Part of the problem. Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, best known for the McDonald’s documentary Super Size Me, revealed he was once accused of rape in a statement posted to Twitter on Wednesday, December 13.
“As I sit around watching hero after hero, man after man, fall at the realization of their past indiscretions, I don’t sit by and wonder ‘Who will be next?’ I wonder, ‘When will they come for me?’” Spurlock began in a lengthy statement on TwitLonger. “You see, I’ve come to understand after months of these revelations, that I am not some innocent bystander, I am also a part of the problem.”
He continued, “Over my life, there have been many instances that parallel what we see everyday in the news. When I was in college, a girl who I hooked up with on a one night stand accused me of rape. Not outright. There were no charges or investigations, but she wrote about the instance in a short story writing class and called me by name. A female friend who was in the class told be about it afterwards.”
Spurlock, now 47, revealed that initially, he did not believe he had raped the woman who called him out in writing class.
“I was floored. ‘That’s not what happened!’ I told her,” Spurlock wrote. “This wasn’t how I remembered it at all. In my mind, we’d been drinking all night and went back to my room. We began fooling around, she pushed me off, then we laid in the bed and talked and laughed some more, and then began fooling around again. We took off our clothes. She said she didn’t want to have sex, so we laid together, and talked, and kissed, and laughed, and then we started having sex.”
“‘Light bright. That kids toy, that’s all I can see and think about,’ she said … and then she started to cry,” Spurlock continued. “I didn’t know what to do. We stopped having sex and I rolled beside her. I tried to comfort her. To make her feel better. I thought I was doing OK, I believed she was feeling better. She believed she was raped.”
Spurlock also explained that he would call his female assistant “hot pants” or “sex pants,” which at the time he thought was funny, but then “realized I had completely demeaned and belittled her to a place of non-existence.”
“When she decided to quit, she came to me and said if I didn’t pay her a settlement, she would tell everyone,” Spurlock explained about his former assistant. “Being who I was, it was the last thing I wanted, so of course, I paid. I paid for peace of mind. I paid for her silence and cooperation. Most of all, I paid so I could remain who I was.”
After asking questions, including if suffering from sexual abuse as boy or his father leaving his mother had anything to do with his past behavior, Spurlock concluded that he is part of the problem, but will “do better.”
“I will do better. I will be better. I believe we all can,” he wrote. “The only individual I have control over is me. So starting today, I’m going to be more honest with you and myself. I’m going to lay it all out in the open. Maybe that will be a start. Who knows. But I do know I’ve talked enough in my life … I’m finally ready to listen.”
