler accordingly remains eligible to work in sports. On paper, he is in the same good standing as anyone else. But in terms of his reputation and marketability, he is far from whole. The day after the Associated Press ran their article, the ski manufacturer Kästle ended their two-year consultancy contract with Pichler. A few months later, a new high-performance biathlon club in Montana extended to Pichler the opportunity to work with them. They soon retracted the offer after some prospective members of the club pointed to the top search results for Pichler’s name. He has been unable to find work in sport since.

“My name is damaged forever,” Pichler said. “I’m very disturbed. I’m mentally on the edge. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

And it could get much worse.

While the Center’s investigation was underway, teenage filmmaker Cameron Kirkegaard made a documentary rehashing the allegations against Pichler. The film, which was partially funded by a grant from the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media, has had only one public screening. That was in October, one month before the Center issued their Notice of Decision. Kirkegaard did not respond to request for comment on whether he would update or in some way edit his film to reflect the US Center for SafeSport’s determination.

A second screening that had been scheduled for mid-January was cancelled pending a legal review. However, that appears to be complete. The film was recently shown at a film festival in Colorado, with another screening scheduled for the end of February.

That screening will be the launch event for a full public release.

Had the Center ruled against Pichler, he would be formally banned, publicly blacklisted, and everyone would know about it. The Center is required by law to “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of adults who are barred by the Center.” This clause has devastated innumerable lives of American sportspeople, and is without precedent or comparison.

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But for Pichler and the few others in his situation, there is no parallel “white list.”

Since receiving his Notice of Decision, Pichler has pleaded with the Center to issue a statement or press release announcing the result of their investigation—anything “official” that can counter the AP’s reporting and the documentary. The Center told Pichler that they do not have any way to publicize those investigations that clear sports people of the allegations against them. The only thing they have is the blacklist, the Centralized Disciplinary Database, so “there wouldn’t be a place for us to be able to publish this information.”

The Associated Press has refused to update their December 2024 reporting with the fact that the Center cleared him of the very allegations contained within that article.

Cancelled individuals often say that they just want something they can give people that will provide the full story. That could be the relevant context of a misinterpreted act or statement; or, as in Pichler’s case, the most recent development, one that upends the entire narrative that precedes it.

A press release or even a social media post from the investigative body would satisfy Pichler and many others like him. To avoid the “Streisand Effect,” where fighting a narrative ends up amplifying it, the Center could ask each cleared individual if they would like a public statement of the outcome.

Media, social media, and search engines do the heavy lifting of cancellations. Institutions like the US Center for SafeSport—or Title IX tribunals, for another—give cancellations an official-looking stamp and formalize the reputation destruction.

There would be wide-ranging benefits if these institutions provided some mechanism of reputational recourse for individuals whom they clear of wrongdoing. Such a statement would provide a modicum of transparency and balance for these feared, opaque, and quasi-judicial power centers. It would help hold the media accountable, testing their professed commitment to the truth and pursuing a story to its end.

For the person involved, public proof of vindication could be valuable during a suit for defamation, tortious interference, or intentional infliction of emotional distress; or in the course of a job interview or simple conversation.

More significantly, it returns to them some level of control over their reputation and, by extension, their future. That’s more than hope—it can be a lifeline.

Related:

• No ‘Morning After’ for Victims of Cancellation (Reality’s Last Stand)

• First draft, final word: Cancelation, narrative foreclosure, and counter-narrative (Abuse of Process)

• Unsafe in Any Sport: The Constitutional and Structural Failure of the U.S. Center for SafeSport (Colorado Law Student Scholars)

• Congress’s Sex Abuse Enforcement Body Nailed For Fraud, Pattern Of Misconduct (The Federalist)

Photo credit: Fredrik Rubensson / Flickr, under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Below are two excerpts from his article, with some commentary from me peppering the second. The first is from his “origin story” on the topic of SafeSport.

The second is on a matter of constitutional law that has allowed the courts to prop up the US Center for SafeSport for the last few years. The main case in question, Navarro v. U.S. Ctr. for SafeSport, had oral arguments at the United States Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in December, and is awaiting the court’s ruling. The precedent at the center of that controversy, San Francisco Arts & Athletics, Inc. v. United States Olympic Committee (1986), is one that I’ve written about elsewhere, and I’ll take this chance to advance a few points that I haven’t put into article form yet.

