Other high-profile sexual assaulters have scaled their apologies to generalities.
Al Franken, U.S. Senator, said in his apology, “Over the last few months, all of us—including and especially men who respect women—have been forced to take a good, hard look at our own actions….” [emphases added]
His universalization of this issue is a distancing technique to mitigate his personal blame and pontificate about how “all of us” have fallen short. Franken isn’t the only one who employs this tool.
Charlie Rose, formerly of CBS News, stated, “All of us, including me, are coming to a newer and deeper recognition of the pain caused by conduct in the past,.”
[emphases added]
Glenn Thrush, a New York Times white house correspondent accused by four women, commented: “I apologize to any woman who felt uncomfortable in my presence, and for any situation where I behaved inappropriately.”
Phrases like “any woman” in “any situation” are hardly the hallmark of taking personal responsibility.
One study from the journal Psychology, Crime & Law noted that sexual offenders describing their sexual violence “often substituted ‘you’ or ‘we’ for ‘I’ in significantly scaled sections to distance self from actions or words, or to project behavior onto others, who were typically unnamed, or cited as a ‘they’.”
Employing generalities is a nearly universal phenomenon with sexual assaulters.
Then there are excuses, from blatant ones, like Roy Moore blaming the Democratic National Convention, to more subtle excuses.
Harvey Weinstein infamously sought to shift some blame for his behavior on the fact that he “came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.” While he asserts that this is not an excuse, it still looks like an attempt to justify his behavior.
Several men choose to hide behind “misinterpreted” or “misunderstood intentions.” Chris Savino from Nickelodeon said “it was never [his] intention” to sexually harass his alleged victims. Comedian Louis CK said he had mistakenly believed masturbating in front of female colleagues was ok because he’d asked them first, and Andy Henry, a casting director accused of pressuring women to disrobe in order to get roles, said he only meant “to explore the vulnerability portrayed in a scene” and that he never “consciously intend to hurt anyone.”
In the excuses category, the Kevin Spacey apology is arguably the most egregious.
In his public statement after being accused of assaulting a young male actor, he noted the he did “not remember the encounter,” it was “drunken behavior,” and he declared his life as a “gay man” as if that justified assault.
Combined, these excuses make Spacey’s one of the worst formal apologies for sexual assault of the past decade.
Why are the men accused of sexual assault so bad at apologizing?
Instead of heart-felt, sincere remorse we see statements tinged with disingenuous reflections on society and personal justifications. These men are apologizing because they got caught, not out of genuine contrition.
These male predators need to man up and say sorry without qualification. Sexual entitlement is never acceptable at work, at home, and yes, even in apologies.