If you haven’t noticed, The Third Ear occasionally covers imitation and scapegoating, related phenomena.
As far as scapegoating goes, I’ve mostly written about the primitive origins of ‘the artist,’ an edgy figure simultaneously reviled and revered—as sketched by culture critic Scott Timberg in “Origins of the Creative Class.” We seem to expect our celebrities, especially misfits and outré musicians, to be sacrificed on the altar of public opinion. It’s small coincidence when their deranged assassins turn out to be founders of their fan clubs, or stars succumb to the ‘tragic artist’ playbook.
This dynamic is rehashed in the new Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black—the horrors of a talented victim destroyed by paparazzi, and her own self-destructive impulses. A visceral reminder of the cruelty of this early-aughts craze in which young starlets were subjected to the relentless gaze of taunting cameramen, it reminded me that this regrettable practice has mutated, largely supplanted by social media.
We are all potential paparazzi, or as Andy Warhol prophesied (a victim of celebrity fanaticism himself), 15-minute celebrities; the professional shutter-flies have all but faded from memory.
On a related note, I’ve been poring through notes on The Scarlet Letter (1841) and The Crucible (1953), Charles MacKay’s accounts of mass hysteria in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), and the history of sixteenth and seventeenth-century witch hunts in Europe and America. All for renewed perspective on scapegoating, or as it’s come to be known in its most recent iteration, “canceling.”
The term supposedly derives from a 1981 Nile Rodgers song, “Your Love is Cancelled.”
“Cancel,” like “woke,” entered African American Vernacular English (AAVE) years ago, spread on Twitter more recently, and entered the popular lexicon around 2015. In the wake of #MeToo in 2017, and the height of #BLM in 2020, media takes on “cancel culture” became ubiquitous.
Which is to say, writing about so-called cancel culture has become quite tiresome. But the practice of scapegoating—witch hunts, human sacrifice, public shaming, boycotting, ostracizing, calling-out, canceling, whatever you wish to call this primitive human need to penalize and victimize in times of social anxiety—is as old as culture itself. Some theorists even consider it the founding act of society, a sort of superstitious justice system.
Small wonder that we resort to justice of the mob, when pundits from all sides bemoan the corruption of institutional justice.
It remains equal parts ugly and bewildering, and for a while there, it seemed to be everywhere. I intend to write about this from a broader perspective, picking up where I left off with “Origins of the Creative Class” and looking at some of the historical similarities between sixteenth-century “witch hunts” and our own (climate change, plagues, protest, new technologies for publishing), but what follows is a case study in cancelation. Or in the most flattering terms, boycotting (a Scottish word, originally, for public shaming tied to economic protest).
It began as a profile of a local journalist driven out of Portland, Oregon, but the backstory encompasses the #MeToo movement; the greatest literary hoax since the days of Edgar Allan Poe; celebrity victimhood, and a gaggle of artists and musicians who flocked around it, including Anthony Bourdain and his erstwhile girlfriend, Asia Argento.
To make sense of it we have to go back to 2003, to the age of the paparazzo.
It’s news to me, perhaps it will be to you.
In 2003, journalist Nancy Rommelmann was inside the penthouse of the Chateau Marmont hotel, in West Hollywood. Marilyn Manson was lounging on the bed, his arms entangled with an eight-year-old child actor named Jimmy Bennett, his costar. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth was milling about, as was her erstwhile husband and bandmate, Thurston Moore. Jerry Harrison, of the Talking Heads, had just finished recording a song with the man, or woman, of the hour—the author of a much-celebrated collection of semi-autobiographical short stories about an underage transgender sex worker, JT LeRoy.
LeRoy’s book, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (2001), had just been turned into a film of the same name, to be released in 2004. Starring, among others, an Italian actress, the film’s co-writer and director, Asia Argento. The entourage above was gathered to celebrate the wrap party, which Rommelmann was covering for the L.A. Times.
Deceitful only begins to describe what Rommelmann turned out to be covering, the literary con of the new millennium.
