“This show is not just a job to me. This is a vital part of my life. This has been a sanctuary these last seven years we’ve been here,” Chris Hardwick told viewers.
Hardwick, host of the aftershow for AMC’s “The Walking Dead” and “Fear the Walking Dead,” teared up while addressing the fan community for the first time in weeks.
“The allegations [against Hardwick] were not true,” said Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo Wednesday night, responding to a clip of Hardwick’s emotional return to the show as aired on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”
“Not everybody who is accused is guilty,” said host Laura Ingraham.
Hardwick, 46, was reinstated and resumed his hosting duties on AMC’s “Talking with Chris Hardwick” last Sunday. He was at the center of #MeToo-based allegations of sexual abuse and was suspended from the AMC show while the allegations were assessed, as CNN and other outlets reported.
As a result of allegations lodged by a former partner via the blogging platform Medium, the comedian found himself suspended from AMC’s wildly popular aftershows, removed from Comic-Con panels, and scrubbed from the website Nerdist, as Yahoo Lifestyle reported.
In this case, the person who was punished pending an investigation into the allegations was male. And in this case, the accused was also cleared of those allegations.
If his accuser, actress Chloe Dykstra, had similarly lost her job or suffered the humiliation Hardwick did — would the reaction of the public have been different?
The Washington Post shamefully justified this new and unethical practice of punishing the accused based solely on unproven allegations. In other words, “punish first, prove later” is the new maxim.
The accused are somehow assumed guilty and immediately punished. Some of these people lose their jobs — temporarily or permanently. If they’re Hollywood types, most of them are tried in the court of public opinion, where their reputations are irreparably tarnished.
But it’s OK, say the #MeToo zealots. After all, someone made a claim. What other choice would an employer have?
Plenty.
The other choice — the right choice — in this order, is to:
- protect the victim
- investigate the allegations
- take action based on results of the investigation
Otherwise, people are taking the unnecessary risk of creating more victims. And that is exactly what has happened.
Perhaps AMC and others need to be reminded that the feelings and experiences of the wrongly accused count, too.
The Left has created a false dichotomy that needs to be called out and demolished. They would have us believe that protecting and believing victims of sexual abuse — and assuming the accused are innocent unless proven otherwise — cannot happen simultaneously. That’s a lie.
Related: The Incredible Dangers of #MeToo’s Mob Mentality
In their twisted reasoning, any punishments the innocent suffer in the name of protecting victims are an unfortunate but necessary evil. Hardwick and others unjustly pulled under in the #MeToo tsunami are the price we must pay to protect women, their reasoning goes — the price we must pay to champion victims’ rights.
Hardwick isn’t the only person, of course, who has suffered unjustly and had his or her pain minimized and trivialized by an overzealous Left eager to see heads on stakes. Offered as additional “proof” in The Post’s piece was Ryan Lizza’s situation. Though the journalist was fired from The New Yorker following #MeToo-related allegations, he got another job at Esquire just six months later. Six months.
The Left is relegating men to a status of disposable chattel whose suffering is irrelevant.
If a woman was blacklisted for half a year based on her revelations she was a sexual abuse victim, we would all, quite rightly, be outraged. But since it’s a guy who was victimized by false claims — eh — it’s OK?
Ryan Seacrest and to some extent, Aziz Ansari, are other good examples.
The Left is relegating men to a status of disposable chattel whose suffering is irrelevant.
Hogwash. It is not OK to victimize women. Nor is it OK to victimize men.
We’re better than that. We have to be. For everyone’s sake.
Watch this video as “The Ingraham Angle” discusses the Hardwick story:
Michele Blood is a Flemington, New Jersey-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to LifeZette.
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