Former Smallville actress is 'second in command of sex cult under investigation for extorting, beating and branding its members

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My final audition for a Steven Segal movie took place in his office. He told me how important it was to have chemistry off-screen as he sat me down and unzipped his leather pants. I️ ran out and called my agent. Unfazed, she replied, “well, I didn’t know if he was your type.”


— Portia de Rossi (@portiaderossi) November 8, 2017

It's an understudied phenomenon, this collective process, but it's as regular as the tides. With every news story there comes a moment of satiety so absolute that the weight of it trumps any story's actual merits. After everyone reads one too many descriptions of the same incident — whether it's allegations about Russian electoral interference or sexual harassment or rape — a reactionary mood sets in. It's the urge everyone gets as a news cycle crests: That's all very well and good, but come on. Time for the takedown, the pushback, the cooler heads that will reason the volume of the tide away.

We all know what will come next. As in 2006, when the Duke lacrosse case gripped the news; as in 2014, when Rolling Stone published it's piece about an alleged rape at UVA, one of the accounts coming out during this wave will be in some way disproved. When that happens, the familiar landslide of public opinion will turn. The incident will become a muted indictment of the hundreds of real victims who have come forward to tell their stories. Much of the public will seize that one false story as an excuse to facilitate the calming of the waters, the burying of a conversation so ugly and difficult that we regress to truisms about "human nature" and try to explain sexual predations as mere "awkwardness" or hapless attempts at flirting.

There are plenty of cognitive distortions aiding that backlash — from the "identifiable victim effect," by which we sympathize more with individual victims than with groups (so as the number of accusers grow, we grow less charitable toward them and suspect them of bandwagoning). There's system justification, a cognitive bias in which alternatives to the existing system feel threatening, so people mistake their psychological relief at reverting to a less confusing status quo with "reasonable skepticism."

But there are two more terms I'd like to suggest. One is the Anti-Bandwagon Fallacy. It's the belief that a news item's truth content actually diminishes as more people come forward with corroborating stories. The other is the Newtonian News Fallacy, by which, for every news story, there must eventually be an equal and opposite news story.

The coming backlash is built in, it's waiting in the wings, and the people who eventually espouse it will be convinced they're seeing through the news rather than participating in the rhythms this particularly dysfunctional media landscape confuses with the truth.

The coming backlash is built in, it's waiting in the wings, and the people who eventually espouse it will be convinced they're seeing through the news rather than participating in the rhythms this particularly dysfunctional media landscape confuses with the truth.