Objectives

If you had asked me who Wesley Lowrey was, I’d have said, he’s the ‘there’s no such thing as objective journalism’ journalist. That is an oversimplification of his 2020 analysis of this topic; you can read the long version in his 2023 Columbia Journalism Review essay. You can then click over to the CJR main page and find a big new article, by Betsy Morais, in which many women say, of Lowrey, #MeToo.

The specifics here are the now-familiar (familiar, that is, from other stories, of other men; I was not included in a whisper network about this individual) mix of concerning, assault-alleging stories and more ambiguous interactions. I know that this is a format meant to give credence to the serious stuff, to show something about a man’s character, and while they can do this, they can also backfire. They can make it seem as though the act of being a blowhard professor (“the course deviated from the syllabus entirely: students generally took turns reading articles Lowery recommended, or he’d expatiate on his own work” or as it is also known, unfortunately, all too often: school) with an eccentric penchant for candles in the office (seems a fire hazard more than anything) is somehow of a piece with the act of getting women drunk—is drugging being insinuated?—and engaging in sex acts with them while they’re not fully conscious. Sexual assault, in other words.

Some of what’s alleged are the acts of a monster. Others are those of one of those cult-of-personality professors (though a couple who come to mind were high school teachers) who think their genius and bourgeoisie-épating means they need to performatively reject boundaries, but who are ultimately just crummy teachers who can’t be bothered with bureaucracy. Still other parts fall in a more gray-area zone, where it seems a bit like you could say yes, monster, and then find yourself looking ridiculous when more information emerges. I am not a judge or lawyer. I don’t know any of these people personally. Nor have I solved that which #MeToo more generally never did, namely what precisely should happen—outside legal penalties—if it turns out a man was in fact as bad as claimed.

What I do know is that there’s a big piece of the story not mentioned, but that is present if you read between the lines.