Andrew Callaghan Allegations
Is there no one pure in this world?
After I sent out “They Will Come For Andrew Callaghan,” a reader wrote back to air some grievances. This Place Rules was needlessly glib, he said, definitely playing a game with false equivalency, and drew no new conclusions. Andrew Callaghan was doing a lot of this for the LOLs, and, ultimately, he’s just another classic Haverford-College-Proud-of-Myself dud.
I wrote back that, while I clearly saw much more in Andrew and his work than this reader did, I probably had come to overly romanticize him, seeing as I laid a lot of hope for cultural transformation at his feet, and almost everyone I knew was a Channel 5 fanboy like me. So, it was good to hear dissent, if for no other reason than to keep me from getting too uncritical in my reverence for Callaghan.
That exchange now feels a bit eerie. When I predicted people would come for Callaghan, I meant powerful people in the media establishment who were trying to snuff out competition. And I meant that it might happen, eventually, if Andrew kept provoking them and rising to new heights of prominence. I most definitely did not mean that, three days after I published the piece, I would wake up to see Andrew Callaghan’s name trending on Twitter because credible allegations of sexual misconduct had begun to circulate the internet.
Turns out there’s more than one beast that can stop Callaghan’s rise. Before the corporate media could come for him, he came for himself. It now seems that the reader’s impression of Callaghan as a Haverford-College-Proud-of-Myself dud was more spot on than he could’ve imagined, that Callaghan is in fact so self-satisfied that he cannot imagine a woman not wanting to have sex with him.
The Allegations. On January 5, an account posted this video to Twitter. In it, a young woman describes a sexual encounter she had with Callaghan. She says she had drinks with him at a bar, and then he claimed he’d had some sort of falling out with his crew members and thus needed a place to stay. She agreed to let him stay at her place but claims she made clear from the outset that she was not going to sleep with him. When they got back to her place, he made sexual advances over and over and over, despite her saying no repeatedly. He was so unrelenting in his advances that eventually she caved and consented to having sex with him.
For a while, she didn’t think much of it other than that she wasn’t proud of having caved, and she stayed friendly with Andrew. But, later on, she started feeling like he’d coerced her into having sex that she didn’t want to have. She’d said no repeatedly and consented in the end only to get him to stop coming on to her. When she eventually confronted him about the encounter, he got furious and told her she was going to ruin his life.
On January 7, the same account posted this follow-up video, a response to demands for receipts that also made public several other stories of alleged abuse that women had privately sent the original accuser. In short, there are quite a few women who accuse Andrew of the same general pattern of predatory behavior. He drinks with women, gets them one on one, then comes onto them. If at first they say no, he pressures them into saying yes. If they keep saying no, he keeps pressuring. And if they absolutely will not cave, he gets indignant.
Those making the allegations claim this pattern of behavior dates all the way back to his high school years in Seattle, they claim it’s why he was ousted from his first popular internet show “Quarter Confessions” in New Orleans, and they claim that Tim Heidecker (of comedy duo Tim & Eric, who co-directed This Place Rules) is now aware of the allegations. Supposedly Callaghan has been removing comments from his YouTube videos that mention the allegations, as have the moderators of the Channel 5 subreddit. So far, no response from Callaghan.
The Reaction. A lot of people, myself included, are devastated by these allegations, having been huge fans of Callaghan’s. I mean, I’ve watched every video the guy’s ever posted and listened to every podcast episode he’s ever been interviewed on. Not only did I see his work as culturally transformative, I saw him as a down-to-earth dude despite his obvious ambition — the kind of guy I’d want to grab a beer with.
Obviously the real victims here are the women Callaghan has allegedly abused. The rest of us feeling devastated are victims only of our own naivete.
A few people have pointed out the irony of Callaghan confronting a sexual predator in This Place Rules, a confrontation during which he suggested the man was projecting his own pedophilic impulses outward onto elites like the Clintons — all while having his own issues with sexual predation. More than a few have acted unsurprised, as though it was self-evident that Callaghan — being a straight white male of vaguely leftist posture who’s obsessed with documenting America’s “underbelly” — would turn out to be a sexual predator. Granted, there is a long history of straight white leftist men publicly taking feminist stances and trying to play the role of “ally,” only to be cancelled for abusing women. But I think anyone saying they saw this coming, without having direct knowledge of the allegations before they surfaced, is being disingenuous for internet clout.
Part of Callaghan’s “vaguely leftist posture” is his periodic appearance on Hasan Piker’s livestreams. Piker is an extremely popular leftist commentator who was a fan and quasi-friend of Callaghan’s. In addition to having Callaghan on his show, he would often discuss Channel 5 videos or other Callaghan-related content. A lot of people are currently mad at Piker for not yet having addressed the allegations.
Someone managed to find a silver lining:
But all I feel is this:
Reflections. The allegations that have surfaced so far seem like the perfect storm for the post #MeToo era. They’re just serious enough to poison Callaghan’s reputation but they fall short of criminal behavior. At present it seems unlikely Callaghan will ever face legal penalties for his actions. He’ll stand trial only in the court of public opinion, where he could lose his name, platform, and wealth.
I’d call Callaghan’s behavior serial sleaziness. One Twitter user mockingly but aptly summed it up: “Imagine Callaghan hitting his pre-rehearsed ‘I had a falling out with my crew, I have nowhere to stay’ line, then filibustering & begging for pussy for hours.” In some cases it sounds more serious than mere begging; after hearing no, he would continue to make physical advances like putting his hand down the woman’s pants or putting her hand down his. He would do so with a kind of playful laughter, trying to turn the refusals into a flirtatious prelude, keeping the woman just comfortable enough to continue tolerating his presence. And, in the end, he would get “consent” from the women he slept with — consent in a court of law, perhaps, but the sleaziest kind of consent, one that doesn’t stand up to moral scrutiny. Assuming the allegations are true, and the events played out as the women claim, the picture that emerges is a 25-year-old man driving around the country, pressuring (often younger) women into having sex they didn’t really want to have, capitalizing on his growing fame to get sexual gratification with little regard for the dignity and desires of his sexual partners.
These are the kinds of allegations that could cost Callaghan a lot in the short term, but that might not destroy his career. The situations described are just ambiguous enough, just commonplace enough, that once the initial outrage subsides, he could well retain a sufficient core of loyal subscribers to keep doing what he’s been doing. Maybe he has to wait a few years for another HBO-type project, but in the meantime he does just fine. His image is always tainted by the whole affair, but he suffers little in the way of lasting consequences.
For him: a setback, not a deathblow. For his victims: no relief, save for sympathy from internet allies. For the rest of us: yet another episode of the post #MeToo era, in which a beloved celebrity turns out to be a slime ball but continues to enjoy a lesser form of celebrity status, in which much vitriol is spewed online but nothing changes because maybe there’s nothing to change. Maybe the world will just always be full of powerful, sleazy men who know exactly how much sleaze they can let show. And maybe those men will always have enough talent and charisma to win the esteem of naïve fans who, until the day they awake to a flurry of credible allegations, will ardently believe that, this time, they found someone worth believing in — that, after coming of age in a decadent society dominated by deranged elites, here, finally, is a cause for hope; here is a man I can trust.
