51rape allegation out of the equation—what’s a man like Parker
doing in bed with a woman like Russell in the first place? she
asked. A 41-year-old queer woman, Bertram Roberts is also some-
thing of a rock star in the movement; she knows what it’s like
when these “18-, 19-, 20-, 21-year-olds” run up and ask to take
a selfie. “They’ll be all doe-eyed,” she said. “Can I just sit and talk
to you? Can I come hang out in your room?” Her answer, invariably,
is “Hell no.” Refusing to bask in that kind of abject admiration,
she says, “is an ethical choice.”
Parker considers this a false equivalency. When he and Rus-
sell met, she wasn’t 19; she was 32. “I’m still questioning what
authority I had over Candice, even if she says ‘I looked up to
you as a hero,’ ” Parker told me, shaking his head stubbornly.
Such reasoning, he contended, strips women of sexual agency.
Any woman who admires his work—or for that matter, any
woman who admires a man who is richer, more successful, better-
looking— “is unable to give consent?” If it’s a question of age,
“how old would Candice have to be to assert herself toward
me, and for me to be able to say yes without being regarded as
[having] preyed upon her?”
Two weeks after I got home from Alabama, I learned that
friends of Russell’s had become worried about her mental health.
Increasingly anxious to provide proof for this story, and claiming
that it was a hit piece on her, she had begun to lean on people to
back up her narrative, including one woman who told me Russell
had asked her to say that she’d overheard conversations she had not.
(After two days of interviews in Alabama, Russell did not answer
any further questions from me or the magazine.)
What happened in the hotel room with Parker, we’ll never truly
know. But in the course of reporting this story, I couldn’t help but
think that Russell may have confabulated or exaggerated her version
of the ensuing drama. The generous view is that, at an exceedingly
vulnerable time, Russell heard what she needed to hear, mistaking,
for instance, a comment about “shady” behavior as a sign of cor-
roboration. The less generous view is that, out of either a growing
sense of desperation or malevolence, she made up parts of the story.
When pieces of a story are not true, what does that mean for
the whole? I’ve wondered what would have happened if, from
the beginning, Russell had simply stuck to her own account of
her experience with Parker and left out the rumors about other
women. Whatever you believe about the truth of it, it’s at least, in
the vernacular of #MeToo, “her story to tell.” Of course, Russell
may have written about many women being harmed by Parker
because she thought there were many. But also, maybe, she did
not think it was enough to talk about a single, relatively powerless
woman: Candice Russell.
Coming forward has clearly been painful and destabilizing for
Russell, as it has been for many women who have alleged sexual
harassment or assault. Although the online chorus was mostly
on her side, she took the doubt expressed by revered leaders such
as Ross as a hostile attack. But it was when she described other
blowback to her Medium piece that her inability to support her
claims became most conspicuous. Russell told me that her website
was flooded with “hundreds and hundreds” of emails declaring
that the blood of the women of Alabama and Mississippi would
be on her hands. But when I asked to see some of them, she said
they’d been lost after her website was hacked. Russell said Ross
called her a “whore” and “a stripper with a $75,000-a-year salary”
on social media, but she couldn’t show me the posts because they’d
been eliminated—perhaps by an internet “scrub” company, she
added darkly. (Ross denies harassing Russell online, dismissing
her claims as “delusional and self-serving.”)
Russell did show me screenshots of three threatening text
messages—“Nobody will ever believe the daughter of a $2 crack
whore,” one reads—but they looked somehow off to me, so I
showed them to a digital-forensics expert. He said that the font
didn’t look like a standard Apple one, and the file had been saved in
an unusual format, using the now-defunct software Picasa—which
raises questions: If Russell had captured these on her phone, why
would they have gone through extra editing and storage software?
It’s extremely difficult to tell when a text has been doctored, and I
have no way of knowing whether these were, but the expert told
me that he’d be “concerned about the authenticity of the images.”One friend of Russell’s, Robin Marty, the author of
Handbook for a Post-Roe America, believes it was Parker’s own
Medium essay that led him to be so completely ostracized from
the movement. Had Parker recognized the power disparity
between himself and Russell; had he said something like “I did
not realize at the time how those actions were perceived by you—
I am going to look at how I have done things and see if there are
things that I can change within my own life,” the outcome might
have been different. Instead, he indulged in textbook “gaslight-
ing,” she says, treating a woman as if it was all in her head.
When I shared Marty’s language with Parker, however, he was
unmoved. Russell was blatantly fabricating, he said. So, on prin-
ciple, he could not accept responsibility for harm—not even if
doing so would somehow restore him to his former prominence.
“Not even to make this go away,” he told me firmly.
Even if Parker had managed to sound more humble—or
more evolved, as Marty might put it—he probably wouldn’t haveComing forward has clearly
been painful and destabilizing
for Russell, as it has been for
many women who have alleged
sexual harassment or assault.