There is a theatrical element inherent to politics. The nature of the public space demands of individuals who enter it to become something other than they are in private. The people must be met in the moment they inhabit. Sometimes the moment finds the person it needs, and it hardly becomes a stretch for such a politician to step into their public role. At other times, events require the politician to rise up to the moment and play a character at odds with their true selves.
As an example, look no further than the most celebrated politician on the planet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a lawyer by training who played the role of the Ukrainian President on a television comedy before rising to that office himself in 2019. Despite having never served in the military, Zelenskyy has worn the garb of a military man since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, perhaps out of ease, perhaps because it is the costume of a wartime leader, perhaps out of solidarity with the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have set aside their private identities to dedicate their lives to public service.
Having said that, there is a desire among voters to be served by politicians who are who they say they are. Maybe this is a feature of representative democracies, where the people hope those they elect to represent them haven’t duped them and will actually do what they promised in their campaigns to do. And maybe this desire is more acutely felt in our modern age, when our media simultaneously enable us to gain a more real and authentic glimpse at public figures while allowing those same public figures to craft a more “real” and “authentic” public persona for public consumption. As voters feel more and more let down by duplicitous politicians, they demand signs that reveal a politician’s trustworthiness, and politicians work overtime to generate those signs for them. It’s an unsettling feedback loop that is both driven by and enhances our dislike of political hypocrisy, a word, by the way, with origins in the ancient Greek theater.
Which brings me to the strange case of one George Santos, the newly elected Republican representative for New York’s 3rd congressional district, who appears to have cut his biography out of whole cloth. This story broke over the holiday break, which was either a blessing or a curse for Santos, as most Americans probably weren’t paying attention to the news, but those who were had to be shocked by its details.
If you missed the story, let me get you up to date. In November 2022, Santos won an open seat election in New York’s 3rd congressional district on Long Island that happens to be New York’s wealthiest congressional district and would also contain the West Egg home of one of America’s most memorable self-invented men, James Gatz, a.k.a., Jay Gatsby. A full six-weeks later, however, the New York Times published a report revealing the resume the 34-year-old Santos ran on was a work of fiction. Follow-on reporting by a range of news agencies exposed even more lies. Among the falsehoods:
Santos claimed to have graduated high school from the elite Horace Mann prep school, but the school has no record that he ever attended. He instead holds a high school equivalency diploma.
Santos claimed he graduated from Baruch College (in the top one percent, nonetheless) and was a star player on the school’s league champion volleyball team. Baruch College has no record that an individual with his name ever graduated from or attended the school.
Santos claimed to have an MBA from New York University. He does not. NYU has no record he was ever a student there.
Santos claimed to be a “seasoned Wall Street financier and investor” previously employed by Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, but neither company has a record of his employment with them. It therefore follows that numerous claims he made about his time at those companies (such as criticizing Goldman Sachs at a conference as an employee for investing in renewable energy) are false as well.
While working at a call center for Dish Network about a decade ago, Santos told fellow employees he and his family owned valuable pieces of real estate in New York and Brazil. He echoed those claims on the campaign trail in 2022. Those claims are not true, as he owns no real estate property.
Santos claimed to have founded and operated a tax-exempt charity for rescue animals, but according to the IRS, there is no evidence such a group was ever registered as a non-profit. There is evidence this charity did hold a fundraiser in 2017 for a New Jersey animal rescue group, but that group never received any of the proceeds from that event.
Santos claimed he was the sole owner of an asset management firm based in either New York or Florida that managed over $80 million in assets. Yet that company does not appear to have any clients, and the assets it did have—about $750,000—were paid out to Santos as salary in 2022 and then loaned to his campaign. He also claimed $1-5 million in dividends. The company’s estimated revenue was actually closer to $50,000.
Santos claimed four of his company’s employees were killed during the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. There is no record anyone killed in that incident worked for Santos’s company. Santos later said his company intended to hire four of the people who were killed there that day.
