How #metoo Accountability Spectacles Enable Frauds: The Saga of The Punk Rock Therapist, Anti-Flag, Kristina Sarhadi, Rolling Stone, and the Enough. Podcast. Part 2
The Press Corpse
I’ve spent the last few months covering the ostensible lack of verifiable qualifications and documentation surrounding Kristina Sarhadi and her Punk Rock Therapist organization that was launched off the back of Sarhadi’s allegations of sexual misconduct against Justin Geever and Anti-Flag, but it’s worth noting that Sarhadi was not able to pull this off on her own. It required the cooperation of various journalistic and media outlets as well as the larger music community as a whole who were at best negligent in their due diligence and at worst actively ignored evidence that cut against their established narrative. As with my previous piece, this piece represents more of my opinion surrounding what I’ve found.
Before I get into this I need to stress again, the evidence I found that there was no record of Sarhadi being a Social Worker and Therapist or that the Punk Rock Therapist wasn’t actually the charity it presented itself to be was not particularly difficult to find. All it required was a basic search of relevant databases that are readily available to the public. We’re talking five minutes tops to google these databases, type Sarhadi’s name or the “charity” EIN into them and the results are given instantaneously. The inconsistencies I found were right there to anyone willing to read or listen to the relevant material. None of this is privileged information, none of it required special credentials or permissions, you don’t need to be a trained journalist to find any of this. I’m a hobbyist, this isn’t my job. I do this on lunch breaks and when I’m stuck in airports. Which is why it makes it all the more strange and frustrating that the people whose job is reporting this stuff missed it entirely.
Unlicensed Hall Monitor
While there was a great deal of coverage and discussion surrounding the allegations against Geever from a wide variety of outlets ranging from US Weekly to Pitchfork to Lambgoat, the case as far as the court of public opinion is concerned really comes down to two sources: the enough. podcast whose episode launched the entire scandal as well as Sarhadi as a mental health professional into the public light, and Rolling Stone whose exposé “The Punk Rock Predator” claimed to have found additional allegations against the singer while adding a more professional sheen to the whole proceedings.
enough. Podcast
The enough. podcast is where Sarhadi launched both her allegations against Geever as well as her public persona as a mental health professional. enough. is “a podcast which aims to shine light into the darkened corners of the music industry while discussing the ways we can and should improve ourselves and, in turn, our community.” which is a really fancy way of saying they’re a gossip podcast wrapped in a sheen of self righteous scolding. They consider themselves a platform for others to share “their truth”, crucially distinct from “the truth”. Over the course of the past 3 years or so they’ve essentially served as the punk world’s equivalent of a blind item column, allowing guests to come on and levy allegations of horrific crimes for the entertainment of their audience in hopes that that audience will then go out and hold those targeted individuals “accountable” for these alleged crimes, which usually means destroying their lives. They don’t do names specifically, they say for reason of “focusing on the story” or some bullshit, but really it is most likely to shield them from the legal repercussions associated with outright defaming someone on a massive level. They are, however, more than happy to give as much identifying information as possible about that person so that their audience of room temperature IQ internet sleuths can hunt them down on their behalf. For such brave truth tellers they sure do love to hide behind plausible deniability. When they can’t find a guest (more frequent than you’d think) they like to do episodes called “subtext” wherein the rehash allegations against whatever famous person they feel like covering that week, their most recent episode saw them deciding to do the brave and groundbreaking work of reminding everyone that Chris Brown is a bad guy.
What, if any, background research they do on their guests or their claims is unknown, but I’d guess fairly minimal, the salacious allegations they can peddle to try and grow their brand seem to place things like facts in the back seat based on my interactions with them. Which is probably how Sarhadi was able to just walk right on, claim that she was a professional without any verifiable qualifications before launching into allegations against Geever without presenting any kind of corroborating evidence, while Gill and Sheetz can barely mask the giddy excitement in their voices as they’re mentally calculating the possibilities this is going to do for their careers, perhaps even promotion within the internet hall monitor sphere.
