When Chris Brown, who in 2009 beat his then-girlfriend Rihanna on the way to a Grammys pre-party, got two performing slots at this year’s awards show, objecting to his presence there was relatively uncomplicated. His crime was relatively recent, and Brown seemed to have little sense that he’d done something wrong, throwing temper tantrums when asked about his assault in interviews and acting as if his Grammy win was a rebuke to the people who were unfairly judging him. And suggesting that he shouldn’t be given a high-profile spot, much less two, at the Grammys was a way of rooting for, or siding with, Rihanna. But in the time since, events have guaranteed that the state of their relationship will be a continued story—and suggested how complicated it’s going to be to find a way to talk about it productively.

First, the news broke that Rihanna had asked Brown to her birthday party. Then, she released a remix of her latest song, “Birthday Cake,” featuring Brown. If the pair aren’t dating again, it’s clear that Brown is back in Rihanna’s life. Which puts those of us who would rather not see folks in his industry bestowing their most advantageous opportunities on Brown rather than someone who didn’t beat a fellow artist so badly she couldn’t perform when she was allotted one of those slots, in a position of not being on the same page as the woman we’d really like to be supporting.

This is not an uncommon dynamic, of course. As Jaclyn Friedman points out, women who are trying to leave their abusers tend to go back, a lot, before they finally decide to either stay or leave for good. The dilemma between wanting to respect a woman as an independent agent while also being worried for her is not one that’s unique to celebrities. And it’s not a problem that anyone’s come up with a fool-proof solution for, or we’d be a lot better at helping women leave the men who abuse them, be they famous or simply our friends.

One sure way not to move the conversation in anything like a productive direction, though, is to challenge Chris Brown to a fight. Which is what C.M. Punk, a professional wrestler, decided it would be a productive thing to do. There’s really no circumstance in which a white man talking about curb stomping a black man is an elevating threat. And whatever Chris Brown needs, it’s emphatically not a beating. Punk could take a note from retired pro wrestler Mick Foley, who’s become an amazing advocate for victims of sexual assault. This isn’t about completing a cycle of retribution. And it’s not about teaching people about who it is or isn’t honorable to fight.

The bridge is yours.

-The final word on Chris Brown.

-Ryan McGee on how HBO killed the episode.

-Get a track off Bruce Springsteen’s new album, “Wrecking Ball,” every day for the next nine days.

-Ah, the joys of a good old-fashioned public art controversy.

-The weirdest political endorsements by musicians.

Yesterday, I wrote about the fact that Hollywood lacks standards for what acts make someone unemployable. But part of the problem is also that while we have a sense of what behavior we don’t want to see treated as if it’s acceptable, there isn’t a clear standard for what constitutes making amends, not just to the people who were directly harmed by celebrities’ actions or remarks, but to the rest of us who have to deal with those people as public figures.

The way director Brett Ratner’s behaved in the wake of his comments last fall that “rehearsal is for fags,” which lost him a chance to run the Academy Awards, is an instructive example of what celebrity redemption might look like. At the time, he promised that “I will be taking real action over the coming weeks and months in an effort to do everything I can both professionally and personally to help stamp out the kind of thoughtless bigotry I’ve so foolishly perpetuated.” And he’s lived up to that promise, committing to produce a new ad campaign for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. It’s an experience that both sounds like it’s been educational for Ratner, and that’s letting an organization that represents the people he offended derive a substantive benefit.

Now, there will always be people who judge someone who’s in the process of redemption. But I think this offers a pretty reasonable standard for deciding if someone should be eligible not just to work, but for career-enhancing slots at an event like the Grammys or a production deal at FX that’s going to require a lot of promotional heavy lifting. Has the person who broke the law or committed the sin against decency educated themselves? And have they made a substantive contribution—whether it’s a donation of their services or raising money for a cause—to make public recompense and reinforce the idea that what they did was wrong, not just for them, but for anyone? If Chris Brown or Charlie Sheen had committed to raising a very serious amount of money for domestic violence charities and followed through on the work, I’d be much more inclined to consider forgiving them. It would be an acknowledgement that they understood that their behavior was wrong, and connected to larger issues in society, and that they were committed to remedying them both.

When the Grammys invited Chris Brown to perform not once but twice during Sunday’s awards show, three years after he plead guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna, the decision sparked outrage—and some good questions. At Ebony, Zerlina Maxwell wants to know if the Grammys think they’re sending a message other than that domestic abuse is no big deal. And the New Yorker’s rock critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, asked “Why forgive Chris Brown so quickly and hang Ike Turner out to dry for so long?” The answer isn’t that the Grammys, or any other institution in Hollywood, have arcane or difficult-to-discern rules about when domestic abusers should be welcomed back and given the platforms they need to make enormous amounts of money. It’s that they don’t have established standards at all, leaving them to handle things on a case-by-case basis that often seems incoherent.

In January, I asked FX President John Landgraf, who is working with Charlie Sheen on a new show called Anger Management, if he thought there was a clear standard for something an actor could do that would make them, in Landgraf’s eyes, unemployable. He told me:

I can’t tell you what that is. But the answer’s clearly yes. You can certainly imagine a performer doing something that renders them unemployable. Again, what is that? I don’t know. And do I hope that won’t take place and believe that probably won’t take place? Yeah. But anybody could do something that would be grounds for termination of a show. How could I define that line? I’m not a lawyer. How could I have a precise list of things and here’s the line and if you’re on this side of the line you’re fine and you’re on that side of the line, you’re not fine? I don’t think that’s theoretically possible.

When it comes to why Landgraf trusts Sheen in particular to star in Anger Management, in which Sheen plays a former baseball player with anger issues whose best friend is a woman, who has a female therapist, and who is raising a daughter as a single father, he said:

Part of what the show is about, frankly, is a kind of comeuppance. For example, he has a teenaged daughter, he has an ex-wife, his ex-wife has questionable tastes in men, and he was the first of her questionable tastes in men. But now, as a co-parent, he has to deal with a series of men in his 13-year-old daughter’s life, and that’s a kind of comeuppance for him. I can’t know what’s in Charlie Sheen’s heart. I can only tell you that as an artist and as a performer, he made a choice in terms of what he chose to do next that to me is indicative of somebody who wants to grow, and he wants to play a more self-aware, more dimensional character, and he wants to make a more complicated, more nuanced show.

I think you and Mo [Ryan, the television critic at Huffington Post] imagine that some of the same things that happened in the past will probably happen in the future, and therefore in your estimation, I’ve stepped into the role of an enabler that was exited by others like Warner Brothers and CBS. And in my estimation, we make a really good show and Charlie grows as a human being, and we don’t know.

I’d argue that the evidence is fairly clear that Charlie Sheen has a pattern of repeated violence against women who are his intimate partners, and of relapses in his program of recovery, and that perhaps my and Mo’s bet is better than Landgraf’s. But making bets about the future isn’t really the point here. It’s how Hollywood treats past behavior and sends messages about which sins matter, and how much, and which don’t.
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