It is unclear where Santos actually lives. He claimed to live in a rental in Queens that he also claimed to have moved out of after finding the home vandalized upon returning from a January 2021 party at (of course this gets dragged into it) Mar-a-Lago. The owner of the house states there was no sign the home was vandalized. He apparently did move to a house in Huntington that he claimed is the residence of a sister who actually lives in Elmhurst, but still receives official mail—including the letter certifying his 2022 victory—at the Queens residence.
Santos has claimed his grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who fled to Belgium and then Brazil to escape the Holocaust. He has also claimed his grandparents are Holocaust survivors. He has claimed his mother is a Belgian immigrant. Genealogical records indicate his family has lived in Brazil for three generations, are neither Jewish nor Ukrainian, and have no ties to the Holocaust. Santos has said he is biracial and that his father is from Angola; no evidence supports that assertion. He has claimed to be Jewish, Catholic, and, to defend himself from the accusation that he misrepresented his Jewish heritage, “Jew-ish.”
Santos claimed his mother was a financial executive who worked in the South Tower of the World Trade Center and survived the 9/11 attacks but died shortly thereafter as a result of the attacks. He claimed his family never applied for relief because they could afford her medical treatment. His mother was actually either a domestic worker, home care nurse, or a cook who, according to friends, spoke no English. She passed away in 2016. There is no evidence she was present in downtown Manhattan on 9/11. Santos has also previously claimed his father survived 9/11 as well.
In 2020, Santos stated he’d been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Neither he nor his campaign has elaborated on that claim. His experience with COVID—he claims he was one of the first Americans to catch it—doesn’t quite add up either.
Santos has used Anthony Devolder (his middle names) and Anthony Zabrovsky as aliases.
I have to say, more than anything else, this story is just plain weird. Try as I might, I can’t come up with an analogue in American political history. Someone in Hollywood is probably already writing a screenplay based on this episode, and when that movie or limited series premieres a few years from now, it will probably be award bait. It’s also worth noting one can just as easily imagine a similar story unfolding within the ranks of the Democratic Party, but, in our current time and place, I also can’t help but think Santos—who speaks fluent MAGA and attended Trump’s rally on the Ellipse on 1/6—knows a mark when he sees one. Here he is speaking at a DC rally the day before the Capitol riot:
Santos has since admitted details of his biography were inaccurate and that he is guilty, as other people are, of “embellish[ing] his resume,” but whoa, that word “embellish” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. To “embellish” something is to add extra detail to it. More specifically, to “embellish” a story means to either exaggerate the details of a true story for effect or to add false details to it. Crucially, when it comes to narrative embellishments, there is always a baseline of truth to the story. George Santos isn’t “embellishing” his life story; instead, he’s written a work of fiction and passing it off as his biography for personal gain. The problem with Santos isn’t that he caught a fish that really isn’t as big as he claims it is. It’s that he’s saying he caught a fish when he really didn’t and has never been fishing in the first place.
Santos is banking his newfound career in Congress on people accepting his relativistic worldview, which regards wholescale fabrication as no different from embellishment or exaggeration or a lie or a little white lie or any other statement that does not represent the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He needs people to accept the Trumpian premise that since no one is perfectly honest, no one is in a position to condemn another for their act of dishonesty. (Point that accusatory finger at someone and you’ll find three pointing back at you, he might say.)
But I would argue that since a sin like dishonesty is endemic to the human condition and in some cases merits our disapproval, we have no option but to judge such acts by weighing the severity of different falsehoods and considering when it may be more or less acceptable to lie. Those three fingers pointing back at us don’t prohibit us from judging others, but are reminders we ought to be humble and careful when we do so. We risk hypocrisy in the process, but hey, at least hypocrisy is the vice that pays tribute to virtue. Santos’s alternative is a form of ethical nihilism.