enough. have continued to cover the allegations against Justin while constantly promoting The Punk Rock Therapist over the past year, ostensibly because it’s the only thing they’ve ever done that anyone has given a shit about. Episode 41 immediately following Sarhadi’s interview was called “What Happens Next” which consisted nearly entirely of Gill and Sheetz insisting that it is the responsibility of everyone who listens to music to appoint themselves cop and weed out anyone accused of wrongdoing. Episode 49, their 2023 wrap up was comprised entirely of them congratulating themselves for a job well done with the Anti-Flag story and all the cool praise they had gotten while promoting The Punk Rock Therapist. Episode 49 is notable in that it was produced despite the amount of spinal trauma both hosts should have suffered from sucking their own dicks for such a prolonged period. Episode 50 from December 2023 features an interview with attorney Karen Barth Menzies that mainly exists to hype up Sarhadi and The Punk Rock Therapist as a therapist and a charity all while making such impassioned arguments against statute of limitations, civil rights, and unchecked judicial power that it’d give Roland Freisler a hard-on. Menzies is actually one of Sarhadi's lawyers, though you’d be forgiven for not knowing that as there’s no mention of it in the show notes and both the hosts and Menzies conveniently forgets to mention it at any point throughout the episodes nearly 50 minute run time. Though fortunately they do remember to mention that Menzies plays bass in “a band called “The Dissenters” after the Notorious Ruth Bader Ginsberg” which does manage to be the most visceral, existential horror inducing sentence I’ve encountered despite all my years of reading Lovecraft. In Episode 54, released April 3rd 2024, enough. rehashes the allegations against Geever while also promoting The Punk Rock Therapist like they always do, though crucially this episode was published AFTER I contacted enough. in March asking for comment on Sarhadi’s missing qualifications and the charities missing registration, though it obviously didn’t stop them from promoting the project.
Now perhaps you could make the argument “Well how are they supposed to know there was no record of Sarhadi having those qualifications? Somebody comes to you saying they’re a certain profession or they’re starting a charity, how deep is a reporter supposed to go to verify it?” Even if we’re going to accept that people who are broadcasting deeply damaging allegations of felony conduct aren’t responsible for even the bare minimum research into the person they’re having on their show, it wouldn’t change that enough. have continued to ignore the massive errors in their reporting long after being alerted to it. enough. are well aware of the problems surrounding Sarhadi, I know because they blocked me on instagram after pointing it out in one of my stories. They can’t claim stupidity as much as it is really the only constant in their lives, they can’t claim they didn’t know either, their continued promotion of Sarhadi as a mental health professional and The Punk Rock Therapist as a legitimate organization despite the overwhelming evidence is a choice. The kind of choice to protect their own reputations, opportunities, and self interests over the truth that their entire brand is built on criticizing in others.
This is also not the only time enough. has encountered and ignored serious issues with one of their interviewees, they’ve also been ignoring their association with a convicted pedophile. On literally the first full episode of the enough. podcast in 2021 Rich and Kendra had a woman named Savvi on to “share her truth.” Savvi alleged that she had been raped by an unnamed bassist of an unnamed notable punk band from Laramie, Wyoming. There is of course only one band at all from Laramie, Wyoming, that being Teenage Bottlerocket. This allegation was naturally presented without any evidence, then repeated ad nauseam around the punk scene, resulting in a Teenage Bottlerocket show in the Twin Cities, Rich’s hometown, being cancelled. You can still find discussion of the band even now being punctuated with claims from the enough. podcast, which were then covered in the Minnesota based news site Racket. Savvi and her husband, Ross Swirling then reportedly used this coverage to harass venues and booking agents to attempt to get Teenage Bottlerocket dropped from shows, their label etc. Savvi and Ross were apparently well known in the Denver music scene for getting shows cancelled and accusing various members of that scene of problematic behavior, from racism to sexual misconduct.
In September of 2023 Ross Swirling was convicted of attempted sexual assault on a child after attempting to meet up with an undercover agent he believed to be a 14 year old girl that he had been messaging on the internet the previous year.
Now obviously this all happened 2 years after the episode aired, I am in no way alleging that enough. had any prior knowledge of Swirling’s behavior, but their coverage was instrumental in Swirling’s crusade against a band he and his partner had targeted and used enough. as a springboard for their campaign against their enemies. It doesn’t have to be some insane mea culpa, just “Hey, on episode 2 we had Savvi on to make an allegation, turns out her husband is a convicted child predator, we obviously had no knowledge of this, but feel for the sake of transparency our audience should know.” that’s really it, I don’t think anyone would ask for anything more, it’s part of reporting (and the bare minimum of the kind of accountability they demand of everyone else) which is why it’s even crazier that they just act like it never happened. At no point has enough. made any kind of acknowledgment of this new development tied directly to a story that they broke. They ignore it of course, because it makes them look bad and calls into question the credibility of their whole project if they were to point out their approach to reporting lead them to unwittingly do the bidding of a pedophile. This was all in September of 2023, the height of the punk scene kissing their asses for the “great work” they had done exposing Geever, wouldn’t want to interrupt that circle jerk to reveal that same groundbreaking reporting approach had inadvertently made you buddy buddy with a chomo. If anybody had actively worked with or even had half a degree of separation from a convicted pedophile in the Anti-Flag camp, enough. would be screaming that from the rooftops.
