Moral Blackmail and the Forgiveness Demand

Considering the post-Me Too redemption arc.

They come back, these supposedly banished men, the way a cancer can. We were told that Me Too had vanquished them, cast them off into lives of obscurity and quiet disgrace—and for a while, I thought that maybe it really had. In those days, the unmasked abusers issued mealy-mouthed non-apologies in the kind of evasive corporate language that is the unmistakable product of lawyers. They said they were “reflecting.” They said they were “taking a step back.” As the months and then years went by with no sign of them, it seemed like a few of these men might be gone for good.

But then they creep back into the frame—sometimes subtly, sometimes boldly. They begin to launch their comebacks. Lately, the primary mode of the abusive man’s post-Me Too comeback has been shamelessness. Andrew Cuomo, found by an attorney general’s investigation to have sexually harassed more than a dozen women while Mayor of New York, is now running for Mayor while still carrying out a campaign of retaliation and legal harassment against his accusers. Armie Hammer, accused of rape and also of various disturbing, degrading, and violent nonconsensual sex acts of various other kinds—including some sort of misogynist cannibalism fantasy—has been doing needless little interviews and making jokes online about vore pornography. These men are delighting in the new libertine sadism of our cultural moment: they are attempting to ape an ascendant vision of masculine virility that is characterized more than anything by its impunity and contempt for self-restraint. They are not who I want to talk about today.

Because these men, the shameless and bullying post-Me Too returns, had the way paved for them by another, more manipulative specimen: the men who demanded forgiveness. Earlier in the Me Too backlash, these men appeared again in front of the cameras squinting and teary. They are ready, they say, to admit their faults, to come clean. But invariably, what follows is less an apology than a careful denial, a hedge. They’re not just there, it turns out, to demand our attention; they are there to call for restoration. They remind us, in the pleading tone of a complaint, that we have a duty to forgive.

Last summer, the actor Kevin Spacey, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 50 men, wept in self-pity during an interview with the British television host Piers Morgan as he described the debt he’s incurred from his legal bills. Morgan, a controversial commentator with a conservative audience, agreed with his guest that Spacey had been the victim of “media overreach” when the actor lost work in light of the men’s claims of harassment and assault. The interview, which lasted for more than an hour and a half, was an opportunity for Spacey to recast himself as a suffering innocent; a falsely accused man, or maybe one tortured by amorousness and the claustrophobia of the closet, who had no idea how he had wound up on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane. Over the course of the interview, Spacey managed to argue both that he had changed dramatically since first being accused of assault in 2017, and also that he had never done anything wrong in the first place. The incidents that his accusers called “groping,” Spacey referred to as “caresses.” The actor Anthony Rapp, the first of the men to allege misconduct by Spacey, says that he was “caressed” by the older man when he was 14 years old.

Spacey’s interview with Morgan came on the heels of a New York Times elegy for the documentarian Morgan Spurlock, who died of cancer on May 23. Spurlock was best known for Super Size Me, his 2004 stunt documentary, in which Spurlock filmed himself eating nothing but McDonalds for 30 days and recorded the deteriorating health effects that followed. In the Times, a friend of Spurlock took the occasion of his death to grieve not only the man she knew, but the career he could have had, she said, if ours was a more forgiving culture. “We Are Good at Punishing #MeToo Men,” the headline declared, somewhat dubiously. “Can We Ever Forgive Them?” Spurlock is not alive, as Spacey is, to make this case for himself. But as with so many of Me Too’s exposed abusers, others were all too ready to do so on his behalf.

In the piece, Spurlock’s friend argues that the filmmaker’s career was derailed by a blog post he published in December 2017, at the height of the Me Too movement, titled “I Am Part of the Problem.” In the blog, Spurlock recounted being accused of rape by a classmate in college; he said that he had had sex with the woman while she was severely intoxicated, and that she had cried during the encounter. He also admitted to the sexual harassment of a subordinate at his production company. The post was a meandering mea culpa, written in a chummy stream of consciousness. Spurlock told one friend that he had published it without asking anyone else to read it first. Probably unwise.

