#metoo

The reason we constantly post about the Gaiman allegations whenever we mention Good Omens is to warn potential new fans about him. We're not doing it to make anybody feel bad for liking the show. We still like it, too. (Although, if you want to watch it, please please do pirate or do the biggest watch party you possibly can. :) Honestly we should all be doing that with everything on Amazon anyway lol).

We know it's exhausting and depressing to still be seeing content about him and the allegations. It's even more exhausting and depressing to post about.

We're sick of seeing his his name, too. We wish we could just forget he ever existed.

But sadly, there are SO SO SO MANY fans who still haven't heard about the allegations. It feels like general knowledge to those of us who have known about it for a long time, but it really isn't.

Thanks to his very expensive PR team, you can scroll a long long long long long long time without seeing so much as a whisper about it. It's terrifying to think of how many new fans are about to sucked into the Gaiman universe without knowing what he's capable of.

Amanda Marcotte at Salon (06.02.2025):

History will no doubt look upon the outcome of the Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard with the same skepticism now applied to O.J. Simpson's 1995 acquittal after charges of his killing his wife and her friend. The 2022 trial, in which Depp sued Heard for defamation after she made anonymous allusions to domestic violence in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed, was a farce — by design. Depp hired publicist Melissa Nathan, who famously bragged she could "bury anyone," to seed social media networks with misogynist rumors about Heard, who had been 25 when she started dating the 48-year-old movie star. The New York Times later reported on Nathan's alleged tactics, based on court documents from a similar campaign against actress Blake Lively. The strategy, according to the Times, is "waging a largely undetectable smear campaign in the digital era," which succeeded when "online criticism of the actress skyrocketed." The evidence in Depp v. Heard, in a sane world, should have favored Heard. His claim to damages was that Heard's op-ed led to him losing his lead role in "Pirates of the Caribbean." A Disney executive denied this on the witness stand, and Depp's longtime talent agent testified that Depp's erratic behavior was what soured his reputation on set. As Jessica Winter at the New Yorker wrote during the trial, Heard produced "a trove of text messages, witness statements, and photos of injuries — which, she says, corroborate her allegations of abuse." Depp had previously sued a British tabloid for calling him a "wife-beater," and he lost, even though British law favors plaintiffs in defamation cases to an outrageous degree. The judge described Heard's side of the story as "substantially true."

[...] As that last sentence suggests, the case ended up being tried in the court of public opinion, where the preposterous story that Depp was the real victim took hold. Instructions to the jurors to ignore the crescendo of support for Depp outside the courtroom didn't matter, leading to a $15 million judgment in his favor. It's not clear how much of the pro-Depp clamor was seeded by his hired guns, but in the end, they were pushing on an open door. As journalist Kat Tenbarge reported for NBC at the time, content creators for TikTok and YouTube found that spreading sexist rumors about Heard was like printing money. There was an immense amount of public hunger in 2022 to forget all the lessons of the #MeToo movement, and instead fall back into the comfortable belief that sexism is a myth, women just make up stories for attention, and it's accused men who are the real victims. 

This week is the third anniversary of the day that a jury favored Depp over Heard. Looking back, the whole situation can be read as a portent for the 2024 election of Donald Trump. The public outpouring of support for Depp reflected a widespread willingness to choose self-delusion over facing hard truths, especially about the dangers of male domination. For a lot of people, it's exhausting hearing about how many women are beaten, raped, killed, harassed, and otherwise oppressed. It can feel much easier to believe it's all just made up. It's simpler to believe that ours is a just system, even as men still hold the lion's share of power and money. It's comforting to imagine that men react to all their privilege with grace and gratitude, and ignore the reality where all too many abuse women because they can. Trump was selling the same message to his voters: Wouldn't it be easier to live in a fantasy where patriarchy is all kittens and rainbows? Isn't it easier to live in the lie than confront the hard truth?

[...] The far-right website Daily Wire spent an astonishing amount of money promoting anti-Heard propaganda during the trial, which confused many people at the time. The Daily Wire is a political outfit, so why would they care about celebrity gossip that doesn't seem to have any partisan value to it? But they understood that Heard v. Depp did benefit Republicans, especially Trump. The entire circus was useful for convincing people that it's okay to choose disinformation over the truth, especially when the facts make you feel bad. It all goes back to George Orwell's insight with the "two-minute hate" in "1984." Self-delusion takes practice. Defending Depp was boot camp for the real test: supporting the lie that Donald Trump would make a fine president. 

