It’s not just Jeffrey Toobin. The New Yorker has signaled yet again that it has a clear crisis of the moral compass when it comes to tolerating notorious sex pests. But this time, the magazine has graduated from attempting to rehabilitate the serial groping Al Franken to Anthony Weiner, the convicted child predator who arguably lost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election.
In the first print edition of the upcoming year, contributor Micah Hauser details Weiner’s “comeback gig” after a “stint in prison and some consulting work.” As you may recall, the disgraced former congressman spent more than a year in prison after pleading guilty to sexting a 15-year-old girl. His laptop in possession of the FBI wound up containing emails relevant to the Hillary Clinton investigation, forcing then-director James Comey to announce he would have to reopen the investigation just 11 days before the election. A year after leaving a halfway house, Weiner was spotted hanging out in the Hamptons and lunching with a mystery woman in the Flatiron district. On top of his Page Six-worthy jaunts across New York, Weiner has been named the CEO of IceStone, a Brooklyn-based sustainable countertop company previously feted by the press.
In other words, Weiner wants back into his old world, and now the New Yorker is actively trying to help him.
For starters, the piece is simply about Weiner’s new gig at IceStone, where Hauser writes, “the retail politician comes alive in the warehouse.” Some spare sentences are reserved for the hand-wringing about Weiner’s felonious philandering, but for the most part, Hauser documents Weiner buddying up with his warehouse staff as though he were illustrating a washing machine factory in a piece about tariffs.
It’s a weak effort, but a telling one.
In years since the #MeToo movement started and sputtered, newsrooms have engaged in countless debates over which allegations constitute fair game. There have been extraordinarily severe allegations, such as the assault charge against Brett Kavanaugh, that everyone agrees would be newsworthy if true, but plenty have been perturbed by lack of evidence corroborating such allegations. And then there are allegations backed by a bevy of evidence, such as those against Louis C.K., but a disagreement over whether his behavior warrants being “canceled.”
If there was a cut and clear example of someone for whom the #MeToo movement was invented to bar from polite society, it’s Weiner, a man proven beyond a reasonable doubt of preying on a young girl. He hasn’t been a member of government in nearly a decade. He is separated from the political aide who, herself, has been rendered irrelevant thanks to the presidential loss her husband helped secure.
But the New Yorker is done with the whole #MeToo facade now. The magazine first telegraphed its pivot when it decided to go all-in on branding Kavanaugh a serial predator on the basis of an allegation corroborated by not one direct contemporaneous witness. By then, they had made clear that sexual assault and misconduct allegations were little more than bludgeons with which to beat their ideological adversaries. Hence, it makes complete sense that folks like Franken, once a formidable fundraiser and Democratic celebrity, would be considered prime candidates to rehabilitate. But a criminal as heinous and predatory as Weiner? Really?
Remember, Weiner didn’t simply send some late night “you up?” texts to a name without a face simply catfishing him. This grown man, one so famous and powerful that his wife would have surely helped run the White House had Hillary won the election, was knowingly soliciting a girl not old enough to drive a car to masturbate for him over Skype amid his musings about raping her. (I’ve linked the original reporting on the details of his crime, but the details are extremely, extremely disturbing, so proceed with caution.)
This is the man that the New Yorker thinks deserves the same second (or, depending on whom you’re asking, sixth or seventh) chance that the media regularly denies to high school students recorded once using a racial slur or complete strangers on the internet caught publishing problematic tweets. At this rate, one couldn’t be blamed for asking if Harvey Weinstein is next.