JT (Jeremiah “Terminator”) LeRoy, the author, was supposed to be an HIV-positive teen prostitute who had sublimated his life story—of abuse, coerced sex work, gender-bending, drug addiction, and transcendence—into art. In the film his estranged mother Sarah (played by Asia Argento), a meth-addicted truck-stop hooker, rouges and dresses the young version of LeRoy in her image—to keep her seven-year-old son from interfering with her transactions, telling customers the boy is a prostitute himself. This leads to a world of sordid outcomes, including Jeremiah being sexually abused by a man his mother is sleeping with. The child actor on the penthouse bed entwined with Marilyn Manson (who also has a role in the film), eight-year-old Jimmy Bennett, played the victimized youngster in the film—Jeremiah, who shares a first name with the author of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, JT LeRoy.
The author of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, Jeremiah “Terminator” LeRoy, never existed.
He, or she, was the literary creation of one Laura Albert, a woman in her late thirties at the time who, “confected the damaged, outré, beautiful victim that proved irresistible to the cognoscenti,” as Nancy Rommelmann told the story fifteen years later, in 2018 (here).
The cognoscenti included fans like Lou Reed and Winona Ryder, who staged readings for “LeRoy,” Debbie Harry of Blondie, Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, songwriter Tom Waits, filmmaker Gus Van Sant, the aforementioned musical celebrities at the 2003 Chateau Marmont party, and many more drawn to the tragic tale of victimhood and transcendence represented by a fictitious young author named JT LeRoy.
To pull off these in-person appearances by the alleged author of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, Laura Albert persuaded her then sister-in-law, Savannah Knoop, to wear LeRoy’s signature peroxide-blond wig and dark sunglasses, so she could parade her young protagonist/author around dressed like Andy Warhol.
As the BBC explains:
LeRoy was regularly photographed out with Hollywood’s great and good, travelled the world on book tours, and graced the Cannes red carpet for a film adaptation of his novel The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things in 2004.
In other words, Laura Albert’s sister-in-law Savanah Knoop, a young woman presenting herself as a man, masqueraded as JT LeRoy, a former male prostitute presenting himself as a woman, a character made out of whole cloth. Albert, meanwhile, introduced herself to LeRoy’s fans as “Speedie,” her prodigy’s red-headed assistant.
In 2005, The Heart is Deceitful hoax was revealed. The cognoscenti felt duped, and angry—mostly at the book’s real author, Laura Albert, who was decried by LeRoy’s former admirers, and went into hiding until 2016.
Savannah Knoop, on the other hand, parlayed the scandal into a successful performance art career, “with pieces at the Whitney and MoMa galleries in New York, among others,” according to the BBC. Her book about the experience (which, presumably, she actually wrote), Girl Meets Boy: How I Became JT LeRoy, was turned into a 2019 film starring Laura Dern as Albert and Kristen Stewart as Knoop.
“People were consuming his victimhood, that was part of the narrative.”
In 2019, Kaleem Aftab, a features correspondent for the BBC, “one of the very people they duped up close,” who in 2005 “conducted one of the last ever interviews with LeRoy / Knoop before the hoax was unmasked by New York Magazine,” caught up with Savannah Knoop.
Knoop told the BBC, about pretending to be LeRoy: “At the time I don’t know if I understood it as being performance art,” adding, “performance is very adrenalising and it becomes a thing where you go out and look for that feeling. It does happen when you take on a role, especially one for a long time, like you hear about actors embodying a role, you really kind of fall into it, you blend in with it.”
As such, “one of the interesting points of similarity between Knoop as LeRoy and Knoop now,” Aftab says, “is that Knoop has gravitated towards LeRoy’s gender fluidity – stopping using the pronoun ‘she’ and now going by the gender neutral ‘they’.”
“They is a made-up word,” Knoop told Aftab, “and I like how confusing and uncomfortable it is.”
Asked whether The Heart is Deceitful hoax was a “scam,” Knoop replied it was about “dismantling the way things work”:
“I think it’s very complicated about the ethics of it. […] It was about engaging with the ethics of it, but kind of being confused!”
