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Originally Posted by RainMaker
The woman literally calls it sexual assault.
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I guess I should have specified in an actual court of law rather than the court of public opinion. As someone else mentioned, nobody's trying to say what he did is as egregious as what Weinstein did. The vast majority of the piece is just her explaining what happened and the only mention of sexual assault is:
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Grace says her friends helped her grapple with the aftermath of her night with Ansari. “It took a really long time for me to validate this as sexual assault,” she told us. “I was debating if this was an awkward sexual experience or sexual assault. And that’s why I confronted so many of my friends and listened to what they had to say, because I wanted validation that it was actually bad.”
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which indicates that it was very borderline to her and not something that should result in Ansari being kicked out of Hollywood or whatever. Obviously it is basically he said/she said and would never result in a conviction of anything, but that's kind of the point.
This is a guy whose stand-up schtick is basically "I thought I was being saucy because I messaged 'heyy' instead of 'hey' on a dating app but it turns out there are guys who send girls unsolicited pictures of their genitals!" Within that context, he comes off in the story as someone who is acutely aware of what the standard for "real world sexual assault" is and exploits that by repeatedly walking right up to that line with no concern about how his date actually responds to his repeated overtures. So that does seem newsworthy due to being in stark contrast to his "woke male feminist" persona.
On top of that, even if the consensus is that it was just a "shitty date" and not "real world sexual assault," it's probably a conversation worth having that when I try to think of what I'd consider a shitty date, I think of the conversation being dull or the girl not being as attractive as she seemed in pictures. Getting groped against my will or worse is not even on the radar.