Out Of The Blue Podcast Series

The now infamous story about seven college students accused of drugging and raping a woman at Cornell is ubiquitous and ugly. Reading through the articles, I felt a familiar knot in my stomach. Is this the start of another moral panic? Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it plainly: “Seven men drugged and gang raped a 20-year-old woman.” Not alleged. Not accused. Stated as fact by a sitting...

Look up the word consent in the Oxford English Dictionary, and you’ll find it has a twin. Same sound, but two spellings. One is with a c, like a penny, a cent. One with an s, like something you send in the mail. Concent, with a c, is really an old word, mostly out of use now. It means harmony, several voices singing together, each one distinct, none of them lost. Consent with an s, well, that come...

I keep coming back to this. Not because I haven’t said it before. I have. I look at all of this from a dozen angles. I used to think this would have a finale, it would be finished. That somewhere there was a final version of this argument, and once I found it, I could stop. I don’t think that anymore. I don’t think of this as a wound as much as it is a mission now. Each pass shows me something the...

Arthur Reed Kimball, writing in The Atlantic in 1900 , was concerned about the invasion of yellow journalism , a press turning increasingly toward sensationalized headlines and scandal for its own sake. I was interested because, you know, being on the target end of scandal wreaked immense havoc on my life. But sensationalism itself wasn’t his real target. As he put it, to lay exclusive stress on t...

*I apologize for the ridiculously low and gravely voice. Allergies taunt my voice, so I sound like I’m doing a voice over for a 1980’s movie trailer!” Going to a museum is, for too many of us, a tedious thing. We wander the galleries the way we’d shuffle the aisles at Target, or wander an outlet mall, mostly unable to put together a coherent sentence about what we see in front of us, or why any of...

When I was a kid, I found comfort in the predictable rhythm of the news programs my mother consumed. In Minneapolis, particularly on bad weather days, WCCO Radio was always on. In the evenings, the 6 and 10 PM broadcasts brought the same anchors and faces, a sense of familiarity into the home. She never missed them. I remember it being calming. First, because it meant I was with my mom and felt sa...

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard Feynman, “Cargo Cult Science” Last week, scrolling Facebook as part of my morning routine, I saw a post from a friend of mine, a retired nurse who was on the front line of the Covid nightmare. She saw, first hand, the ravages of that fast-burning disease, and how unprepared we were. I remembe...

Well, he won an Oscar, and now Jared Leto joins the cancel club amid “fresh claims” from ten women, some of whom say they were teenagers when the alleged conduct occurred — four of them alleging criminal sexual conduct, including one account involving California’s statutory age of consent. Again and again, the headlines hang the accused while the accusers are treated with dignity and presumptive c...

I spend more time than most looking at headlines and reading stories about men who are accused of sexual violence or harassment. It’s ugly reading. Based on statistics alone, most of those accusations are likely true, although until it’s gone through the courts and there is a trial verdict, the accused is still innocent. But the label of rapist, or predator, is attached to the accused from the mom...

Growing old makes a person feel, old. One morning last week, I looked at my wife Marian sitting on the couch across from me, and realized I’ve been with her for most of my adult life. Here’s how we met. Fifteen years before the end of the 20th century, I was working as a part time Bingo caller at the Mystic Lake Casino in Shakopee, Minnesota. Back then, the Casino didn’t look like the cornfield La...

Apparently I’m a known predator. I’m a known, predator. That comma has a lot to say in describing me, or what you think about me. One is a label. The other, an accusation and a lie. I bring this up because I came across some screenshots of comments posted online after my brief visit to the Renaissance Festival just about one year ago. I was there with Penn & Teller, who were celebrating their 50th...

When I started this podcast, I had a clear idea of what I wanted it to be. Twelve episodes. I would tell the story of the false accusation brought against me, from arrest to acquittal. Four painfully long years. I wrote it, voiced it, and produced it alone. I released it to a small group of people. Then I rewrote it, re-recorded it, updated every episode, and released it again earlier this year. W...

I’ve been following the many sordid stories about former Maine senatorial candidate Graham Platner, a trash-stashed, communist “oyster farmer” who apparently has been undone by a series of ugly stories about his behavior, including allegations of rape. Oh boy. I’m not going to list the many bizarre and strange things he’s said and done. You can Google it. As for the rape allegations, that’s exactl...

A photoshoot with wild horses in Linton, North Dakota becomes an unlikely mirror. Watching strangers earn a horse’s trust one slow, patient gesture at a time, I recognized a structure I’d been living inside for years, since I was wrongfully accused, since the trial, since I had to decide, over and over, whether to answer cruelty with rage or with something harder to sustain. This one includes the...

What happens when truth gets replaced by agreement? I start with an odd dream I had last week, a monologue to a stranger, and work through the political situation in NYC, and end up somewhere personal. Agreement isn't truth. And silence isn't neutral. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.outofthebluepodcast.com/su...

I had an odd dream last night that lingered well into the day. I was having a conversation with a guy. I don’t know who he was. Young. Colored hair, tattoos, tackle box hardware on his face. We were deep into it, and I went into a monologue. “It’s not enough to have truth on your side. For crying out loud, even saying it is a cliché. It’s not that you believe something is true, it’s that you think...

The Monday I was released from jail, in June 2018, was an odd and distorted day. I was in a psychological fog, I hadn’t slept. When I was processed into the jail, I was told that “vegetarian isn’t a medical condition” and so I mostly picked over the meals, but mostly didn’t eat in lockup. Being released was uneventful. After posting bond ($100K), I was taken back to my little cell until everything...

“What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.”...

*This was originally published in Available Light - My blog about things that don’t require an argument. A seven hour drive from Minneapolis drops you into the flatlands of North Dakota, agribusiness country, where the landscape asks nothing of you and gives little back. I made the trip to photograph a herd of Nokota horses for the Nakota Horse Conservancy, a breed once nearly wiped out and still...

I couldn’t listen to it. My conversation with Penn Jillette dropped into the podosphere last week. It was a long conversation about what I went through from 2018 to 2022. Heavy things. And I talked a lot. I tried, but I couldn’t listen to it. I’ve been telling these stories for a couple of years now and every time I do, I feel divided. To talk about my own life feels selfish. Indulgent. I don’t wa...

Every morning, after I’ve read the news, much of it depressing, I feel the need to write. Since my blog launched in 2024, I’ve written consistently, and over the past year my output has doubled. Add research, reading, and production time, and my work on Out of the Blue is a full-time occupation — admittedly, not a lucrative one as of yet. The themes I write about are something like stones from a r...

In 2018, I was wrongfully accused of rape. The accusation was false. I had no criminal record, no history of violence. But the moment I was arrested, my career vanished, my savings were destroyed, and I became a pariah. For four years, I fought the charges. In 2022, a jury deliberated for only minutes before finding me not guilty. But by then, the damage was catastrophic and irreversible. This Sub...

In July 2018, Carr Hagerman wrote in his journal: "Who am I now that all my work has been destroyed? I've disappeared." He didn't know yet how much worse it would get. In this episode of Out of the Blue , Carr takes you inside the bail hearing — the frozen clock, the indifferent prosecutor, the $100,000 that changed everything — and maps the financial and psychological wreckage that follows a wron...

(This is an edited episode that originally streamed in March 2025, as episode 6.) In 2018, police arrived at my home with an arrest warrant for two counts of Federal Sexual Misconduct. The accusation was false. The evidence would eventually prove it. But none of that mattered as I was processed and locked in a concrete cell. This isn’t a story about heroic resilience or finding silver linings. It’...