Dismantling the ethics of fraud and fame, being celebrated for being someone you’re not at a young age, would seem to leave one a bit confused.
Passing the blame to media, and the readers so eager to be captivated by a fake persona, Knoop nonetheless notes, correctly I think: “People were consuming his victimhood, that was part of the narrative.”
Aftab, the BBC correspondent, calls this “the allure of victimhood” and “authenticity”:
“Indeed, part of the reason Albert got Knoop to dress up as LeRoy in public, rather than just keep her persona invisible, was that she realised that the appeal of JT Leroy rested upon the authenticity of her character’s ‘outsider’ identity. So when it was revealed that LeRoy was a fabrication, people were angrier than was the case when, say, the crime writer Robert Galbraith was revealed as none other than JK Rowling. Readers were not invested in Galbraith and his presumed boring middle-aged male persona in the same way they were with LeRoy’s 'transgender sex worker-turned-novelist' one.”
Aftab touches on an important point, that literary hoaxes and misleading authorial pseudonyms are nothing new. Whether it’s JK Rowling, or any number of female authors assuming male pen names to overcome 19th-century sexism (George Eliot and the Bronte sisters come to mind), from the Great Balloon and Moon Hoaxes of Edgar Allan Poe, the “whole issue of what is ‘authentic’ art – and whether authenticity matters – has been fraught since time immemorial. In the 18th Century, for example, Samuel Johnson slammed the Scottish writer-cum-hoaxer James MacPherson for penning The Works of Ossian, which he claimed to be the work of a long-lost 3rd Century-bard, and published to great success,” Aftab notes.
What is different in this case is that, post-outing, any mention of the real author of the hoax, formerly praised for her lyrical storytelling, was studiously avoided, while the “performance artist” who played a made-up character continues to capitalize on the success of the fraud—which puzzles the performance artist themself: “What was mystifying to me was that suddenly these JT LeRoy books didn’t exist. That seems so strange!”, Knoop told Aftab.
The fact that the “novelist Albert is now a forgotten ‘fake’ says something, perhaps, about what we value in today’s culture,” Aftab thinks. As Knoop opines, and again I have to agree:
““We’re in a point now where you have to stay in your lane. You can only speak from exactly your own experience. And if you diverge from it, it’s clapped out. Yeah, you’re punished.”
Something outside the lane of “speak[ing] from exactly your own experience” occurred in my hometown of the last fifteen years, Portland, Oregon, shortly before Aftab’s BBC piece was published.
In May of 2017, conservative media had a field day covering the story of a burrito cart opened by two white women accused of trying to reverse-engineer their favorite tortilla recipes while on vacation in Puerto Nuevo, Mexico; Kooks Burritos closed within days of their opening profile in Willamette Week, after locals boycotted the business for cultural appropriation. Whether or not the tortilla recipe was indeed “stolen,” as one critic scolded, matters, a little, (it wasn’t), but the real sin here was cultural appropriation. As evidenced by the fact that a list of all Portland eateries whose cuisine did not match the ethnicity of their ownership (“white-owned appropriative restaurants in Portland”) was soon circulated in the city’s alternative weekly, which called for the shunning of these establishments as well—including some of the city’s most popular restaurants, Pok Pok (“Thai”) and Voodoo Doughnuts (“religious appropriation”—of voodoo).
The “shit list,” as the original publisher called it, along with the Portland Mercury article that shared it, have since been memory-holed, because: “It was not factually supported, and we regret the original publication of this story. —eds.”
Employing a similar enumerative tactic, sixth months later, following Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker exposé of Harvey Weinstein and the burgeoning #MeToo movement, the so-called “shitty media men list” was published nationally, a Google spreadsheet crowdsourced by women in media who were invited to share their experiences of sexual harassment, and name their perpetrators online.
In 2018, numerous other Portland businesses were ‘called-out’ (also in the food industry, whose online review sections are especially vulnerable to public decrial).
