Former director at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum arrested for filming people in bathroom

Some people may be familiar with Andrew Farago, who until some time ago was a curator at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum, and a contributing writer to the Comics Journal, who was also the kind of leftist who attacked easy targets like right-wingers and Comicsgate. Now, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, he was arrested by police for secretly filming people in his home bathroom:

Andrew Farago, an author, historian and former curator of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum, was arrested on June 3 on suspicion of recording 20 people in the bathroom at the party, which had attendees including at least six children ages 3 years old or older, Berkeley Police Department spokesperson Byron White told SFGATE in an email Wednesday. According to court documents viewed by the Berkeley Scanner, Farago co-hosted the party on May 23 at his Berkeley home.

A woman at the party found Farago’s phone wrapped in a towel and aimed in a direction that would “record people’s genitalia as they used the restroom,” and video footage on the phone showed Farago setting it up, the Berkeley Police Department wrote in the documents, according to the Berkeley Scanner. [...]

White said police launched an investigation and obtained a search warrant and an arrest warrant for Farago on May 27. Officers conducted a search at his house on June 20 and seized his electronic devices, White said.

Farago’s arrest warrant included 20 counts of secretly recording someone who is undressed or in their undergarments without their consent, White said. Farago’s name does not appear in the Alameda County inmate records as of Thursday afternoon.

The 50-year-old is a notable figure in San Francisco art and pop culture, including writing comics and co-authoring a history of Batman. Farago also helped advocate for the museum to acquire a new location in 2016 after its former Mission Street location doubled in rent. The museum is now at 781 Beach St., a block from Ghirardelli Square.

Although Farago is still listed as the curator for the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum in several places online, his name has been removed from the museum’s official site and his LinkedIn profile has been deleted.

This is very, very disgusting, and that goes without saying. I expect his book writings will be going out of print soon, and he has truly tarnished a number of projects, not the least being the very museum where he reportedly once worked, but has now hopefully been ousted after committing repugnant acts that could've endangered children. One of the worst things about this is that it may not be the first time Farago pulled such crap, and what if it turns out he did similar acts at the museum he worked for? It's enough to shudder.

I noted how he's also been a contributing writer to the Comics Journal, and 6 months ago, he wrote the following item about the late cartoonist Scott Adams of Dilbert fame, and at the time, Farago said that:

Adams spoke candidly about expected topics like cartooning, office culture, and popular entertainment, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, revealed his self-described “Libertarian leanings” as he ventured into discussions of current events and politics. Controversial and outright hateful comments were framed as “thought experiments,” such as a 2006 Dilbert Blog post that questioned historical accounts of the Holocaust or a 2011 post in which he compared adult women to “children and the mentally handicapped.” Adams offered dating advice that included “pickup artist” techniques and emotional manipulation, but the Dilbert comic strip plugged along as usual, just with more dot-com jokes and cynical takes on the economy in the wake of the 2008 crash. Most daily newspaper readers and feature editors were oblivious or indifferent to Adams and his online activity, and friends chalked up the occasional offensive newsletter or blog post to the cartoonist’s sense of humor or desire to provoke a reaction. He had been happily married since 2006, after all, and was a devoted stepfather to two children, so how much of a jerk could he really be?

Readers, especially in hindsight, felt that Dilbert’s tone shifted during the 2010s, punching down at targets, mocking and belittling societal shifts and perceived “political correctness,” with more cynical, even bitter humor than the bemused, gentle office hijinks of the strip’s first two decades. “Dilbert went from challenging the absurdities of workplace management and the abuses of late-stage capitalism to a broader distrust of all expertise, media, and institutions,” observed Rob Salkowitz in his Adams obituary for Forbes.com. “The tone became combative, the humor more hectoring. Dogbert, Dilbert’s anarchic pet who always managed to come out on top, began delivering preachy monologues more suited to the op-ed page.”

Wow, look how Farago moralizes ad nauseum, and blah, blah, blah. Now, after Farago was discovered to be as much a pervert as his fellow SF resident and leftist Gerard Jones, these kind of writings stand as meaningless. I remember when Farago signed onto a petition in favor of the Kfir Bibas family after October 7, 2023, and hoped he was at least improving over his previous attacks on petty issues like Comicsgate. But as this scandal makes clear, Farago apparently just found another cunning way to virtue signal, and seeing how he endangered children at his house party, that makes his petition signing look very hypocritical, seeing how he committed such an abomination. If that's how he's going to behave, how do we know he doesn't hold those kind of twisted visions for Jewish children too? Will he ever even apologize for his rude social media postings about Comicsgate and any other petty issue where he made denigrating comments about anybody whom he didn't agree with, conservative or otherwise? Probably not, and his fellow leftists are possibly not interested in raising such topics again.

Cosmic Book News also notes:

He received the Inkpot Award from San Diego Comic-Con in 2015 and wrote numerous books on comics and animation, including the Harvey Award-winning Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Ultimate Visual History, The Complete Peanuts Family Album, and The Art of Harley Quinn.

Will the SDCC demand he return the award? He's also humiliated a lot of notable comics franchises and kid friendly creations as a result of his actions, and what do his interviewees think now that this has been discovered? The above site also has a redated picture indicating Farago once took a photo with a kid standing in front of him, and after this whole scandal, sane parents will hopefully keep him far away from theirs. Also, what does the Comics Journal's staff think, now that one of their writers turned out to be scummy?

Some ideologues like Farago who attacked targets like conservatives online in past years possibly did so in the hopes their leftist brethren would overlook any wrongdoings they committed like what Farago's now known to have done, and would serve as a cunning shield from scrutiny. But even that's beginning to prove ineffective, and it's to be hoped more leftists in the medium will learn some lessons from this, and stop villifying the outside while ignorning the inside. For now, it remains to be seen if Farago will go to trial and face any legal penalties for his criminal offenses. His reputation is certainly over, and it wouldn't be surprising if the books he wrote about comics history aren't the masterpieces some press sources likely want everybody to believe they are.