First draft, final word: Cancelation, narrative foreclosure, and counter-narrative

If an accusation is newsworthy, an exoneration deserves at least an edit. Counter-narratives are the hope for canceled people experiencing narrative foreclosure.

Journalists gratify themselves by saying they write “the first rough draft of history.” Few feel any obligation to revise their drafts, contribute to the refinement of history, or even to recognize the mistakes that inevitably populate any first draft. They leave it to others to revise, update, contextualize and, as necessary, discard those early drafts in pursuit of a more record of what happened.

Most people, though, won’t warrant an historian’s attention. If they’re in the news, that first rough draft becomes their public history by default.

When that news is an accusation, it becomes their epitaph, underscoring the narrative foreclosure that many canceled people endure.

Each of the individuals below was fully cleared by the tribunal chosen by their accuser. Whatever my thoughts about the US Center for SafeSport, the criminal justice system (if you haven’t watched HBO’s The Night Of, do so), or campus Title IX investigations, the accusers chose these venues, which adds a level of poignancy to the outcome.

For two of them—biathlon coach Walter Pichler and a coach we’ll call “Donald”—you wouldn’t know that if you searched for their name, or went looking for updates to the articles that reported on the accusations against them. Their public stories ended with each devastating first draft.

The third, water polo coach David Huelsman, experienced an unusual sequence of events. Between being fired and being canceled, Huelsman was cleared by the University of Florida’s Title IX office over a complaint he knew nothing about until his cancelation was underway.

Fire and forget

From the US Center for SafeSport’s opening in 2017 through December 31, 2024, the Center accepted jurisdiction over 12,287 complaints—about half of the total number of complaints they received. Only 214 of those resulted in a finding of no violation: 1.7%.

By comparison, in 2022, 17% of the federal criminal defendants who went to trial were acquitted (please note that the vast majority don’t go to trial).

Walter Pichler has spent most of his life in rare territory. Pichler won a bronze medal in biathlon at the 1984 Winter Olympics, competing for a country that no longer exists in a country that no longer exists (West Germany and Yugoslavia, respectively). He won over a dozen West German national championships, and was one of the youngest ever national team coaches when he took over the US team in 1990. He went on to coach the United Kingdom’s men’s and women’s biathlon teams. Pichler then coached at an elite winter sport training center in Austria for six years before serving as head of Nordic sports for three years.

Recently, and with much less fanfare and much less joy, he became part of that 1.7%.

An Associated Press reporter called Pichler in November 2024 to ask him a few questions about biathlon. After a handful of introductory questions, the reporter asked Pichler if he knew that he was being accused of sexual harassment. Not only was that the first Pichler had heard of it: it was before the US Center for SafeSport officially heard about it.

The Center received the complaint against Pichler from former biathlete Joan Wilder (the subsequent article identified her by name) on December 5: after Wilder had sent the AP reporter down the trail. One week after Wilder filed her complaint with the Center, the AP published the article, which meant it appeared in dozens of media outlets that republish the AP’s content, from PBS on down to local newspapers. The day after the article was published on December 11, Kästle—a leading ski manufacturer—terminated Pichler’s consultant contract, effective immediately, after a two-year relationship.

The Center took the case in January 2025, and conducted interviews between April and September.

During that time, a nascent elite biathlon club in Bozeman, MT, asked Pichler to present a strategic plan for the club. He contacted the US Center for SafeSport to verify that he was permitted to have even such minimal interaction with a sports organization while under investigation. Good to go, the Center told him, because he was not under a temporary suspension. However, he still was canceled: people associated with this (and rival) clubs googled him and raised the issue until the club withdrew the offer.

While this was going on, Colorado filmmaker Cameron Kirkegaard was filming and producing a documentary about the abuse of female athletes in American biathlon, namely, Joan Wilder and Joanne Reid. Line of Fire was funded in part by a grant from the Colorado Office of Film, Television and Media. Kirkegaard did not contact Pichler for comment, nor did anyone else associated with the film.

