Over the last year, the left-wing lynch mob has torn down everything from historic statues to reputations of noteworthy Americans.
One who has experienced brutal assaults on his character and lived to tell it is Alec Klein. His new autobiography, "Aftermath: When It Felt Like Life Was Over" (Republic Book Publishers), chronicles his experience with the #MeToo movement and how he overcame the threat of retaliatory allegations — baseless allegations, Klein insists.
The first significant aspect of Klein’s story is how a professor with an illustrious career researching the innocence of those within the criminal justice system who were wrongfully convicted got accused.
Klein’s career was two-pronged as both a journalist and a professor. He is an award-winning investigative journalist with The Washington Post and has written national bestselling books. He has also taught at both Georgetown University and American University in Washington, D.C. At Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Klein was the director of the Medill Justice Project. This outlet focuses on reviewing and investigating murder convictions in Illinois and determining if people were wrongly convicted.
“Throughout my whole career,” he writes, “I never worried about anything. I was an investigator at The Washington Post for quite some time, and people had always wanted to kill or harm me. What came up before the 2018 attack was in 2015. There was an administrative assistant, who didn’t directly work for me, who was already on work probation and resigned all of a sudden.
“She then immediately turned around and accused me of harassment. The university [officials in charge of that investigation] interviewed many people involved [with that case and] ended up ruling against her and found her complaint to be false. Northwestern University even reached out to the participants involved afterward to tell them that the case was to remain private because they had found that woman’s complaints to be entirely false.”
When the #MeToo movement attacked Klein in 2018, he recalls, “they actually used the attacks by that woman who made those false statements as their main attacks against me in their public letter.”
But Klein did not ever worry about them resurfacing because the university had decided that “the woman couldn’t even apply for another job at the university again after they looked into it because they were so disgusted by those statements.”
What did come as a surprise to Klein was that “the university did not even lift a finger when it should be defending me [in 2018], even after deciding that those allegations were false three years prior.”
The great irony comes from the fact that Klein was highly sympathetic to the #MeToo movement’s origin, and felt strongly that “without a doubt, women have been mistreated over the centuries.”
However, he also felt that there was “a great motivation for the movement, but it has gone too far in some instances. Nobody should always be believed regardless of circumstances. In journalism, you cannot publish extremely damaging things about somebody without verifying the validity of the claims, because that can destroy someone overnight.”
Whatever the good intentions with which the #MeToo movement began, there is a clear cause for reform of some of the investigations it launched and how both sides of every case are treated. In Klein’s words, “Our country was found around the idea of tolerance and free speech. We have a marketplace of ideas, and nowadays, people want to shatter that. What makes America so great is that we are tolerant, and right now, there is so little tolerance on universities and other places.”
The silver lining of the whole ordeal is that Klein recognized that the cultural conflicts that we are facing today “come from a more spiritual cause because there is a lack of faith. If we continue down a path where we are continually casting people out of society, then what would we have left to hold us together?”
For Klein, the answer does not lie with the top-down institutionally legislated approach, but rather from the more natural Aristotelian approach, in which “change has to come from the home and the communities that we live in.”
His harrowing tale and powerful message of faith should resonate with those looking for hope as we all are facing such strife during this multifront culture war. His book attempts to humanize all sides — not through sheer self-exoneration, but through a meditative reflection on the purest and highest good that life offers each of us.
(Michael Cozzi is a Ph.D. candidate at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.)
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