Even in the colourful environs of New Orleans, Stephen Elliott's car stood out: a bright pink Honda hatchback with a panda motif on the doors and hood. But on a January morning in 2019, people who walked past the vehicle were doing double takes for a different reason: a single word had been painted in huge, straggly black letters on the hood, doors and rear hatch: “Rapist”.
To Elliott, this incident didn't come as a complete surprise: it was the second time his property had been subjected to vandalism in three months. In October of the previous year, someone had sprayed the word “SCUM” across the facade of his house.
In both cases, the perpetrator’s identity was a mystery, but his or her motivations were not. Elliott had been accused of rape in 2017, in an entry on the now-notorious Shitty Media Men list — a Google document of crowd-sourced, anonymous allegations of bad behaviour. The apparent crimes were usually (but not always) sexual. The list triggered investigations into the conduct of various male professionals in the media world, including The Atlantic’s Leon Wieseltier, who was fired afterwards, and The Paris Review’s Lorin Stein, who resigned. Elliott, who in addition to the rape allegation was accused of sexual harassment, coercion, and unsolicited invitations to his apartment, says that his agent dropped him after he was named, and that friends and professional opportunities alike suddenly disappeared. At the time the list emerged he had been hoping to launch a career as a screenwriter (his memoir, The Adderall Diaries, had been recently made into a film starring James Franco). His move to New Orleans came after he concluded that this was no longer possible, that he needed a fresh start.
Elliott isn’t the only man to maintain that the allegations against him are false. "I didn’t do what I’m accused of on the list. But obviously I wronged somebody to the point that they want to mess with my life," one anonymous man told The Cut in 2018. But in a world where the accused talk about quietly moving on from the list as an act of feminist solidarity — in that man's words, "taking one for the team" — Elliott is alone in his relentless desire to clear his name.
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One of his earliest attempts came in the form of an essay in Quillette titled "How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life", which was published in September 2018. The response was heated. But it was the lawsuit he filed a year later, just before the statute of limitations for such a case expired, that caused the biggest uproar — maybe even more so than the list itself. "Stephen Elliott Continues to Be a Shitty Media Man," read one representative headline. It was not the alleged rape, but the news that he was suing the list’s creator, Moira Donegan, for defamation, that triggered the vandalism to Elliott’s home and car.
Elliott reported those incidents to the police, a fact he tells me he recently shared with Lila Shapiro, a journalist from New York Magazine who was writing a five-year retrospective on all things Shitty Media Man. But when that story was published last week, there was no mention of the vandalism. Rather than bringing readers up-to-date, the story dwelled deeply on the circumstances surrounding the original creation of the list — and in Elliott's case, assembled prior reporting, previously published accounts, and testimonials from his former friends and colleagues to paint a picture of him as a man with a long, fraught history of overfamiliar, boundary-challenging behaviour.
Elliott was the kind of colleague who would hold your hand, climb into your lap, overshare about his sex life and ask impertinent questions about yours, oblivious to how uncomfortable he was making you. He doesn't dispute this — "I can be needy, I can be clingy," he tells me, though he believes that there's some context missing: "The cues I misread were more like, I thought we were friends. It’s never a sexual situation." But this is the thrust of the piece, more or less: in choosing to focus on Elliott's personality, his way of moving through the world, it suggests that we can elide the problem of his having been accused of a crime that not even his fiercest detractors actually seem to believe he committed.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="More from this author" author="Kat Rosenfield"]https://staging.unherd.com/2022/07/the-sex-work-lobby-exploits-strippers/[/su_unherd_related]
Full disclosure: Elliott and I have several friends in common, and my husband and I met him once for a drink near his home in New Orleans when we were there in 2019. I found him appealingly guileless, but I also did not struggle to understand why some people don’t; Elliott is notoriously open about the topics most people keep under wraps, and it's not hard to see how that frank vulnerability could seem, or be, manipulative under the proper circumstances. (The New York Magazine piece includes a quote from memoirist Elissa Bassist, who describes failing to set firm boundaries with Elliott because "I was so afraid of hurting his delicate feelings".) Even his defence against the allegation that he raped someone is kind of a kinky overshare: where other men on the list described racking their brains to figure out which sexual encounter might have spawned the accusation, which woman had come to see what happened as nonconsensual, Elliott says he has no such back catalogue of encounters to pore over because he doesn’t have penetrative sex with women.
