By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | January 11, 2018 |
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Politics | January 11, 2018 |
After yesterday’s troubles regarding the now infamous Shitty Media Men list and its origins, wherein fears that Harpers Magazine and Katie Roiphe would out its creator, women started coming forward to claim authorship before they could be outed. Mandy Stadtmiller came forward in a tweet that has since been deleted, and then so did Lexi Alexander, as did many more. How do you combat fear of doxxing and harassment? Go all Sparatcus on those motherfuckers!
The New York Times released a piece that claimed no names were ever going to be revealed and gave Roiphe, feminism’s favourite campus rape apologist, another excuse to claim social media hysteria was stirring up trouble where there was none. We know this to be a lie because, as noted by Nicole Cliffe, a New York Times reporter saw an email fact-checking one of the possible creators of the list.
And we know this email is real because it was sent to Moira Donegan, the woman who revealed herself to be the actual creator of the list in a piece for The Cut.
“Katie identifies you as a woman widely believed to be one of the creators…” 👌 pic.twitter.com/ZRgnJ7Wk8E
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) January 11, 2018
(That’s obviously the email that the NYTimes reporter saw, which is just a flat-out contradiction of Roiphe’s story. And if anyone tries to pin that on a fact-checker, good luck.)
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) January 11, 2018
In the piece, Donegan notes how the list, intended to simply be ‘a place for women to share their stories of harassment and assault without being needlessly discredited or judged’, quickly grew more popular and notorious than imagined, eventually making its way to a think-piece in Buzzfeed before leaking to Reddit. Donegan goes further to put aside some misconceptions about the list (ones anyone who had actually seen it would have already been aware of, but alas bullshit to discredit women spreads quickly): There was a disclaimer to note that all added claims should be taken with a grain of salt; a system was imposed to differentiate between allegations and the seriousness of their claims; and she took the list down after 12 hours, around the time she was alerted to the Buzzfeed piece being written about it.
Creating the list greatly impacted Donegan’s life, she writes, including the loss of her job. She then notes that Roiphe directly contacted her in December ‘to ask if I wanted to comment for a Harper’s story she was writing on the “feminist moment.” She did not say that she knew I had created the spreadsheet.’ It was following that contact that Harpers’ fact-checkers then got in touch to ask if she was one of the people who made the list. So for those keeping track of this fuckery, Roiphe, who told the New York Times that she never planned to name anybody, is a stinking liar. And she’s a fucking journalism professor! Screw her rape apologising hack work.
I’m sad that Donegan felt the need to come forward, but I’m glad she robbed that hack of her power. I’m glad women wanted to band together to protect a whistleblower, and I’m glad we haven’t all forgotten that Katie Roiphe is the fucking worst. She’s done more to set back women on the issue of campus rape than any GOP politician could ever dream of, and it’s staggering to me that she continues to be employed as both a journalist and a journalism professor.