Bari Weiss's article on New York Times titled "What do you do when you are anonymously accused of rape?"
Lyz Lenz, a former managing editor of The Rumpus, tweeted about an instance where Mr. Elliott “invited me up to your room to watch a movie” and didn’t “take no for an answer.” Ms. Lenz says that he “hounded” her and she “hid under a table.” And Marisa Siegel, who is now the editor of The Rumpus, wrote in an essay about how she was “shaken” after Mr. Elliott “barged” into her hotel room during a conference and stayed for at least 30 minutes.
When I asked him about these stories, Mr. Elliott said: “I’ve certainly been unaware of boundaries and transgressed them without realizing.” But he insists that Ms. Lenz’s and Ms. Siegel’s accounts are not only full of half-truths or lies, but beside the point. “These people are trying to get me to engage in any argument that is not about the fact that I was falsely accused of rape,” he said. “Because they don’t want to talk about that.”
He added: “If your position is that it’s O.K. to falsely accuse someone of rape because you don’t like them, just own that position. That’s clearly what a lot of people believe.”
On the one hand, Stephen Elliott v. Moira Donegan and Jane Does (1-30) is a straightforward defamation case.
The complaint says that the statements on the list were “abusive, vulgar, intentionally misleading,” that “the Defendants’ actions were malicious in nature,” and that the list was “sent to numerous members of the parties’ shared profession, the media industry to intentionally harm Plaintiff’s reputation and further cause harm to Plaintiff’s career.”
This account of maliciousness does not at all square with how Ms. Donegan has described her aim in creating the list.
She wrote in New York Magazine that the list was “meant to be private” — a written version of a whisper network — and that, unlike an HR department or the police, “the value of the spreadsheet was that it had no enforcement mechanisms: Without legal authority or professional power, it offered an impartial, rather than adversarial, tool to those who used it. It was intended specifically not to inflict consequences, not to be a weapon — and yet, once it became public, many people immediately saw it as exactly that.”
“I thought it was a good essay,” Mr. Elliott offered when I ask him about it. “The problem with it is that it’s not honest. She deliberately mischaracterizes her motivation. If you create something with the intention of hurting your enemies, that’s a weapon.”
He is planning to provide documents to the court that he thinks prove Ms. Donegan’s intent was malicious. Chief among them are since-deleted tweets, like:
On Oct. 26, 2017, she tweeted: “I like the witch hunt but I love that it happened in October.” The next day she wrote: “Small, practical step to limit sex harassment: Don’t employ any men.”
On Nov. 15, she wrote about the Paris Review editor whose name was on the list: “As if both of those things weren’t obvious already, I’m interested in Lorin Stein and my DMs are open.” Then, when The New York Times published an article about the resignation of Mr. Stein, who apologized for inappropriate behavior, she tweeted the article with an invitation: “champagne anyone.”
That’s the straightforward part.
The new part is that this is a case being brought against a mostly anonymous group who created an anonymous list containing potentially defamatory statements.
I asked Floyd Abrams, a leading First Amendment expert, about this case, and he said he had never seen one like it. Andrew T. Miltenberg, Stephen Elliott’s attorney, admits he’s never brought one like it.
That’s not to say that Mr. Miltenberg is new to defending men in sexual assault cases. He is famous for it. He defended Paul Nungesser, a Columbia student who was accused of rape by Emma Sulkowicz and then made the subject of her performance art piece. Mr. Miltenberg won a major settlement against the school.
He estimates that he currently has more than three dozen cases stemming from sexual assault charges, including one being brought by the football player Keith Mumphery against Michigan State, but that Mr. Elliott’s is the first where he’s taken on anonymous accusers.
“I’ve had cases where we know what the allegations are and we know who said them. None of that is true here,” he said. “The intersection between the internet and allegations like this and anonymity is very dangerous place to be. There’s no protection for the accused. It’s the perfect way to assassinate someone’s character without having to prove anything.”
The other thing that sets this case apart is that it seems likely to snowball — perhaps more than Mr. Miltenberg appreciated when he took it on.
At first, Mr. Miltenberg told me that he expected 15 to 20 women to be identified as Jane Does once they got the “underlying metadata” — as in anything from IP addresses to emails — in discovery. (That is, assuming Google cooperates; a spokesperson told Mashable that the company would “oppose any attempt by Mr. Elliott to obtain information about this document from us.”)
...In the case of Stephen Elliott it is impossible to say almost anything at all about the allegation. There is no named accuser. There is no night in question. There aren’t even contending memories. There is nothing other than what’s written in the cell of that spreadsheet.
But something that Ms. Siegel wrote in her essay struck me as one plausible explanation: “What happened is that years of behaving badly (not criminally) caught up to him."
“There’s a lot of anger out there about me,” Mr. Elliott said. “That’s the level of anger that could produce a malicious allegation — especially when it’s an anonymous list. I don’t like this guy. So I put his name on the list, throw in a TV dinner, watch ‘The Wire’ and forget about it.”
That rage came pouring out on Thursday evening after news of the lawsuit broke, including from many prominent editors and writers. Isaac Fitzgerald, who was a previous managing editor of the The Rumpus, wrote on Twitter that the lawsuit was “an outrageous act of violence against Moira first and foremost, as well as everyone who contributed to the list or found any measure of solidarity or hope or comfort or usefulness in it.” A GoFundMe to cover Ms. Donegan’s legal fees quickly went up and by Saturday morning more than $86,000 had been donated.
People are right to be concerned that the case could be used to stifle women’s speech. A lawsuit can be a weapon. But so can a list. And none of the reactions seemed to address what Mr. Elliott’s lawsuit is about: His claim that he has been falsely accused of rape.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opin ... collection
Her stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/by/bari-weiss