The world needs to be nicer to the embattled Justin Timberlake and “all the other celebrities who have done this,” said Chris Cuomo on Tuesday. But instead, too many of us pounce on “the gotcha” moment that “consumes us” because “it makes us feel better about ourselves.” Never mind that Timberlake, who was arrested on suspicion of driving while intoxicated in Sag Harbor, posed a danger to himself and others. “I don’t even know that the guy did it,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo began his segment by telling viewers that “what you do most often is what you will do best.” In other words, practice what you preach: the idea is that the habits we most consistently reinforce are the ones we will be best at. Cuomo then went on to wield this lesson like a moral gotcha moment of his own.
“This is what we do in this society most, traffic in negativity,” he said. “And it hit me, not because I’m a huge Justin Timberlake fan, though I do wish I could sing a dance like he. I live near where he was busted, right near Sag Harbor, New York.”
“Gorgeous place, dream life that my wife and I have built for our family. The town is filled with media,” he continued. “For what? The guy’s not even there anymore.”
Cuomo acknowledged that “DUIs matter” and “a lot of pain and death and loss come from people not drinking responsibly, let alone drinking and driving” but case doubt on whether or not Timberlake was actually under the influence in the first place because the singer purportedly did not “blow the breathalyzer, apparently.”
Timberlake was stopped after he ran a stop sign and veered out of his lane late Monday night. He told the officer he had one martini and refused to take the breath test. AL.com reported that court documents noted, “His eyes were bloodshot and glassy, a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage was emanating from his breath, he was unable to divide attention, he had slowed speech, he was unsteady afoot and he performed poorly on all standardized field sobriety tests.”
The outlet also reported that the officer didn’t know who Justin Timberlake was. A second source reported, “Justin said under his breath, ‘This is going to ruin the tour.’ The cop replied, ‘What tour?’ Justin said, ‘The world tour.’”
The issue, Cuomo went on, is how the story of Timberlake’s arrest has been covered. “This is not a commitment to common concern because we don’t cover DUIs,” he said. “This is for the local papers, for the crime log and your local paper. It’s the appetite for the gotcha that consumes us. To show Justin Timberlake—and now let’s fit him in with all the other celebrities who have done this.”
“Let’s judge him,” Cuomo continued. “Let’s judge them because it makes us feel better about ourselves. The magic of daytime television is what? To show people live in lives that suck worse than your own—especially when they’re bold-faced names.”
The public, he continued, “loves to see them come down, to feed this weird need to bring down others.”
“And I gotta be honest: seeing all that media there, I was just happy they weren’t there for me,” Cuomo said in an apparent reference to his own public fallout following allegations of sexual misconduct and that he advised his brother Andrew Cuomo in his own case.
Though “drinking and driving matters,” he added, it’s not something that is covered nationally unless “it’s someone famous.” Cuomo continued.
“We used to cover what matters,” he said. “What could make things better rather than traffic in what makes us worse. And look, I know I do it, too. Everything I’m covering tonight is a negative. But we do it in the pursuit of a higher goal, not just to traffic in someone’s problems in a misplaced sense of satisfaction or justice.”
Reporting on Timberlake, he continued, is “just another example of us at our worst.”
Timberlake’s questionable moral character aside, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has noted that 37 people in the United States die in car crashes related to drunk driving and driving while impaired, which is one person every 39 minutes. In 2022, 13,524 people died in alcohol-impaired accidents.
There is no “safe” amount of alcohol to have in the body before getting behind the wheel, the organization also noted. In 2022, 2,337 people were killed in crashes that involved a driver with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .01 to .07 g/dL. It is illegal to drive with a BAC of .08 g/dL.
You can watch the Chris Cuomo segment in the video above.
