Who Gets to Decide Who Is Mourned?
James Cowman
When I first encountered the six-page document Craig Nevius published about Ryan O’Neal, I was primarily interested in the allegations it contained. There are serious claims throughout it, including charges concerning Ryan’s treatment of Farrah, the struggle over control of Farrah’s Story, and extraordinarily private details about Farrah’s cancer treatment. The more I have examined the document, however, the less its individual accusations have become the central issue for me.
What I cannot get past is the circumstances under which Craig chose to publish it and the judgment with which he chose to end it. Ryan O’Neal died on December 8, 2023. Craig’s Facebook post containing the document is dated December 8, 2023. Ryan had just died, and Craig published a six-page denunciation that ended by questioning whether this man should be mourned at all.
I do not believe death places a person beyond criticism. Ryan had a complicated personal history, and serious claims against him do not become irrelevant merely because he died. Nor do I believe Craig was obligated to suddenly revise his opinion of Ryan or pretend affection that he did not feel. If Craig did not mourn Ryan, he had every right to say so. What troubles me is the movement from I do not mourn this man to something much broader: this man should not be mourned. Near the conclusion of the document, Craig writes that Ryan should not be mourned as Farrah’s loving companion and devoted caretaker, and then goes considerably further, saying that he is not sure Ryan “should be mourned at all,” except perhaps as someone who was mentally ill. That is no longer simply testimony about Ryan’s behavior. It is a judgment about the legitimacy of other people’s grief.
I find that extraordinarily presumptuous. Mourning is not an acquittal. It does not certify that the person who died behaved well, erase what he may have done to other people, or require anyone else to forgive him. Human relationships are considerably more complicated than that. A person can have been destructive in one relationship and deeply loved in another. Children can mourn difficult parents. Former partners can grieve people who hurt them. Friends can remember qualities that enemies never experienced. Even contradictory feelings can exist within the same person. Craig was entitled to his relationship with Ryan and to whatever judgment resulted from it. What authority did he possess, however, to determine the emotional response everyone else was entitled to have when Ryan died?
Tatum O’Neal provides the clearest example of this. Few people had placed a more damaging account of Ryan into the public record than his own daughter. In her memoir A Paper Life, Tatum described a childhood and family relationship marked by dysfunction and alleged physical and emotional abuse. Their conflicts continued publicly for years. Yet when Ryan died, Tatum did not use his death as an occasion to repeat those accusations. She told PEOPLE that she felt “great sorrow” at his passing and that he had “meant the world” to her. She said that she loved him, believed he loved her, would miss him forever, and was grateful that they had ended their relationship on good terms. Nothing in that statement required Tatum to withdraw what she had written about her father. She did not have to rewrite their history in order to mourn him. She simply demonstrated something Craig’s document seems unwilling to allow: a person can retain an extremely complicated, even painful understanding of someone and still grieve his death.
The timing is what prevents me from treating that question as incidental. Had Craig published the same document six months before Ryan’s death, I would still have serious concerns about it. Had he published it six months later as part of a larger historical argument about Farrah’s Story, I would still question its tone, some of its conclusions, and its use of Farrah’s private medical information. But publication on the day Ryan died changes the rhetorical act itself. Craig introduced the document on Facebook with the statement, “No joy in this.” The words suggest reluctance, perhaps even a sense that what followed was an unpleasant obligation. Yet what followed was a sustained denunciation ending with an explicit challenge to the idea that Ryan deserved mourning. Whatever Craig intended internally, the public effect is difficult for me to read any other way: Ryan O’Neal has just died, and before you mourn him, here are the reasons you shouldn’t.
The ethical problem becomes even more complicated because Craig repeatedly presents himself as a defender of Farrah—her privacy, her intentions, her documentary and her legacy. Yet in making his argument against Ryan, he reveals extraordinarily intimate information about the final period of Farrah’s life. He discusses her colostomy, her difficulty adjusting to the appliance, her physical agitation and emotional anxiety, what she supposedly wanted to do with the footage, and what she intended eventually to disclose publicly. The information may have been included because Craig believed it corrected a false narrative about her medical decisions. But the ethical paradox remains. Farrah’s intimate suffering becomes evidence in Craig’s case against Ryan. A document presented partly as a defense of Farrah therefore exposes some of the most private details of her illness in order to strengthen an argument against someone else.
