The apology letter to Terry Crews (delightful, funny Brooklyn Nine-Nine actor) from Adam Venit (handsy, gross, disgraced movie agent who groped Crews’s genitals at a party) is really bad. Spectacularly bad. Bad enough to warrant its very own Bad Apology Bingo card.
Venit actually wrote the letter back in March, but Crews released it publicly yesterday after Venit resigned from his high-powered agency job. The implication, obv, is that Crews accepted the apology only with Venit’s resignation.
@WME ‘s ADAM VENIT FULL APOLOGY LETTER:
Received: March 22nd, 2018
Accepted WITH HIS RESIGNATION: September 10th, 2018#Accountability
Read in full below: pic.twitter.com/Hbe4tu7UPL
— terrycrews (@terrycrews) September 14, 2018
Sorrywatch is glad that Crews is satisfied. But just because Crews forgives Venit doesn’t mean the rest of us have to. SorryWatch tweeted this very sentiment back when Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir — in which she forgives her psychologically abusive father Steve Jobs — was published.
Apologies are mandatory. Forgiveness is not. If Lisa Brennan-Jobs wants to forgive her father, it’s her choice. We can respect it and simultaneously be horrified by him. https://t.co/8I0SA2H8Jn
— Sorry Watch (@SorryWatch) August 24, 2018
Same thing here.
Venit’s apology is so narcissistic; so full of heroic “I”s and “me”s; so determined to place himself on the same journey (?), the same moral footing (??), the same heroic character arc (???) as Crews; so unwilling to see himself as the victimizer and Crews as the victim; so disgustingly eager to move on to the redemption arc portion of the story that it generated its very own Bad Apology Bingo game! (The third in a series!) Adam Venit thus becomes the ONLY PERSON EVER (so far) to earned his very own solo card, with enough vile turns of phrase in one single apology to fill 16 squares. (And it would have filled the standard 25-space template if we’d included words/phrases/qualities that have appeared on previous Bad Apology Bingo cards, such as “Move Forward,” Vagueness, Self-Aggrandizement,”If”, Noble Talk of Our/My Values, Lack of Specificity, and “Move On”!) So congrats, Adam! We’re calling this The Adam Venit (‘Venit’ Is Only Two Letters From ‘Venal’) Career-Memorial (We Hope) Bingo Card.
This is not even an apology! At no point does he express regret for his own actions. It is not clear that he even knows what he did wrong. The passive tense and ascription of agency to non-living things (“this experience has caused…”, “heal from this situation”) is bad enough, but the only thing he comes close to apologizing for is “for us being here now, together, in this situation.” What the Hell does that even mean?
Also maddening is how much he keeps putting himself and Terry on equal footing (“start a dialogue,” “I, like you…” “have us both heal,” “us being here now, together, in this situation,” “I want to… be a positive influence with you,” “who we both are,” “we are both so much more…”)!!! NO NO NO! Venit is the PERPETRATOR and Crews is the VICTIM. These 2 things are not equivalent, they are opposites! AAAAARRRRGGGGHHHH!!! I. Can’t. Even.