We cancelled the show we had planned this morning. We don’t do that. But a line got crossed in this community this week, and there was no version of the two of us doing a normal Friday while it sat there.
We started where the world started this week, with Dolly Parton, and by the end she had handed us our organizing principle. Not the tote-bag version, the real one. Watch the old Barbara Walters interview, where Dolly gets asked why a pretty woman bothers with the wigs and the rhinestones and answers without flinching: I know who I am. No temper, no wounded dignity, complete control of the room. That is what what would Dolly do means—calm, compassionate, firm, and completely unwilling to pretend that harm isn’t harm.
With Great Claims Comes Great Responsibility
So, firmly. An essay went up this week alleging that Ellie Leonard is a fabricated persona built to run interference on the Epstein files, with side claims aimed at Kate Justice and at Cliff. If you present yourself as a working journalist and allege that a real woman is a fake person, you had better arrive with a mountain of evidence. Cross-checked, footnoted, corroborated. Noting that a television character once had a similar name is not a mountain. It isn’t a foothill. It’s a vibe, and a vibe is not journalism. It’s a feeling wearing a press badge.
We have all watched where the alternative leads. A president spent years being told to prove he was born here; his instinct was that it was too stupid to dignify, and he was right, and it didn’t matter—a baseless claim plus an army willing to repeat it is a machine that runs on its own. That machine built the world we live in now. Meanwhile the Epstein files, the actual mountain, still haven’t produced the releases and prosecutions they should. If that’s your beat and you’re spending your credibility on a persona theory about a mother doing research, you are aiming a loaded thing at the wrong target.
The standard has to survive contact with your own intuition, too. One commenter offered that she had met someone once and simply read that she was a bad person. Friend, respectfully: you are outsourcing your critical thinking to a ghost. The last time an American looked into a man’s eyes and announced he had seen a soul, it was George W. Bush looking into Vladimir Putin’s, and we are all still paying that bill. A hunch is a reason to close a tab, not a reason to join a pile-on.
The comment section is the part that turned our stomachs: people volunteering that they had always had a weird feeling, that she had always rubbed them the wrong way. A striking number of the creators taking fire this summer are women, and so were most of the voices doing it. There is no shortage of room at the top; nobody has to clear a space by making one. If your strategy is amplifying unverifiable claims because the frenzy grows your follower count, you are not an activist. You are a mob with a publishing schedule. And one claim here—that Ellie discussed sexual abuse in front of her small children—is untrue, cruel, and capable of real damage to a family if believed. She is also already being stalked. Don’t pour fuel on that.
There is a pattern under all of this we would be cowards not to name. This summer the creators drawing fire keep turning out to be Jewish ones, at the exact moment terms like Zio and AIPAC are used as synonyms for Jew. We are both Jewish. One of us says genocide about Gaza, and Holocaust, and apartheid about the West Bank, in print, under his own name. We have both been called Israeli operatives anyway. The first friendship this cost us was lost by gently challenging a claim that Jewish creators were being paid off. That was the first splinter, and it has not stopped since.
What Dolly Would Do
Here is what we won’t do. We are not psychologists and we are not diagnosing anyone from a livestream. When our own chat started speculating about the author’s family, we shut it down, because conjecture is conjecture no matter which direction it points. She appears to be having a hard time, and we have both had seasons of being certain the world was organized against us. It is terrifying, and we are sorry it is happening to her. Both things are true at once: we hope she is okay, and the claims are false and doing harm. Compassion is not agreement, and neither cancels the other. We are also not doing this again tomorrow. We get tagged into these things constantly and decline, because there is too much real work.
Sixty-seven days to the midterms. Before you spend another afternoon in a comment section, ask the Dolly question, and then ask ours: is this going to flip the Senate? Nobody reaches the end of their life proud that they yelled at a woman researching the Epstein files because another woman on the internet told them to. That is a tragic waste of a mind, and you only get the one.
If you don’t like us, don’t watch. It’s Substack; there are a million other channels, and we are certifiably not for everybody. But if you’re going to make things up about the people we love, bring your footnotes.
—Dana & Lawrence
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