The film debuted in October 2025.

One month later, on November 11, Pichler received the US Center for SafeSport’s decision. The Center applies a “preponderance of the evidence” standard. This standard is known as the 51% rule: is something more likely than not to have happened. The Center determined that Wilder’s accusation and evidence failed to satisfy this bar. Pichler was clear of wrongdoing.

The Associated Press has not updated nor modified their articles naming Walter Pichler in any way. They have not published any articles reporting that the Center cleared Pichler, nor has the reporter so much as tweeted this follow-up.

Line of Fire is scheduled for another showing on January 16, 2026, in Granby, CO. Cameron Kirkegaard did not respond to my request for comment about whether he would be modifying his film or his pre- / post-showing presentation to reflect the Center’s finding.

Pichler is considering legal action to block the upcoming showing.

One shot, one kill

Despite being a professional athlete, and then a coach and adviser to a range of athletes, including professionals and Olympians, Donald never set up a website for his businesses nor established a social media presence. In fact, he only ever had one article written about him. As a result, when you search for his name along with his city and sport, only one article comes up: a half-decade old piece reporting on his arrest for sexual assault.

The judge in his case dismissed all charges two-and-a-half years after his arrest.

Yet he remains permanently banned by the US Center for SafeSport.

Being charged with a crime is a violation of the SafeSport Code, as is being subject to any criminal disposition “other than an adjudication of not guilty.” Only if you go to trial and are acquitted will the Center consider you cleared. If you never get that far because your accuser never shows up in court and the judge says enough is enough and dismisses the charges, well, that’s not enough for the Center. Individuals like Donald have to go through the process of reopening their case and pursuing a new decision.

None of this qualifies for even an italicized footnote on that one article.

Abuse of Process readers won’t be surprised to hear that the publication in question is part of Hearst Communications.

Their lack if interest in the outcomes, let alone the consequences, of their reporting is a shame, in addition to being a source of shame.

If the arrest of a local coach is newsworthy to a national media outlet, the outcome of the subsequent judicial process should be, too. The arrest is, after all, just the first step.

Had they followed the story in and out of the courtroom, they would have had plenty to write about: the jealous power politics of local sports clubs, questionable investigative practices by the police, attempts to coerce a plea (no, really, watch The Night Of), Kafka-esque policies at the US Center for SafeSport, and a series of court hearings where Donald’s defense lawyer waited for the district attorney to present witnesses and evidence that never came. All against the feverish big city backdrop of COVID-19, the MeToo movement, and Black Lives Matter.

Donald’s story is a textbook cancellation. Since it only took a single article, it might be better described as an assassination: one shot, one kill.

After taking such a shot, whether you’re a hitman or a soccer player, you don’t stand there and admire your work. You get on with your next assignment, and submit another first draft that becomes someone else’s final word.

Clear in private, cancel in public

David Huelsman was the men’s water polo coach at the University of Florida from 2016 to 2023, having played on the team as a student in the late 2000s. He was also a 17-year employee in the university’s IT department.

About a year after stepping down as the UF water polo coach, Huelsman was fired from his IT job in March 2024. Human resources resisted giving Huelsman any explanation for his termination, saying only that it was not performance-based, nor in any way related to his conduct in the IT department, but was still on adverse terms: he would be ineligible for rehire by the university system for three years.

Eventually, the Assistant Vice President for Human Resources told him that he was being fired from the IT department because the Recreational Sports department had filed a complaint against him regarding his time as water polo coach.

This was the first Huelsman had learned of any complaint—official or unofficial—against him.

He didn’t learn until months later that it was a Title IX complaint. By that time, the university’s Title IX office had resolved the situation, stating in part that the allegations did not justify a formal investigation:

Respondent is no longer affiliated with UF. All listed harmed parties in the initial report from Rec Sports were reached out to but no one stated they were harmed. The one harmed party who did make a report, their allegations do not rise to a Title IX/Gender Equity violation.

