On New Year’s Eve, Dan Harmon, creator of the show Community (“Troy and Abed in the mooooorning!”) tweeted this.
Two days later, at 2:11 am, Megan Ganz, a writer on Community, tweeted this:
Hmm. That afternoon, Harmon tweeted a response to her. Six years late is better than never!
It starts here. Harmon said, in part, “I didn’t want to add narcissism to injury by naming you without permission, but I’ve talked on my podcast about the lines I crossed. I will talk about it more in any way that you think is just. I am deeply sorry. i’m filled with regret and a lot of foggy memories about abusing my position, treating you like garbage. I would feel a lot of relief if you told me there was a way to fix it. I’ll let you call the shots. Til then, at least know I know I was an awful boss and a selfish baby.”
Ganz replied : “I wish my memories were foggier. I wish there was a way to fix it. It took me years to believe in my talents again, to trust a boss when he complimented me and not cringe when he asked for my number. I was afraid to be enthusiastic, knowing it might be turned against me later. You want relief? So do I. I want to watch the first episode of television I wrote again without remembering what came after. Figure out how to give me that relief and I’ll return the favor.”
Harmon again: “I’m disgusted and sorry that I stained our show and your talent with my selfish, childish shit…I have kept a wall between me and coworkers and I have preached doing so as gospel because of how I treated you.”
Ganz’s very wise response: “I don’t think walls are the answer. Unless you put them up with male coworkers, too. Otherwise you’re falling into the Mike Pence School of Gender Relations that says men can’t be trusted with women’s phone numbers.”
Harmon: “I also never wanted to bring your name into it because you had a right to your own career and narrative and the thing I regretted most was impinging on that. I’d done it enough. So I kept it anonymous but have warned everyone, don’t do what I did. Be aware of power dynamics. I’ll reiterate, if and when you want me to do something – a public letter, a co-sign on your letter, a book, pamphlet, public whatevering, I will support it, I will nod, I will verify, I will suffer and atone. But it has to be at your behest, or it’s just more dansplaining.”
Ganz: “I appreciate your attempts to make amends and your acknowledgement of fault. That doesn’t sound as tidy as ‘I forgive you,’ but that’s not my feeling yet. I’m working towards it all the time, for my benefit more than yours.”
A quick SorryWatch analysis: It’s good that his first tweet contains the words “I am deeply sorry.” That’s the best start any apology can have. BUT: Harmon could have called, written, or emailed an apology to Ganz at any time in the six years before she prompted him to say he was sorry. “I didn’t want to add narcissism to injury by naming you without permission”? Pardon? If he knew enough to feel bad (in another tweet to her, he said he had “felt sick” about it), he should have known enough to reach out earlier. Apologies need not be performative public acts; they can be personal. (And should be — we’ve had too many incidences of celebrities saying in a public statement that they’d apologized privately when they hadn’t.) He also doesn’t say what he did beyond treat her like garbage and act like a selfish baby. Her response (alluding to him asking for her number) makes it seem as though his behavior was sexually charged, not just babyish, which he didn’t say. He’s not fully owning what he did. SorryWatch is also not nuts about him saying he’ll prostrate himself with “public whatevering” and “I will nod, I will verify, I will suffer and atone.” That’s a whole lot of “I.” It’s not about Harmon or his suffering or abasement; talk about narcissism! The goal of an apology is to make it right for the person wronged, not for the apologizer to make it all about him. (Also, he’s putting the onus on her. “Tell me what to do!” We at SorryWatch will tell you what to do: 1. Say you’re sorry. (Good job, Dan!) 2. NAME WHAT YOU DID. 3. Acknowledge the impact. 4. Make it up to the person wronged in a concrete way. 5. Explain the steps you’re taking to insure it won’t happen again. 6. Make reparations. (In this case, a donation to a women’s rights organization or a group that benefits women in comedy would not be amiss — a good use of Twitter might be to crowdsource such organizations. Or he could ask Ganz if she has a favorite cause.)
HOWEVER! This week, Harmon apologized for seven minutes via podcast!
Fix your ear tongues on these memory pops!
Here’s a weird one for you: Last week, I called out my former boss @danharmon for sexual harassment, and today I’m going to ask you to listen to his podcast. https://t.co/BEZAWH787V
— Megan Ganz (@meganganz) January 11, 2018
Ganz’s response:
We are in the business of analyzing apologies. But we are not the recipient of this apology. Ganz is. She appreciates and accepts it. That is far more important than anything we might have to say about it. We wish her healing, and lots of awesome funny non-horrible workplaces in the future. (And we note that her Twitter is a delightful follow, and Snarly’s daughters love It’s Always Sunny, which she now co-exec-produces, and of course collectively SorryWatch is gonna love anyone who casually uses the word “allocution.”)
But.
Harmon’s seven minute mea culpa is NOT a master class in how to apologize. I transcribed the whole farshtunkiner thing to write this post, but I’m afeared that this post is heading into War and Peace territory, so we’ll try to be quick.
