I know we all wanna move on, but I want to linger on the Kansas situation for a last moment, b/c there are a few important principles being overlooked. One is about accountability and redemption, the other how quickly we reach conclusions. A couple thoughts:

The first question presented by the Coleman story was whether an adult should be judged by what he did in middle school. There are those who argued that what he did indicated “who he is as a person” https://twitter.com/borrfdad/status/1298693600172105729?s=20

I strongly believe that adults and children should be treated differently when it comes to responsibility for their crimes. That view is only controversial in the U.S., the most vicious carceral state in the world. The question for me was always empirical: Has he changed?

I was quite explicit about that, repeatedly so: https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1297266038233595904

And so on Saturday afternoon, I asked people who knew Aaron to reach out to me. That brought in a lot of leads that I worked until Sunday, when he dropped out https://twitter.com/ryangrim/status/1297266739026305036

On Tuesday, he announced that he was re-entering the race, and I picked the reporting back up and that day broke the news of his ongoing abusive behavior *as an adult.* https://theintercept.com/2020/08/25/aaron-coleman-ex-girlfriend-assault/

That led to many people on here gloating that they had been right all along. But that gets us to the speed at which people reach conclusions, another important principle at play here.

There are significant differences between this situation and Alex Morse, but there’s also a critical similarity. Consider this: I spent 5 days getting attacked for expressing skepticism of his charges, but was only vindicated because they were bogus.

What if I had dug into the Morse allegations and found they had merit? Would I have been wrong to have expressed skepticism? Would y’all have been right to have piled on? Of course not.

Instead, after we exposed the fraud, everybody here just quietly deleted their condemnations of Morse and the few skeptics.

The entire internet had condemned him, yet if you hunt around today, you’re hard pressed to find a single person who’ll admit participating in that.

There are hostile actors out there looking to exploit legitimate rage to rip people apart. It costs you nothing to pause, think, and ask for a bit of context and evidence before leaping to a conclusion. It took just a few days, and that’s not too much to ask to get it right.