Matt’s article is long but very readable, even for non-legal types (i.e., normies), so I encourage you to download it and give it a read.

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Excerpts edited for clarity: full court citations and footnotes removed, additional paragraph breaks inserted.

MR: I started figure skating in 2005 at the age of nine. In my career I have been lucky enough to train with some of the most decorated coaches in the world, compete at five national championships, and coach some of the best students I could have asked for. I have personally never been the subject of a SafeSport investigation, and yet my experience as a skater can be divided into a pre-SafeSport time and a post-SafeSport time.

Through my time in figure skating, I saw a culture that gravely needed oversight and reckoning. Despite the hope I felt about the change SafeSport would bring to the skating world and all U.S. sports, I was angered and disappointed with the results.

During my long presence in the sport, I saw a huge shift in culture in 2019 from one where each rink quietly dealt with their drama on their own to one where incidents were sensationalized in the media and formerly private figures were targeted by malicious actors on the internet.

The main catalyst for this was the suicide of John Coughlin, a pairs skater who took his life after a media firestorm around his SafeSport investigation.

The Coughlin case is controversial. Discussing it risks reopening old wounds, but avoiding it would be dishonest. It was a defining moment in SafeSport’s history, one of the earliest tests of how it handles the area between accusation and reputation, and, due to SafeSport’s broad confidentiality measures, one of the only ones with public information readily available.

After I retired from competitive skating, I proudly helped build a skating community as a coach. I soon saw my community be greatly affected and harmed by the actions of SafeSport.

Through my first two years in law school I have interviewed former skaters and parents of skaters and skating-adjacent parties in order to ascertain their experiences with the culture of skating and the SafeSport system. In addition, I have discussed SafeSport’s system for protecting victims with constitutional law professors, sexual assault investigators, and civil procedure experts. What I found, and what this article argues, is that SafeSport, though designed to protect athletes, now exercises quasi-judicial power without the procedural safeguards or public accountability necessary for legitimate governance.

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Navarro v. U.S. Center for SafeSport relied heavily on San Francisco Arts and Athletics v. USOC.

San Francisco Arts and Athletics held that the USOC was not a state actor, reasoning that its congressional charter and statutory rights—specifically, exclusive control over the word “Olympic”—did not amount to government control or delegation of a public function.

But that case involved a limited trademark dispute, an issue with no bearing on SafeSport’s quasi-adjudicative role. That distinction matters.

As the Supreme Court emphasized in Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974), the state action doctrine applies only when a private actor’s specific conduct is fairly attributable to the state and implicates constitutional rights.

The court in Navarro adopted SFAA’s reasoning without grappling with the fact that SafeSport, unlike the USOC, exercises adjudicative authority over individuals pursuant to a congressionally mandated scheme. It also neglected to engage with the entwinement analysis articulated in Brentwood, which recognizes that even absent formal government creation or direct control, sustained entanglement with public actors and delegated authority over public functions can render a nominally private entity a state actor.

GP: The Center, its lawyers, and safeguarding advocates would argue that nothing the Center does “implicates constitutional rights.” There is no right to participate in sport, they argue. Even if there was, that would not apply here.

The Center, their argument goes, moderates membership and eligibility decisions for private entities: the USOPC and the national governing bodies. No one has a constitutional right to belong to any private organization. Membership in any organization is a privilege, not a right—a phrase you will see and hear repeatedly from the Center and its preferred external counsel.

MR: The Navarro court failed to distinguish SafeSport’s unique role from the broader administration of amateur sports.

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By framing its adjudicative authority as merely another form of “coordination,” the opinion ignored the reality that SafeSport performs a congressionally delegated public function: imposing binding, government endorsed disciplinary sanctions that determine access to Olympic and Paralympic sport.

In Lebron, the Court made clear that what matters is not how the entity is described, but whether it serves public ends under the direction or influence of the government, a standard that SafeSport clearly meets.

Navarro ignored the practical reality that SafeSport operates as the final arbiter of eligibility in Olympic and Paralympic sports, a role with profound reputational and economic consequences. While SafeSport is nominally private, its statutory mandate, exclusive disciplinary jurisdiction, and control over a public-facing registry of alleged abusers place it squarely within the state action doctrine under Lebron. It is not merely coordinating amateur sports, but administering federally authorized, coercive discipline, with public consequences and no alternative forum.