One of them was Kachka, a favorite of locals and food critics, which serves “former Soviet Bloc” cuisine, as one server told me. The name of the restaurant derives from a Ukrainian word that allowed the owner’s grandmother to escape persecution by the Nazis, in Minsk: she lied and told the Starosta she was crossing the border into Ukraine to visit relatives, when a guard asked her to prove her Ukrainian identity by stating the Ukrainian word for “duck,” kachka. The owner’s grandmother was Belarusian, not Ukrainian, but guessed the word correctly.
She was the only Jew in her ghetto spared—by the word, “Kachka.”
The owners of Kachka—the granddaughter of a holocaust escapee and her Mexican-American husband—were accused of being Nazi sympathizers. I’ll spare you all the details.
In the words of Kachka’s accusers: “I’m pretty far to the left and I knew I was not going to be able to have a rational discussion.” They heard “snippets” of another table’s conversation “definitely discussing Jewish people and Israel,” so photos of the offending party were posted on Facebook, with encouragement to “Remember his face […] Yell as loud as you can.” Kachka was accused of not doing anything to punish the other customer, whose German air force t-shirt was interpreted as Nazi symbolism. The post was deleted after the complainant received online threats herself.
The restaurant was inundated with one-star reviews. The owners were dismayed, but Kachka survived. Which is more than the owner of Ristretto Roasters, or his business, can say.
In 2019, Din Johnson, the founder of a soon-to-be-shuttered Portland coffee chain, was dying of cancer. His wife happened to be Nancy Rommelmann, the journalist who covered the wrap party for The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things in 2003.
In 2018, Rommelmann published a story about the film’s director. It captures the atmosphere of that night at the Chateau Marmont much better than I can; it also details the ensuing history of the director, star, and screenwriter for The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, Asia Argento.
Argento, along with actress Rose McGowan, was the public face of the #MeToo movement’s resurgence in 2017—#MeToo was originally started in 2006, “by 44-year-old Tarana Burke to inspire healing for sexual assault survivors in her black community in the Bronx,” as Leah McSweeney, the co-host of Nancy Rommelmann’s YouTube series, “#MeNeither,” wrote in 2018. Argento and McGowan turned #MeToo into an international campaign centered around mostly young, mostly white women harassed by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, via interviews with Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker.
McSweeney, a writer for Penthouse magazine at the time, and Rommelmann, a freelancer for most of the periodicals in Portland, opined that Argento and McGowan were “narcissists” manipulating the #MeToo movement for their own gain. They also questioned whether there was a qualitative difference between a #MeToo target like R&B singer R. Kelly, later convicted of sex trafficking and child pornography, and someone like comedian Aziz Ansari, who was publicly accused of having a consensually-awkward date.
Hot take, for Portland, Oregon in 2018.
However Rommelmann had been following the Asia Argento saga since The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things in 2003, one of the few journalists to question whether JT LeRoy was real. When asked about it during the wrap party for the film, Rommelmann says, Argento “sneer[ed]”—the director and screenwriter who collaborated with Laura Albert and Savannah Knoop professed to be less aware of the hoax than an outside journalist. (In 2007, two years after the hoax was revealed, Laura Albert told Rommelmann “the whole JT thing” was just a lark, and implied that Argento was in on the joke.) In 2016, Argento breathlessly told The Guardian, "I'm a fool! How could I not see it? It made me feel worthless to be honest….I was fucking manipulated."
“Manipulated” is how some observers of the final season of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown claim Argento made others feel, not least of them Argento’s boyfriend at the time—the host, celebrity chef and food writer, who took his own life in June 2018. After meeting Argento on set in Rome, Bourdain invited her to direct an episode set in Hong Kong, where he came to, as he put it, “fall in love in Asia […] with Asia.” Cast members became increasingly concerned as the host began to exhibit erratic behavior around anything having to do with the woman he usually referred to as the “crazy Italian,” Argento.