enough. repeatedly demand accountability of anyone who platforms someone who allegedly or potentially causes harm, while constantly sidestepping that kind of responsibility for themselves and their actions when they fuck up and those fuck ups have massive consequences. They open every podcast with the disclaimer that they are simply a platform for people to share “their truths” and accept no responsibility for the stories within, which sure is awfully convenient. Does anyone think that if I booked a show for Brand New and simply said “we’re only a platform for people sharing their truths and we accept no responsibility” any of these people would accept that? They have all these rules and demands for how you need to live, how you need to think, and then they magically become libertarians when that standard is applied to them. Sure, you may not accept legal responsibility for the stories you platform, but what about the responsibility to be honest with your audience? These people want endless power to to go after whoever they believe violates their codes in the name of accountability, but at the same time won’t hold themselves to a standard even an iota as rigorous as they hold everyone else. Must we all be constantly engaging in endless inquisitions against strangers in order to hold up some standard of accountability, or are we staying in our lane? Which is it you fucking morons?
Enough. did not return my request for comment on the Swirling situation or any request for comment regarding their work over the past 4 months of investigating this.
Rolling Stone
A little over a month after Sarhadi went public on enough. Rolling Stone published a piece called The Punk Rock Predator by Cheyenne Roundtree which not only laid out additional allegations against Geever, but also formalized the whole affair in a way that enough. simply couldn’t. Rolling Stone is still a bloated shell of its former self, and has been for a very long time like most legacy media institutions, but people trust it. I think there’s a lot of problems with the article which I’m going to lay out, but the piece is very narrative heavy and at times can be unwieldy when trying to ascertain the who, what, where, when etc of the allegations. I wrote this piece, The Punk Rock Predator For Dummies, in an attempt to collect all of the actual allegations, evidence, and other pertinent information into something that is meant to work as a companion piece.
Rolling Stone’s coverage is a bit strange, in that Rolling Stone does actually correctly refer to Sarhadi as what she is, describing her as a “holistic therapist and health coach”. However the question arises why did nobody at Rolling Stone notice the significant and meaningful change in Sarhadi’s qualifications between her time on the enough. podcast and her time speaking to Rolling Stone. Sarhadi’s interview on the podcast is what set all of this off, Sarhadi is the central figure in Rolling Stone’s coverage of Geever, she’s the primary lens through which the story is told, Roundtree had to have listened to the podcast at least once, but she either doesn’t notice or doesn’t think it’s relevant that her central figure’s CV has changed drastically in less than a months time. If the central figure of your story claimed to publicly be a lawyer representing clients and but when you start to interview them you find out they’re actually just a paralegal that would at least be worthy of addressing.
But Roundtree doesn’t even acknowledge it. In fact later in the piece she goes on to promote The Punk Rock Therapist project and its website, which had conveniently just launched the day before, and featured Sarhadi once again referring to herself as a Social Worker and Therapist. Roundtree doesn’t seem to believe this is of any note, nor does she seem to notice the glaring ethical and conflict of interest questions surrounding a therapist treating patients who have allegedly both been sexually assaulted by the same person. Like I’ve said before, any therapist who was actually licensed would understand that to be a deeply problematic proposal but Roundtree appears oblivious both to the ethical issues at hand and that Sarhadi’s should know about them. Hell, she doesn’t even check if it’s a registered charity, instead just providing PR for Sarhadi and the project. This of course is not the first time in recent history that Rolling Stone has ignored major credibility issues with a central figure in their reporting on sex crimes.
The Punk Rock Predator’s problems however are not limited to the ignorance of the glaring issues with Sarhadi. From the go, there is a miscount with the allegations. The piece claims that there are an additional 12 allegations not including Sarhadi, but the piece only contains 11. One of the women, identified as “Jenn”, is brought up fairly early in the piece, but Roundtree details no actual allegation from Jenn outside Jenn’s observation that Geever is a hypocrite, something that anyone could provide. Jenn’s actual allegations would appear weeks later in a local Canadian outlet, but Roundtree offers no reason as to why they were not published in the original piece, yet still included in the final count. It may feel like a minor nitpick (probably not if you’re the one actually being accused), but it contributes to a larger picture of sloppiness.