And yes, politicians prevaricate all the time. They spin, misrepresent, exaggerate, and even lie. No president has ever done so on the scale of Donald Trump, but he’s an easy example. Instead, consider Joe Biden, who has a bad habit of spinning falsehoods to ingratiate himself with audiences. The vast majority of Santos’s peers in the House of Representatives have no doubt tweaked their biographies in one way or another to enhance their electoral appeal. A few, like Democratic Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, have even said they’ve done notable things they didn’t actually do (in Blumenthal’s case, serve in Vietnam) which is highly problematic. But again, it falls upon voters to use their judgment to assess the severity and implications of those fibs. We should know full well that politicians are prone to lying and spinning. In fact, it would be dangerous and even dispiriting to demand the crystalline truth from all politicians all the time. Yet we can also set limits to the kind of prevarications the public ought to tolerate.
While self-mythologizing politicians have frequently popped up throughout American history, I’m hard-pressed to think of someone like Santos who won office masquerading as a figment of his imagination. Does that really matter though? The New York Young Republican Club doesn’t seem to think so. The Glen Head Herald reports the organization is still backing him. As club president Gavin Wax—who admitted to having a conversation with Santos that convinced him Santos had actually attended Baruch College—said:
This is politics. Politics is about power. Democrats and the left understand this, and they circle the wagons against any of their controversial members, whether it’s for lying or other things. If he resigned, we would lose the seat. And we will lose the vote. Simple as that.
If that’s the mindset of voters these days—and for many Americans, it is—it’s possible as long as Santos votes the way those who sent him to Congress expect him to that he could keep his seat. I’ve long argued that when you’re judging a politician, it’s their political record that counts more than anything else.
Yet qualifications and experience matter; the very fact Santos felt the need to tout a fictional resume is proof even Santos thinks my claim has at least popular merit. I’ll concede an individual’s qualifications and experience are not the end-all/be-all when it comes to assessing a politician, but Gavin Wax would be wise to admit power isn’t the end-all/be-all of politics, either. It’s more than fair for voters to expect their representatives to have the sort of background that can help them make wise and measured political decisions, craft solutions to public problems, carry out the responsibilities of the office, and lead their fellow citizens through uncertain times.
I fear if the voters of New York’s 3rd district come to accept Santos as their representative, the nation will only further diminish the roles talent and skill play in politics. They’re already often in short supply or discounted—the last two Republican presidents have demonstrated what happens when voters don’t regard a lack of qualifications for the office those men sought as disqualifying—but if Santos somehow hangs onto his position, we may end up with a Congress full of talentless hatchetmen with make-believe, focus-grouped resumes. We’ll miss genuine skill and talent in crises and moments that demand actual governance.
Do I expect Santos to hang on though? Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy needs every vote he can get to keep his gavel and doesn’t seem too eager to get rid of Santos, especially since Santos comes from a district that is two points more Democratic than the nation was as a whole in the 2020 presidential election. Santos also voted for McCarthy on all fifteen ballots for Speaker, even flashing a white supremacist symbol during one round. (He’s so in debt when it comes to benefits of the doubt that he isn’t getting one for that move.)
On the other hand, the more Santos stays in the news, the more of a liability he becomes for Republicans, and House Republicans—both in and out of New York—seem increasingly uneasy with Santos’s membership in the chamber. McCarthy might also have it out for the freshman congressman after learning Santos’s campaign manager impersonated McCarthy’s chief of staff to raise money. Counterintuitively, Matt Gaetz’s Joker Caucus may also want Santos gone even if that means replacing him with a Democrat, as that could make it easier for them to depose McCarthy if the new Speaker defies them. Consequently, Santos seems on thin ice.