Note the self-licking ice cream cone of justification. They lead with Huelsman no longer being employed by the university—omitting that this was by the school’s choice, not his own. Then, they cite the baselessness of the accusation—the accusation used to fire him—to free themselves of the need to investigate.

And because there was no formal investigation, they never had to inform Huelsman that any of this was taking place.

Huelsman started piecing these events together in early June. A UF journalism student reporting for Main Street Daily News—a local Gainesville, FL, outlet—contacted Huelsman for a story about Huelsman’s firing. In the course of that interview, the student reporter informed Huelsman that a Title IX complaint had been filed against him.

The fact that he was fully cleared by the Title IX tribunal was mentioned in passing in the first of a series of articles over the next few weeks.

The day after the first article was published, two detectives from the University of Florida Police Department served Huelsman with a Notification of Trespass Warning, banning him from campus under threat of arrest. This was the subject of the second article.

The third article spun a years-old, team-wide inside joke about jorts (jean shorts) into a macabre tale of “a severe power dynamic” and a player who “began to wonder about how much Huelsman was thinking about his body.” If you’re unfamiliar with water polo, jorts are downright modest—practically an abaya—compared to what players wear in the pool.

The articles air anonymous accusations of ambiguous events, some of which were refuted by other players who spoke on the record. None of the accusations were ever corroborated independently or on the record. No further allegations, past or contemporary, have been brought forward about Huelsman: not from his time as a collegiate coach, not from his time as a high school coach, not from his time as a youth club coach, and not from his time as a professional club coach.

University police lifted Huelsman’s campus ban in October 2024. This fact was appended to two of the original articles some time between August 2025 and December 16, 2025, based on a review of these pages at archive.org and each page’s metadata. Those changes came after repeated entreaties by Huelsman for the outlet to amend or correct, if not retract, the articles published about him.

They are the only changes so far: Main Street Daily News site stands by the rest of their reporting.

Narrative foreclosure: Cancelation and “the pre-scripted ending”

Here’s an anecdote that’s happened enough times it’s approaching the status of “data.” When I tell people that I’ve listened to many podcasts featuring Amanda Knox or that I watched “The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox” on Hulu, the first thing they say is “Foxy Knoxy! Haven’t heard that name in a while.”

Two books, a Netflix documentary, a Hulu series, two appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience plus countless other podcasts, and still for the rest of her life, more people will know her as Foxy Knoxy the Kinky Sex Murderess than Amanda Knox, the actual person.

On one of those non-JRE podcasts, “Off the Vine with Kaitlyn Bristowe,” Knox talks about Dr. Christine Marie’s work on narrative foreclosure. As Knox describes it, narrative foreclosure “is the feeling that you are not the protagonist of your own life anymore. You’re just a pawn of someone else’s [life], and the deep feeling of dread and helplessness that comes from that.”

Dr. Christine Marie adapted the concept of narrative foreclosure for media-based trauma, but it originated in the psychology of aging.

Narrative foreclosure is “the premature conviction that one’s life story has effectively ended...[that] one already knows the ending of one’s life. No other alternative endings are considered as realistic, [so] there is little left to do but play out the pre-scripted ending.”

The pre-scripted ending for a canceled person is a life of exile, emptiness, unfulfillment, looking over your shoulder, rejection, and despair.

Walter Pichler has not been offered a job since the one that was withdrawn in spring 2025. Knowing that there are many articles (and a film) reporting on the accusations and zero reporting on his exoneration, he doesn’t see how anyone in sport is going to hire him unless he first explains that he was fully cleared of the accusations against him.

But he worries that if he explains too much of his side of the story, he might run afoul of the Center’s anti-disclosure policies.

In the years post-exoneration, Donald was within a week of working with two athletes—one still playing, one retired—who not only achieved massive success within their sports, but are household names in America’s sport culture.

