#halperin

In the fall of 2017, Mark Halperin’s career looked like a terminal case. A celebrity, at least by the standards of the journalism industry, Halperin was known for the Game Change books he’d co-authored with John Heilemann, and for mastering a reporting style that relied more on his access to important people than the profundity of his insight. Multiple women toldCNN that the political journalist had pressed his erection against them without their consent. Others said that he had masturbated in front of them; another told the news channel that he “violently” threw her against a window in order to kiss her, and later threatened her journalism career. Halperin reportedly abused the women during his time at ABC News, where he had power and his victims had little. The Daily Beast then located othervictims; some were college students when they encountered Halperin’s unwelcome lechery. And people knew about it years before CNN ever published a word. His misconduct was, in the Beast’s words, “an open secret” among his peers.

When Halperin lost his commentating gigs and Penguin canceled his publishing deal with Heilemann, he lost access to his hunting grounds. #MeToo, which was then in its infancy as a mainstream movement, had delivered overdue justice — again. In October alone, credible accusations of misconduct took down Halperin, Harvey Weinstein, and my own boss: Hamilton Fish, then the publisher of The New Republic. But as #MeToo gathered strength, it inspired commensurate worry from critics, who feared it would one day go too far, that anonymous accusations would tip into mob justice. That for every Mark Halperin, there would be an innocent victim, a man unfairly ruined because a woman had exaggerated or even manufactured a claim.

Like the people who populate them, movements are fallible. But women have a great deal to lose by advancing even minimal accusations of misconduct, a fact that #MeToo’s antagonists tended to ignore. In a similar turn, the last two years haven’t provided much credence for the fear that vigilante justice would take over. Weinstein is still persona non grata, but other men’s careers remain remarkably resilient.