Also, let’s not forget the wisdom of Lester Freamon (by way of Mark Felt):
Yeah, I’m not sure how a guy who didn’t go to college, whose only known employment was at a call center, who is carrying credit card debt, who’s been evicted multiple times, and who reported no income as little as two years ago managed to loan his campaign hundreds of thousands of dollars. His campaign committee’s handling of campaign funds is super shady, as are the activities of a supposed SuperPAC that raised money on his behalf; if prosecutors can’t nail him and those running his campaign to the wall for campaign violations, it will only prove this country has no campaign finance laws. There is also some speculation Santos is connected to some sort of Ponzi scheme. I’d suspect the IRS, FEC, SEC, and DOJ have a lot of questions for him. (He’s also under investigation for fraud in Brazil.)
The scam George Santos pulled is both brazen and shameless. Yet as poorly as it reflects on his character, we should also note how poorly it reflects on the parties. The con man always deserves more blame for pulling a con than the conned, but New York Republicans have a duty to vet their nominees. (Some apparently knew Santos was a liar before Election Day.) And New York Democrats, who did know about Santos’s money problems (here’s the oppo file) completely dropped the ball by failing to dig deeper into the guy’s background, especially since this was a very winnable but contestable district. Over in Ohio’s 9th congressional district (the so-called “Snake by the Lake,”) Democrat Marcy Kaptur trounced a Republican who lied about his military experience in a Republican-leaning district gerrymandered to end her congressional career. The Democrats’s failure to do so in NY-3 is completely inexcusable.
The opposition research aside, in September, the small Long Island newspaper the North Shore Leader investigated Santos’s finances and found many of his claims problematic. By that point, the Democrats and Santos’s opponent should have been running with this story. Sure, it’s tough to grab headlines in the NYC area, but it shouldn’t have been hard for the Democratic nominee to contact the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—a New York congressman!—to get him to feed a crazy-but-true story like this to a national news outlet as polls showed New York races tightening.
This episode may raise some interesting issues related to the theatricality of politics, but one of its biggest takeaways should also be the need for quality local political news reporting. The North Shore Leader did what it was supposed to do—hold those seeking public office to account—but it turned out few were paying it any mind. We’re way past the time when we ought to be reconnecting with good local news. That’s important to do because if politics—theatrical as it may be—is still more than just theater, we need journalists in our own neighborhoods who can vet the people auditioning for these important public roles.
For more on the New York Times’s reporting, including a copy of Santos’s resume, see this article.
Signals and Noise
Brazil experienced its own version of 1/6 on 1/8, with supporters of far-right ex-President and Trump cos-player Jair Bolsonaro storming and ransacking the seats of the federal government in Brasilia. Despite a lack of evidence, Bolsonaro’s supporters believe the election Bolsonaro recently lost was rigged.
Bolsonaro, for his part, remains holed-up in suburban Orlando. Florida is weird.
At least 47 people have died in Peru as a result of clashes between protesters and police forces following the ouster of the nation’s left-wing president, who had attempted to consolidate power in a bid to address longstanding issues related to poverty. Much of the blame has fallen on the nation’s security forces. Some of the dead were bystanders or attempting to provide aide to injured protesters.
The United States has agreed to train Ukrainian forces to use anti-missile Patriot missile systems at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Western nations have also agreed to supply Ukraine with tanks, which the U.S. and its European allies have kept off the battlefield so far out of fear it would bring Russia closer to a direct conflict with NATO. Worries of an impending Russian offensive backed by hundreds of thousands of Russian conscripts appears to be driving NATO’s calculations.
Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal writes the West may not be adequately prepared to provide Ukraine with the material support it needs to prevail if Ukraine’s war with Russia drags on for years. Or, on the other hand, maybe time is actually on Ukraine’s side, as Phillips Payson O’Brien argues in The Atlantic.
Tension between Serbia and Kosovo is rising again. Reports suggest Russia’s mercenary paramilitary Wagner Group may be intervening discreetly on Serbia’s behalf.
Christian Davenport of the Washington Post writes that, in its new Space Race with China, the United States is building a broad coalition of nations to set the terms for lunar exploration.
