The past week has been full of headlines regarding Danny Masterson, Mila Kunis, and Ashton Kutcher. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a quick summary: three women finally felt empowered enough in the wake of #MeToo to come out and say that Danny Masterson raped them. The case had been building for years, but earlier this year he was convicted and within the past week he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 30 years. Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher, his former That 70s Show co-stars and friends were asked to write a character witness letter for the judge to consider when determining his sentencing. The Internet got outraged and Kunis and Kutcher eventually did a video (poorly) trying to defend themselves. Everyone is screaming about cancel culture, Scientology, and where lines in the sand should be drawn regarding ending a friendship after a friend does something criminal. All are valid discussions, but it’s well worn territory so I’m not going to touch that with a ten foot pole today. Instead I want to focus on a Little Engine That Could story, which is Topher Grace.

Topher Grace is an actor who also starred on That 70s Show. To be clear, I barely watched the show. I saw episodes here and there but it just wasn’t really my jam. I’m not trying to sound any type of way as much as I’m saying I don’t really have a dog in this fight personally or parasocially. But being someone who would always read celebrity gossip, in part to keep up with what the comedians in the aughts may be poking fun at so I understood the context of the jokes and in part because…well, dopamine hits, guilty pleasures, and so on and so forth because I’m not above those things! I distinctly remember articles about how Topher Grace was the odd one out of the That 70s Show cast as the entire cast would hangout together without him. Rumors swirled that Grace was difficult, snobby, too full of himself, and so forth. When he left the show in its final season, that only fed that rumor mill further.

Grace survived and went on to continue to work in many successful movies, seems to keep his nose out of drama, and lives a pretty quiet life for a successful actor. The rest of his cast…not so much. Let’s do a rundown of their post That 70s Show lives:

Ashton Kutcher- I honestly don’t follow Ashton much post the early days of Punk’d, but he was famously married to Demi Moore for a while and allegedly cheated on her. Apparently he has an organization to help sex trafficking victims, which has turned out to be a weird look for him regarding his support of Masterson while being tried for rape, and I’ve heard some people say his organization may not be as clean as he promotes it to be but I don’t know the facts enough to comment on it either way.

Mila Kunis- Relatively scandal free, besides maybe a few side eyes at various soundbites (that may or may not be out of context- again, this cast of actors aren’t people I’m invested in so forgive me if I’m missing things).

Laura Prepon- The only things I know about her is that she dated Danny Masterson’s brother for a while and was a scientologist but apparently has left the religion in recent years.

Wilmer Valderrama- He’s basically the character Matthew McConaughey played in another 1970s period piece from the 1990s, Dazed and Confused, in that he keeps getting older but his girlfriends stay the same age. Mandy Moore, Lindsay Lohan, and Demi Lovato are all his exes with the age differences getting more vast with each woman (the worst being Lovato was 18 when they started dating and Valderrama was 29).

Danny Masterson- We all know about Danny now. Also worth noting his is a Scientologist and while that’s another story for another day, Scientology played a huge role in many aspects of this case.

There are other cast members from That 70s Show but they were either the parents or reoccurring characters, so I’m sticking with the main group from the cast. From where I’m standing, I see a bunch of Scientologists, creepy/not so nice dudes, an actual rapist, and the people who are friends with and support people like the above. And yet the aughts media portrayed Topher Grace to be the problem child of the cast. Yikes.

I think another part of why I find celebrity news somewhat interesting is because it’s a mirror that reflects our culture’s values, lack thereof, and promotes dialogue about how we understand life. There are parallels that play out with celebrities that happen to us common folks too. I think most of us have felt misunderstood at some times. Or maybe people assume because we’re not partaking in something that it must be for some toxic reason, like being too good for something or that we were left out when in reality we could just be avoiding a bad/dangerous scene that we were in fact invited to. Social media was barely a thing, so Grace had no space to defend his case, but I can’t imagine if he had a TikTok where he could explain himself in 2006 that he would have gone down that route. Like what could he have said without making the situation worse? If he defended himself by saying, “They don’t leave me out but I actively choose not to hang out with them” that would have made him sound like a dick. And if he continued and said something like, “No really it’s not that I’m not likable. I just choose to be friends with people who don’t believe in Xenu or abuse women” he would have been subjected to a lawsuit, firing, or at best an extremely uncomfortable working environment.

The press eventually left this rift alone, in part because their show ended but in part because…well, I’m gonna say it, the media likes catfights with women more than when men don’t get along. Don’t believe me? We’ve been talking about the infamous Kim Cattrall quote about Sarah Jessica Parker,“We aren’t friends. We’re professional actresses.” for over a decade (maybe even two decades). Yes, with the (terrible) reboot that is And Just Like That… and with Cattrall not returning to the show inevitable fuel to the fire has been added. But even without those compounding circumstances, the media always played up the Sex and the City’s feud amongst it’s co-stars way more than it did for Grace’s perceived distance from the That 70s Show cast despite that the shows aired in similar time frames. So I’d be remiss to not point out that embedded cultural sexism may be a factor as to why some people are only now having their memories be jogged now about how Topher Grace seemingly did not fit into the That 70s Show click who otherwise all seemed like good friends.