Uh-huh. So anyway, men dont like being falsely accused of sexual crimes (crimes in general).

And that's not even getting into the recent doordash girl who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a man who was completely passed out and didnt touch her (she also filmed him naked and put it on the internet).

Society no longer cares about intent or if actual damage was done. If a woman feels like a victim, the man will likely be treated like a criminal. And that's a frighteningly low bar.

Multiple emails released by the Justice Department show Jeffrey Epstein and prominent scientists making derogatory comments about women’s intelligence and inclusion in elite academic spaces. (Emily Scherer for The 19th; Getty Images)

By Jessica Kutz Climate Reporter

February 23, 2026

In 2018, an elite group of academics and scientists planned to gather for an exclusive retreat at a luxury farm in the woods of Connecticut. The guests had been hand-picked by prominent New York literary agent John Brockman, who frequently hosted similar salons for luminaries in science, technology and media. 

The problem? Brockman had included two women on the list, and his staunch supporter and biggest funder wanted them out. 

“John, the old conferences did not care about diversity. I suggest you not either,” Jeffrey Epstein wrote in response to an email about the programming. “The women are all weak, and a distraction sorry.” 

In reply, Brockman justified the women’s inclusion, and says they’d been a part of a related book about AI, which needed to be inclusive to sell. “Today, it’s impossible to get a publisher to buy such a book with essays by 25 men and no women,” he wrote. 

Brockman concludes the email by citing #MeToo and mentioning the news of another scientist, whose book he had tried to publish, coming under fire for sexual harassment allegations. He wonders whether it might be best for optics if the disgraced financier — the biggest financial backer to Brockman’s nonprofit Edge Foundation — didn’t attend after all. 

“Me-Too is not going away; it’s growing, it’s all-pervasive and we’re now in a McCarthy-ism moment on steroids.” 

Brockman did not respond to a request for comment.

The 2018 exchange, which was revealed as part of a trove of files released by the Department of Justice, illuminates Epstein’s deep interest and entrenchment in the scientific community. He was well connected to scientists at top universities who continued to associate with him after a 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor. But the files also underscore how he used his power and money in ways that kept women out of places where they might succeed. 

“I think we all had a sense that the system wasn’t super fair, right?” said Nicole Baran, a member of 500 Women Scientists, a grassroots organization that started in 2016 to combat racism and misogyny in STEM — or science, technology, engineering and mathematics. “Seeing some of these emails — and peering behind the curtains of the rooms that we were never invited into, I think has really laid bare, I don’t know, just truly how broken and corrupt the system is.”

The emails are a reminder to women like Baran that the profession, at its highest levels, still operates under the gaze of men. And in a field where funding is scarce — and climbing the career ladder is often only possible through a combination of luck, mentorship and networking — the files reveal the ways sexism and misogyny still hold women back. 

For the boys in the club, the arrangement worked to their benefit. Epstein donated millions of dollars to their research, hosted them at networking dinners at his home, invited them to visit his island or his ranch in Santa Fe, and connected them to potential funders to further their work. 

As a result, these men were able to establish their own well-funded labs to pursue their work, land lucrative book deals and make connections to other prominent men, particularly those in Silicon Valley who were working on technological advancements like AI.

But as the emails reveal, these same men did not see women as intellectual equals.

Take Roger Schank, an AI researcher and theorist who died in 2023. He suggested in one email that “intelligence comes about in part from real focus” and that it is rare for a woman to not be “first and foremost focused on what others are thinking and feeling about her.” 

“Hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you don’t own a kelly bag,” he wrote. To which Epstein responded: “It’s the tail of distribution , no really smart women – none.” 

(Epstein’s emails and those of his correspondents often contained typos; The 19th is reproducing the text as it appears in the files released by the Justice Department.)

Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, who emailed with Epstein hundreds of times, made a joke in one email about how “half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.” 

The email was sent in 2017, more than a decade after Summers came under fire for a speech he gave at a conference for women and underrepresented groups in STEM, where he suggested that there weren’t as many women smart enough to be in these professions due to higher variability in men’s intelligence. During his time as president he was also scrutinized for the lack of women in tenured positions. The Guardian reported that under his reign the share of tenured positions offered to women fell from 36 percent to 13 percent. 