While they were dating, according to Argento, Bourdain contributed a $380,000 payment to the former child star of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, Jimmy Bennett. A 2018 New York Times article published two months after Bourdain’s suicide revealed that Bennett had initially demanded much more—$3.5 million "in damages for the intentional infliction of emotional distress, lost wages, assault and battery," from his alleged assailant, Argento.
The Times article also explained that Argento had plied Bennett with alcohol before having sex with him in 2013, when he was 17, and she was 37.
By 2017, Bennett’s career was faltering. Following Argento’s rise to prominence as the public face of the #MeToo movement (after she told Ronan Farrow she was raped by Harvey Weinstein, but admitted to having consensual sex with the producer in the months that followed), Bennett saw an opportunity, threatening to sue Argento for sexual assault.
Discussing the $380,000 payment Bourdain had arranged, Argento explained in a statement to the Times after his death: "Anthony personally undertook to help Bennett economically, upon the condition that we would no longer suffer any further intrusions in our life"—all but acknowledging the money was intended to quash a scandal. (Argento denied having sex with a minor, until texts and photos revealed otherwise.)
In June 2018, after separating from his wife, falling “in love with Asia,” paying for Bennett’s silence on Argento’s behalf, becoming her vocal male #MeToo ally, and telling The Hollywood Reporter, “As you might have guessed, I already have an Asia Argento tattoo,” an already depressive and addiction-prone Bourdain saw photos of Argento canoodling with a 28-year-old French reporter on the cover of Italian gossip magazine Chi.
As Leah McSweeney, Nancy Rommelmann’s onetime co-host of “#MeNeither” reported:
Argento fought to have the photographs pulled. Bourdain was mysteriously no longer following his girlfriend on Instagram. Argento then posted an Instagram story of herself in a Sid Vicious shirt that said Fuck Everyone, and captioned the image: “You know who you are.” Three hours later he killed himself. And she deleted the image off of her instagram story.
In the days that followed Argento asked fellow #MeToo spokesperson Rose McGowan to publish heartfelt condolences on her behalf, implying she was too distraught by Bourdain’s suicide to make a public statement… then “posed wearing a Suicidal Tendencies parody shirt while touting the hashtag #stayingalive” on her own Instagram feed.
Argento and McGowan have since had a very public falling out, after a brief friendship based on shared victimhood—“the shared pain of being assaulted by Harvey Weinstein,” in McGowan’s words—with McGowan alleging that Argento had been receiving nude texts from Bennett since the boy was twelve. (McGowan, who has charted her own tumultuous course through #MeToo following the death of Anthony Bourdain, now lives in Mexico, with no plans to return to the United States.)
Following Bourdain’s death, and the revelation that Argento slept with the child star who played her seven-year-old son in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, Laura Albert struck out at her former director as well: “You have no business trying to co-opt a movement that you participated in with glee.”
To make sense of all this, it may help to return to the unlikely voice of insight in this sordid affair, the imposter who played JT LeRoy on Laura Albert’s behalf, Savannah Knoop:
“…performance is very adrenalizing and it becomes a thing where you go out and look for that feeling […] you hear about actors embodying a role, you really kind of fall into it”
Argento seems to have gone farther than anyone in embodying a role in the JT LeRoy affair, falling into the part of Sarah in the film. According to Albert (who has her own ethical performance issues, like secretly recording phone conversations with colleagues), Argento pursued not one JT LeRoy avatar but two. The novelist claims that during production, Argento was courting the person she thought was the real JT LeRoy at the time, Savannah Knoop, for financial gain: “She wooed JT to get the rights [to the film], which is what producers or directors often do.”
Like the players who embodied JT LeRoy—Jimmy Bennett and Savannah Knoop—Argento played the role of victim, and victimizer, in large part for money and attention. Bourdain, sadly it must be said, probably played the oldest victim of all: the self-destructive artist courting his own public demise.
For observers of Asia Argento or Jimmy Bennet during #MeToo, for fans of gonzo foodie Anthony Bourdain, or the celebrities who embraced the dubious career of JT LeRoy, as the woman who once pretended to be him said:
“People were consuming [their] victimhood, that was part of the narrative.”