That, he tells me, is what makes the framing of this story so frustrating. A woman who felt uncomfortable about Elliott's over-familiar behaviour "has a right to her interpretation. What you feel about what happened, it’s not invalid. It’s not really objective," he says. "What is objective is rape."
But this is what’s so strange about this case: not that Elliott’s sexual history makes the rape allegation implausible, but that nobody seems to care. Hence the focus on his documented history of making women uncomfortable, which is supposed to be understood as different in degree but not in kind from the felony of which he’d been accused. No charges were ever brought against him, and no other women alleging rape or even sexual misconduct ever came forward, anonymously or otherwise. As novelist Claire Vay Watkins said: “Stephen Elliott did not rape me, did not attempt to rape me. I am not anywhere close to implying that he did. I am saying a sexist negation, a refusal to acknowledge a female writer as a writer, as a peer, as a person, is of a piece with sexual entitlement.” It’s a neat rhetorical trick: in one breath, Watkins emphatically does not accuse Elliott of raping her, while also emphatically suggesting that he's the type of guy who would.
The New York Magazine piece seems to confirm this with a previously unpublished and fairly shocking allegation from a woman identified as R.D., who said that when she walked into a writing class hosted by Elliott, he “stopped the class and dove at me and threw his face into my tits and started moaning”.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Lionel Shriver"]https://staging.unherd.com/2022/10/metoo-lost-me-the-love-of-my-life/[/su_unherd_related]
Elliott has been generally candid since his cancellation about when and how he’s crossed the line with women: yes, he was pushy about asking to sleep in women’s beds. Yes, he put his hands in people’s pockets. But this, he says, categorically did not happen — and he also says something else: “Does that even sound plausible to you?”
He has a point: the story is outrageous. But not only that, it's the one testimonial against Elliott that genuinely supports the conflation of a creepy person with a rapey one. Amid multiple reports of Elliott wheedling and whining to sleep in women’s beds (but then relenting, albeit poutingly, when told no), here was a legitimate instance of nonconsensual sexual contact, an incident that seemed to truly bridge the gap between “boundary challenged” and “violent felony committed”.
In other MeToo stories, this is where you would often see a quick journalistic aside: that another member of the class remembered witnessing this incident, or that R.D. told a friend about it at the time. Corroboration lends credibility, especially when the accused flatly denies it. But the this story contains no such note, and here’s where things get weird: Elliott says that not only is this story false, but that the accuser (whose identity he learned during fact checking) is someone with whom he had a multi-year sexual relationship. He also says that the woman in question violated him by carving the word “owned” into one of his buttocks with a needle while he was tied up and either blindfolded or wearing a hood, he isn’t sure which. (A friend of Elliott’s from the BDSM scene confirmed to me that he told her about the ass-carving incident several years ago during a conversation about his experiences as a submissive. R.D. did not respond to a request for comment. Shapiro declined to answer questions about her reporting process via email.)
Of course, none of this is to say definitively that Elliott didn't abruptly halt a writing class to molest a newly-arrived student, nor can we know for certain that said student later carved the word "owned" on Elliott's rear end. The only thing clear from these conflicting accounts is that the truth, buried as it is in a miasma of old grudges, kinky sex, and a transformative reckoning with the norms that govern relationships between men and women, is extremely complicated. But this is what’s striking about the Shitty Media Men list — and to a certain extent, the coverage of it ever since: it not only eschews nuance, but displays a practiced incuriosity as to what the truth might be. And when questions arise as to the veracity of the list, or the fraught implications of making it, the response is to downplay its seriousness until it sounds less like a groundbreaking movement for social justice and more like something a bunch of girls did at a slumber party. “That first night? It was the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my life,” says one woman quoted in the New York Magazine piece.
