A Washington Post investigation published in May 2012 described an incident from Mitt Romney's days at Cranbrook, the elite Michigan prep school he attended in the 1960s: Romney, then a senior, allegedly led a group of boys who held down a younger student named John Lauber — who was suspected of being gay and whose bleached blond hair had been a subject of comment — and cut off his hair while he cried and struggled.

The story, which Romney responded to with an apology that notably included a claim that he didn't remember the incident, arrived at a particular moment in the 2012 presidential campaign, when debates over marriage equality were intensifying and Romney's position on LGBTQ rights was under scrutiny.

The incident raised several distinct questions. The first was a question of character: what does a nearly fifty-year-old act of cruelty tell us about the person a man has become? People change. Adolescence is not destiny. The case for focusing on recent conduct and current beliefs is legitimate.

But there was also a second question, more uncomfortable: what does it mean that Romney said he didn't remember? The victim's family said Lauber, who died in 2004, had carried the memory of the incident for the rest of his life. Others who witnessed it described it as traumatic enough that it stayed with them decades later. For the person who organized it, it apparently left no trace.

Psychologists and social commentators noted that this kind of asymmetry — in which the aggressor doesn't remember while the victim never forgets — is common in bullying situations, precisely because the act meant something entirely different to each party. For Lauber, it was humiliation and violation. For Romney's group, it was apparently just another afternoon.

What voters were to make of all this, in the context of a presidential election, was left to individual judgment.