Mark Halperin wants you to trust him again.
The disgraced political analyst, whose career took a nosedive after several women accused him of sexual harassment and assault, has tried to rehabilitate himself with a new piece of #Resistance fodder, his book How to Beat Trump.
Readers, however, weren’t so easily fooled. When the book was published on Oct. 29, it sold a mere 502 copies in its first week.
Two years after the accusations against Halperin became public, the press still wasn’t good. One of his alleged victims called for the book to be pulled before publication. Many sources whom Halperin quotes in the book ended up distancing themselves from the project.
But instead of accepting the loss, Halperin’s publisher has decided to blame “cancel culture.”
“In this guilty-until-proven-innocent, cancel culture where everyone is condemned to death or to a lifetime of unemployment based on an accusation that’s 12 years old is criminal,” Halperin’s publisher Judith Regan told the New York Post.
But we’re not talking about a handful of old tweets. Halperin has been accused of harassing and manipulating female coworkers, propositioning them for sex, calling late at night, and making unwanted advances. The accusations against him may have allegedly taken place beginning in the 1990s, but there’s a reason the women didn’t speak out until 2017 after the news about Harvey Weinstein broke and launched the #MeToo movement.
“I was a victim of Mark’s repulsive behavior,” Dianna May, who claimed Halperin made her sit on his lap, told the Washington Post. “For years, I’ve regretted not saying something. But I was embarrassed and scared that I would lose my job if I spoke out. Who would believe me? It was an awful position to be in.”
The accusations were apparently an open secret at ABC. It just took a cultural shift for them to break into the mainstream.
So no, this is not about cancel culture. There are many misconceptions about the term. Here’s what usually means: Someone gets punished for a bad tweet or comment, even if it happened years ago and they’ve apologized. Here’s what it’s not: Someone fails to profit from an attempted comeback after harassing and manipulating young female subordinates for years.
MSNBC wisely nixed a program that Morning Joe hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski wanted to launch with Halperin, so he clearly still has plenty of friends in the media, if not at the highest levels of MSNBC.
Halperin will have no trouble getting rehabilitated by his powerful peers. But the rest of us aren’t buying it.
