it's okay to stand by your guilty friend

as long as you acknowledge the guilt part

Celebrity criminal cases generate a lot of feeling—to put it mildly. They come to represent things beyond the actual cases themselves. I am only faintly aware of who Danny Masterson is—he was on a TV show…?—but I can see in the way people talk about his recent conviction for rape that he represents not only “powerful men who get away with everything” but also “the entire establishment of Scientology.”

And that is, frankly, fair—because, if you read the details, he does indeed seem to be… a powerful guy who thought he could get away with anything and wasn’t afraid to use his church to intimidate and silence women. So, you know. Good riddance.

But there’s a side discourse going on that’s what I actually want to talk about. This is about the letters various celebrity friends of Masterson’s wrote to the judge to testify to his character. (You can read them here.) There is a lot of feeling that these letters, too, represent powerful people trying to get away with everything, such that some o…