She created a document to warn women of sexual harassers. It' haunted her ever since.

She created a document to warn women of sexual harassers. It’s haunted her ever since.

by Margaret Sullivan April 22





Moira Donegan readily admits that she didn’t know what was coming last fall when she briefly posted a crowdsourced document identifying dozens of men in the publishing industry who reportedly had sexually harassed or assaulted women. “I was naive,” the former New Republic staffer told me by email last week. Donegan, who is 28, intended the shareable spreadsheet — titled “Sh---y Media Men” — to be circulated privately as a warning system among a fairly small group of women. It would be a digital version of the way a woman might advise her friends to stay away from someone because he’s a creep, or far worse.

Almost immediately, it went viral, and after only 12 hours, Donegan took it down. But in the digital age, it lived on.So did the repercussions.Some of the prominent men it identified were fired or disciplined after their employers did internal investigations. Among them: literary critic Leon Wieseltier at the Atlantic and Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review. (Wieseltier apologized; Stein acknowledged disrespectful behavior.)

. . . . .



Donegan explained, months ago, her original intention. “The anonymous, crowd-sourced document was a first attempt at solving what has seemed like an in­trac­table problem: how women can protect ourselves from sexual harassment and assault,” Donegan in January wrote in the Cut, an online subset of New York. She identified herself as the creator of the spreadsheet in that piece because she had reason to believe, after receiving questions from a magazine fact-checker, that Roiphe’s piece was going to name her. (Roiphe has contested that.) In her exchange with me, Donegan further explained her reasoning: “Existing reporting channels too often serve to protect the accused, disappear complaints, and further punish women for coming forward.”

Was the spreadsheet unfair to the named men when the contributing women wanted anonymity? Has the whole thing gone too far? I’ll put myself squarely on Team Donegan. Yes, she was naive about keeping her document circulating quietly as a warning mechanism. But her intentions were righteous and her fears well-founded about what often happens to women who report their truths. I know of no cases in which men were disciplined solely because of their appearance on the spreadsheet. If it forced employers to look into long-standing situations and take action, so be it. If it caused a great many men to be put on guard — and hence more respectful in their dealings with female colleagues — that’s all to the good.

. . . .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/she-created-a-document-to-warn-women-of-sexual-harassers-its-haunted-her-ever-since/2018/04/20/a39f9fa8-44a0-11e8-8569-26fda6b404c7_story.html?utm_term=.c3c5c536b8de