One of the biggest stories this year will be the reopening of China—and the likely deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Chinese—after nearly three years of COVID lockdown. The world economy could experience a boom…or another round of inflation.
This article in the Washington Post by Fenit Nirappil and Lauren Weber is an important update on XBB.1.5, the latest COVID variant of concern. The key points:
XBB.1.5 is the most transmissible Omicron variant yet.
It is not less immune to antibodies, just more adept at attaching to cells and replicating.
Boosters designed for previous Omicron variants can increase an individual’s ability to resist XBB.1.5, as can a previous infection, but breakthrough infections will probably be more common. Boosters continue to reduce the likelihood of severe illness.
XBB.1.5 does not make people sicker than previous variants.
Previous vaccination DOES NOT make one more susceptible to catching XBB.1.5.
To increase one’s chance of avoiding an infection, wear high-quality masks in public and avoid large crowds. (Note how COVID numbers rise in the winter, when people tend to gather indoors.)
Katherine Wu at The Atlantic adds this about XBB.1.5: The spike of infections in the Northeast—where XBB.1.5 has been the dominant strain for a number of weeks—has been notable but fairly modest and in line with an expected seasonal spike.
That loud succession of thunderclaps you heard this week was the sound of a nation-full of Democrats slapping their foreheads repeatedly and in unison upon learning classified documents were discovered at a DC office Joe Biden used after leaving the vice presidency in 2017 and at his home in Delaware. Andrew Prokop at Vox has a breakdown of the case and how it differs in important ways from Trump’s post-presidential classified documents scandal. So far, some of those differences are:
Approximately 20 documents were found in Biden’s office and home. Trump was in possession of approximately 300.
Some of Trump’s documents included highly sensitive material. So far, it appears Biden’s documents contained briefing material about a number of countries.
It appears Biden, his team, and the National Archives were not aware he had the documents in his possession. It’s clear Trump knew he possessed them.
Reports indicate Biden’s team immediately reported the discovery of the documents to the National Archives. Trump resisted returning the documents, deceived the government about whether he had returned them, and attempted to hide them from government officials, which led to the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Trump claimed to be above the law when it came to retaining classified documents. Biden has cooperated with law enforcement since the scandal broke.
As a result, don’t be quick to say the two cases are the same. Yes, both cases involve the possession of classified documents, but Trump’s defiance of the law sets the cases apart. Regardless, it’s not a good look for Biden, even if it was an accident. (A CNN reports seems to suggest all this may have been the result of a harried final days in office as vice president, with aides packing too quickly.) An investigation is warranted, and we’ll need to know if there was a reason Biden may have wanted to take those documents with him upon leaving government in 2017. It does make the decision to prosecute Trump for his handling of the classified documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago that much more difficult and politically perilous, though.
Senator Lindsey “Goose” Graham of South Carolina claimed on FOX News that non-conservative media wasn’t covering Biden’s classified documents story. That’s not true. It was a top story on all three major networks and front page news on the New York Times and Washington Post. The day the story broke, CNN devoted more than three times the amount of prime time air time to the story than FOX News did.
Asha Rangappa has written a lengthy overview of the nothingburger that is Hunter Biden’s laptop. The New York Times also has an in-depth look at Hunter Biden’s legal troubles, which stem mainly from a failure to pay his taxes and falsifying a form he completed to purchase a handgun. The special prosecutor looking into his case seems much less interested in the younger Biden’s connections to Ukrainian and Chinese businessmen.
Scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way write in Foreign Affairs that they expect the United States is “headed” toward (or already in) a period of “endemic regime instability…marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections and severe conflict between presidents and Congress (such as impeachments and executive efforts to bypass Congress), the judiciary (such as efforts to purge or pack the courts), and state governments (such as intense battles over voting rights and the administration of elections).” The authors think the main issue in future presidential elections will be whether the United States leans democratic or authoritarian in nature.
From Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark: “In the last several weeks, Donald Trump (1) expressed solidarity with the January 6 insurrectionists, (2) dined with a Neo-Nazi, (3) flung racial slurs at the wife of the senate GOP Leader, and (4) called for the termination of the Constitution so that he could be restored to power. And, yet within minutes of being elected to the third highest Constitutional office in the land — in the early morning hours after the second anniversary of the attack on the Capitol — this is what My Kevin had to say: ‘I do want to especially thank Pres Trump. I don’t think anyone should doubt his influence. He was with me from the beginning. He was all in. What he’s really saying for the party and the country is we have to come together.’”
By Mona Charen of The Bulwark: “The Normalization of Marjorie Taylor Greene”
I’m going to flag this article—“In Today’s Rowdy GOP, Could Jim Jordan be the Adult in the Room?” by Gary Abernathy for the Washington Post—and ask this question: Why aren’t more people talking about Jordan as a potential 2024 GOP presidential nominee? Yes, we can see the skeletons in his closet, but his pugnacious style is exactly what Republican voters are looking for.
The House rules package the new Republican House adopted allows any member—including a Democrat—to file a motion to vacate the chair and compel the House to drop all business to vote on a Speaker. It would only take five Republicans upset with McCarthy voting with all Democrats for such a motion to pass.
Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg writes, however, that the motion to vacate isn’t the rules concession that will come back to haunt McCarthy. Instead, the decision to seat three MAGA conservatives on the Rules Committee has the potential to strip McCarthy of his control over the chamber.
But there’s apparently more to the deal McCarthy made with hardliners who initially withheld their votes from him during his bid for the Speaker than what is included in the Rules package, and not everyone knows what the specific details are, how binding the deal is, or even if it’s been written down/exists. (As Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota said, “I’m not at liberty to discuss whether I’ve seen it or not.” Seen what, Dusty?) One irony was that many of these deals were supposedly cut in the name of “transperancy.”
James Parker of The Atlantic imagines how author Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, The Road) would have described that other McCarthy’s week-long humiliation en route to becoming Speaker of the House. (“Monstrosities of democracy they came forth in their pomp in the noon of the day. From the backwoods, from the boggy peninsulas. From the gleaming mall-lands. From the sucking swamps. Sun it did throb like a thumb in the eye of God. And the chamber was a cauldron of mockery, bepopulate with jeerers and carousers.”)
Defense spending has the potential to divide the House Republican caucus, with traditional conservatives looking to maintain current levels and MAGA Republicans looking to cut it.
The first bill House Republicans want to pass—a repeal of $80 billion in funding for the IRS—would raise the federal government deficit an estimated $114 billion. That $80 billion in funding is intended to audit wealthy tax returns and deal with the backlog of tax returns.
Biden is catching flak from both the right and the left for his new plan on immigration.
Meanwhile, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is walking a fine line when it comes to an influx of Cuban refugees to Florida.
During the 2022 midterms in Pennsylvania, approximately 16,000 mail-in ballots were disqualified on what amounts to technicalities (i.e., lacking a secrecy envelope, signature, or date.) Two-thirds of those disqualified ballots were submitted by Democrats.
In election fraud news, the wife of an Iowa Republican politician has been charged with collecting others’ unmarked absentee ballots and voting 23 times in the 2020 election.
Alabama’s Attorney General has indicated women who use abortion pills to end pregnancies can be prosecuted under the state’s new anti-abortion law despite provisions in the law that criminalize abortion providers rather than those seeking abortions. The prosecutions will be based on laws designed to protect children from meth lab fumes.
A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found the number of Americans holding anti-Semitic views is on the rise, particularly among young Americans.
Inflation continues to cool, with prices rising in December 2022 6.5% compared to one year prior.
