It was the day before the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to question Attorney General William Barr about the Mueller report, and Al Franken was gripped by FOMO.

“I’ve written some advice to my former Democratic colleagues on the Judiciary Committee about tomorrow’s hearing with AG Barr, it’s a little rough on Barr,” tweeted the former senator, who resigned in late 2017 amid allegations of groping and unwanted kissing from several women. The tweet directed to a self-published article—nearly 1,600 words of unsolicited guidance, including such shrewd insights as “listen to your colleagues’ questions” and “listen to Barr”—posted on his Web site, AlFranken.com.

Meanwhile, journalist Mark Halperin, who lost gigs at NBC, Showtime, and Bloomberg following accusations from multiple women of kissing, groping, and sexual harassment, resurfaced in April after a roughly 17-month absence from the public eye. His not-so-smooth re-entry has been eased by such high-profile apologists as MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, and CNN’s Michael Smerconish, who feel that Halperin has suffered enough. Smerconish, who kicked off Halperin’s comeback by inviting him on The Michael Smerconish Program, went so far as to tell the Daily Beast in an e-mail that “to not let him opine after 2 yrs would be akin to a professional death sentence.”

Halperin and Franken are only the latest #MeToo exiles attempting to resurrect a semblance of their former lives. In the past several months, disgraced TV stars Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer have emerged as free-range socialites, haunting the dining rooms of starchy restaurants on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in the Hamptons. In February, former CBS chairman Les Moonves hung up a shingle in Hollywood for a new entertainment company called Moon Rise Unlimited.

A common characteristic of the exiled #MeToo men, regardless of where they stand on the spectrum of offense, is how convinced they seem to be that the public discourse cannot survive without their unique contributions. Whether we like it or not, some of them are crawling out of their hidey-holes and offering up deep thoughts. But should they? And even then, does anyone care? Dianna Goldberg May, who accused Halperin of sexual harassment, says his efforts have been insincere. Tina Dupuy, who accused Franken of inappropriately grabbing her, is exasperated by the idea of litigating #MeToo comebacks—“We always talk about their needs. They are the predators.”

There has been a lot of hand-wringing over what, exactly, is the proper punishment for people like Franken and Halperin—men who have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct and found guilty in the court of public opinion, and who have acknowledged wrongdoing. How long is an appropriate amount of time to remove oneself from the conversation? The calculus should perhaps involve the nature of the allegations, and what the perpetrators have done to make amends.

Halperin recently launched Mark Halperin’s Wide World of News, a hodgepodge blog of hot takes and hyperlinks. He has a .blog domain name, indicating that he didn’t spring for a premium account. And then there’s the actual content, which consists of spurts of wisdom, perhaps dashed off between stops on his contrition tour. Under a post entitled “Not a Bumper Sticker,” Halperin writes that Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bennet “trumpets entrance into Democratic field with essay that would fill the beds of a pair of Ford pickups.”

Franken started podcasting toward the end of last year, when he recorded a conversation with Andy Slavitt, who oversaw Medicare and Medicaid during the Obama administration. “Maybe I’ll do another one. I don’t know,” he said at the end of the hour-long interview, posting it to SoundCloud, where he has 1,034 followers. He’s since added six more installments to this as-yet-unnamed podcast—guests have included journalists Michael Lewis, David Frum, and retired judge Nancy Gertner—and blogged on a range of topics, both political and personal, ranging from his new grandchild to Trump’s attacks on the late John McCain to a GoFundMe drive he helped spearhead that raised more than $75,000 for the library at a northern Minnesota high school on an Indian reservation.