Today I was reading this advertisement which seemed like it was for an acting school of sorts, which isn’t anything out of the ordinary. People trying to advertise their business, but what was interesting is this person that was running the school apparently in the past had some allegations where they were sexually harassing students. Now he actually was running a school before, but I guess because of these allegations, he sold his share in the school and moved on.
I guess years later, he opened up another school by the sounds of it, and so as expected, they’re looking for students and advertising is one way to do it. Now the interesting thing is, it’s been a couple of years to my understanding since this accusation, and this guy was a fairly known actor during the time, but just randomly it seems like everyone’s commenting about this guy’s past. What actually got me thinking was how I don’t know the exact details about the case in particular, and to my knowledge nothing ever came out of it in terms of an actual prosecution, but it makes you wonder, can you ever recover from something like this? Because for a lot of people, they would think time will basically heal wounds or potentially someone’s past. For example, if somebody went to jail for some kind of crime ten years ago as an example, you would think that most people would have forgotten about it, as long as you do something productive in your life in a positive way, people will forgive you.
But in this case, I guess, no one has actually forgiven the person, and it makes you wonder how you would actually go about showing if you were potentially, let’s just say, innocent or a changed person per se. I don’t really know what the answer is in this case. This is usually why people hire PR firms, for example, to manage this type of issue. I would think the only thing you could really do is get out in the community and try to make a positive impact in some way, whether it’s trying to help people in general, trying to start some type of charity.
I really wouldn’t know what else one could do in terms of trying to improve public perception in this regard because in many cases too, especially in this case since it wasn’t proven to my understanding, it seems like you’re basically stuck in a corner as people either expect you to admit that you did something or you would have to essentially try to target a brand new audience that has never heard of you before. Which one would you do in this case?