When Garrison Keillor Met The Outrage Machine: A Plea For Restraint In The #MeToo Era

For the last week or so, I’ve been reading Scalia Speaks, the wonderful new collection of some of the many speeches that Justice Scalia gave over the years. (Even if you’re not a Scalia fan, it’s a hell of a read.) One of the recurring themes in the book is Justice Scalia’s love for the play A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt.

In one of the portions that Justice Scalia either quotes from directly or refers to repeatedly in his speeches, the following exchange occurs between St. Thomas More and one of the other characters, who is named Roper. Here’s the relevant part of the exchange for my purposes:

More: And go he should if he was the Devil himself until he broke the law.

Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.

As someone who defends students nationwide in campus sexual misconduct cases, I’ve been thinking about this exchange as the avalanche of sexual harassment allegations has continued to pour in since the Harvey Weinstein bombshell started the trend last month.

Before I go further, let me state what, in our age of contextless Internet outrage, is so obvious that it should not need stating: I think that the exposure of serial sexual harassers and assaulters is a tremendously good thing that is long overdue. Sexual harassment is bad. Sexual assault is bad. People like Harvey Weinstein deserve what they get, and more.

What concerns me is the rush to judgment on people who are manifestly not Harvey Weinstein, and the overreaction that I worry will only get worse from here. As the inevitably overwrought reaction to this column will doubtless demonstrate, no one ever gets praise for trying to slow the roll of the Outrage Machine.

Perhaps the best recent example of this overreaction occurred just yesterday, when Minnesota Public Radio not only severed all ties with Garrison Keillor, but took extraordinary efforts to basically erase him and his work from public existence. And it did this based on an allegation that, although it has not been made public, seems to have been made by a single person, and, if you credit Keillor’s explanation at all, does not appear to have actually involved sex.

To be sure, some of you won’t believe Keillor’s explanation and may be the type who always believe the accuser and doubt the accused. I hope none of you ever become defense lawyers, because you’re really not allowed to do that. (Nor, to be clear, should any good prosecutor do that.)

As Keillor tells it (in what has to be the driest response to allegations like this in recorded history), he placed his hand on a coworker’s back while trying to comfort her, didn’t realize that she had an open shirt, and touched her bare skin. That was it — no sex, and no sexual contact. Again, we don’t know what his accuser’s version is, but I certainly hope it will come out soon.

Here is what Minnseota Public Radio said that it would do in response to these accusations:

* end distribution and broadcast of The Writer’s Almanac and rebroadcasts of The Best of A Prairie Home Companion hosted by Garrison Keillor;

* change the name of APM’s weekly music and variety program hosted by Chris Thile; and

* separate from the Pretty Good Goods online catalog and the PrairieHome.org website.

Just think about this for a second. Even if you believe that Garrison Keillor inappropriately touched a single female coworker at some point in the past, think about how many people will lose their jobs because of what Minnesota Public Radio has decided to do.

Think about how ridiculous it is to not rebroadcast old shows that many people (including me, as is probably obvious by now) enjoy tremendously, because of a single bad act.

Think about how ridiculous it is to change the name of a radio program that has existed for more than 40 years because of a single act. Without the Prairie Home name behind it, Chris Thile’s fresh new take on the show is likely toast– and if the show ends, dozens of people will lose jobs that they have probably had for decades, and over an act committed by someone who retired from the show more than a year ago.

Think about what’s going to happen to the Pretty Good Goods website — how many people that site probably employs, how many people rely for their livelihood on selling goods on the site.

Anyone who does criminal defense work, or even defense work of any kind, should recoil at this kind of wildly disproportionate response to a single allegation of misconduct.

What Harvey Weinstein is alleged to have done is infinitely worse. But should we burn every copy of Shakespeare in Love, Good Will Hunting, Pulp Fiction, The English Patient, Chicago, My Left Foot, and The Piano? (Okay, maybe Shakespeare in Love, an overrated period piece that never should have beat out Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture.)

Again, if Keillor did something inappropriate, it may well have been appropriate to fire him, or take some other action to punish him personally. Until we know more details, it’s hard to say.

But the idea that Minnesota Public Radio would attempt to essentially erase him from history is nothing less than Orwellian. This isn’t ripping down Confederate statues; there is zero chance that anyone would be “triggered,” to use the parlance of the day, by hearing an old Prairie Home Companion rebroadcast, or by buying some cute Lake Wobegon tchotchkes from the Pretty Good Goods website. Poor Chris Thile and the people he works with never did a damn thing to deserve this. Yet MPR eagerly sacrifices them and many others on the altar of Outrage.

I don’t know where this will end, but I worry that it won’t be in a good place. We have a tradition in this country, one that we very happily adopted from England, of giving everyone — even the Devil himself — the benefit of the law. The rush to judgment and extreme overreaction that seems to be happening in some of these cases strikes me as a very scary thing for people who care about due process.

First they come for the Devil, and then they come for you.

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Justin Dillon is a partner at KaiserDillon PLLC in Washington, DC, where he focuses on white-collar criminal defense and campus disciplinary matters. Before joining the firm, he worked as an Assistant United States Attorney in Washington, DC, and at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. His email is [email protected].