"The Two Expat Bros Who Terrorized Women Correspondents in Moscow"

[lapucelle]

"There’s more than one way to harass women. A raft of men in recent weeks have paid for accusations of sexual harassment with their companies, their jobs, their plum political posts. But one point has been overlooked in the scandals: Men can be belittling, cruel and deeply damaging without demanding sex. (Try sloughing off heaps of contempt with your self-esteem intact.) We have no consensus — and hardly any discussion — about how we should treat behaviors that are misogynist and bullying but fall short of breaking the law.

Twenty years ago, when I was a Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, two Americans named Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames ran an English-language tabloid in the Russian capital called the eXile. They portrayed themselves as swashbuckling parodists, unbound by the conventions of mainstream journalism, exposing Westerners who were cynically profiting from the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.

A better description is this: The eXile was juvenile, stunt-obsessed and pornographic, titillating for high school boys. It is back in the news because Taibbi just wrote a new book, and interviewers are asking him why he and Ames acted so boorishly back then. The eXile’s distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted me."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-two-expat-bros-who-terrorized-women-correspondents-in-moscow/2017/12/15/91ff338c-ca3c-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html?utm_term=.1b6fa04e5675

[4now]

1. Matt Taibbi is a hate filled misogynist

and why Rolling Stone continues to employ him is beyond me.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. The two of them were unapologetic monsters.

Pretending it was all an act is simply disingenuous.

[Nevernose]

3. I was never harassed by Matt Taibbi

That’s a direct quote. Believe the women.

He did say some misogynistic shit twenty years ago and was mean to an American reporter, but there is far more to this story.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/the-destruction-of-matt-taibbi.html

[bettyellen]

4. yeah, they just had their careers trashed by assholes....

No big deal.

[kcr]

5. Walker Bragman?

Hahahahahaha

[lapucelle]

8. Bragboy...

dumped by Salon (along with HA-HA), now a cub reporter at Paste, still grinding the same ax. Next stop...National Enquirer.

[kcr]

16. Yes. The two of them are birds of a feather.

I hope Salon dumping them is a step toward improvement. I don't know if they'll ever get back to their prime, but it's something.

[lapucelle]

6. I believe victim Kathy Lally of the Washington Post,

the reporter who wrote the article I linked to. She was Ames' and Taibi's target and victim. Here's Ms. Lally's reaction to discovering that she was a "character" in what Taibbi and Ames conveniently choose to characterize 18 years later as a "work of fiction" rather than as the memoir it actually is according to its publisher:

"When “The eXile: Sex, Drugs and Libel in the New Russia” came out, the memoir had a few more surprises in store. 'We dragged . . . Lally’s charred [corpse] through the dust-and-fly-infested streets of our newspaper for all to have a laugh,' Ames wrote. In the most unexpected anecdote, Taibbi said that another reporter, Fred Weir, described in great detail how the eXile had made me cry. 'Good!' Taibbi describes himself shouting. I was aware of Weir; probably we had bumped into each other at news conferences. But I didn’t know him. I couldn’t imagine why I would ever have wept in front of him."

Why anyone would selectively take the word of a Taibi apologist (who actively encouraged liberals to vote Trump over Clinton) at an online rag like Paste over the word of a WaPo reporter who was NAMED and gleefully victimized by Taibi and Ames in the memoir itself is beyond comprehension.

https://www.salon.com/2016/04/29/a_liberal_case_for_donald_trump_the_lesser_of_two_evils_is_not_at_all_clear_in_2016/?platform=hootsuite

[SunSeeker]

11. Why would anyone indeed.

[brer cat]

12. So if a couple of women say he didn't harass them,

then they didn't harass anyone? That should get every person accused off the hook. Nicely done!

[Nevernose]

13. Its the the women from the book

[lapucelle]

14. Kathy Lally is mentioned by name in the book.

She is a "woman in the book".

[mcar]

7. Taibbi was a grown man when he did this

An apology isn't even close to good enough.

[SunSeeker]

9. K & R for exposure.

[sheshe2]

10. Oh...

The old... boys will be boys, wink wink nudge nudge.

Or as donnie likes to say...locker room talk.

[lapucelle]

15. Melania called it "the dirty boy talk", as if she's heard it before.

[ehrnst]

17. Not surprised at all, unfortunately. (nt)

[dsc]

18. In terms of journalism their excuse is worse than

if it were true. What their excuse amounts to is that they published a pack of lies and called it the truth. That should disturb anyone who cares about journalism.