From Richard Rubin of the Wall Street Journal: “The effective corporate tax rate on large, profitable companies declined to 9% in 2018 in the aftermath of the 2017 tax law, down from 16% in 2014, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Friday. The share of large, profitable companies paying no corporate taxes was 34% in 2018, up from the five-year average of 25%.”
Jimmy Vielkind of the Wall Street Journal writes about the continuing struggles of public transit systems, which are still reeling from work-at-home rules introduced during the pandemic.
Oliver Milman of The Guardian reports newly uncovered internal documents from Exxon reveal that projections concerning global warming made by their own scientists as far back as the 1970s accurately predicted the rise in global temperatures due to the burning of fossil fuels and foresaw the dangers of global warming. Still, over the ensuing decades and despite their own research, Exxon claimed other academic, government, and scientific studies making similar projections were flawed.
In dinosaur news, the Journal of Comparative Neurology published a report positing that theropods—which include velociraptors and tyrannosaurus rexes (rexi? no, it’s rexes)—had as many neurons in their brains as baboons, suggesting the prehistoric creatures could have solved problems, used tools, and formed cultures. And these brainiacs consider this “news”? Have they not watched the documentary Jurassic Park (which, BTW, gets the ending all wrong. The raptors eat the kids. I’m sorry, but they do.)
Clever girl, indeed.
Vincent’s Picks: She Said
If Hollywood ever had to make a movie, this would certainly be the one. She Said, directed by Maria Schrader and currently streaming on Peacock, follows New York Times journalists Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) as they investigate allegations of sexual misconduct and sexual assault levied against one of the movie industry’s most powerful men, film producer and Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein. Kantor and Twohey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story was published in October 2017, and by the end of the month more than eighty women—from studio employees to production assistants to A-list actors—had accused Weinstein of rape or sexual harassment. While accusations of inappropriate sexual behavior by powerful men had been drawing headlines and social action for months, the publication of Kantor and Twohey’s story, along with an article in The New Yorker by Ronan Farrow, proved to be a major catalyst for the #MeToo movement. For his part, Weinstein is currently serving a twenty-three year prison sentence in New York for his crimes and was found guilty less than a month ago in California on similar charges.
Like All the President’s Men (1976) and Spotlight (2015), She Said is a journalistic procedural that follows Kantor and Twohey as they chase leads and try to convince their interview subjects to go on the record. The film is particularly good dealing with this latter point, as many of Weinstein’s victims (and enablers) are willing to share their stories with the reporters but are hesitant to either let the paper print their accounts or attach their names to their accusations. It’s not that these women are necessarily scared of Weinstein, although they may fear reputational damage if the story breaks and the public isn’t sure who to believe. It’s that they want their accusations shared alongside those of others so that the burden isn’t theirs alone to bear, or that the experience still fills them with shame, or that they’ve put the ugliness of that episode behind them and don’t want to make it a central part of their lives again. In films like this, we often are left with the sense that journalists and their sources are working against intimidating outside forces looking to stifle threatening investigations. Here, we see how the pressure to stay silent often comes from within.
Kazan (Olive Kitteridge, The Big Sick) as Kantor does a good job showing how a reporter might work through this challenge. She’s a sympathetic listener whose questions coax answers out of her interview subjects. Pay close attention to her facial expressions: She’s the sort of person you would feel comfortable sharing your most closely guarded secrets with. Mulligan (An Education, Promising Young Woman) as Twohey is flinty and more aloof. She deals mostly with institutional sources who seem to think she’s someone they can roll. (Weinstein had numerous friends in high places or on his payroll who covered up his misdeeds.) Eventually these people end up saying too much or think they have settled the matter, only to find a gently stubborn reporter insistent on getting a basic question answered. Throughout the film, both Kazan and Mulligan speak slowly and deliberately, suggesting they are not desperate to push people for answers that seem destined to come to light. It’s a personal and professional approach—relaxed as they seek a woman’s consent to tell her story—that stands in stark contrast to Weinstein’s brutish behavior. The cast also includes Patricia Clarkson as their supportive editor Rebecca Corbett and Andre Braugher as New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet.
