“I feel good about speaking my truth,” she told The Kansas City Star, “but I’m still very upset because he’s going to have some form of power. And I don’t think he has a right to have any kind of power.” She added: “I don’t know why he’s not being held accountable.”
The now 20-year-old woman whose nudes Coleman shared similarly told The New York Times, “It’s good that he admitted to what he did.” But “I just don’t think he needs to be in a powerful position considering what he’s done to girls.”
The women, in the statements they gave on the matter, were not talking about Coleman’s right to employment or even to a generalized form of forgiveness. They were arguing merely that Coleman, a 19-year-old who committed his wrongs only six years ago, should not represent the people of Kansas in its state legislature. They were citing their abuse as their evidence. “He’s an awful person,” as one of them put it, “and he should not be allowed to run for anything.”
If you’re talking about atonement, those public rejections of Coleman’s apologies would seem to be crucial. But the women’s comments have been notably absent from much of the weekend’s discussions about what Aaron Coleman deserves. On social media, many people sought symbolism, abstracting the story’s particulars into lessons about life in a digitized society, or about feminism run amok. National news outlets addressed the women’s experiences through the utilitarian lens of Coleman’s potential effects on Democratic politics. These were continuations of the way the Star summarized Coleman’s primary victory: “Aaron Coleman, 19, Wins Kansas House Despite Facebook Flap.”
There’s a woman who will spend every Thanksgiving, for the foreseeable future, wondering who in her family has seen that naked photo of her. There’s a woman who spent months, in the era of Elliot Rodger, hearing the phone ring, over and over, at her house. There’s a woman who was once made to feel so worthless that she tried to take her own life. Here those people were, presented to the public as a “Facebook flap.”
“Can you come back from #MeToo?”
That’s how Air Mail, Graydon Carter’s shiny newsletter, publicized an essay it sent out earlier this month: a lengthy profile of Leon Wieseltier, the editor and famed intellectual. The answer to the question Air Mail posed is “yes.” The evidence is the existence of the essay itself, written by Carter’s son, Ash—which follows Wieseltier’s journey as he sets out to found a new journal of ideas. (The journal will be titled Liberties. It will attempt to inspire, Wieseltier writes, “the rehabilitation of liberalism.”)
There is a notable absence in Air Mail’s consideration of the arc and the art of the #MeToo comeback: current commentary from the women who came forward in 2017 to accuse Wieseltier of workplace harassment. One former colleague of Wieseltier’s wrote at the time that during a staff outing to a bar after work one evening, he “cornered me, alone by the bathroom, and put his mouth on mine.” Another recalled that “he made constant comments about my looks and clothes”—“including the time he left a CD on my desk as a gift, along with a thank-you note for the miniskirt I was wearing that day.” Another noted the power he wielded over her professional life: “It felt like Leon could make or break my career … I lived in horror of alienating or upsetting him in some way.”