1. Untold story
The story I didn’t tell is one I want to try telling now—now that the Me Too moment is over and no one is listening.
In the autumn of 2017, I wrote an essay about sexual harassment from the standpoint of someone who had been thinking about it for nearly 30 years. I gave it the title “A Likely Story” and posted it on Medium.
This was a couple of weeks after the publication of the New York Times and New Yorker articles that eventually led to the downfall of Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein.
The essay I wrote drew on an experience I’d had with a married colleague at The New Yorker in the early 90s, a longtime staff writer at the magazine with a readership and a reputation and a certain amount of literary prestige, who sometimes wrote in that quiet, sly New Yorker voice and whose cumulative behavior, on and off, over a couple of years alarmed me so much that on two occasions I went to my boss, Robert Gottlieb, then editor of The New Yorker.
In the essay, I said a lot about sexual harassment generally but didn’t go into any detail about my situation. I didn’t describe my interactions with Mr. New Yorker Writer or explain why, as a married man and a veteran staffer, he had more power and status than I did as a single woman and the magazine’s comparatively new theater critic. I didn’t recount the different strategies I used to try to get Mr. New Yorker Writer to back off and leave me alone. I touched a bit on what happened after Bob Gottlieb was replaced as top editor by the anti-intellectual, celebrity-focused Tina Brown: how women seemed almost to disappear from the magazine, among them the veteran writer and editor Veronica Geng. I mentioned that Veronica had been fired after herself breaking off an affair with Mr. New Yorker Writer but not that I had shared my concerns about him with her. I didn’t make any reference to the book I’d been writing for two years about an acting school founded by the playwright David Mamet and William H. Macy or how Mamet, after years of cordial relations, suddenly began ghosting me after Mr. New Yorker Writer decided (of all the gin joints in all the world) to write a profile of a then-obscure friend of Mamet’s. Nor did I describe Gottlieb’s dismissive response when I went to him for help: how he laughed and told me that there was nothing he could do and that I shouldn’t worry about the whole thing.
I didn’t actually tell my sexual harassment story at all.
The piece had a curious genesis. We were a couple of weeks into the MeToo movement, and men in the entertainment industry were confessing to things all over the place. Alec Baldwin had made a public statement about not always having treated women with the utmost respect. (“I’ve bullied women. I’ve overlooked women. I’ve underestimated women,” he confessed.) An article about Baldwin linked to one about another actor, Stephen Collins, having confessed years before to molesting underage girls. It so happened that Collins had once groped me at an awards ceremony, a fact that had vanished from my memory but which came back to me now as I read about him.
It must have been all the references to “confession” in the context of sexual harassment that called to mind something else I’d forgotten: my acquaintance with Mr. New Yorker Writer had begun with a confession. This man I’d never spoken to—had scarcely even been introduced to—had phoned me because, he said, he had a confession to make about something terrible he’d done that involved me.
What Mr. New Yorker Writer wanted to confess to was having leaked my most recent column before publication to the author of the play I was reviewing. The playwright, he explained, was a friend of his, and Mr. New Yorker Writer had seen the play and hadn’t known what to say about it. My negative review, however—the galleys of which Mr. New Yorker Writer had got hold of—had been so clear-eyed and incisive and had expressed so well what he himself had been unable to articulate! So Mr. New Yorker Writer had read it to the playwright over the phone.
This was, at the time—before the internet, before journalism was posted within moments of having gone through a final edit—an extraordinary thing to have done and an even more extraordinary thing to tell me. Nowadays, it’s hard to credit the idea that once whole days might pass between the time a magazine was put to bed and the time it was seen by the public. Back then, though, the embargo against leaking pre-publication content was a serious matter.
The New Yorker closed on Fridays. Over the weekend, a small number of “roughs”—copies of the magazine that looked exactly the way the finished product would look, only they had the word “ROUGH” stamped on the cover—were generated and appeared on the desk-chairs of the writers who had a piece in that issue. You came in and checked them, which meant that you cast your eye over your work to make sure that no egregious error had crept into the piece at the plant.
Actually, I never knew what it was we were checking roughs for or how anything could have changed between the magazine’s close and the time it got printed. I figured that roughs were a formality or, like a human appendix, the vestige of something that no longer had a function. The point was that only a small number of them were made up. And they never left the building.
To leak writing from an unpublished magazine to a member of the public, let alone share the contents of an unpublished theater review, was unthinkable. It was something that no one would do. And if they did it, they wouldn’t talk about it. And if they talked about it, they wouldn’t tell the person whose work they’d shared.
It was so unconscionable a breach of journalistic ethics that my heart began racing as I listened to what this guy was telling me. He was telling me that he’d done something that would have been a firing offense if it had been done anyplace else by anyone else but which he knew he could confess to because he couldn’t possibly get in trouble over it.
Now, almost thirty years later, with the world swept up in the machinations of predatory men, I remembered how I’d internalized this incident and the message I’d read into it. Mr. New Yorker Writer had been telling me that he could do anything—anything in the world he liked—and nobody would care.
I didn’t write about any of this in 2017—for reasons I’m not sure I fully understood at the time. Instead, I wrote about getting groped by Stephen Collins at the Drama Desk Awards and how I think sexual harassment is about getting away with something.
The story I didn’t tell on Medium is one I want to try telling now—now that the Me Too moment is over and no one is listening. For one thing, it bothers me that it’s over—even if there were aspects of Me Too that went too far. There’s another sense in which it also didn’t go far enough, and I like the idea of keeping the conversation about sexual harassment going. That said, because Me Too is over I feel less uncomfortable about telling a story that involves people who meant no harm or did no harm and didn’t deserve to be dragged into the spotlight while everything was so fraught. Three of those people have since passed away. One was Bob Gottlieb, who died earlier this year. Another was Larry Kramer, the playwright who figured in Mr. New Yorker Writer’s confession and who died in the spring of 2020.
A number of aspects of this sexual harassment story may make it atypical. One is that I wasn’t particularly young when this happened. (I was over thirty; but even so, I was unable to navigate the situation.) Another is that I did initially sleep with the guy in an attempt to appease him. (That didn’t help either.) Another is that—leaving aside Mr. New Yorker Writer himself—I’m not sure anyone actually did anything wrong. I think everyone probably acted in a manner that was expectable and in keeping with their character and situation. It’s true, for instance, that Bob Gottlieb laughed and was dismissive when I brought the problem to him, but Bob seemed to laugh at pretty much anything anyone told him. It was part of his happy-go-lucky persona, one of the things that made him fun to be around. I’m not sure I ever saw him take anything that anyone else said very seriously. As for his stance that there was nothing he could do, I reckon that was probably true. I doubt that there was anything that anyone could have done—at that time, at that institution.
There are things that I will probably never know or understand about what really happened all those years ago. But there are also things I think I understand about sexual harassment that have yet to be isolated and explored.
I also think that there may be a futility to this endeavor and to what this newsletter—which isn’t really a newsletter; it’s a serial narrative—is trying to do. Because these stories really can’t be told. That’s always been true. In the days before hashtags, sexual harassment stories couldn’t be told for a number of contradictory reasons: because nobody cared and nobody wanted to listen; because everybody knew what was going on and thought you should just accept it; because, while everybody knew what was going on, if you told one of these stories, you wouldn’t be believed. (I went into the reasons for this in “A Likely Story.”)
The truth is, though, that even at the height of the Me Too moment these stories were untellable because there’s no one in them to identify with. Because no one wants to be the person in that story.