[su_unherd_related fttitle="Suggested reading" author="Ann Manov"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/11/the-importance-of-complicated-sex/[/su_unherd_related]
Illuminated here is the fundamental tension at the heart of MeToo: it is very difficult to demand that sexual assault be taken seriously, but simultaneously insist that false allegations thereof are no big deal. At the peak of the movement, it was not unusual to hear that it was “worth it” for a few innocent men to be ruined for the sake of social progress. In Elliott’s case, there’s also a heavy element of victim blaming: a representative tweet from literary influencer Maris Kreisman expressed that it was “infuriating but also mildly fun to watch Stephen Elliott place blame on everyone but himself”, as though being falsely accused of a serious crime were simply the natural, even entertaining, outcome of having a difficult personality. And indeed, it’s hard to imagine any other criminal allegation being treated this way, with the accused expected to fall on the sword for the sake of the greater good, guilty or not.
There's something about this that recalls the famous scene in the movie The Fugitive, where Richard Kimball, played by Harrison Ford, is cornered at the precipice of the Cheoah Dam. He turns, pleading, desperate: “I didn’t kill my wife,” he shouts.
His pursuer replies, “I don’t care.”
That’s when Kimball jumps, but it’s not the leap that’s shocking; it’s the apathy that precedes it. The notion that innocence doesn’t matter, that the truth doesn’t matter. Stephen Elliott isn’t accused of murder, but there are nevertheless echoes of that same apathy in the public exhortations — of critics, of former friends, even of fellow accused men — to just stop fighting, already. To accept the rape accusation as a fair cop for all the discomfort he might have caused. To “conduct yourself with grace in the court of life”, as one former colleague puts it, “rather than the court of law”.
But for whatever it gets him (and it’s not likely to be much), Elliott's determination remains a thorn in the side of that satisfying narrative about women coming together to take down the bad men once and for all. The idea that there should be serious consequences for serious crimes — and by extension, serious repercussions in the event that an accusation is made falsely or frivolously — isn't just alarming, but a buzzkill. The idea of wielding one's power responsibly, and being held accountable when you don't, is not part of the patriarchy-smashing vibe we're trying to cultivate, here. And on this front, it’s impossible not to notice the role reversal, and the parallels, between this and how women have long suffered for reporting sexual harassment.
The Shitty Media Men list might have been the outrage du jour, but it wasn’t until Elliott filed his lawsuit that people really got angry. Why did he have to ruin the fun? Why couldn’t he just take a joke? Why, in the age of MeToo, are you taking accusations of sexual assault so seriously?
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SubscribeJust as men have in the past behaved badly and got away with it because the women can’t prove the fact adequately to bring them to book so now there seems to be a compensating movement to allow women to behave badly by libellous accusations against men without repercussions. When men don’t go along with it and attempt to challenge the facts as happened with Amber Herd and in this Stephen Elliott case the outrage seems to be directed against men for challenging the narrative and requiring the accusations be proved.
It seems to be all part of the woke contempt for provable facts. Allegations can be thrown by a member of the victim class that even when demonstrably false do little to diminish the force of the accusations on the grounds that they are the victim’s truth. Weird behaviour can be elided into rape or speculation about skin colour into racism and that is fine if it is made against one of the supposed privileged class.
“Just as men have in the past behaved badly and got away with it ”
What was this bad behaviour that we keep reading about? Dying by the millions in war after war, while the women stated safe in their homes? Working in brutal, unsafe industries or occupations to feed and house their families? Its interesting how women, while going on and on about awful men, are not very keen on any of those perks of the patriarchy – not very keen on extending conscription to women, being breadwinners or working in truck transport or oil rigs, are they?
And it’s also worth noting that most of the reasons women are safer than 5000 years back, is due to men. Men invented the technologies that improved female health outcomes and reduced the burden of household work, men introduced laws criminalising violence against women and formed the police forces that enforced those laws.
The funniest thing here? The women whining about unfounded metoo allegations actually rely on male CEOs and leaders to believe their hysterics and throw innocent men under the bus with no evidence. After all, if you #believe all women#, as you supposedly should (**) men control the world.
** Unless it’s an allegation against a Democrat presidential candidate, of course
That was a very defensive reply, that hints at insecurity on your part to my eyes.