This is where I also have difficulty separating Craig’s voice from Farrah’s name. He signs the document not merely with his professional credentials but as a “Friend of Farrah Fawcett.” That label gives his account an additional kind of authority. Craig was there. Craig knew her. Craig was her friend. Those facts may make his testimony important, but they do not transform his judgments into hers. This becomes especially important when the rhetoric turns from describing events to deciding what Ryan thought, what he wanted, what Farrah believed about him, and ultimately whether Ryan deserved to be mourned.
I have spent a great deal of time watching Farrah’s public interviews, including interviews conducted during periods when she had every reason to be angry with men who had been part of her life. I have yet to find an interview in which she publicly discusses a former partner in anything resembling the language used in this document. That does not mean Farrah never became furious privately, never complained about someone to friends, or never said harsh things when cameras were absent. Of course she may have. She was human. Nor can I prove that she would never have approved of something Craig later wrote. What I can say is much narrower: the public Farrah I have found in the historical record did not appear to use interviews as opportunities to destroy the men with whom she had been involved. That makes me extremely reluctant to treat Craig’s anger as an extension of Farrah’s own voice.
A friend can preserve someone’s memories. A friend can provide evidence unavailable elsewhere. A friend can describe what he personally witnessed. But friendship does not confer ownership of another person’s moral authority. “Friend of Farrah Fawcett” does not mean voice of Farrah Fawcett. Craig’s interpretation of Ryan belongs to Craig. His anger belongs to Craig. His belief that Ryan should or should not be mourned belongs to Craig. Those judgments should be evaluated as his judgments rather than elevated by the implication that they necessarily represent what Farrah herself would have wanted to say.
There is also something fundamentally irreversible about making such a statement at the moment of death. Ryan could no longer respond. Farrah could no longer confirm or challenge what was being attributed to her. The conflict had reached a point at which one surviving participant could present his interpretation while both of the people at the center of the relationship were permanently silent. That reality should, in my view, increase the obligation toward precision, restraint and careful separation between evidence and inference. Instead, the document frequently moves in the opposite direction. It assigns motives, character judgments and moral conclusions with considerable certainty and finally reaches beyond Ryan’s actions to the question of whether grief for him is appropriate at all.
That is why I no longer think my strongest objection to this document depends upon proving or disproving every allegation contained within it. Some claims may be true. Some may be disputed. Additional records may eventually clarify others. Those are legitimate historical questions. But another question exists independently of factual accuracy: what is the ethical responsibility of a person telling this story? A claim does not become ethically neutral merely because it is true, particularly when it involves private medical information, the dead, intimate relationships and events that cannot now be answered by the people involved.
Ryan O’Neal’s death did not erase the darker parts of his history. It did not require Craig Nevius to forgive him, praise him or mourn him. But neither did Craig acquire, through his friendship with Farrah or his conflict with Ryan, the authority to decide whether anyone else was entitled to grieve. That is the part of the document I cannot get past. On December 8, 2023, Ryan O’Neal died. On December 8, 2023, Craig published a document ending with the suggestion that perhaps Ryan should not be mourned at all. Whatever reasons Craig believed justified publishing it at that moment, they do not resolve the ethical question.
For me, that question remains remarkably simple: Who gets to decide who is worthy of mourning?
Certainly not Craig Nevius.
Sources Consulted
James Cowman
When I first encountered the six-page document Craig Nevius published about Ryan O’Neal, I was primarily interested in the allegations it contained. There are serious claims throughout it, including charges concerning Ryan’s treatment of Farrah, the struggle over control of Farrah’s Story, and extraordinarily private details about Farrah’s cancer treatment. The more I have examined the document, however, the less its individual accusations have become the central issue for me.
What I cannot get past is the circumstances under which Craig chose to publish it and the judgment with which he chose to end it. Ryan O’Neal died on December 8, 2023. Craig’s Facebook post containing the document is dated December 8, 2023. Ryan had just died, and Craig published a six-page denunciation that ended by questioning whether this man should be mourned at all.