The Times writer identified this post as the end of Spurlock’s career. In her telling, it was an apology that doubled as a confession, but it had turned him, unfairly, into a target. “I can’t shake the feeling that nearly seven years after #MeToo, we still haven’t found a way for men who want to make amends to do so meaningfully,” Spurlock’s friend wrote. “If we as a society want to truly break the cycle of harm, we need to offer an opportunity for forgiveness to those who are truly willing and eager to change.” But had Spurlock changed? The blog post incurred public scorn in no small part for its self-congratulatory tone, which frequently seemed to suggest that admitting to sexual misconduct absolved Spurlock of having committed it. To my mind, the blog’s most conspicuous feature is the fact that it was directed not to the women Spurlock had hurt, but to the public. But such nuances were lost to Spurlock’s friend—or at any rate, she chose not to address them. “It’s sobering to me to realize in hindsight that if Mr. Spurlock had simply said nothing,” she speculated, “his reputation probably would have survived intact.”

That would be tragic if it was true, but perhaps it isn’t. It’s a fact that Spurlock’s career never recovered after his blog post. But it’s also true that his professional life had already deteriorated significantly long before it. Spurlock’s career had meandered in the years that followed Super Size Me, and he never repeated its success. Partly, that was because its style of winking Bush-era satire came to seem facile and smug as the 21^st century wore on. But mostly, it was because the very premise of Spurlock’s film was largely discredited in the years after its release. In 2007—a full decade before Spurlock’s confessional blog post—Swedish scientists who attempted to repeat Super Size Me’s experiment became the first to discover that Spurlock’s results could not be replicated. It eventually became clear that many of the health problems that Spurlock experienced during filming, which he had attributed to fast food, were in fact probably the result of his untreated (and undisclosed) alcoholism. At one point, over the course of Super Size Me’s 98-minute runtime, a doctor tells Spurlock to stop his McDonald’s experiment because his liver is “turning into pâté,” and that he was developing the kind of cirrhosis usually only seen in end-stage alcoholics. It wasn’t the McDonalds.

This is a common feature of the post-Me Too demand for restitution: the claim that careers were ruined by the movement that in fact had been ruined by the men’s own actions long before. Abusive men’s other inadequacies—their bitterness or unoriginality, their addictions or poor work ethic, their professional misbehavior or their professional bad luck—are erased from their accounting, covered over conveniently by their retroactive claims to have been martyrs to feminism’s excess. In this telling, it’s not that these men were responsible for messing up their own lives, either by assaulting women or otherwise. It’s that Me Too went too far, and they got in the way.

But the facts of these men’s professional declines are not really what these pleas for forgiveness are about. They are not really about whether Spacey groped or “caressed,” his victims; they are not really about the state of Morgan Spurlock’s film and television career in the mid-2010s. They are about an insidious tactic in the popular efforts to reverse the Me Too movement: the use of calls for forgiveness as a kind of moral blackmail.

Don’t get me wrong: forgiveness, on its own, need not be a concept that anyone treats with suspicion. Forgiveness is a virtue, a grace. There are few pains greater than that of shame and self-hatred we feel when we have hurt someone who did not deserve it; there are few kindnesses more humbling and transcendent than the mercy of those we’ve wronged, who let us back into their lives. To recognize one’s own failures, to grieve them, and then to apologize and work to make things right is maybe the single experience from which moral growth can emerge. It is crucial for the development of ethical capacities; it is crucial for the maturation of the soul. There is some unique relief, too, in being forgiven: it provides the reassurance, so precious and rare, that in the end our characters may amount to more than our weaknesses. I have hurt people, and I have been forgiven; it is among the greatest honors of my life.

But maybe this intimate vitality of forgiveness—the fact that it is something so many of us long for—is exactly why demands for forgiveness have been so effective when they are wielded as critiques of Me Too, and of anti-violence feminism more broadly. Because calls for forgiveness, in cases like these, are not mere personal efforts at atonement. They are not private acts of contrition and amends-making; they are not even addressed to the women who have been hurt. Rather, these demands for forgiveness are public, and often, they are framed as accusations. It is the media that has wronged him, Kevin Spacey cries into a microphone; it is the victims who have been cynical and opportunistic. It is the Me Too movement that is cruel and unforgiving, says Morgan Spurlock’s friend; she laments that there is no public space for forgiveness even as she cries out it in the paper of record. (No one is saying this, the Me Too critic says, directly into a microphone.)

