"If God were the ocean, you'd be a cup of God."

Sorry, I can't put that in context, because Oprah — who interviewed Russell Simmons into saying that — has taken down the 3 videos of Simmons that used to play on her SuperSoul page:

"Music mogul Russell Simmons openly admits that he first started taking yoga classes to flirt with attractive women...." But guess what he tells Oprah? You'll have to guess, because Oprah took the video down, but I bet it's some blather about the spiritual power of yoga. (Of course, if a man takes yoga to "flirt with attractive women," he's going to tell them he believes in the spiritual power of yoga. The "flirting" would only work if the women didn't think you were only there for access to them. I assume men who don't maintain the pretense of believing in yoga get kicked out of these classes.)

But what did Russell Simmons do? Here's Jenny Lumet's essay: "Russell Simmons sexually violated me." That came out after the L.A. Times published "Russell Simmons and Brett Ratner face new allegations of sexual misconduct" ("Keri Claussen Khalighi was a 17-year-old fashion model from a farm town in Nebraska when she met Brett Ratner and Russell Simmons at a casting call...").

And here's an Atlantic article "The Pierced Piety of Russell Simmons/The hip-hop mogul’s public righteousness pushed two women to tell stories of his alleged mistreatment of them in the ’90s."

Simmons is associated with two things in the public mind: the drive, grit, and party-hard lifestyle that accompanied the rise of hip-hop, and his newer public idealism involving spirituality, veganism, charity, and progressive politics. But [his 2 accusers] Khalighi and Lumet clearly saw something false, worryingly so, in the narrative Simmons had been peddling. His supposed commitment to the #MeToo movement already was revealed to have its limits when he told the actor Terry Crews to give “a pass” to an agent Crews accused of groping him. Now Simmons joins the growing list of men who have taken high-minded stances in public only to be accused of doing monstrous things in private.

Some Simmons supporters might respond to the allegations against him by saying that he is not the man he was in the ’90s. But even before these women came forward, Simmons cheerfully stood as an example of how publicly performed “consciousness” can fail to extend to matters of the flesh. For a 2012 Forbes profile that touched on his womanizing ways, he said, “It was the last problem for Lord Buddha before enlightenment. I go to the classes, but I’m still looking at asses.” The Los Angeles Times article about Khalighi highlighted a passage in his 2014 book Success Through Stillness that said he’d transcended his former identity as a man “constantly on a mission to make more money, have sex with more women, and snort more coke than the next man.” But, Russell had added, he was “still working on the women part.”

AND: Remember something I said last week, when we were talking about the question why so many men have been ruined over sex allegations, but Trump has held his ground. I put out 4 theories at the time, but here's the one that has special relevance in the case of Russell Simmons:

Many of the new targets of allegations are people who had seemed to be male allies of the women's movement, and it's the lying and the hypocrisy that bothers us the most. The accusations against Trump seem only to reinforce what we already saw on the surface of Trump: brash exuberance, wanting plenty of good things for himself, excitement over beautiful women, impoliteness. The new allegations don't take us back to the Trump allegations because Trump wasn't accepted as an ally of feminism. He seems to represent the old school, male chauvinism. That's a different category and not what we're paying attention to right now.