The Newsroom Recap: URRRRRRGGGGGGGH (AKA, The One With The Poorly-Timed, Poorly-Handled Rape Plot)

Trigger warning: this piece contains discussion of rape and sexual assault. 

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Aaron Sorkin has a woman problem. Aaron Sorkin has daddy issues. Aaron Sorkin has an earnest small-town youth minister for a music supervisor (I assume). Aaron Sorkin has a problem with new media. Aaron Sorkin has a mission to civilise. Aaron Sorkin has failed.

This was worse than the Osama episode, worse than the Sex & The City bus tour, worse than ‘Fix You’. Charlie, once a marvellous character imbued with all Sam Waterston’s crotchety charm, has spent the season nearly having a heart attack, and then goes out on one in the least graceful way possible: with a brutal headdesk, under the second extended, partially slow-mo, agonising musical montage in as many weeks. Sloan’s satisfying demolishment of the stalker-app guy is immediately tainted as it offers not a shred of catharsis for poor Charlie, and then it kills him. How does she come back from that?

Then there’s the secret women’s business. I had stirrings of discomfort a few weeks ago during Gary’s romantic entanglement with a more junior reporter; she felt very strongly she had been passed over for a plum assignment because Gary was suffering post-coital discomfort — but it turned out Gary was actually a good guy! He was just covering for Don, who gave the assignment to another girl over Toots here just because Toots wasn’t as good a writer. See, ladies? It’s not an issue for HR – sometimes sexual impropriety in the workplace is all in your head, which you should probably fill with a bit more book-learnin’ so you have Merit.

It’s okay for a character not to be stupendously good at their jobs (see: literally everyone who’s ever been in this show except Terry Crews*), but why did that particular point have to be made?

And then there’s the Rape Plot: a Princeton student who was assaulted and subsequently ignored by campus and local law enforcement starts a name-and-shame site for fellow survivors — an admittedly exploitable support network and warning system, a bit like Lulu but for rapists rather than exes (which could actually be effective if used properly; it’s estimated 90% of them are serial offenders, attacking an average of six times each).

To be fair (fair!) to Sorkin and his writers, there is actually almost no doubt cast on Mary’s story. We are supposed to believe her. Yes, she took drugs the night of the assault. No, it’s still not her fault. Yes, the men she’s accused did do it. No, we’re not going to meet them; the show will not humanise them. Everything she said about the way rape is kicked under the rug by colleges and dismissed by law enforcement is true; there are hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits sitting in storage in the US (we don’t know exact numbers because so many jurisdictions don’t require records to be kept of untested kits).

All this is right, and true, and even if Mary sounded more like an exhausted, exasperated blog post than a whole person, her argument was sound and she was allowed to win in principle. Sorkin clearly wanted us to rage against the unfairness of a system that rapists can abuse precisely because they feel so confident they’ll never be caught or punished.

But it was still Don who decided not to let her say her piece on air, even though she wanted to (because she’d never get her day in court); he basically says, ‘Forget it, Mary, it’s Chinatown, things will never change, so don’t try’.

Perhaps he felt a misguided need to protect Mary from the media circus, even though it’s not his business to assume he knows what’s best for her. Perhaps he was repulsed by Pruitt’s ghoulish insistence on pushing rapist and survivor onto a live panel discussion about a traumatic crime, for entertainment value. Perhaps his intentions were good — but either way, he ended up comparing Mary’s site to revenge porn.

Let’s read that again. Sorkin’s idealistic, smart, “balanced” journalist character compared a site where assault survivors share their experiences and warn others about rapists on campus, to sites where pissed-off men upload naked pictures of their former partners for their fellow shitlords to fap to. Don even mentions Sloan’s revenge porn experience specifically — apparently without realising that he’s describing a gross violation of bodily autonomy, intimacy and privacy — and equates that with being falsely accused of rape.

Nobody is suggesting that an actual false accusation of rape is a walk in the park for the accused – but neither is being assaulted, having a rape kit taken, having to recount the worst minutes or hours of your life to strangers, being disbelieved, stigmatised, and shamed. Neither is being afraid all the time. A false accusation (which are very rare, and rarely proven) could certainly be devastating, and follow you around for a while; trauma lives inside you too, and can’t be shaken off by moving to a new city.

There are already too many people who refuse to believe survivors; you will not tip the balance against some persecuted horde of falsely accused men if you support and listen to women who are trying to make themselves heard.

Of course, this episode had to air this week (and I have to hope Sorkin himself was at least more horrified than smug when he registered the timing). This week, when nineteen women’s stories of abuse and assault still weigh less than a nation’s stubborn adulation of one man; this week, when one piece of shitty journalism magically undermines the testimony of every woman who’s spoken out about being raped. This week, when a “libertarian” “journalist” decided it was his duty as a reporter to publish the personal details of a high-profile alleged rape victim because she might have said a thing that wasn’t entirely accurate. This week, when we were reminded that even visual evidence of a crime being committed against a person of colour or a woman isn’t always enough to see justice done.

So yet again, a discussion about violence done to women is turned into a discussion about the well-being of men. The potential value of Mary’s site to thousands of women is outweighed by the potential for its misuse against men (I assume Don is also in favour of shutting down Twitter because some of its users send rape threats occasionally?). The incredibly brutal, public suicide of Lily, Neal’s source, becomes about getting Neal home and Will out of his cosy little jail cell so he doesn’t have to actually read that lovely hardbound copy of Love In The Time Of Cholera.

John McAvoy’s abuse of his wife is nearly erased in the absurd, pointless back-and-forth between son and (blatantly imaginary) father; it becomes something John did to Will, rather than to his mother — of whom there is not a picture on that wall.

And when a woman in the Newsroom writer’s room objected to the storyline because she wanted “to fight with Aaron about the NSA, not gender”, Sorkin kicked her out. He fought for this storyline, and fought to have his say about whether we should believe women who accuse men of rape. (His answer is basically the predictable, “Well, it’d be nice to support them, but nobody should have an opinion until we know all the facts”. It makes me wonder if he’s listening to Serial, and glad we don’t have to find out through Season Four of this show).

And then he opted to deal with the most important news story of 2013 by putting Maggie and Jim Fucking Goddamn Stupid Puffy Harper on the wrong plane and having them make out and not talk about Edward Snowden even a little bit.

So next week, I assume Newsnight will finally air the Kundu story. ACN will have a big, important piece of news to break, it will totally trend, and Lucas Pruitt will nod approvingly as he sees that the internet is capable of caring about things not attached to or recently emerged from a Kardashian. Will will get to be a big hero, having spent six weeks in jail to protect a source who nobly and conveniently blew her own brains out, and whose death will now not be in vain, or something. Thus Charlie, murdered by new media, shall be avenged (no doubt after an interminable funeral scene).

Neal will come back as though he never fled the country to avoid a felony charge, and boot out Stalker App Guy, who can never work in digital media again because we’re very strict about ethics. Jim and Maggie will be insufferable. Sloan will never get a spinoff, because life is unfair. The show will fade out on a nine-minute mash-up of ‘Fix You’, ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘Hide & Seek‘, as Will finally introduces Neal’s Bigfoot story in the B-block, right after a live cross from Damascus.

The mission to civilise is right on schedule.

*Dear HBO: please consider making a fourth season of this show, only rename it The Crewsroom and it’s just Terry Crews and Olivia Munn and Jane Fonda and Marcia Gay Harden getting drunk and making Vines about Terry’s pecs.

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The Newsroom airs on Showcase at 7:30pm on Mondays, fast-tracked from the US.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh. Read her Newsroom recaps here.