I do not believe death places a person beyond criticism. Ryan had a complicated personal history, and serious claims against him do not become irrelevant merely because he died. Nor do I believe Craig was obligated to suddenly revise his opinion of Ryan or pretend affection that he did not feel. If Craig did not mourn Ryan, he had every right to say so. What troubles me is the movement from I do not mourn this man to something much broader: this man should not be mourned. Near the conclusion of the document, Craig writes that Ryan should not be mourned as Farrah’s loving companion and devoted caretaker, and then goes considerably further, saying that he is not sure Ryan “should be mourned at all,” except perhaps as someone who was mentally ill. That is no longer simply testimony about Ryan’s behavior. It is a judgment about the legitimacy of other people’s grief.
I find that extraordinarily presumptuous. Mourning is not an acquittal. It does not certify that the person who died behaved well, erase what he may have done to other people, or require anyone else to forgive him. Human relationships are considerably more complicated than that. A person can have been destructive in one relationship and deeply loved in another. Children can mourn difficult parents. Former partners can grieve people who hurt them. Friends can remember qualities that enemies never experienced. Even contradictory feelings can exist within the same person. Craig was entitled to his relationship with Ryan and to whatever judgment resulted from it. What authority did he possess, however, to determine the emotional response everyone else was entitled to have when Ryan died?
Tatum O’Neal provides the clearest example of this. Few people had placed a more damaging account of Ryan into the public record than his own daughter. In her memoir A Paper Life, Tatum described a childhood and family relationship marked by dysfunction and alleged physical and emotional abuse. Their conflicts continued publicly for years. Yet when Ryan died, Tatum did not use his death as an occasion to repeat those accusations. She told PEOPLE that she felt “great sorrow” at his passing and that he had “meant the world” to her. She said that she loved him, believed he loved her, would miss him forever, and was grateful that they had ended their relationship on good terms. Nothing in that statement required Tatum to withdraw what she had written about her father. She did not have to rewrite their history in order to mourn him. She simply demonstrated something Craig’s document seems unwilling to allow: a person can retain an extremely complicated, even painful understanding of someone and still grieve his death.
The timing is what prevents me from treating that question as incidental. Had Craig published the same document six months before Ryan’s death, I would still have serious concerns about it. Had he published it six months later as part of a larger historical argument about Farrah’s Story, I would still question its tone, some of its conclusions, and its use of Farrah’s private medical information. But publication on the day Ryan died changes the rhetorical act itself. Craig introduced the document on Facebook with the statement, “No joy in this.” The words suggest reluctance, perhaps even a sense that what followed was an unpleasant obligation. Yet what followed was a sustained denunciation ending with an explicit challenge to the idea that Ryan deserved mourning. Whatever Craig intended internally, the public effect is difficult for me to read any other way: Ryan O’Neal has just died, and before you mourn him, here are the reasons you shouldn’t.
The ethical problem becomes even more complicated because Craig repeatedly presents himself as a defender of Farrah—her privacy, her intentions, her documentary and her legacy. Yet in making his argument against Ryan, he reveals extraordinarily intimate information about the final period of Farrah’s life. He discusses her colostomy, her difficulty adjusting to the appliance, her physical agitation and emotional anxiety, what she supposedly wanted to do with the footage, and what she intended eventually to disclose publicly. The information may have been included because Craig believed it corrected a false narrative about her medical decisions. But the ethical paradox remains. Farrah’s intimate suffering becomes evidence in Craig’s case against Ryan. A document presented partly as a defense of Farrah therefore exposes some of the most private details of her illness in order to strengthen an argument against someone else.
This is where I also have difficulty separating Craig’s voice from Farrah’s name. He signs the document not merely with his professional credentials but as a “Friend of Farrah Fawcett.” That label gives his account an additional kind of authority. Craig was there. Craig knew her. Craig was her friend. Those facts may make his testimony important, but they do not transform his judgments into hers. This becomes especially important when the rhetoric turns from describing events to deciding what Ryan thought, what he wanted, what Farrah believed about him, and ultimately whether Ryan deserved to be mourned.