The allegations vary wildly in severity, from statutory rape, to simply that Geever allegedly tried unsuccessfully to kiss someone and invite them back to his hotel room. Details are inconsistent, sometimes ages are given, sometimes they are not, sometimes locations are given, sometimes they are not. Ages are given as younger than when the actual allegation of misconduct take place years later. A great deal is made about Justin and his alleged predilection for teenage girls and that being inherently damning itself but many of the allegations appear to originate in states or countries where the girls in question were of the age of consent or no details are provided to discern such a thing. Outside of a single instance Roundtree doesn’t seem to make any distinction between behavior which is subjectively amoral and objectively criminal with regards to the ages of the women. I am not commenting on the wisdom of a man in his late 20’s and 30’s possibly sleeping with teenagers who are of the age of consent, but the attempt here seems to be to paint Geever as a child rapist when he merely may just be morally repugnant and I think that distinction matters.
Four of the allegations within the Rolling Stone piece are made without any corroborating evidence whatsoever (Jenn, Molly, Karina, Rebecca). Three of the allegations the only corroborating evidence regarding the misconduct provided is that Rolling Stone spoke with a friend or family member of the victim who claims they were told about the allegation (Stefanie, Elizabeth, Sarhadi), sometimes not even until decades after the fact. Of course someone saying “yeah I was told this” only proves that the allegation has been made before (and even then, we’re just taking someone’s word that they were told), it doesn’t mean it actually happened. I could’ve told my sibling that Will Smith ran me over with his car 15 years ago, my brother telling a reporter that isn’t conclusive proof it happened. A kid from McMartin telling his parents that he was satanically abused isn’t proof positive it occurred. Only one has a police report, which was filed 3.5 years after the alleged incident (Hannah) and crucially, after Sarhadi went public on the podcast but right before the Rolling Stone piece was published. The police ultimately could not even prove that a crime had occurred, which Roundtree barely remarks on. Some of the allegations refer to sex that is explicitly nonconsensual, but others are for admittedly consensual acts that the victim feels that there was a power imbalance for, others it’s somewhat unclear if the encounter was consensual or not. Only one of the allegations was the alleged victim clearly under the age of consent (Tali) and that allegation is in reference to an alleged assault from the 1990s when Geever was a teenager, which of course is impossible to investigate now. The most recent allegation comes from 2020, but the vast majority of the allegations are at least a decade or more old, most dating back to the early 00s or late 90s. Pictures are provided showing alleged victims with Geever, but if a picture with a person is conclusive proof they were assaulted, everyone on social media is in trouble. There are some letters and emails that seem to prove sexual contact, but when you really dig into it there really isn’t any single conclusive piece of evidence. There’s a lot of disturbing stories to be sure, but a harrowing story doesn’t mean that story is true. The UVA coverage was disturbing, the Duke Lacrosee coverage was disturbing, the McMartin coverage was disturbing, the WMDs in Iraq coverage was disturbing, disturbing coverage doesn’t make any of it true. What you’re left with is a piece that is heavy on salacious allegations, but fairly light on actual evidence, and certainly nothing conclusive.
These self appointed accountability cops don’t consistently apply their demands for accountability or standard of evidence either, in fact they all turned a blind eye with Joe Biden when he was accused, who would be condemned by the same standard of evidence they’re using on Geever. Mike Tunison has made this point more eloquently than I for years now but how any of these institutions can continue this kind of coverage running people out of society while they gave Joe Biden a pass to the most powerful position on the planet is laughable. If the only standard for an allegation to be true is that you can find someone who will say “yeah I was told the allegation before” then Joe Biden is just as unequivocally guilty as Justin Geever, in fact there’s arguably more compelling testimony against Joe Biden. You will of course be shocked to find out that neither Cheyenee Roundtree or enough. have devoted any of their coverage to Tara Reade or Joe Biden. Instead they’ve opted to focus their crusade on celebrities and musicians rather than the most powerful man on the face of the earth, who by their own standards, would be a rapist. It creates an infuriating paradox where allegations alone make you so dangerous that you are unfit to have a career in art or even live in polite society but are perfectly fine to set world policy or have the nuclear codes. In fact, Rich and Kendra, if you provide me conclusive proof that you didn’t vote for Joe Biden in 2020 I’ll gladly donate $500 to whatever mickey mouse club fake charity Sarhadi is propping up this week, tax exemption be damned.
