CynaraM

This Gizmodo article gives the essential details.  Basically, he used mentorship and an appearance of friendship to coerce young women into sex.  

So, let me this out of the way, more to purge it from my brain than anything else.  Thank god, he didn’t rape anyone.  He’s not one of the worst ones.  He’s not a Weinstein or an Epstein or whatever.  No criminal charges have been brought or are expected, so far as I know.  In a previous generation, many people would have shrugged and blamed the women for expecting anything else from a powerful man.  

I don’t want any of that ‘previous generation’ bullshit suggesting he didn’t know it was wrong; the man is fifty-two years old, he’s not from the fucking Edwardian era. Even people in bowler hats and corsets would have known it was wrong.  They would have kept their friends and family away from him, and some of them would have told him so to his face. 

And it was wrong. Victims have braved the demented fanboys and spoken about their experiences.  He groomed them with lavish praise and the promotion of their professional work to thousands. He embraced them with his charm and warmth and wit.  And then, there were things that hurt them and that haunt them now.

And I am shaken.  I’ve been crying.  I’m angry.  Because we all felt his warmth and wit and charm, and we trusted him.  If our brief email contacts had turned into something more, I would have been thrilled.  It would have worked on me, it absolutely would. I didn’t even want to work in comics, and I would have been drawn in by his fame and personality and my absolute love of his work. 

Favourite writers can be something like household gods, or at least they are for me.  We do know they’re human.  I’ve never felt quite the same about Vonnegut after reading a biography that detailed his first marriage and family life.  I couldn’t reconcile the man and his work for a while.  Eventually, I came to feel that Vonnegut had put the best part of himself into his writing; that he’d been the man on the page that he couldn’t be in his real life. He’s not the only one.  And that man on the page has been important to me for a long time, and I don’t think I’ve lost him entirely.  

I haven’t written anything to Ellis.  Why would he care?  Maybe he would care?  Is he angry and bitter behind his carefully worded and thoughtful (though imperfect) apology?  He used to say that the contract between writer and reader is that he wrote the books and we bought them if we wanted to, that was it; but he went out of his way to foster personal relationships with his fans through the internet.  And wow, we find out now: did he EVER foster personal relationships with his fans through the internet (blech).  

Kurt Vonnegut said that a book is a conversation between two people, and readers want to know what kind of person they’re talking to.  He told his creative writing students that, when writing a book, you needed to be a good first date for whatever stranger was sitting down with you.  I understand why some authors crave separation from their fans, (especially in the modern publishing industry, where you’re under pressure to share everything from writing advice to selfies and cat pictures), but I think Vonnegut was absolutely right about this.  We want to know what kind of person wrote our favourite books, because *context matters.*

I can see the ‘cancel culture has gone too far’ people on the horizon, and they may very kindly shut the hell up.  For every person who has been ‘cancelled’, twenty more have been forgiven after a limp show of contrition, and a thousand more have never even been called to account.  No-one’s owed a job in their dream field, no-one’s owed an invite to the Met Gala or a Netflix special or a contract with Marvel.  You can be talented and still be an unemployable turd.  

The thing is, even Ellis’ victims feelings are so complicated, and this is one of the reasons I keep crying.  Some of them, at least, are still fond of him.  They don’t want to ‘ruin’ him.  They have good things to say about him.  I suspect they miss him.  I think I’m paraphrasing here: they just want him to be the man he pretended to be.  

Others close to Ellis have come out in support of the women, saying the signs were there, but they didn’t really understand.  They were ignorant, or willfully ignorant.  We all wanted to believe the facade.  

I dread what might happen next.  The bitter interviews; the too-brief sabbatical; the unearned comeback, making crass jokes to the only people who will listen to him anymore.  I don’t know what he should do for the victims; they can speak for themselves, and I can only speak as a fan.  But speaking as a fan, Warren, please don’t become the Louis CK of the writer’s set.