I have spent a great deal of time watching Farrah’s public interviews, including interviews conducted during periods when she had every reason to be angry with men who had been part of her life. I have yet to find an interview in which she publicly discusses a former partner in anything resembling the language used in this document. That does not mean Farrah never became furious privately, never complained about someone to friends, or never said harsh things when cameras were absent. Of course she may have. She was human. Nor can I prove that she would never have approved of something Craig later wrote. What I can say is much narrower: the public Farrah I have found in the historical record did not appear to use interviews as opportunities to destroy the men with whom she had been involved. That makes me extremely reluctant to treat Craig’s anger as an extension of Farrah’s own voice.
A friend can preserve someone’s memories. A friend can provide evidence unavailable elsewhere. A friend can describe what he personally witnessed. But friendship does not confer ownership of another person’s moral authority. “Friend of Farrah Fawcett” does not mean voice of Farrah Fawcett. Craig’s interpretation of Ryan belongs to Craig. His anger belongs to Craig. His belief that Ryan should or should not be mourned belongs to Craig. Those judgments should be evaluated as his judgments rather than elevated by the implication that they necessarily represent what Farrah herself would have wanted to say.
There is also something fundamentally irreversible about making such a statement at the moment of death. Ryan could no longer respond. Farrah could no longer confirm or challenge what was being attributed to her. The conflict had reached a point at which one surviving participant could present his interpretation while both of the people at the center of the relationship were permanently silent. That reality should, in my view, increase the obligation toward precision, restraint and careful separation between evidence and inference. Instead, the document frequently moves in the opposite direction. It assigns motives, character judgments and moral conclusions with considerable certainty and finally reaches beyond Ryan’s actions to the question of whether grief for him is appropriate at all.
That is why I no longer think my strongest objection to this document depends upon proving or disproving every allegation contained within it. Some claims may be true. Some may be disputed. Additional records may eventually clarify others. Those are legitimate historical questions. But another question exists independently of factual accuracy: what is the ethical responsibility of a person telling this story? A claim does not become ethically neutral merely because it is true, particularly when it involves private medical information, the dead, intimate relationships and events that cannot now be answered by the people involved.
Ryan O’Neal’s death did not erase the darker parts of his history. It did not require Craig Nevius to forgive him, praise him or mourn him. But neither did Craig acquire, through his friendship with Farrah or his conflict with Ryan, the authority to decide whether anyone else was entitled to grieve. That is the part of the document I cannot get past. On December 8, 2023, Ryan O’Neal died. On December 8, 2023, Craig published a document ending with the suggestion that perhaps Ryan should not be mourned at all. Whatever reasons Craig believed justified publishing it at that moment, they do not resolve the ethical question.
For me, that question remains remarkably simple: Who gets to decide who is worthy of mourning?
Certainly not Craig Nevius.
Sources Consulted
- Nevius, Craig J. “Ryan O’Neal Was Narcissist / Farrah Fawcett’s Colostomy.” Windmill Entertainment, six-page statement. The document contains Craig’s allegations concerning Ryan O’Neal, Farrah’s Story, Farrah’s cancer treatment and colostomy, and concludes by questioning whether Ryan should be mourned.
- Windmill Entertainment / Craig Nevius. Facebook post, December 8, 2023. “RE: Ryan O’Neal/Farrah Fawcett. No joy in this.” The post establishes that Craig published the six-page document on the day Ryan O’Neal died.
- O’Neal, Tatum. A Paper Life. Tatum O’Neal’s memoir, used for her account of her childhood, her difficult relationship with Ryan O’Neal, and allegations of physical and emotional abuse.
- McNeil, Liz, and Angel Saunders. “Tatum O’Neal Says Dad Ryan ‘Meant the World’ to Her as She Pays Loving Tribute to the ‘Paper Moon’ Star.” PEOPLE, December 11, 2023. Used for Tatum’s statement after Ryan’s death expressing sorrow, love for her father, and gratitude that they had reconciled.
- McCartney, Anthony. “Ryan O’Neal, Star of ‘Love Story,’ ‘Paper Moon,’ ‘Peyton Place’ and ‘Barry Lyndon,’ Dies at 82.” Associated Press, December 2023. Used to confirm that Ryan O’Neal died on December 8, 2023, and for general biographical context concerning his family relationships.
