I wonder if we’re tiring of #MeToo. I wonder if we’ll just reach a limit to how many of our idols we can bear to see lose their crowns. And I wonder if we’re still clinging to the hope that those who perpetrated abuse are somehow fundamentally bad people, instead of facing the more deeply disorienting possibility that our very ideals about what constitutes accomplishment—our reverence for power and confidence and, yes, aggression and entitlement—might promote or inculcate abusive behavior in nearly anybody. We still want to believe in the possibility of a “golden boy,” a man who still has it all: infinite power and infinite goodness.

I wonder all this because of the sexual harassment controversy surrounding Tom Brokaw, the former anchor at NBC who has since become the network’s eminence grise. In a 1,000-word email to friends and colleagues, Brokaw declared last Thursday, April 26, “the first day of my new life as an accused predator in the universe of American journalism.” He said he was “ambushed and then perp walked across the pages of The Washington Post.” He claimed that his accuser had taken him to the “guillotine,” unjustly “stripped him of any honor he has earned,” and even tried to destroy his “citizenship.”

On April 26, the Post had published the accusations of Linda Vester—a former Fulbright scholar in Egypt; a graduate of the Sorbonne; a foreign correspondent in Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Rwanda, and Somalia; a television anchor; and the funder of scholarships for girls and treatment for PTSD-afflicted veterans. She alleged that Brokaw had tried to kiss her uninvited, and groped her in front of her colleagues, when she was an intern for NBC in the 1990s. Another NBC employee told the Post Brokaw touched her breasts in the office.



In his 4 a.m. email the following morning, Brokaw wrote that Vester had “failed in her pursuit of stardom.” She “complained,” he said, “that I tickled her without permission (you read that right).” She “had limited success”; yet was “not frightened” and “eager for advice.” In other words, whatever efforts she made to overcome her mediocrity should convince us she would stop at nothing. Presumably to offset her so-called “failure,” Brokaw surmised, Vester “married a wealthy man”—but nevertheless, he reckoned, she hungered for fame by “portraying herself as [#MeToo’s] den mother [and its] ‘keeper of the flame.’” (A couple of allegations made to help a Post reporter describe a workplace culture, of course, constitute no such self-righteous portrayal: When Brokaw talks about positioning oneself as a “den mother” and “keeping the flame,” he is describing himself.)

This is the Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, and Bill Cosby playbook: Discredit the woman. Complain that she overreacted to a little fun. Accuse her simultaneously of career failure and of being too ambitious—her ambition a symbol of her voracious, smothering sexuality. Wildly overstate her own claims to make them appear ridiculous. And insist that any allegation against him, is, in essence, an attack on the notion that anything at all can be holy—an attack against America. Brokaw becomes, in his defense, a synecdoche for the proper success story, the ideal American man, the country itself and what is most precious in it.