One of my favorite lyrics of all-time comes from Marvin Gay’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” which is, “believe half of what you see, son and none of what you hear.” I like it so much because I think it’s fundamentally true. Anytime you see something you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg and it’s fundamentally out of context. Witnessing a couple fighting at a restaurant would make it too easy to see the couple as toxic and should probably just break up. Maybe, but they could also just be literally having the worst day of their relationship where all of the dams broke and from there they problem solve and it’s totally fine. But if someone tells you about witnessing a couple fighting, you have even less intel. Moreover you don’t know how reliable the narrator may be; maybe they love drama and embellish it, maybe they have stakes in the fight like secretly being in love with one of the parties, or maybe they’re projecting their own life’s history onto a couple having a fight that has nothing to do with the narrator and shares no similarities. This is the case in real life but I think media coverage of real people in entertainment really amplifies this phenomenon. There’s so much that’s reported on that’s very out of context, and Topher Grace was seemingly a recipient of that.

I’m all for calling people out but I also think mob mentality can be kind of dangerous. Recently Brenden Fraser won as Oscar after being basically blacklisted from Hollywood because he he spoke out against a Hollywood power player who sexually abused him. Not wanting to ruffle feathers, people in the industry just distanced themselves from him. In a 2023 lens that seems fucked up, and it’s because it is. But at the time we didn’t have a cultural blue print as to how to rally around victims of abuse and I think we took men being sexually abused less seriously (and sadly probably still do more than we’d like to admit to). Monica Lewinsky is another great example. When President Clinton had an affair with her, she was a 22 year old intern. Nowadays she’s become something of a hero because people now recognize the power dynamics at play. We also now believe in holding men who cheat accountable versus slut shaming the women involved. But in 1998 adults in both the media (particularly on late night talk shows) and just in life in general made this 22 year the butt of every joke in one of the biggest tar and feather sessions I can remember. In recent times people take her story more seriously and culturally we’ve been trying to make amends and apologize to her, which is good but my goodness, I cannot imagine what she went through until this point.

Recently there’s been two deaths in the news regarding individuals who went through cancel culture before that was even a term, Sinead O’Connor and Paul Reubens. If you don’t know, O’Connor was a successful singer who got canceled for ripping up a photo of the pope on Saturday Night Live. People were outraged. Apparently one of her reasons for doing so was in protest of child abuse within the Catholic Church, an issue we started paying attention to more closely in the early 2000s but sadly for Sinead O’Connor she did this in the 1990s. Nowadays this would clearly still offend some Catholics, but most non-Catholics would have been like, “yeah, it sucks the powers that be in the Catholic religion lets childhood SA happen” and she wouldn’t have been canceled but at best polarized amongst the people. Paul Reubens, aka PeeWee Herman, was at the peak of his career when he was arrested in an adult movie house for…ya know, doing things that adults do when they watch adult movies. Look, I’m not interested in playing the morality police here but isn’t that kind of like getting mad at someone for eating red meat in a steakhouse? This event largely torpedoed his career. Yes, he was still working for many years leading up to his death but professionally he was never at the top of his game like he once was. And being in comedy, I’ve heard many stories since his passing and nobody has had a bad thing to say about the guy, which makes me even sadder. There’s plenty of not-so-nice men in comedy, but we as a society took down this guy? Ugh.

I’m NOT about to say we need to stop cancel culture because I’m not trying to dog whistle something that I don’t intend to hear. I believe in holding people accountable. I believe in calling out bad behaviors. Most people who have been canceled or have had cancelation attempts made on them are people who I think did bad things and it’s no sweat off my back what happens to them. I’m not offended at people being offended. What does make me nervous however, is mob mentality paired with a lack of critical thinking, completed by emotional thinking being in control. We lose nuance, perspective, and the ability to hear and process more data as it rolls in objectively. Topher Grace is lucky because he was only the victim of at best seeming like a stick in the mud comparatively to his co-stars and at worse was maybe a weird or difficult guy nobody liked. But him being seemingly private just kind of did his thing, continued to have a career, and people generally seem to like him, so good for him. No real harm done. Not everyone is so lucky and with social media getting so out of control with people’s hot takes where a common comeback on Reddit is either “go touch some grass” or “you live on the Internet too much”-while I have doubts that cancel culture does in fact cancel people and I have thoughts on that I will explore here eventually- I am afraid we’re still in for a few misunderstandings turned atomic with people who don’t deserve a public stoning before we learn to do better.

What sucks is that I don’t have answers as to how to fix this. Human nature is really complicated and why people react to anything or join in on mob mentality is also very complex. It’s above my pay grade to know how to fix it. My only attempt at fixing the problem is to write something like this, in hopes someone smarter than me reads it, feels seen, feels empowered to talk about these issues with more people, and then from there someone smarter than all of us with more of a platform can set a better tone and example as to how to live in a society with nuance and patience before we make (some) judgment rulings. Again, this ain’t me whistling at dogs. I believe women. I believe victims. I believe people’s stories. But often times it’s only as deep as taking a religious stand before its time, going to a theater before Internet p0rn is a thing, being 22 and in over your head, society and/or Hollywood not having the balls to go against an industry exec (especially in a period where society doesn’t take men’s SA stories seriously), or a likely nice guy not wanting to hang out with people who do jerky things (if not criminal things). There needs to be space for rumors to air out while we get all of the facts instead of jumping to conclusions, at least if nothing that is harming anyone is alleged.

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