Katie Roiphe, Moira Donegan, and What We Can Learn From Twitter Mob Mentality

The “Shitty Media Men” list that came into a short-lived existence during the Harvey Weinstein awakening enjoyed a second life of sorts Tuesday and Wednesday, in the form of a viral controversy about its creator and a pending magazine story about the #MeToo movement. The result is that we now know the creator of the list—journalist Moira Donegan wrote a piece for The Cut Wednesday night identifying herself—but the whole controversy creates as many questions as it answers.

On Tuesday, N+1 editor Dayna Tortorici tweeted that a magazine writer was about to reveal who’d begun the list—a shared Google Doc of reputedly predatory, or at least creepy, male writers and editors, most of whom are based in New York, and several of whom have been fired since their names appeared on the unpublished and unvetted and unsigned, but very powerful, list. The rumor was rabidly retweeted, and, in the wake of speculation (and later confirmation) that the writer in question was contrarian feminist Katie Roiphe and the publication Harper’s, a campaign began to pay journalists to pull their stories from the prestigious print publication.

Roiphe is known for her inconveniently clear-eyed takedown of campus sex panic, almost a quarter century ago. As someone attuned to the flaws in its logic, she’s the digital-age feminist revival’s perfect enemy. And for Nicole Cliffe, founder and editor of the erstwhile humor blog The Toast, Roiphe’s rumored outing of the list-maker meant an opportunity for flashy, viral, high-ticket internet activism:


The New York Times reported in the lede of its story on the scandal that “five were said to have pulled” their stories, apparently taking up Cliffe’s offer. Cliffe had committed to pay $19,000, the Times reported. Either those five who were “said to have pulled” changed their minds, or they were actually pulling a pretty solid scam. Because, according to Harper’s vice president for public relations Giulia Melucci—who emailed with THE WEEKLY STANDARD Wednesday—exactly none of Harper’s writers had reclaimed their copy in protest. “No writers pulled their stories,” Melucci said.

Roiphe’s statement to the media likewise contradicted the version of events that had spread for the first half of the week: “I am looking forward to talking about what is actually in the piece when it actually comes out. I am not ‘outing’ anyone. I have to say it’s a little disturbing that anyone besides Trump views Twitter as a reliable news source,” her statement read. And she told the Washington Post, “I am not naming anyone as participating in any way in the list.”

She’d never intended to out Donegan, she claims. But, the Times story describes an email exchange between a Harper’s fact-checker and Donegan, which Donegan’s essay corroborates: The fact-checker told Donegan that Roiphe would name her in the piece. This fact-checker’s email inspired that first tweet from Dayna Tortorici. In fact, a Twitter forensics analyst could probably trace the precise eruptions of indignation and reactive outrage back to Donegan, a writer for n+1. Instead she outed herself Wednesday in New York magazine’s blog The Cut:

This escalated when I learned Katie Roiphe would be publishing my name in a forthcoming piece in Harper’s magazine. In early December, Roiphe had emailed me 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. I declined and heard nothing more from Roiphe or Harper’s until I received an email from a fact checker with questions about Roiphe’s piece. “Katie identifies you as a woman widely believed to be one of the creators of the Shitty Men in Media List,” the fact checker wrote. “Were you involved in creating the list? If not, how would you respond to this allegation?”

“The experience of making the spreadsheet has shown me that it is still explosive, radical, and productively dangerous for women to say what we mean,” Donegan later writes.

Her point, timely and devastating, arguably also applies to an embattled contrarian like Roiphe—or at least, it describes an experience the embattled contrarian writer would probably also recognize.

Donegan’s account is forthright and well-reasoned. She did not realize the document would go as viral as it did, and her attempts to address the problems of anonymous claims were overshadowed by the overwhelming response to the document, and subsequent backlash. Her honesty and introspection demonstrate more bravery than the indignant Twitter mob that rose to protect her.

And yet, after all this, “We don’t know what actually happened,” Al Tompkins, a media analyst at Poynter, reminded me. We don’t know exactly what Roiphe planned to report, however pointed the fact-checker’s email to Donegan was, per two sources: the Times and Donegan herself. Or whether Roiphe changed her mind in the wake of the controversy. And we don’t know whether any Harper’s writers actually took up Cliffe’s offer. What we do know is that Roiphe’s reporting got a lot of free publicity—thanks to which we now know, for better or worse, that Donegan started the spreadsheet. And thanks to Donegan’s essay, which is very good and well worth your time, we know in her own words why.

We also know that Nicole Cliffe said she’d pay writers to pull their copy, leveraging her hold on a Twitter mob and her apparent wealth to punish a publication and try to protect Donegan from doxxing. However righteous this second underlying goal, it’s a disturbingly repressive means—particularly so within a movement that’s powerfully proven the value of reported fact compared to a long-whispered rumor.

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