Another aspect of the film worth noting is Kantor and Twohey’s status as mothers. Kantor is a mother of two who is constantly being called away from her home or awakened in the middle of the night by the demands of the investigation. The film implies she sees her work as a reporter on this case as an extension of her maternal role. On the other hand, Twohey is a new mom suffering from post-partum depression eager to get back to work so she is not constantly tending to her child. By the end of the film, though, her work seems to bond her with her newborn. To this, we might also note the almost silent obligation the two women feel to report this story not as a juicy piece of gotcha journalism but to the millions of woman around the world who have been subjected to unwanted sexual advances.
There is a question about whether or not this movie works as film. The first hour in particular almost plays as a staged documentary. I get why the filmmakers wouldn’t want to sensationalize a story like this, but by attempting to dramatize this story without much, well, drama, the film ends up suffering from a lack of emotional and cinematic heft. It often feels too clinical, explaining rather than showing the story. That feeling subsides somewhat in the second half as the investigation begins to come together and the reporters begin circling Weinstein. At that point, we start to truly appreciate how the actions of two intrepid yet soft-spoken reporters using the printed word to reveal the truth can change the world.
Exit Music: “I Ain’t Superstitious” by Jeff Beck (1968, Truth)
Many great guitarists emerged in the 1960s (Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix) but if you want to follow the general development of guitar rock over the course of the decade, you need only trace the evolution of the Yardbirds. That UK group—never as popular in the States as the Rolling Stones, the Who, or the Animals—was at the forefront of the British rhythm and blues scene, passing through three key phases from 1963 to 1969: An early blues phase, a middle hard psychedelic phase, and a late heavy blues phase. That early blues phase was distinguished by the work of guitarist Eric Clapton. Their late heavy blues phase set the terms for heavy metal behind the work of Jimmy Page, who recomposed the group first as the New Yardbirds before morphing into Led Zeppelin. Bridging both eras was a period when Jeff Beck, who passed away last week, left his imprint on the group.
Beck is the least well-known of the 60s British guitar titans but his contributions to rock and roll are indispensable. He always seemed to be developing the musical ideas other artists would master. Beck played guitar on the Yardbirds’s 1966 single “Shapes of Things”, not necessarily the first rock and roll song to feature psychedelic sounds, but likely the first to wed it to an explosive hard rock attack, opening the door to Hendrix’s pyrotechnic stylizations and the mind-blowing heroics of guitarists in the 1970s. Later, again with the Yardbirds but more significantly in groups he assembled, Beck pointed the way toward heavy metal. “Beck’s Bolero”, recorded with Page, bassist John Paul Jones, and drummer Keith Moon of the Who in 1967, is often cited as the first heavy metal record. It is often reported Moon believed the product of that session would be rejected by the public and “go down like a lead zeppelin.” Over the course of the next two years, working with vocalist Rod Stewart and future Faces/Rolling Stone guitarist Ronnie Wood on bass, Beck’s Jeff Beck Group would record two albums—Truth and Beck-Ola—that Led Zeppelin would be accused of ripping off on their first two LPs. (You can hear a track from Truth, “I Ain’t Superstitious”, a Willie Dixon song originally recorded by Howlin’ Wolf for Chess Records in 1961, below.)
Yet Beck always found himself in the shadow of his peers. He was Clapton’s replacement. Hendrix surpassed him as a 60s psychedelic rocker. Stewart had the massive solo career. Led Zeppelin filled arenas in the 1970s and has ruled classic rock radio in the decades since. Read about “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder and you’ll undoubtedly learn it was originally written for Beck before Wonder realized it was too good not to record himself. But there isn’t a single hard rock guitarist who would ever deny the artistry or importance of Jeff Beck. His contributions to the history of rock and roll music are worth your appreciation as well.