It’s not godawful, but it’s not great. After some hemming and hawing, he says he was “attracted to a writer that I had power over because I was a showrunner.” This is good phrasing, showing that he understands the power differential. But then he goes on to blame his feelings, not his behavior. He says he knew his feelings were “bad news,” that he “wasn’t doing anybody any favors by feeling these things.” Dude, we feel what we feel; we can’t help feelings. What we can help are ACTIONS. They’re what matter. He continues, “It’s not as if this person didn’t repeatedly communicate to me the idea that what I was doing was divesting her of a recourse to integrity.” I am not sure what those words mean? Like, at all?
Then he says he broke up with his live-in girlfriend because “I thought that would make having inappropriate feelings for a coworker appropriate.” AGAIN. IT IS NOT ABOUT THE FEELINGS. He does refer eventually to going “full-steam into creeping on my employee” (ok, better! “creeping on” presumably means words and actions, not just “feelings”!) and telling the employee he loved her. She rejected him. “I was humiliated…and now I wanted to teach her a lesson.” VERY GOOD. This is taking responsibility. But then, dammit, he says, “I’m gonna assume that when she tweets about it and refers to ‘trauma’ that’s probably it, because I drank, I took pills, I crushed on her and resented her for not reciprocating it.” Altered states do not excuse behavior. Mel Gibson tried that one. Nope. But here is a key phrase that’s unapologetically (get it?) terrific: “The entire time, I was the one writing her paychecks and in control of whether she stayed or went, and whether she felt good about herself or not, and I said horrible things, just treated her cruelly, pointedly. Things I would never, ever have done if she had been male.” GOOD JOB. THIS IS THE CORE OF THE APOLOGY AND WE DO NOT NEED SEVEN MINUTES OF WANKING, [sic] JUST THIS. But then he’s back to talk about feelings, and lying to himself about them, and “I lost my job; I ruined my show; I betrayed the audience; I destroyed everything.” Again with the “I.” THINK ABOUT THE PERSON YOU WRONGED, NOT YOURSELF. There’s another good phrase: “I never would have been able to do it if I had any respect for women. On a fundamental level, I was thinking about them as different creatures; I was thinking about the ones that I liked as having some special role in my life.” This is self-aware, but also an indication of his entitlement, which still shines through the apology. (I, I, I.) (Note the way Ganz, on Twitter, had said that she was working on forgiveness “for my benefit more than yours.” He tends to, uh, make things about him.) Harmon ends with a long, impassioned plea to other dudes not to do what he did (“you can cause a lot of damage that is technically legal and hurts everybody”) that again takes us away from the one-to-one apology that should be what he’s focusing on.
Harmon concludes: “I think we’re living in a good time right now, because we’re not gonna get away with it anymore. And if we can make it a normal part of our culture, that we think about it and possibly talk about it, then maybe we can get to a better place where that stuff doesn’t happen.” Amen to that. He also essentially asks his asshole fans not to dox or otherwise hurt his former employee, which is a sad necessity and a good thing to say. He concludes with the SorryWatch Bad-Apology-Bingo-winning “let’s move on,” as well as “I’m gonna now have a drink,” which we do not begrudge.
Because Ganz forgives, and that’s more important than our parsing.
Oh, I SO agree – it’s not great. But it’s enough bc it was enough for her forgiveness, which itself made me weep. The fact that the Thing made her feel crazy, because she wasn’t sure that it had happened as she remembered? Have the T-shirt. The fact the worst pain and humiliation could not be undone without the one who humiliated her confirming her right to her rage, pain, and shame? Oh, yeah – I have the hat, and the coordinating twinset. It is THE WORST that these things can make us DOUBT OURSELVES. But, I’m crying for her peace, and the grace which she passed on to him, which is a glorious, amazing, unmerited thing, amen.
Amen, and so beautifully said, Tanita.
The podcast has been taken down.
Maybe it was down temporarily? I just looked/listened and it’s there.
the thing about dan is he didn’t name an incident or incidents, he pointed out the culture he created that hurt her. you couldn’t write up in an article as salacious or provable, like the mental harm. he said he ruined her confidence and gas lit her by favoring her, a new writer, because she was really funny but his attraction ruined the pride she should feel. promoting her work while also being clear he was romantically attracted to her kept people, and herself, from believing she was good on her merit. no newspaper would write that up as something even though I think that was the worst part for her. he wasn’t just making her uncomfortable, she is talented and he was giving her attention regardless of it. she had no way to tell if she was funny or attractive, and dan copped to screwing that up for her. she wrote one of my favorite episodes of community, of course she’s talented, (the law and order spoof). it was good to hear a man understand the specifics, nuances and ramifications of harm he caused, not just the “sorry, i feel bad, i wont do it next time”. he analyzed the harm he caused and not just the bad actions he took, he didn’t say “I’ll try to fix it” he figured out what he took and how that theft affected her then gave her back some of the worth he took away.