GP: POSIWID is a systems theory principle, not a legal one. But it should be. The purpose of a system is what it does. POSIWID.

The US Center for SafeSport investigates and adjudicates claims of wrong-doing; and, if they determine that a violation occurred, they deprive both the respondent (i.e., the accused) and the other 11 million Americans under the Center’s jurisdiction of certain liberty interests.

The SafeSport Code prohibits anyone covered by the Code from knowingly engaging in any sort of sport-related activity with someone that the Center has suspended. That abrogates the right to contract for both the respondent and anyone who may wish to hire, contract with, or otherwise transact with that person. Any extant relationships are, effectively, rendered null and void. Parties to a contract with a suspended individual must immediately breach that contract, or risk being sanctioned themselves, even if both parties mutually and voluntarily wish to maintain the relationship.

By listing people on the Centralized Disciplinary Database, the Center causes irreparable harm to their reputation. While reputation has fallen far down the hierarchy of individual rights, there are common law traditions that assert that individuals have either a property interest or a liberty interest in their reputation. The Center’s public blacklisting impairs one’s right to their reputation regardless of whether you argue from liberty or property.

These are the unavoidable, inevitable, and provable consequences of the Center executing its authority and mission under the Ted Stevens Act and the SafeSport Code.

Whatever else the Center does or does not do with regards to safe guarding American athletes or simply moderating eligibility decisions for private entities, infringing on rights is what it does.

MR: SafeSport matches all three factors from Lebron. It was designated and empowered by Congress, tasked with enforcing public norms around athlete protection, and remains under active congressional supervision through oversight hearings, funding structures, and statutory reporting obligations.

This is a far cry from the circumstances in NCAA v. Tarkanian (1988), a case where the Supreme Court declined to find state action because the NCAA operated independently of any statutory framework, exercised no exclusive public function, and was not created or controlled by the government. SafeSport, by contrast, was empowered by federal statute and operates as the sole adjudicator of abuse complaints within Olympic and Paralympic sports.

SafeSport’s power to issue binding suspensions, publicize misconduct findings, and determine eligibility across the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic movement closely resembles the kind of public functional government control described in Lebron: a congressionally empowered entity serving public ends and operating under continuing federal oversight. While most competitions themselves may be privately organized, SafeSport’s congressionally delegated authority effectively controls access to the entire national amateur sports system, leaving no practical alternative for affected athletes. This is fundamentally different from the passive promotional role at issue in SFAA v. USOC.

GP: One paragraph from the SFAA decision should start the wrecking ball swinging at the entire edifice of the US Center for SafeSport:

“This Court also has found action to be governmental action when the challenged entity performs functions that have been ‘traditionally the exclusive prerogative’ of the Federal Government... Neither the conduct nor the coordination of amateur sports has been a traditional governmental function.”

Few actions are as traditionally exclusive to the government as curtailing individual rights in response to a determination of wrong-doing.

Moreover, this is a function that cannot be delegated. Neither the legislative nor the executive branches can delegate functions that are the sole remit of their co-equal, the judicial branch.

Even if the Center offered the full suite of due process rights that we afford to defendants in criminal and civil courts, its actions would still be constitutionally impermissible. The ability to curtail individual rights is exclusively the function of the government.

MR: SafeSport itself has cited a case called Behagen v. Amateur Basketball Association of the U.S. (10th Cir. 1989), to argue that the Center is a private actor not subject to constitutional constraints. In Behagen, the Tenth Circuit held that the Amateur Basketball Association (a National Governing Body subordinate to the USOC, henceforth ABA) was not a state actor for constitutional purposes. The court reasoned that because the [USOC], which certifies NGBs, was itself not a governmental entity under [SFAA], it followed that a subordinate organization like the ABA could not be one either.

Both the SafeSport Code and arbitral appeals [invoke] Behagen’s reasoning to conclude that SafeSport, like the USOC and NGBs, performs only private functions. However, this posture offers no recognition of SafeSport’s unique statutory origins or its binding disciplinary authority, which includes the power to bar individuals from participation in federally recognized sport.

By lumping SafeSport together with the entities it was created to oversee, this argument misapplies precedent and ignores the significant state action concerns raised in Lebron and Brentwood.

