One of the supposed benefits of attending an elite private college or university is the access students theoretically gain to the school’s illustrious alumni on graduation. Sometimes, though, the alumni get access to you, even before graduation, as Connor Aberle of Wesleyan’s class of 2019 is discovering this weekend. Kenneth Lonergan, the writer and director of Manchester by the Sea, took issue with an editorial Aberle published in student newspaper the Wesleyan Argus about Casey Affleck and wrote a positively scathing letter to the editor about it that was published on Saturday.
Aberle’s article was about the sexual harassment lawsuits filed against Affleck back in 2010, which were settled out of court, and the propriety of Wesleyan using Lonergan’s status as a former student to promote itself. At issue was a newsletter from the university communications office about the school’s alumni Oscar nominees and winners—not just Lonergan but also Best Original Song nominee Lin-Manuel Miranda, plus a Best Picture nominated producer on Hidden Figures. But Lonergan’s presence bothered Aberle because of his association with Casey Affleck, and so, in the time-honored tradition of college newspaper editorialists everywhere, he went on an all-out attack.
Under the headline “How Wesleyan Is Complicit in Affleck’s Sexual Misconduct by Endorsing Lonergan ’84’,” Aberle wrote a piece that, in its position on Affleck, is not that far off from this Daily Beast article: Aberle, like many other people, thinks that the allegations surrounding Casey Affleck make honoring his performance in Lonergan’s film a mistake. It is not the least sloppy editorial you will ever read; besides not really making a case for its basic premise—that by praising Lonergan, Wesleyan is indirectly helping enable Affleck, somehow—Aberle also slips from referring to Affleck as someone who has been accused of sexual harassment to calling him “a perpetrator of sexual violence.”
On the other hand, it’s an editorial in a college newspaper, the kind of thing that shouldn’t come back to haunt Aberle until he seeks political power. (And if any editorial is going to come back to haunt him years from now, it should be the one where he argues for a government run by computer overlords, not his opinion on the Oscars.) Still, Lonergan didn’t hold back in his response, calling Aberle’s piece “such a tangle of illogic, misinformation and flat-out slander that only the author’s presumed youth can possibly excuse his deeply offensive display of ignorance, and warped PC-fueled sense of indignation.”
Lonergan outlines the flaws in logic and language in Aberle’s article one by one but also uses the opportunity to address the allegations against Affleck and their handling by the media more generally, referring to “equally wrongheaded pieces on the subject” by professional journalists and outlining the situation as he sees it:
… [Aberle] writes as if Casey Affleck were actually guilty of a crime. In fact, it was alleged 7 years ago, in a civil lawsuit for breach of contract, that Casey sexually harassed two women formerly in his employ. Casey denounced the allegations as being totally fabricated. Like most civil suits, this one was settled out of court by mutual consent on undisclosed terms. In other words nothing was proved or disproved. So how does Mr. Aberle dare to write as if he knows who was telling the truth and who was not? Anyone can sue anyone for anything in this country; the unsubstantiated details go in the public record and stay there.
I’m sure most college journalists are eager for their work to be judged by the same standards professionals are, and Lonergan’s advice—that Aberle “take a much harder look at the merits of his own arguments” is worth doing at any age. But there’s “judged by the same standards” and then there’s “locked in a duel of words with a man more than twice your age who just won an Academy Award for writing and who is using his fame to draw attention to what he calls ‘the reckless sloppiness of [your] thinking.’ ” It’s not as though Lonergan would have had a problem finding a venue to publish his defense of Casey Affleck without publicly dismantling the writing of a college sophomore. Despite the seriousness of the issues at hand, Lonergan’s choice to address the issue while attacking someone who probably can’t legally buy alcohol is dispiritingly petty and a little reminiscent of something one of our most brilliant, humane directors once wrote:
He doesn’t need you to rub his face in shit because you think it’s good for him. He’s going to find out that the world is a horrible place and that people suck soon enough, and without any help from you.
