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THE CREATOR OF popular US TV shows Rick and Morty and Community has publicly apologised for harassing a former colleague while he worked with her.
Writer and producer Dan Harmon issued the public apology after being called out on social media by his former colleague, the writer Megan Ganz.
Harmon had been Ganz’s boss while she worked on the popular US sitcom Community.
Ganz responded to a tweet last week from Harmon where he said 2017 was “The Year of the Asshole. Myself included”.
She asked him to be more specific.
What followed was a public back and forth between the two on Twitter, where Harmon said he was “filled with regret and a lot of foggy memories about abusing my position, treating you like garbage”.
“I would feel a lot of relief if you told me there was a way to fix it. I’ll let you call the shots. Til then, at least know I know I was an awful boss and a selfish baby,” he said.
Ganz responded that Harmon should “figure out to give me some relief and I’ll return the favour”.
Following from this, Harmon spoke and publicly apologised on his podcast Harmontown yesterday about what had happened, saying that he wanted to be “part of the solution and not the problem”.
The apology
Speaking on the podcast, Harmon explained what had happened while the pair worked on Community together.
(You can listen to the full account here, from about 18 minutes in)
After a disclaimer, he launched into a long account of what had happened and gave an apology. He didn’t name Ganz directly.
“The most clinical way I can put it in fessing up to my crimes is that I was attracted to a writer I had power over because I was a show runner and I knew enough to know that these feelings were bad news,” he said.
He said he did the “cowardly, easiest, laziest thing you can do with feelings like that and didn’t deal with them”, and that by not dealing with them he made the writer deal with them.
“Flirty, creepy, everything other than overt enough to constitute betraying your live-in girlfriend who you’re going home to every night…” he said.
He said that he lied to himself, his girlfriend and everyone else about what he was feeling, and why he was giving the writer so much extra attention.
“And so that’s what I continued to do telling myself and anybody that threatened to confront me with it that if you thought what I was doing was creepy or sexist or unprofessional it was because you were the sexist or jealous,” he said.
I was supporting this person, I’m a mentor, I’m a feminist, it’s your problem, not mine. You’re the one who actually is seeing things through that lens.
He said it was communicated to him multiple times that he was being inappropriate with the writer and “divesting her of a recourse to integrity”.
He said he then broke up with his girlfriend, who he had “lied to entire time, while lying to myself”, and then his behaviour got worse.
“I broke up with my girlfriend and then I went right full steam into creeping on my employee. Now it was even less appropriate, after all,” he said.
“Now I wasn’t in danger of being a bad person. After that season, I got overt about my feelings after it wrapped.
I said ‘I love you,’ and she said the same thing she had been saying the entire time, in one language or another: ‘Please, don’t you understand that focusing on me like this, preferring me like this, liking me like this, I can’t say no to it and when you do it, it makes me unable to know whether I’m good at my job.’
“Humiliated”
“And because I finally got to the point where I said to her ‘I love you’ because that’s what I thought it was, when you target somebody for two years. And it was therefore rejected that way, I was humiliated,” Harmon said.
He said that after that he continued to do the cowardly thing and now “wanted to teach her a lesson”.
He said he treated her badly at this point, “and that was probably the darkest of it all”.
“I’m going to assume when she tweets about it and refers to ‘trauma’ that’s probably it,” said.
Just treated her cruelly, pointedly, things I would never, ever would have done if she had been male and if I had never had those feelings for her.
He said he lost his job and ruined the show over what he had done to Ganz.
And I moved on. I’ve never done it before and I will never do it again, but I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it if I had any respect for women.
He said that he had fundamentally thought of women “as different creatures” and that following what had happened he had gotten away with it by “not thinking about it”.
“And if she hadn’t mentioned something on Twitter, I would have continued to not have to think about it, although I did walk around with my stomach in knots about it, but I wouldn’t have had to talk about it,” Harmon said.
He said that it was important to “think about it” and that he hoped society could “get to a better place where that stuff doesn’t happen”.
“So that’s it. Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t make this worse on anybody but me,” he said.
Response
Ganz responded on Twitter, accepting Harmon’s apology.
“I find myself in the odd position of having requested an apology publicly, and then having received one—a good one—also publicly,” she said.
He’s not rationalising or justifying or making excuses. He doesn’t just vaguely acknowledge some general wrongdoing in the past. He gives a full account.
She said she didn’t expect “the relief I’d feel just hearing him say these things actually happened”.
“This was never about vengeance; it’s about vindication.
Because if any part of this process should be done in the light, it’s the forgiveness part. And so, @danharmon, I forgive you.
Following working on Community, Ganz has gone on to write for Modern Family, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and other shows.
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RTE to hand out two abacus
.. and 6 Pencils (HB with Integrated rubber)
RTÉ deserve a few boots. This isn’t one of them however.