The named wrongdoers here are nonspecific. They are "the media,” that ill-defined boogeyman that nobody likes, rather than a specific report or editorial; or “the Me Too movement,” rather than any particular woman, who might have her own rationales and claims that cannot be so easily caricatured. But pointing the finger at such vague, offstage enemies allows these speakers to obscure the reality that the person whose behavior they’re trying to change is you. Because these pleas for forgiveness are not apologies worthy of the name: instead, they are demands.

Lots of conduct can fit under the term “apology.” Apologies can be sincere or cynical, earnest or begrudging, groveling or stoic. But apologies that reflect a true change of character on the part of the wrongdoer always share one thing in common: they are not transactional. An apology should create no obligations for the wronged party; even when sincere, it cannot create a demand for forgiveness or restoration to her esteem. Perhaps this is why the famous Me Too men’s calls for forgiveness are not made to the people whose forgiveness they might actually need: such pleas are not interested in the actual wrongdoing; they are not concerned with the meaning of sexual violence, with its effects on victims’ lives, or with their targets’ wellbeing. They are concerned with other people’s esteem—with undoing the effect of the revelation in the public’s mind.

And what do these pleas ask of the public? Mostly, they seem to be asking us to turn back time. They ask us to judge Me Too, and the knowledge that it brought us, as a kind of erasable mistake. We made a mistake when we judged these men by the accusations against them, these forgiveness peans tell us. We should not have judged Kevin Spacey as bad, because he was simply misunderstood. We should not have judged Spurlock’s conduct, because he admitted it. The rationales for forgetting are beside the point: what matters is the outcome. The calls for forgiveness are calls, that is, to restore public opinion to what these men and their defenders believe is its natural level: to an assessment of abusive men that pays no attention to their abuse. They are not efforts to make amends to the victims, and they do not attempt to do so. They are efforts to make the public forget about the victims entirely.

Many are eager to do just that. The Me Too movement made us all aware of things we would rather not know, complicating our love for men on television and men in our lives with inconvenient, sometimes horrifying knowledge about their conduct. It is very tempting to simply forget this information; very appealing to pretend that it need not influence how we think of them. And it is especially appealing to forget when we are told that our forgetting is compassionate, high minded, a kind of righteous nuance—and that remembering, by contrast, would be a kind of cruelty. The call for the forgiveness of Me Too abusers—and the attendant erasure of their victims’ claims—accomplishes a neat reversal: suddenly it is not the abused victim, but the abusing man, who has a claim on our sympathy, on our moral obligations. Suddenly it is not the abused victim, but the abusing man, whose side we must take in righteousness.

In her 1997 paper “Violations of power, adaptive blindness, and betrayal trauma theory,” the Stanford psychologist Jennifer Freyd coined the acronym DARVO—deny, attack, reverse victim and offender—to characterize the responses of domestic batterers when confronted with their own conduct: they will deny the violence, attack the credibility and motives of their accuser, and claim that it is they who are the victims of her malice. “Figure and grounds are completely reversed,” Freyd writes. “The more the offender is held accountable, the more wronged the offender claims to be. … The offender is on the offense, and the person attempting to hold the offender accountable is put on the defense.” The forgiveness demand completes this last turn of Freyd’s cycle at a particularly insidious level: it reverses the moral economy of abuse, making it not the abused targets, but the unforgiven abusers, who are seen as victims deserving of our sympathy.

Not every apology from an abusive man needs to be understood as a cynical manipulation. But nor should a reluctance to forgive by abuse victims or their allies be understood as selfish, cruel, embittered or withholding. It is seemingly always women and other marginalized groups who are told of the virtues of forgiveness—and it is always their anger and resentment that creates the greatest discomfort for those in power. In a culture where sexual violence has rarely been understood as real violence—regarded instead as a private prerogative of manhood, on the one hand, or as a triviality exaggerated by overwrought women, on the other—a refusal to forgive can be understood instead as a persistent insistence on the wrongness of sexual abuse. Forgiveness allows both the perpetrator and the surrounding community to return to the status quo ante, something they are often very eager to do. But non-forgiveness, grudge holding, and unyielding expressions of anger or hurt refuse this forgetting. In that sense, non-forgiveness can be, indeed, a signal of the victim’s defiant self-respect; of her refusal to allow the wrong done to her to be treated as if it—as if she—does not matter.

