Last week, former Community writer Megan Ganz called out the show’s creator, Dan Harmon, on Twitter for behaving inappropriately toward her while he was her boss. Ganz, now a Modern Family writer, didn’t specify precisely what Harmon did to her, but throughout the pair’s lengthy exchange she said she wanted “relief” from her memories of what happened. “I want to watch the first episode of television I wrote again without remembering what came after.” A week later, she returned to social media and told her followers to listen to the latest episode of Harmon’s Harmontown podcast.
“Here’s a weird one for you: Last week, I called out my former boss @danharmon for sexual harassment, and today I’m going to ask you to listen to his podcast,” said Ganz. “I’m not being flippant. I didn’t bring up this mess just to sweep it back under the rug. But I find myself in the odd position of having requested an apology publicly, and then having received one — a good one — also publicly.”
https://twitter.com/meganganz/status/951373401339265024
https://twitter.com/meganganz/status/951373404485033985
During a seven-minute chunk of “Don’t Let Him Wipe or Flush” (beginning at 18:38), Harmon acknowledged Ganz’s accusations and offered a detailed account of what he did, why he did it, and why it was wrong. “I really want to be really careful about that language because a huge part of the problem is a culture of feeling things that you think are unique and significant because they are happening to you,” he said. “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 showrunner and I knew enough to know that these feelings were bad news.”
“I knew that they ran the risk of undercutting people’s faith in my judgment, her faith in her talent, the other writers’ respect for me, the entire production, the audience,” Harmon continued. “I knew I wasn’t doing anybody any favors by feeling these things and so I did the cowardly, easiest, laziest thing you can do with feelings like that and didn’t deal with them. And in not dealing with them, I made everybody else deal with them, especially her.”
He then explained how he ultimately left his girlfriend at the time so that he wouldn’t feel as guilty about pursuing Ganz — despite her constant rejections of his advances. “I was humiliated. So I continued to do the cowardly thing. I continued to do the selfish thing. Now I wanted to teach her a lesson. I wanted to show her that if she didn’t like being liked in that way then, oh boy, she should get over herself. After all, if you’re just going to be a writer then this is how ‘just writers’ get treated,” Harmon continued. “And that was probably the darkest of it all.”
“So that’s it,” he concluded . “Please don’t hurt her. Please don’t make this worse on anybody but me.” As for Ganz, in a final tweet about the Harmontown podcast episode, she accepted his public apology, “This was never about vengeance; it’s about vindication. That’s why it didn’t feel right to just accept his apology in private (although I did that, too). Because if any part of this process should be done in the light, it’s the forgiveness part. And so, @danharmon, I forgive you.”
(Via Spin)