In the coda to this melodrama, the one person who probably didn’t wish to play a victim was Nancy Rommelmann.
Her wheelhouse in 2019, along with co-host Laura McSweeney, was a little-heard-of YouTub series, “an almost-weekly conversation about the cultural issues of the day, and an attempt to create a space where people can find ways to think out loud through uncomfortable topics”—including, “people who play the victim for personal gain, and related issues that drive us insane,” as she told The Stranger (Seattle’s version of the activist alt-weekly that promulgated the “white-owned appropriative restaurants” list, The Portland Mercury).
As reporter Katie Herzog, who experienced her own cancelation ordeal, explained at the time, after interviewing Rommelmann for an article, “Portland Coffee Company in Hot Water”:
The two women connected over their skepticism of Argento. The series, she says, is really meant to be an exploration of taboo ideas as well as an exercise in free speech. It’s two women speaking their minds about, Rommelmann says, “difficult subjects that it's easy to get shot down over.”
The co-hosts also discussed their own experiences of sexual assault and harassment on the show.
However you feel about difficult subjects, Nancy Rommelmann, or Leah McSweeney (I find the latter’s reporting, at least the piece I reviewed for this article, a little too reminiscent of her subject’s social media outbursts), it’s difficult to argue that what happened next to Nancy Rommelmann and husband Din Johnson wasn’t a playbook case of getting shot down, or scapegoated—for taboo ideas, perhaps, but also for fairly standard business practices.
Camila Coddou, an operations manager at Ristretto Roasters, the local coffee chain owned by Rommelmann’s husband, resigned after her position became untenable in 2018. Coddou had hired someone for a key management position without consulting her boss, recommended “operational changes beyond her purview,” and “sought to push the company in directions” Rommelman’s husband “saw as neither feasible nor useful”—including hosting a “‘Reparations Happy Hour,’ which would involve stationing white people at the front door to buy patrons of color a coffee,” according to Rommelmann.
In short, the working relationship between Din and Camila had become dysfunctional and both parties knew it. Days before Camila handed in her resignation, Din told me he was going to let her go before the end of the week. Her resignation relieved him of the trouble. Camila was ready to move on, and Din was ready to ask her to do so. Such things happen in small businesses all the time.
In a blog post, Coddou complained Johnson had accepted her resignation with “undo haste.” According to Rommelmann, she pointed to a male colleague who had resigned several years earlier and been allowed to serve out his notice, confessing that, while she couldn’t explain the difference in treatment, it was clearly “based in a deep and abiding misogyny.”
Five months later, another Ristretto employee alerted Coddou to Rommelmann’s YouTube series, #MeNeither. Coddou issued an open letter to several Portland media outlets, accusing the journalist, and by association her husband, of having “in-depth discussions denying the experiences of sexual assault survivors and questioning their credibility,” and “qualify[ing] gradations of sexual violence in order to label some as more valid than others”—particularly those of Asia Argento and Rose McGowan.
“The views shared are misguided, dangerous, and hurtful, and do not represent the values of the Ristretto employees signing off on this letter.
Invalidating assault survivors throws into question the safety of Ristretto Roasters as a workplace and has the potential to create a demoralizing and hostile environment for employees and customers alike. This cannot be tolerated.”
“The reason this is so upsetting,” Coddou told Herzog at The Stranger, “is because what it does is support rape culture, and considering the current political climate, we just can't do that anymore.”
For her part, Rommelmann told The Stranger: “I am a journalist. I deal in facts, not feelings. Saying we must believe all women is about as accurate as saying every sandwich is delicious. Most are! Some are not.”
As Herzog (who had been friends with Coddou for almost fifteen years at the time) still managed to objectively report:
From the videos, it’s clear that the co-hosts do not categorically deny all claims of sexual assault. “Sexual assault and violence against both men and women is real and it's very, very bad,” McSweeney says in one episode, “and that is why lying about it happening is very, very bad.”