While there have been innumerable television specials and op-eds asking what happens to abusive men after they have been exposed, there has been relatively little attention paid to what happens to their victims in the wake of such disclosures. Perhaps it is assumed that the righteousness of their claims insulates women from psychic fallout, social ostracism, or professional retaliation. Not so. In a piece responding to Spacey’s interview with Piers Morgan, the Guardian columnist Martha Gill noted a kind of grim symmetry between the fates of abusers and their victims. Blacklisted, forced out of jobs or even industries, publicly shamed: until quite recently it was survivors of sexual harassment who were most often “cancelled.” Gill writes as if she is describing a newly altered world, but her use of the past tense strikes me as somewhat optimistic: women who speak about sexual violence are still punished for doing so, often in disproportionate, sadistic, strange, prolonged, and heartbreakingly intimate ways. But she is right to note that many of the dour fates that abused men and their defenders complain of have historically been meted out exclusively to their victims. Somehow, these women’s fates have not merited the same degree of hand-wringing attention. Few show much interest in the afterlives of accusers, or in the moral quandies that their lives might present. It is a subject that most people seem eager to turn away from.

One exception is Judith Herman, a psychiatrist whose work with victims of rape and incest was instrumental in forcing the psychiatric to recognize that sexual violence experiences could produce long term psychological suffering in the form of PTSD. In her 2023 book Truth and Repair, Herman looks extensively at the question of apology and forgiveness in cases of sexual abuse—but unlike many of the forgiveness pleas of the mainstream, her work examines them from the victims’ perspective. Herman, one of the most committed anti-violence feminists I have ever encountered, is almost rapturously enthusiastic about the uses of apology, which she claims can do wonders for sexual violence victims who suffer traumatic symptoms. But she cautions that these apologies must meet certain conditions. A psychologically palliative apology, she says, must be free of self-pity: the wrongdoer must be sorry not for themselves, but for their victim. The victim must face no obligations in the face of the wrongdoer’s apology: she must be entirely free, without condition or caveat, to accept or reject it. And often, the apology must be repeated, accompanied not just by declarations but by demonstrations of remorse and changed behavior. This kind of apology, according to Herman, can be profoundly transformative. But it is also extremely rare. For my part, I’m not certain that I’ve ever seen such an apology come from a man accused of sexual violence.

Meanwhile, according to Herman, a counterfeit apology can do more harm than none at all. “While genuine apologies foster the hope that evil deeds can be redeemed, insincere apologies add insult to injury by mocking that hope,” Herman writes. “Many perpetrators are not, in fact, truly sorry for what they have done.” Herman goes on to say that many of the trauma patients she works with in fact fear expressions of regret from their abusers, anticipating that such false apologies would “simply be another form of manipulation.” “I would be wary of an apology,” said one survivor, a poet Herman calls Caroline, “because then I would feel pressure to forgive him.”

Like the apologies that are issued not from sincere remorse or personal change but out of a transitory or transactional search for personal gain, such forgiveness—coerced, manipulated, and insincere—is an insult to the genuine article. Herman speaks instead of a unilateral kind of forgiveness that many of the women she spoke with aimed for, something less akin to reconciliation and restoration of the perpetrator and more like a private, personal, and one-sided emotional divestment on the part of the victim—a gradual dissipation of rage and bitterness. “This kind of letting go cannot be accomplished by an act of will, however,” she cautions. Instead, it is a reflection of personal healing, something for which “forgiveness” may not be the right word. (“I don’t know if it’s called forgiveness,” said one of Herman’s informants, a woman who was raped in her home by a stranger, “but I would call it peace.”) If this sounds gauzy and sentimental, it isn’t. Herman characterizes this emotional resolution in brutally bleak terms: “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.”

Hope of a better past: is this not what the Me Too men, and their cheerleaders, are working for? Is it not a better past that Morgan Spurlock’s friend is demanding, when she takes to the pages of the New York Times to lament that her dead friend did not receive public redemption before he died? Is it not a better past that Kevin Spacey is demanding, when he attempts to relitigate the public interpretation of his alleged sexual assaults on a prime time talk show? These men, and their fans, want to undo the past. But it is not their past violence that they want to reverse. They want to reverse what happened when people found out about it. If forgiveness is, as Herman says, a kind of coming to terms with the unchangeability of the past, then maybe the camp that needs to “forgive” is theirs.