Remember Connie Chung?

Poor Connie Chung. Once the darling of the media, she has faded into oblivion. Until last week when she resurfaced, albeit briefly, in a Washington Post op-ed piece about being raped fifty years ago. There's nothing like a #MeToo confession to hurtle a has-been back into the news, which is where every celebrity yearns to be all of the time.

Many years ago I worked with a woman named Beth. She was the drab office manager in a wildly creative Baltimore ad agency brimming with designers and photographers, and was often overlooked when you wanted to have any fun. One day Beth and I had lunch at a nearby bistro. As soon as we sat down and ordered she told me how she had been raped many years earlier in a dark parking garage, after working late. Her compelling story filled our lunch hour. Stunned, I was of course sympathetic and consoling, until, as we were waiting for the check, she said, "And just my luck, it happened again two years later, in the very same parking garage!"

That's when I thought that maybe her story was just that -- a story, calculated to make her seem more interesting. Or perhaps she had re-created the circumstances at the time to make her life more exciting. Certainly I am not suggesting that's true for most rape cases, but it might help explain why so many celebrities choose to come forward with their old secrets.