All of the #MeToo stories that we’ve heard so far have come from women — and men — sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and assault. Some men like Matt Lauer have been fired, others have been named, while others still hide and wonder when it’ll be there turn to be named and shamed.
Controversial documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock has his own story of harassment and assault, but his isn’t a #MeToo story.
Because he’s confessing that he, too, is part of the problem. And he’s speaking up because he figures that someone will name him, sooner or later.
Most of us know Morgan Spurlock as the man whose deeply dishonest “documentary” nearly ruined fast food for the rest of us.
(Super Size Me was wildly misleading, as anyone with common sense can tell you. It turns out that measuring how a single abruptly-no-longer-exercising alcoholic’s body responds to eating fast mood for every meal every day is not a responsible sample size)
Because of Spurlock, a lot of children’s Happy Meals came with apple slices (garbage) and milk (why?!) instead of french fries and soda as people freaked out after the “documentary” aired and gained national attention in 2004.
Well, Morgan Spurlock is somehow still a thing in 2017, and he posted to TwitLonger, which is also somehow still a thing in 2017. His post begins:
“As I sit around watching hero after hero, man after man, fall at the realization of their past indiscretions, I don’t sit by and wonder ‘who will be next?’ I wonder, ‘when will they come for me?"”
Off of the top of my head, I can’t think of a man named in a #MeToo story whom I’d have characterized as a “hero” even before hearing that he was a sex monster.
But Morgan Spurlock sounds like he’s coming forward to reveal that he himself is a sex monster.
Morgan Spurlock’s lengthy confession, titled “I Am Part Of the Problem,” continues:
“You see, I’ve come to understand after months of these revelations, that I am not some innocent bystander, I am also a part of the problem.”
And he explains why:
“When I was in college, a girl who I hooked up with on a one night stand accused me of rape.”
Oh.
“Not outright. There were no charges or investigations, but she wrote about the instance in a short story writing class and called me by name. A female friend who was in the class told be about it afterwards.”
A lot of trauma survivors write about their experiences, directly or indirectly. Others might process the horrors of their lives through music or visual art.
“I was floored.”
We should note that not every rapist is the kind of over-the-top malevolent predator that you see on police procedurals or in the accusations against men like Weinstein. A lot of rapists don’t realize that they’re rapists.
“‘That’s not what happened!’ I told her. This wasn’t how I remembered it at all. In my mind, we’d been drinking all night and went back to my room.”
He continues to describe his version of events.
“We began fooling around, she pushed me off, then we laid in the bed and talked and laughed some more, and then began fooling around again. We took off our clothes. She said she didn’t want to have sex, so we laid together, and talked, and kissed, and laughed, and then we started having sex.”
Spurlock says that he stopped after she started to cry.
“We stopped having sex and I rolled beside her. I tried to comfort her. To make her feel better. I thought I was doing ok, I believed she was feeling better. She believed she was raped.”
Some people might cry during consensual intercourse, but the dead giveaway should have been the lack of consent. He admits that he remembers her saying that she didn’t want to have sex.
What he’s describing, even to his recollection, sounds like rape.
And that was not the end of Morgan Spurlock’s admissions.
“Then there was the time I settled a sexual harassment allegation at my office. This was around 8 years ago, and it wasn’t a gropy feely harassment. It was verbal, and it was just as bad.”
Women have been enduring this kind of harassment for generations. That doesn’t make it any better.
“I would call my female assistant ‘hot pants’ or ‘sex pants’ when I was yelling to her from the other side of the office. Something I thought was funny at the time, but then realized I had completely demeaned and belittled her to a place of non-existence.”
It sounds like he made her workplace experience a living hell.
“So, when she decided to quit, she came to me and said if I didn’t pay her a settlement, she would tell everyone.”
Honestly, good for her. Sometimes, in an unjust world, money is the only way to get justice.
“Being who I was, it was the last thing I wanted, so of course, I paid. I paid for peace of mind. I paid for her silence and cooperation. Most of all, I paid so I could remain who I was.”
Morgan Spurlock then admits that he also cheated on every wife and girlfriend he ever had. Every single one.
He shares his own background of sexual abuse as a child and a young teenager (which is very sad) and reveals that he has been drinking regularly since the age of 13.
You get the impression that Spurlock feels that revealing all of this makes him somehow brave or more righteous than the other sex monsters we’ve heard about in recent months.
We don’t see how.
What he describes is a story of raping a woman in college, regularly sexually harassing a woman at work, and betraying the trust of every woman who’s ever loved him.
While his story of childhood trauma (he doesn’t mention who inflicted this upon him) is absolutely tragic, the evil done to him as a child does not excuse his actions as an adult.
In fact, that he mentions this in the same post where he describes his own misdeeds reminds us of Kevin Spacey coming out as gay in an attempt to deflect attention from the accusation that, as had been rumored for many years, he’s a sexual predator.