What Roundtree is doing here is a fairly common practice in metoo stories since the birth of the movement seven years ago, wherein the journalist just stacks stories of various wrongdoings with greatly varying amounts of intensity or even criminality of the offense and the evidence in order to build something that none of these stories individually are really able to prove. This has been present in everything from the Weinstein coverage, to the shitty media men list, just heap allegation after allegation, doesn’t matter if the conduct is criminal, doesn’t matter if any of it can be proven, it’s about putting numbers on the board and then pointing to that number and going “well would x amount of people lie?” totally oblivious to the fact that yes, many hundreds of people can say something that is untrue, McMartin and its hundreds of accusations is the perfect example of it. She is Frankensteining together a monster from parts that are too weak to stand on their own. This may pass muster with the activist class that has taken over journalism, but for the public that relies on journalists to tell them the truth about the world, is this right?
And again, all of these allegations are supposedly “checked” by a team that blatantly missed the evidence sitting right in front of them that Sarhadi was not the mental health professional she claimed to be and raised funds off of. I’m a hobbyist and I picked up on it, people whose job it is to make this absolutely airtight missed this. Rolling Stone cosigned The Punk Rock Therapist, giving it and Sarhadi glowing coverage multiple times, I’m supposed to trust that they really did their homework on this?
While I’m sure The Punk Rock Predator is probably fairly legally sound, various iterations of the word “allege” and “claim” appear 21 and 24 times respectively throughout the piece, the question arises if this reporting is responsible. I know that the standard for reporting is obviously lower than the standard for criminal conviction or even charges but when you dig into the piece there really isn’t any smoking gun proving Geever did anything, in fact the evidence itself is shockingly light even for that lower standard. Both Rolling Stone’s reporting and the majority of the campaign against Geever is based around Sarhadi, who unquestionably has deep credibility issues. This article fairly clearly tries to paint Geever as a child rapist, a label that will make him one of the most uniquely reviled people on the planet, does this piece meet an evidentiary standard to justify the repercussions? As a reader, as a member of the court of public opinion this coverage is trying to sway, I say no. This is mobilizing the court of public opinion to condemn a man as a dangerous, vile felon, before he has even been tried, let alone charged.
Perhaps there was a time in the past where this kind of reporting would be weighed against a healthy societal belief in due process and presumption of innocence, that the fact that Geever has never been arrested, charged or convicted of any of these alleged crimes for which he is innocent until proven guilty would temper the worst of the societal backlash. But if that time ever existed, it’s far gone now, and due to the current climate, this reporting is more or less a social death sentence for Geever and his former bandmates. Should the press be the ones handing out these sentences and does the evidence the press has put forward support the conclusion?
Metoo stories are Roundtree’s beat, Rolling Stone publishes pieces about this kind of stuff all the time, this of course begs the question is all of their other reporting this sloppy? This fast and loose with facts? This active in ignoring glaring issues at the center of the reporting? This isn’t journalism, this is activism disguised as journalism. Roundtree is not reporting on a situation and weighing both sides, if she was she would report the allegations while be honest about the quality of the evidence against Geever, she would have done her due diligence about Sarhadi, she would take effort to point out that Geever has not been charged with anything and give that the weight it deserves. Roundtree is instead mounting a case, playing prosecutor. The primary thing pushing this piece forward isn’t a preponderance of proof, it’s the activist insistence that all of these allegations MUST be believed and to question them or require even a bare minimum standard of evidence is blasphemy against that insistence of belief.
Erdely may be gone, but a decade out from “A Rape on Campus” it doesn’t seem like the lesson Rolling Stone learned was one of caution, but rather count on the fact that the culture has shifted so much that everyone will be too afraid to question it this time.
Neither Roundtree or Rolling Stone responded to my request for comment.
Avoidarama
You may ask yourself “what are Rolling Stone, enough., and the larger Punk community, who have justified this entire crusade under the guise of “accountability” doing to correct their reporting ensure that everyone has all of the information available to make an informed decision?” And the answer is that they’re entirely ignoring it. Rolling Stone has not returned my requests for comment or correction, enough. has not returned my requests for comment. I’ve emailed nearly every website that covered these allegations my findings, none responded. I posted my article over on the subreddit r/punk, which is at this point the largest punk forum on the internet, Roundtree herself sourced many of the alleged victims for her piece from r/punk and at this point the subreddit has countless posts and discussions about the allegations against Anti-Flag. Despite all this, my posts were quickly deleted and I was banned from posting on the sub without any explanation. Nobody can actually point out a flaw in my reporting, nobody can explain to me why they won’t cover it, outside of the fact that it reflects poorly on the ideology they’ve all bought into.