In another exchange, Epstein and Jeremy Rubin, a bitcoin developer and MIT researcher, went back and forth over whether there are any games that women are actually better at than men. It would be “interesting to attempt to make an intellectually stimulating game where women outperform men,” Rubin wrote in 2016. “Unless women are inherently inferior to the maximally talented man at all tasks ;).” 

For women like Lauren Aulet, a neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, the files revealed conversations that were more brash than she expected. “I think what was most shocking was simply how blatant and explicit the misogyny was.” 

“We have this narrative that explicit misogyny is something from the ’50s and ’60s, and what we have now is like implicit bias and microaggressions,” she said, adding: “I think this made clear that explicit misogyny is still out there in science and in academia, it’s just perhaps behind closed doors.”

Importantly, she says, the ways in which women are talked about, and also excluded from the connections these men had, have professional repercussions

“Women scientists aren’t necessarily the people that come to mind for certain men when they’re thinking about who they’re inviting to dinner or who they’re inviting to a conference,” she said. 

Not having that visibility can matter when it comes to achievements like being offered a tenured position — the height of stability in academia. “Often the tenure board will reach out for letters of recommendation from other people at other institutions in the field. Certainly, the more you’re known broadly, the better it is for your career in terms of tenure.”

Other scientists, like Alison Twelvetrees, a neurobiologist based in the United Kingdom, said she was not as surprised by the contents of the emails. “You just feel that it’s happening, even if you’re not privy to the exact contents of the conversations.” 

In her career, she said she’s often been the only woman in the room. “You become very aware of the — I mean a very British way of putting this — blokey banter that you’re not a part of and you kind of feel that exclusion.” 

For Twelvetrees, the emails also showed how these scientists would let things slide in their interactions with Epstein. “A lot of men who get to the top, they’re cowards,” she said. “So even if they’re aware that they’re not supposed to condone the way people are speaking, or they shouldn’t be that way in those environments, they will condone it,” she said. “It’s that sort of cowardice to [not] be an active bystander and not call it out. It’s still the majority.”

She sees a connection between the ways women are talked about in the files and the response to a recent push to strip Elon Musk of his fellow title at the Royal Society, the U.K.’s premier scientific institution, after his AI tool, Grok, was given the capability to undress women and girls. 

So far, the head of the institute has said the only reasons to strip fellows of their titles is if they’ve conducted scientific misconduct, things like falsifying data, Twelvetrees said. “[Elon’s] used the products of science to make his personal AI assistant Grok a mass engine of misogyny and white supremacy. I don’t understand how that isn’t scientific misconduct.”

In January, X, formerly known as Twitter, announced it had limited image generation to paid users and added additional safety guardrails. However, reporting has shown Grok can still generate explicit images despite these changes.

For her, it’s just another example of men not being allies to women. “It’s these people at the top just sort of being pretty casual about stuff they should be standing up to,” she said. 

Outside of quipping about women’s intelligence, some of the emails show men talking about young women in their profession in ways that are degrading. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University who corresponded with Epstein many times, recommending an undergrad student for a possible job, describing her to Epstein as a “v small good-looking blonde.” Yale has since placed Gelernter on leave, while they review his conduct.  

In another series of exchanges, Epstein and Summers discuss a woman whom Summers said he was mentoring, but who he implied he wanted to sleep with. He has since clarified to the Harvard Crimson the woman was not a student. In November, he told the student newspaper that he was deeply ashamed of his actions and takes full responsibility “for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.” He has stepped down from public positions including at the Center for American Progress and on the board of OpenAI. 

The interactions revealed in the files are “very dehumanizing” for women, according to Baran, an assistant professor of biology at Davidson College. “I think especially when you think about like, these are men who had colleagues [and] mentees that were women,” she said. “And I think what was so clear is the way in which women in particular were just not spoken about as people with equal intellectual capacity and power.”  

The revelations also made her question some of the work produced by some of the men scientists connected to Epstein, including researchers she teaches in her own classes. “It’s really hard to separate the science that these people created from the theories that are considered sort of foundational,” she said. “Especially in this area of  psychology and evolution in particular, where I’m finding it just really hard to disentangle [from their] behavior in their personal life that seems so egregious and horrific.”