His friends and colleagues made all the right introductions and opened all the doors. But despite their influence and good intentions, they couldn’t overcome Google and a single article. The current player’s agent and the retired player both did a quick search on their soon-to-be coach, and sent the word back. No matter how much they trusted their friends’ recommendations, and even though knew how things turned out, they couldn’t afford to be associated with someone whose only public profile is as an accused sex offender.

Since the articles in Gainesville local media, David Huelsman has had two offers to work in IT. One was withdrawn before he could start; and he was terminated within days of starting the other, both after an employee Googled him and saw the articles.

Dr. Christine writes:

[The victim of media humiliation and misrepresentation] may believe her reputation and life legacy has been permanently destroyed. The consequence to this is the premature belief that one’s life story is essentially completed; she has reached the end of life. Freeman describes this as the phenomenon that “has the power to arrest some lives, to bring them to a stop without death occurring.” On the other hand, for those to whom it seems that the world has all but ended, it may not be a big leap to take that final step.

Over the last two and a half years, many canceled people have told me how close they were to that final step. Their fight for life is inseparable from the fight for a counter-narrative.

Michael Capiraso was one of the first. The former CEO of New York Road Runners, he has applied to over 200 jobs since he was canceled in 2020. He tapped into a 25-year deep network of contacts in sports, fashion, and media, invested tens of thousands of dollars in reputation management and career support, and has received three responses, and zero offers.

Capiraso discovered Dr. Christine’s work on cancelation in 2021. There’s no way to overstate the importance of him chancing upon the interview she gave mere weeks after he had been canceled. Several years later, she told him about narrative foreclosure and how it was integral to the forward-facing trauma of cancelation.

He had spent hours alone and with his therapists “ruminating about how I was going to go to my grave with racist and sexist on my tombstone. I couldn’t let that happen. Well, I almost did, because I had considered ending things.”

Run out of town

He decided that he was not willing to let the media’s portrayal of him extend to his obituary. He had to stay alive if he wanted anything other than the pre-scripted ending for himself and his family.

Acknowledging the differences in scale, Capiraso recognizes elements of his cancelation in Knox’s two-decade long saga.

“Knox didn’t want to die with people thinking that she did it,” Capiraso says. “That was one of the driving forces that kept her going. I don’t know if that was the driving force that kept me going. But my therapist used to say, you just have to put questions in people’s minds. All they saw were these negative stories and false narratives about me. When I finally got healthy enough to do it, my mission was to create the counter-narrative.”

Just give people a question.

Does any of this make sense? (see, inter alia, jorts).

For this to be true, what else has to be true?

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When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do? - Paul Samuelson, maybe (but probably not) quoting John Maynard Keynes

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There is no legal obligation for journalists or media platforms to continually update their articles or other reporting with each new development in a story. Any attempt to impose one would violate the First Amendment as compelled speech.

However, journalists should undertake an ethical duty—if not professional ethics, then at least personal ethics—to update stories as new and relevant facts become available, or as new developments unfold.

Journalists don’t need to continuously monitor developments from every story they’ve ever written. That could be a beneficial use case for AI. But when the new information is delivered directly to them, or when the new developments come from the same source as the initial reporting, it’s difficult to understand the reluctance to add new fact.

When first drafts foreclose the future

Most people will never make the Associated Press, a sport’s hobbyist mouthpiece, The New York Times, or even local news. If they do so because they were arrested, or added to the US Center for SafeSport’s blacklist, or simply accused of something, that will be the most publicity they ever receive. It will be the top result for any search for their name, it will be the first thought people have when their name comes up in conversation, it will be the barrier between them and a normal, productive social and professional life.

From there, it’s hard to see anything other than a single pre-scripted ending.

I’m fond of the adage “We don’t stop playing because we get old. We get old because we stop playing.”

A dark twist for the canceled might be: “We don’t suffer narrative foreclosure as we approach death. We approach death when we suffer narrative foreclosure.”

Photo credit: Ludovic Peron / Flickr, under CC BY 2.0.