Yesterday, ESPN’s The Sports Reporters—holy shit! The Sports Reporters is still on?—featured wealthy fabulist Mitch Albom discussing the $950,000 settlement Florida State University paid to Erica Kinsman, the woman who accused Jameis Winston of raping her and later sued the university over its indifference to her case. Guess who had remarkably awful things to say? (It was Mitch Albom.)
Here’s how Albom started things off:
“I’d feel a lot happier about this if the woman took that money and gave it to charity and said, ‘That’s not what this was about.’ I always am suspect when people end up saying, ‘Well, I’m going to take it.’”
This is a legitimately impressive string of compounding inanities. Mitch Albom’s personal happiness, Mitch Albom makes clear, is the fair measure of morality in a given situation; his happiness is decreased when people who aren’t him and about whom he knows nothing don’t give their money away; and, further, when they don’t give their money away, he finds it suspicious on its face. What he’s saying, in so many words, is that Kinsman not giving her settlement to charity makes him think she’s a liar who fabricated a story for profit.
The most remarkable thing is how casually this falls out of Albom’s face; he just flings it out there like it’s the most normal thing in the world to say. That’s because for a certain type of asshole, it is a perfectly normal thing to say. Albom has spent his professional career lecturing and chastising anyone who happens to fall into his droopy and dim line of sight when not fabricating stories for profit, and he’s not about to let a woman who’s lived through a very public and unpleasant rape investigation off the hook. I think we’d all feel a lot happier if Mitch would donate his fortune to charity and just fuck off already, but the least he could do is say what he means.