License increase first though. About €350 extra each should cover the €150 million consultancy fees in to what type of abacus. Wood or Plastic.
11 year old looks at this calculator-like device, then looks at his Xbox 360, then at this calculator-like device, then at his IPad….. 11 year doesn’t look at his calculator-like device ever again!
They would be covered in lead paint and cost 52 million squillion along with a committee to oversee this failure. Just don’t lick the paint
BBC hands out free coding devices to help children with programming and give them a leg up in future science.
RTE reminds children everyday at 6 that a primitive god needs his daily attendance.
“primitive” – there are modern ones I ought to know about?
There’s thousands of gods, all it takes is some imagination.
I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a relatively recent deity.
Step up to the plate RTE
Would you be willing to pay extra for your TV licence. You don’t think the overpaid Dobsons & Turbridys of this world are going to take a pay cut now do you.
Why is it their role to do this? If theres benefit schools should be the ones to recieve the funding to provide it. I dont immediately see that the national broadcaster and TV license money should be funding these resources as opposed to the Education Department unless as a rather quirky publicity stunt. If this is assessed as beneficial and worthwhile simply give the Department the extra budget. The BBC is fantastic but no need to ape their every move.
Someone has to pay for the new wine cellar
Fair play to BBC
If rte handed these out they would also implement the household coding device license fee
In a few years we will discover they were ‘accidentally’ collecting data on every home with one of these devices.
Maybe if they didn’t dumb down the curriculum the kids wouldn’t be idiots over there
Not to mention dumbing down the BBC itself.
The UK has consistently outperformed Ireland every year since records on education index. This kind of programme will ensure that this continues while the department of education and rte still make a mess of getting basic internet and IT to schools. Don’t mock our neighbours as a nation of UKIP following troglodytes when we are playing catchup.
I didn’t understand any of that.
They are going to give out little yokes to the kids to play with so they can get jobs doing same when they are big. Because the mines and shipyards are gone and the call centres are in Asia.
God damn I always hoped this age of coding, computers, AI etc would come after my time.
Well if it did you wouldn’t be able to make that comment just there, a touch ironic that eh
No it’s not ironic. You kind of misunderstood my point. I mean a world where everything is about computers, technology etc, which is the age we are about to enter/just entering. We’ve had commenting abilities on the internet for years.
You do realize that your commenting is enabled by coding and computers, – and lots of it? Probaby millions of lines of code, since you use Twitter’s oauth login to enable the post. Given that you are using our Twitter account to post, – its almost certain that some AI came into it too, for Spam and Web security filtering, especially since you sent your comment also to Twitter.
I would say it is in fact ironic by definition, since code,computers and probably AI enabled your comment.
Alan R
Can you read?
I am nit computer literate, as many pensioners/disabled, especially rurals are not.
No lessons available but an hour a couple of times per week and some buses and we could rectify this gradually.
BBC give out coders. Rte give out reminders on behalf of Irish water to sign up or else you will be reduced to a trickle and fined and a lein put against your property.
Have we not given up on rte yet?, apart from the odd decent thing like Notoriuos or L/H wouldn’t go near it!
Don’t understand why you need a device to plug into a computer to start coding. You can write code in any simple text editor.
That confused me also.
The point is for this thing to be a visual incentive to code rather than directly aid coding. It’s a wearable device with scrolling text, flashing lights and other things that make it very obvious what your coding changes are doing. I guess the idea is changing a sequence of lights or flashing your favourite sports team across a screen is more understandable and exciting for learning the impact of code than a hello world screen.
I’m not convinced. If someone isn’t impressed into coding by seeing games, the internet and everything else related then I doubt that piece of crap will inspire them, flashing lights or not.
It apparently needs to be plugged into a ‘real’ computer anyway so it’s redundant.
From the scant information provided in the article it seems to be a poor attempt to make it appear that the British government are doing something to improve their education system when all they are really doing is wasting money by handing out a bit of tat.
Combined with the fact that the average punter never has had and never will have the need or interest to program anything it looks almost totally useless.
Coding to be used in wars nice one lads
Can’t top that RTE, might as well close down now and save us that licence fee.
“Mein Gott! Der Tommy Trojan und der Englander fischingßcam!”
“Take that Fritz. His firewall has come unstuck chaps. Hurrah for our boys!”
Permission to shout “Bravo” at an annoyingly loud volume, sir.
TALLY HO!
Only a Winston could get away with that…lol +1
Fairly pointless. What eleven year old in Britain hasn’t already got at least one device that they can code on now if they felt like it?
And if RTE did do something like this everyone on here would be saying “waste of money” “typical RTE” “They should spend money on decent programming first” blah blah blah. RTE can never be right regardless in the eyes of the “this country is sh!te” brigade that usually comment on here.
There’s enough gadgets in the class rooms, alot of the kids can’t count without a calculator
Oh to have a broadcaster where folk dont pay a licence fee for the angelus
have your say