Chris Noth would have us believe that he is a victim.
In his first interview since being accused in 2021 of sexual assault by multiple women, the Sex and the City actor vented about how he’s had to “persevere” and lay low after the allegations to protect his family and mental health. Oddly, the catalyst for the interview—published on Aug. 7 in USA Today—stems from a partnership with the menswear brand Samuelsohn, which named Noth the face of its new mental health campaign.
It is a stunning decision that Noth, of all people, would be chosen as the mouthpiece for men’s silent suffering when he is the alleged root cause of at least four women’s agony. (No criminal charges have been filed against the actor.)
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In a moody photograph posted to his Instagram on the same day the interview was published, Noth writes to his followers that seeing how depression impacted his loved ones has inspired him to make mental health a cause he cares about. He notes that the partnership with Samuelsohn “aims to bring awareness and support for men who need it,” suggesting that he, with his furrowed brow staring down the lens, needs your support.
All the while, he maintains to USA Today that all of his sexual relations were consensual, and admits he’s only guilty of one thing: adultery. On one end, he attempts to humanize himself, equating himself to every other man. He just got a little weak, is all. “You give yourself the same excuses that many men do; it’s just a little side dance, and it’s fun,” he told the paper. “You’re not hurting anybody.” He may have cheated on his wife, he says, but “what it isn’t is a crime.” Noth thus positions himself as a victim, viewing what he did with these women as mere adultery—a dalliance on a random Tuesday, and not, as his four accusers have alleged, criminal behavior. Conversely, he seems completely aware of his power and celebrity in such situations: “And suddenly, many people want to have sex with you. It’s like, ‘Well, I’m not going to get this chance again.’”
The #MeToo movement’s domino effect helped many people, specifically women, find the courage to come forward and share their stories of sexual abuse and power dynamics in the workplace and elsewhere. For some, the movement welcomed the performance of victimhood where “trauma talk” was now accepted in everyday discourse. Words like “gaslight,” “toxic,” and “objectified” were increasingly used in describing men or the way men made us feel, even in apparently innocuous situations. Some were characterizing a man yelling “Nice dress” or “Smile, honey” across the street as a “violation” or “sexual harassment.”
It seems like Noth has learned these rules of performance to help him turn his story on its head, to where he is now the victim. Never mind what he’s been accused of; he wants us to focus on men’s mental health. Look at how hyperbole has destroyed so many men, he seems to be saying. I’m just one of them.
And it’s true: Hyperbole erodes meaning, making it hard to decipher real victims from people who merely imagine themselves to be ones. The lines get blurred because the same language is often used in both situations; after #MeToo, it’s become the norm for some to conflate crass behavior for something more nefarious, or even criminal.
There’s precedent for this conflation. Increasingly, I read articles online and on social media about mistresses “coming forward,” lamenting their affairs, and using language that should be reserved for sexual assault victims. This equivocation is especially common in women engaged in public cheating scandals. For example, Pastor Carl Lentz made news in 2020 when he was fired from the megachurch Hillsong for cheating on his wife. His mistress, Ranine Karim, spoke with The New York Post about how she met Lentz at a park in Williamsburg, asked if he was married (to which he said yes), and then carried on a five-month relationship. “I’m here to tell the truth,” she told The Post, “and maybe by doing that, other people will have the courage to come forward.” But why does a woman coming forward about her decision to cheat with a married man require “courage”? Karim had chosen to have an affair, yet appropriated the language and phrases other women use when sharing stories of being the unwilling victims of abuse of power. That kind of language should be kept for those hiding out of fear, not embarrassment.
Noth seems to be taking a note out of Karim’s book and addressing the allegations against him by talking about them as if they were allegations of cheating, not rape or assault. The lines have become so blurred. Who is playing a victim, and who is being victimized?
I’ve revisited the allegations of rape made by the two women in The Hollywood Reporter, where both expressed a sense of feeling special because of who Noth was. One said he’d made them feel special because he wanted her thoughts on a potential project based on a book he was reading. The other described having an out-of-body experience sitting across from him at a restaurant, Il Cantinori, that had been featured on Sex and The City.
I wrote the follow-up story on a third woman for The Daily Beast who expressed similar sentiments when Noth frequented the restaurant where she worked. But these feelings didn’t preclude their ability or understanding that what happened was non-consensual. We write these moments into the story not because they show weakness or vulnerability on the victim’s end, but because they lend a literal BIG-ness to the famous person in that moment.
“People are afraid of all this,” Noth said in USA Today, almost challenging readers of his interview. “Fear is the overriding operative word when it comes to whether they believe it or not... I have to just continue on.” It is easier for him to continue, a year and some months banished from Hollywood—and he speaks eagerly about “getting back into the club, the business” when the public inevitably decides to forget about the allegations against him. But what about the women who feared retribution and feared they would not be believed? What about their fear of coming forward, even anonymously? We need to stop giving a pass to people playing victim so we can better recognize actual victims.
Of course, the specifics of the allegations against Noth, their vivid and harrowing descriptions, are left out of the article, as it would presumably conflict too much with the romantic ideal that Samuelsohn CEO Stephen Granovsky claims Noth epitomizes: “There just isn’t another character in modern times that looks better, feels better, is more proud to wear a suit than Chris was in Sex and The City.” But this romantic view of a man in a suit—the suave, fictional Mr. Big—gives people like Noth an inflated sense of power and the ability to leave pain and destruction in their path without recourse.
