#MeToo and the State of the Public Apology

Accused celebs can do a lot with the right words. So why don’t they?

Every time someone gets #MeToo’d, it’s yet another public epiphany — albeit one with diminishing returns.

We keep confronting our collective gullibility, our misplaced faith in institutions. But there’s a related phenomenon just as ubiquitous to the “Menghazi” scandal that I think deserves more of our scrutiny: the state of the public apology.

Spoiler on that current state: It’s not great. Try to remember the last time an accused creep issued a public response that made you feel even a minor sense of satisfaction. But why should that be, in an era when social media has people more practiced than ever at addressing the public at large? And how do celebrities manage to witness public apologies either flying or failing on a regular basis, but never learn anything from the process when they’re the ones called to the carpet?

The Bare Minimum

You can rank any apology on a spectrum that ranges from admirable to pathetic based on how many of the four basic criteria it manages to hit, writes Michael Karson, professor at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Does the statement acknowledge what they did, why they did it, the…