The question arises how exactly is anyone supposed to learn any information that cuts against the narrative? These news organizations aren’t transparent in the slightest. enough. exists in an entirely closed loop, their instagram and youtube accounts, the only places they post, don’t allow comments, how would a listener even know there’s an issue with any of the reporting they do? Reddit, once a bastion of freedom of information is now entirely captured by the ideologies of self appointed moderators. There is exponentially more hard evidence that Sarhadi is not who she says she is than there is Geever is a sexual predator, but that is entirely ignored. If someone tweets that the keytar player of a f-tier christcore band touched their ass at a Warped Tour during the Bush Administration, these websites climb over each other to report it regardless if there’s any corroborating evidence. That person’s life is entirely destroyed, we have a days long discussion about the toxicity of the scene. Prove that somebody that these websites covered and repeatedly insisted was a mental health professional isn’t who they say they are and provide primary source documents for all of it? Suddenly these people’s commitment to accountability disappears.
If you’re reading this and going “why didn’t I hear about this?” the people to ask are Rolling Stone, enough., punknews, exclaim, lambgoat, theprp, Pittsburgh City Paper, NME, and the jannies over at r/punk why they didn’t think you deserved to know this information. These people don’t care about accountability or transparency, they don’t care about truth or justice, they care about power and protecting their own self interests and pet ideologies, the very thing they constantly accuse everyone else of when they call for accountability. This is just business as usual with a counter cultural sheen. These people hate you, they think you’re stupid, they don’t think you can be trusted with information, to think for yourself, so they assign themselves to think for you.
There is a push by my detractors to paint my reporting as an attempt to “discredit survivors”, but I don’t really think that’s fair. I’m laying out the information that is publicly available in an exposé that they commonly cite as proof of Geever’s guilt, if organizing all that information plainly “discredits” anyone, that’s the fault of the story, not the person collecting the information. It’s worth pointing out that I’ve never actually said any of the accusations against Geever are false, in fact I’ve gone out of my way in every one of these pieces to say as much. My point has always been to question whether the larger societal response to those allegations are appropriate, are they consistent with the civil rights we are all guaranteed, has the reporting on those allegations been thorough and honest, is the reaction justified, are you sure and why? “What happened?” and “Do we have enough evidence to show just cause for destroying someone’s life?” are two entirely separate questions and I’ve only ever been interested in the latter. Obviously they aren’t separate for metoo activists who have always wanted accusation and accusation alone to be enough to justify total power over the accused, that’s kind of their whole thing, but it doesn’t mean we should just hand that power over to them. I doubt any of this throat clearing will deter the people defending these kinds of mob actions who seem to be committed to misunderstanding and misrepresenting my work, but it feels like it needs to be said.
While it’s easy to point at Sarhadi and all the ways she’s mislead and manipulated the public throughout all of this, I actually don’t think she’s the most reprehensible character in this moral panic, that distinction is reserved for the media that covered this. To some extent we cannot stop bad things from happening, people lie, they deceive one another, that is an unfortunate part of the human condition. However it is the job of the press through careful investigation and caution, to report honestly, fairly, and with integrity. Yes, even the media makes mistakes, like all institutions it is human and can fail, even the best reporters can be mislead, and if that was simply all this was, that would be understandable. But when faced with the mistakes in their reporting, these outlets did not seek to rectify the situation, rather to ignore it in an attempt to hide it from the public.
These allegations of serious felony sexual assault were not placed in the hands of qualified professionals capable of investigating and adjudicating them with careful consideration for the rights of all parties involved. Instead they were given to people so thirsty for a story that justified their activist moral crusade that they neglected even the most basic levels of due diligence on the person they built their entire story around. They helped stoke a moral panic around that person that destroyed the lives of multiple families overnight and have spent the past 3+ months totally ignoring the glaring issues in their reporting and covering for their friends, all while demanding accountability from everyone else. Make no mistake, these people funneled alleged rape victims and funds to a crystal healer’s fake charity and they’ve known about it for at least nearly 4 months now. They happily drained every last ad dollar, every last piece of social capital, all of the power that they could find from the situation, and they did not care who they hurt in the process.
All of this has real, human consequences. In the third and final part of this we’ll take a look at the people on both sides caught in the center of this moral panic.
Please direct any inquiries to jacktorrancewrites@proton.me