I thought it was obvious what behaviour the poster was referring to, and to pretend it never happened simply because men have had it worse in other aspects of life seems slightly pathetic
Quite agree.
“…and to pretend it never happened simply because men have had it worse in other aspects of life seems slightly pathetic”
You’re missing the important point that #meToo’s defence against the the charge that it should be held accountable is based on the wider ideology of opposing patriarchal oppression. It is in other words a political position, and that means that Samir’s comment is wholly defensible, and really can’t be criticised on the basis you’re attempting.
Of course I can criticise it. He’s implying that the original post about men abusing their position is wrong because men had it hard in the past. Most people who are slightly more nuanced can see that yes some men did have it hard in the past, and that some men also abused their power in their treatment of women. I’m quite capable of believing that the way metoo essentially condemned men as guilty simply by an accusation is morally wrong, but that also some men are dangerous sexual predators.
That is true. And some women – actually more than a few – are dangerous sexual liars.
You lost your point the second you said pathetic. I think your blinkered mind can’t fathom what he was saying. I pity your intellectual limitations.
Stop it. You’re no nickel psychiatrist.
He’s right on the money. If they read a little history, the Pound Me, Too (#MeToo) founders would have realized that women’s proclivity to falsely accuse men has been understood and accounted-for for millennia. Although probably not a good example, Islam’s weighting of a woman’s testimony half that of a man’s is not just by accident.
Most of what you say I would not disagree with as is usually the case when you post.
However, I did think it clear that the bad behaviour by men complained of was in the context of the article about rape and sexual assault and there can be no doubt that many men have got away with these because there was insufficient corroboration beyond the woman’s word to result in a conviction or even for the claim to proceed to Court. That is inevitable so long as we require (as we should) that a jury is satisfied that such an assault took place as sex is something that is normally mutually sought and enjoyed and some additional evidence would rightly be required to establish that this was not the case beyond the mere assertion of the supposed victim.
In this sense your comments do not appear to be germane to or in refutation of the sentence you quote.
Despite the difficulty that women often find themselves in proving that they have been sexually assaulted to the satisfaction of a jury, the establishment of an Internet forum for women to make unsupported allegations that are not subject to proper scrutiny but which can result in social and professional ostracism of the man is a throughly undesirable development. It is entirely right that men should have recourse to the law to clear their names of any such false charges and the idea that women should be shielded from this by angry denunciation is a piece of woke absurdity.
This is the inevitable conclusion of identity politics. The casual nature of metoo to apply broad brush allegations against men with seemingly no requirement for evidence using patriarchy theory as its underlying thesis will naturally result in that kind of response.
The emergent consequence is inevitable division.
It is worse than hat, Andrew. No sane man considers approaching a woman these days, and that alone will bring a sad end (in reproductive terms) to the shit-show of unaccountability masked as “feminism”. Let’s hope that other cultures around the world (the ones escaping this suicidal drive) will see it for what it is.
I never refer to feminism without the qualifier, “toxic.”
The problem is that metoo and it’s supporters have zero interest in sexual assault in the conventional sense – involving physical or mental coercion or grooming of young girls. If anything, the most vociferous female supporters of this movement coincide with those who do their best to defend the grooming gangs or refuse to pinpoint high crime rates against women by “victim groups” in Detroit or Chicago.
So which rapes are we talking about, where as you say “many men have got away” and is the focus for metoo?
Well, consider the following cases of “rape” where the rapist used to “get away”:
– Victim willingly goes to a party, gets drunk, sleeps willingly with someone equally drunk and decides to regret the next morning
– Victim sleeps with a film producer, or CEO, goes around freely with the “rapist” in exchange for career benefits and then discovers was “raped” a few years later.
– Victim sleeps with or exchanges naughty text messages with college professor, continues sleeping and communicating normally with the prof for months – before discovering years later it was “rape”
– Victim in an army unit beats up other soldiers in a rage, and when about to be punished recalls being “raped” on a night when multiple other soldiers were sleeping in the same tent.
All of the above were real or close to real incidents of “rape”.
Here is the catch though.
Imagine all of those “victims” were white males.
What do you think would happen if and when they came forward with their stories of “rape”?