GP: The “lumping” is even shallower than that. The US Center for SafeSport is statutorily independent of the USOPC. But because said statute encompasses the USOPC, the NGBs, and the Center under Section 36 Chapter 2205 of the United States Code, the Center’s advocates argue that court rulings that apply to one of those entities automatically apply to another.

As Paul Sherman, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, tweeted on a different matter:

“The Constitution doesn’t care what section of the state code a law is in, it cares what it does.”

MR: The analogy to Behagen, a case concerning an NGB acting under USOC certification, ignores SafeSport’s unique structural role: it is not merely a participant within the Olympic hierarchy, but a federally empowered regulator of that system, tasked with policing misconduct on behalf of Congress. The ABA functioned as a National Governing Body operating under the oversight of the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) which the Supreme Court has explicitly held is not a government actor.

By contrast, Congress authorized and empowered SafeSport to investigate and discipline both the USOC and its NGBs as an independent oversight body.

By analogizing itself to a subordinate NGB like the ABA, SafeSport invites a legal framing that undermines its own institutional narrative of oversight and independence. It cannot simultaneously claim to be a watchdog over the Olympic movement and also functionally within it when seeking immunity from constitutional oversight. While the USOC itself is not a state actor, SafeSport’s analogy to USOC-certified NGBs underscores its structural entanglement with the very system it was created to regulate.

This entanglement amplifies, rather than excuses, its need for Constitutional accountability.

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SafeSport cannot have it both ways. It cannot simultaneously claim the moral authority of an independent oversight body while invoking analogies that position it as a subordinate in the Olympic hierarchy.

Its statutory origins, exclusive authority, and public consequences make it a textbook example of a private actor performing a publicly delegated regulatory function, precisely the scenario the Court ruled on in Lebron and Brentwood.

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Congress authorized SafeSport to solve a crisis of accountability. By insulating it from constitutional review, it has replaced one form of unaccountable power (NGBs) with another. Recognizing state action restores the balance. In its current form, SafeSport’s unchecked authority is shaped less by law and more by the unpredictable forces of public opinion, which in skating is largely funneled through the sport’s rumor-driven media ecosystem.

That sets Matt up for his next section. As you’ll see from the title, it hits straight at the core of my work, laying out how the Center is a vehicle for cancelations:

When Law Fails, Narrative Rules: Media Based Enforcement in the Absence of Due Process

Photo credit: Daniel Huizinga / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.

It gets worse. A few weeks prior, the coach texted her: “Are you 18?”

Between those two messages, amongst others, the athlete thanked the coach for a gift he gave her.

The first two don’t require much creativity to read in the worst way possible. The third might not be a red flag for people unfamiliar with the proscriptions of “safe guarding,” but gift giving is frequently construed as a grooming behavior. The US Center for SafeSport, for example, lists “the exchange of gifts” as a “boundary violating coaching behavior” and a potential element of an “intimate relationship.”

I’m the coach in those texts. In the wrong hands, they end my career and maybe my life. Each is benign. But if truth and context mattered, there wouldn’t be cancelations.

“No Innocent Construction” was the other finalist for the name of this site.

“No innocent construction” is an element of defamation law in many states. It first came to my attention in Brian Holzgrafe’s defamation suit against Daniel Lozier. Holzgrafe was the head men’s and women’s tennis coach at Quincy University in Illinois. Lozier, who had been on the men’s team, accused Holzgrafe of having a sexual relationship with a female tennis player on the team. Illinois defamation law and Illinois Supreme Court precedent hold that a statement, considered in context, is not defamatory per se “if it is reasonably capable of an innocent construction.”

Holzgrafe won the suit, and was awarded $3 million in damages.

Upholding the verdict, a federal judge ruled that there is “no innocent construction” of the accusations Lozier made against Holzgrafe.

Most cancelations turn on statements and actions that have a spectrum of constructions: some innocent, some absurd, some cringe-worthy, some malevolent, some criminal.

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Context normally rules out most of the latter two. But context is more than just what was said before and after the statement in question, or who else was around, where, and when. There’s a cultural context, too, and that is why sports people—coaches in particular—are such easy targets: competitive sporting environments are exclusive, and therefore unknown and truly foreign to most people.

