Anyway, I was confirming that getting rid of him wasn’t likely due to just the one isolated mistake. The New Yorker is where Ronan Farrow published his article on Harvey Weinstein. They’d have a really tough time justifying keeping Toobin on in light of both the new incident and his reputed past claims of harassment.
Zoom now is your office cubicle.
Well, now that I know that I’ll get the rope.
Hey, it wasn’t autoerotic asphyxiation!
Yes, I saw it. I want to be clear that I’m not doing a knee-jerk defense of Toobin here, but merely objectively pointing out that @Shalmanese seemed to be doing an awful lot of pure speculation. From that standpoint of objective fact I didn’t think your post added anything more. A link to a site whose motto is “Harvard Law School Is Bogus” and which, after smearing Toobin with unsubstantiated innuendo, also refers us to similar articles on Alec Baldwin and Eric Holder, both of whom, along with Toobin, are to be regarded as “mendacious moral midgets”, does not seem to me to be a site with high credibility.
Granted, your second, subsequent post appears more damning, but really, the only things we know for a fact are a few things surrounding the paternity matter and the extramarital affair. Not good, for sure. But this was known years ago. If it wasn’t a disqualification from the New Yorker then, why is it now?
Look, I have no reason to defend Toobin. I respect his knowledge and experience, and I also love the New Yorker and have defended it in controversial situations more than once. But I do have something of an obsession with objectivity and fairness, and to our institutions’ duties to rational and balanced reaction to the moral failings of otherwise good people.
Both of those sites had actual links to the published claims they were making, had you only clicked on them. Or I could have pulled any number of other websites; those were just the first of many that came up. The point is, it adds to the body of perceived creepiness of what you call otherwise good people, enough to call their character into question. It’s not like he didn’t know he was a public face of the magazine and news station.
Yeah, I see no good reason to give him a pass on this.
Now they know why he made all those faces during conference calls.
And if you’re going to be moaning, better use the “mute” function.
But do we know that he was otherwise a good person? From where I sit, I can’t see how anyone on the outside can know that. We don’t know if he was otherwise good or really creepy.
I’m asking you to look beyond Toobin to the entire system that produces men like Toobin. The New Yorker did an investigation in order to make a decision to fire Toobin. There’s a file that’s sitting on the New Yorker’s server that contains the results of that investigation. The people who did the investigation know what’s in that file, Toobin knows what is in that file. But the New Yorker intentionally is not making the results of their findings public, Toobin is free to craft whatever narrative he wants without any pushback from the New Yorker. Anyone who makes the quite reasonable point that people who masturbate on work calls almost certainly have a whole lot more dark shit in their closet is shouted down as engaging in “pure speculation”.
The end result of this is that we’re sending a signal to other powerful men that, even in the event that they do get caught on one of the many abuses of power they perform, the dictates of “professional courtesy” are still strong enough that organizations will allow them to pretend it was “one regrettable mistake” and keep their reputation mostly intact and that society at large will work to preserve that fiction by claiming anyone speculating without the facts is acting irresponsibly.
We see the pattern over and over and over again and every single time, we’re meant to be surprised like Lucy with the football.
“Much injustice has been done throughout history” is how a bad college freshman paper begins. Well, yeah: much injustice has been done that way. Much injustice has also been done throughout history by people who refuse to hold powerful people accountable for their misdeeds, by people who refuse to see patterns of misbehavior, by people who claim they’re just obsessed with objectivity and so they can’t be blamed if they’re functioning as a de facto defender of powerful miscreants.
Much injustice hasn’t been done throughout history by people posting their thoughts on messageboards, though, so I think we’re all safe.
Objectively and fairly, the only reason we are having this conversation is because Toobin is rich and famous. If it had been any of us, we would have been dropped like a hot rock, and there would have been no discussion about whether we were “good people” just suffering from a moral failing.
So objectively and fairly, I think he should be treated as I would have been in that situation: Shitcanned.
CNN has taken him back as their on-air chief legal analyst. I’m sorry, but showing that kind of poor judgement that he did, an 8 month hiatus, isn’t appropriate. Bad decision CNN.
That’s right – CNN’s best legal analyst should be banned for life from contributing his legal expertise anywhere because he was accidentally seen jerking off. 
Maybe you’d be happier if you could pour a bucket of tar over him and roll him in feathers, too.
One does not follow from the other. Saying eight months isn’t long enough isn’t the same thing as saying it should follow him for life.
Plus there was as huge conversation in this thread about whether this was “just” someone accidentally being caught masturbating. There’s the whole issue of whether or not he should have been on a sex call while at work, and even allegations that he has a history of engagement sexual harassment.
Granted, I know that because I just read a huge portion of this thread for the first time. It’s such an old thread that I bet people have forgotten its contents.
huh. i must admit there were times in the last several months when i thought “toobin must be beside himself”. all the election stuff, guiliani, insurrection…
i’m sure there were quite a few conditions on his reinstatement.
I didn’t know pants came with padlocks.
I’m glad he’s back, although it does seem a bit too soon. He was appropriately contrite and self-critical in that interview.
That he’s the best legal analyst is debatable. But even if he was, he’s a liability to the company. He demonstrated poor thinking skills, a lack of regard to his teammates, etc. etc. Are you saying that you’d keep someone on staff that exposed himself in a work setting, even if he was your top performer? No way.