The identitareans in general have refined hypocrisy and double standards to god-like levels.
It’s hardly surprising when the underlying ideology is glued together by contradictions.
The same as happens when the victims are women, no matter their colour?
Unfortunately, the idea that ‘sex is something that is normally mutually sought and enjoyed’ is very much confined to the beliefs and practices of a small section of both time and culture. Outside our little bubble, sex has always been, and still is, regarded as the right of men and the lot of women, a social order predicated on the generally superior physical strength of men.
That being the case, it is a tragedy to see dishonest women choosing to destroy a man’s reputation and life with blatant disregard for what is factually true.
Utter rot! In which century do you believe that men have had it so much harder than women?
Bad behaviour is bad behaviour. Rape is rape. False allegations are false allegations. But a whine like this is about trying to position oneself as a member of a victim class. You too? Really?
Victim’s occupation: Victim
Apparently you can now be “accused” of offering an unsolicited invitation to come to your home. How about an unsolicited invitation to have a drink, or to go out for dinner? I’m amazed that people manage to arrange dates at all these days.
That’s exactly what I thought. Invitations are nearly always unsolicited, but importantly, invitations can always be refused. I suppose that if a person keeps inviting you and you’ve made clear that you want nothing to do with that person then it borders on harassment, but this didn’t seem to be the scenario being described.
Most marriages have started with some unsolicited invitation from the man.
I suppose woke men are now expected to sit demurely casting brief shy glances at the objects of their affection hoping they might be noticed and that the empowered woman deign to make some unsolicited suggestion that could lead to a sexual encounter after which they should sit by the phone hoping to be called if their performance was adequate.
No wonder there are apparently a lot of incels if unsolicited invitations are classified as equivalent to sexual assault.
Young men ought to know by now that many women are “woke in the streets, gender roles in the sheets” to coin a phrase. This is because women follow the woke rules for social protection and professional advancement. But of course women actually want men to be rebellious and objective. They want to be led away from that all that girlish subjectivity and conformity. In short women, even those who work in media, academia or non-profits, still want a man to be a man. So a man who stands up to woke rules and fantasies will be recognized at once to be masculine and, therefore, attractive.
Meanwhile other men, especially the young and inexperienced, being fearful of the obvious consequences of confronting female subjectivity, such as social ostracism or professional cancellation, do as you say and to a greater or lesser degree become “incels.” Or many calculate that it’s just not worth the trouble to demonstrate masculinity for women who have no idea what that is and what it’s worth. After all children are taught that history is nothing more than a series of oppressions caused by straight white men.
Other men recognize subjective woke spaces as fertile ground for indulging their deviant behavior among naive if not brainwashed women, spaces I might add where there simply aren’t any masculine men around who would otherwise put a stop to the woke man’s escapades.
Men in leadership roles elsewhere, who are more likely to be targets of a MeToo plot, than to be rapists, long ago decided not to meet alone with women in the workplace and so on. Behavior which of course women deride, as it negates one of their strategies.
Why is it men think they know what women want? Do any of you actually ask a woman what she wants rather than surmising? When we, my other half and I, got together 37 years ago, it was by having conversations about all sorts of things including liking other people, sex and what boundaries we both had. It must have worked as we are still together. Maybe if more people had these discussions/conversations, more couples would get together and stay together?
Ever heard of lying?
When Brett Kavanaugh was accused of running a college rape gang, a local radio guy was all in, echoing the accusations as indisputable. I argued that, aside from being ludicrously implausible, there was zero evidence. The radio guy said that, as the father of three daughters, he was compelled to “believe all women”, the catch phrase of the day. I said “So, if you gave one of your daughter’s friends a ride home after a sleepover and she then publicly accused you of groping her, should everyone, including your employer, believe her?” He stopped talking to me after that.
Is there a Shtty Media Woman equivalent? Thought not.
Women being raped in Ukraine and brave women being shot and beaten up by mad mullahs in Iran.
Meantime, white western feminists fulminate about micro-aggressions, bad sex regret, and manspreading on the tube.
Am I missing something? Don’t black western feminists fulminate about the same things? I thought black women were supposed to be particularly exercised by micro-aggressions.