Coaching the person, not the player

Most people’s impressions of coaches are formed by some combination of “Varsity Blues,” “Miracle,” “Ted Lasso,” and their history-teacher-baseball-coach from high school. As someone who has inadvertently become a valuable red cell sounding board recently texted me, “90% of my regrets in life boil down to me not realizing how little consequence there would have actually been if I just told my sports coaches to f--k off when I was a kid.”

Contrast that to a story a friend shared with me:

At the team camp before the 2015 World Championships, I went into the dining hall early one day to work. My roomie for the camp, a full-time employee of the federation, was FaceTiming with one of his athletes who was competing on a different continent before coming to join us. I looked at him like I was going to leave, but he waved me to sit down. I could hear the entire conversation.

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When they were saying goodbye, I heard her say “I love you, best friend.” And he said “I love you, too, best friend.”

Grooming, power imbalance, intimate relationship, Coach Svengali levels of control... Anyone on the outside who heard that call could understandably think the worst, take it to the media or a safe guarding organization, who would make it even worse than that, and use it to end the coach’s career, reputation, and life. If anyone knew that my friend had heard the call and not fulfilled his duty as a mandatory reporter—even if he had nothing more than an ungenerous suspicion based on a fragment of a phone call—they could end him as well.

Here’s the immediate context, which I removed above:

She was distraught—long time on the road, hadn’t competed well, had a huge trip to join us—and then started bawling. He talked her down and they came up with a plan.

And the broader context, given my friend’s decades in elite sport:

I think it was an interaction between two adults who had been working together for years in high stress, lonely circumstances.

It wasn’t a regular occurrence for me, but it wasn’t uncommon, either. I could come up with more than a dozen athletes, men and women, who said “I love you” at some point. Usually post-collegiate athletes, usually getting the shit kicked out of them on the road, sometimes going through extreme family / relational stress.

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Innocent construction vs. absolute malice

A coach sent a player a picture of himself from the waist down, wearing cut-offs with the caption, ‘Joining?’” The player responds “I’ve outgrown my Jean shorts :/ legs too big,” to which the coach replied “Booo.”

About a year earlier, David Huelsman was coaching the Gators’ men’s water polo team. The team was in Providence, Rhode Island, for a competition and was killing time in a thrift store. Someone had the idea that they should all buy pairs of cheap jeans and cut them into jorts to wear on the pool deck before taking the water for their first game. They all did, they all had a laugh, the other teams had a laugh, and it became the sort of silly memory and inside joke that bonds teams together.

The Gainesville (FL) Main Street Daily News omitted this backstory, but did include another uncorroborated jort-related allegation from the player. The article presented a single, extreme construction to lead the readers to a single conclusion.

If someone who was not on the trip had leaked the “jort texts,” someone who didn’t know that everyone on the team participated and everyone at the pool saw the Gators’ jorts (before seeing much more of the Gators when they removed the jorts to begin play in Speedos), their sense of concern might lead them to suspect the worst and take action accordingly.

This would be the standard move from “The Cancel-Your-College-Coach Playbook”: “vague allegations brought forth anonymously, then interpreted in the worst possible light via a steadfast refusal to interrogate context, culture, or professional best practices.”

That is not what happened here. A player who unequivocally knew the truth purposefully gave an absurdly malicious—and, knowing the full context, likely homophobic—version of specific events to the media.

There are two possible constructions of the article itself. First, the journalism student who wrote this article—his third about David Huelsman—is the only person close to the University of Florida men’s water polo team who did not know the backstory behind these texts. Alternatively, he knew and willfully chose to omit it from his reporting, at the expense of the truth and David Huelsman’s career and reputation.

Neither is particularly innocent, but neither would end the reporter’s career as effectively as he ended Huelsman’s.

Chew on this: Cancelations collapse reality

Schroedinger’s Cat is a famous thought experiment in physics, one that reached escape velocity and took hold in pop culture as early as the 1970s.

A cat sits in a sealed box with some radioactive material, and a radiation detector connected to a vial of poison. When the material lets off some radiation, the detector breaks the vial of poison, killing the cat. But radioactive metals don’t decay at a regular, predictable rate. We can not know if the cat is dead unless we open the box. But the lid is also connected to the vial: if you open the box, the cat dies immediately.

So if you take a look, was the cat dead or did you kill it by looking?