When asked if she supports the #MeToo movement, McSweeney told me, “I support Tarana Burke’s vision of #MeToo and I support survivors of sexual abuse. It has become muddied when people like Asia and Rose appoint themselves as the faces of #MeToo and when we put Aziz Ansari and Louis CK in the sexual assaulter column.”
Any such nuance was lost on Coddou, who told Herzog, “Supporting Ristretto is supporting Nancy Rommelmann, and people should know that they’re potentially supporting people who have viewpoints that are harmful and, quite frankly, dangerous.”
In the fallout, Coddou arguably succeeded at what she accused her former employer of doing, creating “a demoralizing and hostile environment for employees and customers alike.”
After The Oregonian, Portland’s major newspaper, and Willamette Week picked up the story, Ristretto, which Rommelmann’s husband had built from the ground up over the course of fifteen years, became a target.
A college-age girl walked into one of the cafes screaming, variously, that the baristas were in danger, and that working for Ristretto somehow posed a threat to the community. Employees who had previously been secure in their jobs became jittery and quit. One of Din’s managers suggested that he sell the company and that I offer a public apology before it was too late.
This was within 48 hours of the first news reports appearing.
Din Johnson was told to leave his wife, or lose his business.
Grocers and wholesalers were threatened with similar guilt by association—by Coddou, who contacted a list of Ristretto’s outlets and suppliers—if they refused to cut ties with the problematic beanery. Local grocers—community anchors like New Seasons and Market of Choice—banished the offensive beans from their shelves. Johnson laid low, laid off employees, cut ties, and cut costs, but was soon going underwater.
In 2019, as Ristretto was going under, Rommelmann wrote a piece for Tablet, about her decision to leave Portland:
This invitation to shut up for the greater good might seem quaint, compared with the liberties being sacrificed elsewhere daily, the publishers who pulp books based on fictional characters not displaying subjective standards of cultural verisimilitude, The New York Times ceasing to run political cartoons lest someone take offense, the designer Carolina Herrera being called out for designing a gown with a floral pattern inspired by indigenous weavings. I get we live in an overheated environment where words and food and flowers can get you burned, and have myself been burned in Portland. Still, a city can develop a cast, a tenor […] you might have reservations about where the place is heading, might sense people taking undue pleasure in stoking their suspicions […] Did I mention I am moving back to New York?
Facing the end of his life, and a good deal of his life’s work, Din Johnson managed to make peace with the city where he grew up, suggesting that accusers like his, while vociferous and destructive, are an anxious minority clamoring for attention. His wife, after a fashion, made a peace of her own.
All cities have their terribleness, all their goodness, and there are things about Portland I will miss. I will miss the Waypost, a bar with amber lighting that makes everyone look 27 and a tiny stage where there’s usually something fine and unexpected, five guys on cellos, a girl telling bedtime stories. I will miss Oaks Park Skating Rink, where the massive 1920s Wurlitzer pipe organ drops from the ceiling and an organist plays disco for skaters mostly born after 2002 […] I will miss the clouds, which Portland does better than anyplace I’ve been and which many of you have seen an iteration of on the opening of The Simpsons, whose creator Matt Groening grew up here […] And I will miss the squad that took us through some recent hardships, including my daughter’s father living with us as he dies of lung cancer […] we leaned hard this year into the Portland Trail Blazers […] we thank these guys so much, they made the season bright […]
“It’s still beautiful here,” my husband said last night, as we sat on the porch, looking at a July moon. “It’s the people.”
Soon, other people will live in this house. I wish them well. I wish Portland well, and if I were to say anything to those who come here to live their ideals, it is to not be afraid […] Anyone who tells you to hate swaths of people has their own agenda. Find out for yourself. Make your own courage. Make Portland beautiful.
Nancy Rommelmann now lives in New York, where she writes for a variety of publications, occasionally about Portland. Her daughter works in set design, most recently for the FX series Reservation Dogs. Din Johnson passed away during the pandemic.
Camila Coddou is a “freelance self-help influencer,” in the words of a former friend, on Instagram.