It doesn’t matter. Just as it doesn’t matter that women can’t have penises, or that George Floyd wasn’t murdered, or that there’s no such thing as ‘free movement of labour’, or that you can’t feed five thousand people with five loaves and two fishes. These are Symbolic Truths. The Age of Enlightenment is over.
Got that?
Do people often solicit invitations? What a bizarre phrase.
“Illuminated here is the fundamental tension at the heart of MeToo: it is very difficult to demand that sexual assault be taken seriously, but simultaneously insist that false allegations thereof are no big deal.”
It really says something that even nowadays, in this supposedly kinder, gentler world we’re constantly told we inhabit, that this actually needs to be explained.
False allegations are a massive big deal; not only for the men falsely accused, but for any woman who was actually assaulted, because it puts into the jury’s mind that false accusations are common. Anyone who thinks differently needs to explain to me, in words of one syllable, why it is not harmful.
It is rather bizarre.
And one more point to the two you have already made is this: were the allegations not harmful, they wouldn’t be made due to them not accomplishing anything.
Whereas I do feel for those women who have never been able to get any justice for sexual harassment in the past, this type of behaviour is not acceptable. These are un-proven accusations which can destroy a man’s life, maybe he is guilty, who knows? It also gives a forum for deliberately false allegations by anyone with a grudge e.g. an angry ex-wife. It doesn’t even need to be a woman; it could be a business rival or cuckolded husband. If someone has been assaulted the only way forward is to report it to the proper authorities. It can always be difficult, often it is a “he said she said” situation, but there is no other fair way that I can see. Perhaps we should think about simply ensuring that we are not alone with a member of the opposite sex, that way women are not assaulted and men not falsely accused – back to chaperons.
I do find it a little strange that this guy shares information about his sex life with women; I wouldn’t do so with a man (I probably wouldn’t with a woman, either) no matter how friendly I was with him. But perhaps I just old-fashioned that way, and this is acceptable behaviour nowadays.
Could everybody *PLEASE* stop saying ‘sexual assault’ when they clearly mean ‘rape’?
By law, ‘sexual assault’ means everything down to an unwanted pat on the bum (see here) , and is *not* in any way a serious crime. The confusion is often used as, effectively, a feminist argument. Since sexual assault is quite common (true), and rape is very serious (true), confusing the two gives a false impression that rape is much more common than it really is.
Thank you Kat Rosenfield for another superb article: well written, nuanced thought and tackling a difficult subject.
This brings to mind the saying that women act on feelings, not facts.
Genuine rape victims suffer because too many women lie about rape.
The Believe All Women movement suffers because women lie about rape.
Women are too eager for vengeance and too committed to misandry.
Maybe some nuance? ‘Some women’ is not the same as ‘women’.
Accusing all women of misandry might risk you being accused of misogyny.
This story makes me think of the problem of ‘revenge porn’ – some women seem to be using this ‘list’ in the same spirit as some angry men are sharing intimate images of ex partners.
Stephen Elliott and Jacob Appelbaum have a lot in common w/ Mr. Cap’n Jack Sparrow.
Details on Appelbaum’s situation.
So this guy talks about sex right out of the gate. OK, whatever.
And if I ran into a woman who did the same, I would run away after the first couple minutes of meeting her. Just a little too loopy for my taste and, frankly, a waste of my time; thank you very much.
I think my wife had (has) it right: she does not need a man and so got a half decent one. And did not have to “kiss too many frogs” along the way either.
And the same sort of thing held true for me: I knew how to masturbate to fulfill a young man’s natural urges and so was just as happy to head home if I ran into a nut bar or a sane women who just wasn’t into me.
Maybe I am missing something, but it doesn’t seem all that complicated.
“So this guy talks about sex right out of the gate. OK, whatever.”
“I knew how to masturbate”
Missing something?
On a related, but important, matter: what’s so admirable about a woman who “does not need a man” (or vice versa)? Interdependence is a defining feature of every social species. Even autistic people need other people. Everyone needs to be needed. Those who don’t feel needed, whether by other individuals or by society as a whole, are in big trouble. And we all pay the price in one way or another.