A coach who asked to remain anonymous in case of future legal or administrative action told me this story:

“A staff member had this quirk about how it was bad luck to take the last stick of gum in a pack. She once offered me a stick of gum, and when I said, no, thanks, she hesitated. ‘I don’t want to open it, because if there’s only one stick then that’s bad luck for me.’

“I said, ‘If you were given a pack of gum that might or might not have one stick in it, the gum would exist in a state of existence and non-existence at exactly the same time. It would be Schrodinger’s Gum.’ Some time later, I put some paperwork on her desk along with a pack of gum with a Post-It note that said ‘Schrodinger’s Gum.’

“That came out in the university’s investigation into me. They confronted me with it, looking for some sexual interpretation of it. ‘What did you mean by this?’ It’s a joke, I said. Schrodinger’s Gum.

“’I have no idea what that means.’

“Erwin Schrodinger. The German physicist.

“’I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

“Well, it’s one of the most famous thought experiments in all of science. It’s about this cat in a box, and he’s alive or not until there’s a deterministic event.”

“’I’ve never heard of that.’

“She got on my case, and I said ‘How is it possible that you’ve never heard of that? I just don’t understand how you don’t know who Erwin Schrodinger is. How is it you’re this stupid?’ Yes, I was being a bit of a dick and I probably shouldn’t have said it because it pissed her off, but come on.”

This incident happened while this coach’s cancelation was still in the “internal inquest” stage, before the media took over. He had some sense of the distortion and disconnection from reality involved in such incidents. But things hit differently in the first person. “At that moment, it became clear to me how batshit things were. One of the reasons I pushed back was my disbelief that this could be a thing.”

Schrodinger used his cat not to explain how the universe works, but to expose the contradictions and absurdities that had gained traction in his field of quantum theory.

Schrodinger’s Gum does both: it illustrates how cancelations work by exemplifying uncontested absurdities and irrationality. This coach’s inquisitors could not conceive of an innocent construction because they couldn’t process his words at face value. They lacked all context, so they presumed malevolence. Their ignorance was proof of his guilt.

Quantum of solace

“Why them and not me?” is the fundamental question of survivor’s guilt.

The vast majority of coaches—myself included—have done the vast majority of what got other coaches canceled.

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Let’s return to the texts from the beginning of this article. “my hips are so tight/sore” “Are you 18?” “thanks for the gift”

The day before her hips were “so tight/sore,” we did a training session with a high volume of new exercises, emphasizing eccentric muscle activity in the adductors. She is a centerback in soccer, a position that requires kicking the ball 40+ yards repeatedly during a game, so this was highly specific training. For additional context, we did the training outdoors, mid-morning, at a public school’s track next to a fire station: lots of old people walking laps, and a building full of burly, sworn-to-protect men.

“Are you 18?” Yes, she was. That meant I could use a guest pass for her later that week at the gym I belong to, in order to introduce her to some weight-lifting exercises and techniques she would likely see in college and when playing professionally.

As for the gift, a high school graduation present.

Three texts, three innocent constructions.

Why did I not get canceled for them, while so many other coaches were canceled for similar things? Why do I still get to have these rich and rewarding experiences, and they don’t?

Is it simply because this athlete and I (and now you beautiful, understanding people) were the only ones to read these texts?

Maybe others did, and even if they were unsure and had a bit of side-eye, they gave them an innocent construction because they know me, her, and what the coach-athlete relationship really is.

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Schrodinger wasn’t comfortable with some of the conclusions of quantum theory. His colleague Albert Einstein didn’t like some of its implications. “God does not play dice with the universe,” the latter wrote.

Part of maturing as a sports person is recognizing the role of random chance—luck—against the backdrop of rigorous preparation. Coaches accept that a fluke goal or a freak injury can determine your season, or whether you keep or get a job. Tragically, we now rely on luck to not get canceled for doing our job by people who know nothing about our job and the relationships it entails and requires.

Every act of coaching has become another roll of the dice.

I’ll keep doing it until my luck runs out.

Related:

• The Cancel-Your-College-Coach Playbook (James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal)

• Call Her Lawyer: Costs of Cancelation Rising for the Accusers (The American Thinker)

• First draft, final word: Cancelation, narrative foreclosure, and counter-narrative (Abuse of Process)

Photo credit: From The Garden of Schrodinger’s Cats, Jeroen van Luin / Flickr under CC BY 2.0.