Megan Greenwell is an Abuser
After four-plus years of torture, I'm tired of waiting in vain for journalists to actually do their job, or for a malicious careerist to show mercy. It's time for her to do some explaining for once.
Megan Greenwell is the former editor-in-chief of Deadspin, the former editor of Wired.com, a former editor at New York Magazine, a former editor at ESPN the Magazine, a former staff writer at The Washington Post, and a graduate of Columbia University. If her Twitter bio is to be believed, she currently teaches sports journalism at Syracuse, and serves as the co-director of a journalism seminar at Princeton. Pretty impressive for someone under 40!
Megan and I worked in the same small suburban bureau for The Washington Post for about a year and a half, from early-ish 2006 to late-ish 2007. Sorry if I don't have the exact dates; it was a long-ass time ago. She was the only colleague there who ever invited me to an event outside the office, but she's also the only one I had any animosity with. So when, much to my dismay, I found myself accused of criminal-level charges (stalking, physical intimidation, and harassment) on the anonymously compiled and almost entirely unvetted Shitty Media Men List, along with the demonstrably false footnote that there was an HR file at The Post backing this up, well, it seemed safe to assume it could have only come from her - or some other person she played telephone with in media industry backchannels who then badly distorted what happened.
On September 30, 2018, I emailed Drew Magary, my former colleague who at the time was working with Greenwell at Deadspin, to tell him the disaster the last year of my life had been since the list leaked, and that the claims made about me were not true. I told him there's nobody it could have come from but Megan, so could he ask if she'd be willing to talk and accept an apology for the rude stuff I actually did. Magary and I had drifted apart some in the years since we wrote for the same website, but we were on polite enough terms that he passed my request on to Greenwell. To me, this seemed like the most responsible route. If Megan had actually thought of me as a predator, sending her a cold email would likely be shocking and upsetting. And Magary had some familiarity with both of us. What's more, if it came as a shock, she could always just screenshot it and post it on Twitter, during a time I was terrified of more attention being drawn to these claims.
Here's what I sent her:
Megan,
I understand this is a weird time to be reaching out about this issue almost exactly a full year after the Shitty Media Men list was created, and during Kavanaugh's nomination process. I don't have a cogent explanation as to why it happened this way, other than I've spent the last year in equal parts fear, confusion, and anger. This was just the time for me to do it. If this constitutes additional stress during an already trying period, then I'm sorry for that.
In my exchange with Drew yesterday, he mentioned that he recalled you insisting that you weren't the person to put me on the list. Whether or not that's accurate, I do you owe you an apology for how I acted toward you when we worked in the same office.
I'm sorry for the times I was rude, inconsiderate, and even downright surly to you during our time in the Southern Maryland bureau. When you first arrived there, I was glad to have someone I could joke around with. We got along pretty well that first month or so. I never really had a connection with Phil Rucker, Josh Partlow, William Wan, or any of the other reporters who floated through there, so it was nice to have someone with shared interests and a somewhat similar sense of humor.
I remember asking if you wanted to hang out outside of work, and at first you seemed receptive. I don't remember what the turning point was, but not long after that you were increasingly annoyed with me. I don't doubt that the me of 12 years ago could be irritating, even in ways I don't totally grasp now, and I should have respected your wishes to be left alone. It was a lonely time for me, what with close friends from the area moving away, and being stationed at an office far away from anyone I knew or any kind of thriving social scene. I was also deeply bored and unsatisfied with my position. There are only so many Southern Maryland community activity calendars you can put together before you go batty and wander off to talk someone's ear off. Nevertheless, I should have respected that you had things to do, and were under no obligation to give me the time of day.
I also regret some of the professional jealousy and resentment I projected at you. It was clear I was not thrilled with being an editorial aide for longer than, I don't know, a couple months. I was doing anything I could to ingratiate myself with editors by picking up any assignment I could, endlessly pitching freelance stuff, and volunteering for Saturday night shifts in the downtown office. For a while, I was such a reliable volunteer, Metro reporters considered me a go-to if they wanted to get out of them. So I became more and more frustrated and bitter when The Post wouldn't accept me into the reporting internship, and the dozens - if not hundreds - of applications I sent to other papers were ignored. It was presumptuous and entitled of me to feel like I was being cheated somehow. And it was wrong to be snide to you as a result.
Perhaps the most regrettable thing I did at the office was putting that essay about The Post's infatuation with Ivy Leaguers up on my desk. I think we can both agree there's plenty of classism in media, but as a middle-class white guy who went to college I'm immune to a lot of it. What's more, putting up that article was hardly confronting the issue in a serious way, when at most a handful of people would ever see it. I was just being a petty little asshole. So I'm sorry for that. There were certainly better ways to channel that frustration than an act that likely came off as an effort to diminish the hard work you had done.
As for the allegations on the list, I've operated under the strong assumption that it was you who wrote them, because there certainly was animosity between us by the time I left and I had been an annoyance, even if I couldn't square what was alleged with what I had done. Also because the alternative is, if you weren't the source, the accusation is entirely fabricated. You were the only person who made any bit of sense, even if I didn't agree with the charges. There were no other women at The Post I communicated with in anything other than bland pleasantries.
My entry on the list points to an WaPo HR file that was supposedly backs up these allegations. After the list came out, I checked in with human resources at The Post, where they still have a scanned copy of my personnel file. I was told it mentions nothing of any accusation or investigation, only my being forced to resign for writing for KSK. The woman in HR I spoke with said she consulted with editors who were newsroom liaisons for HR when we worked there (apparently the newsroom structure is different now and they no longer have these). Anyway, those editors said my name didn't ring a bell for any issue.
That put me a little at ease, but as I've reflected on 2006-2007, I've been to willing to consider the possibility that I did something bad I don't remember, and that HR departments are far from perfect. I should have checked in on this earlier because there have been times I've allowed myself to be angry at you, when I didn't even know for sure whether you were making these claims. Or whether there was something I forgot. That was dumb and lazy of me, so I'm looking to correct that now.
So, at this point, the question is: did you put me on the list? If so, can you lay out an account that lines up with the charges made? Stalking and physical intimidation in particular are mystifying to me. For starters, I only saw you once outside the office and that was at a party you invited me to early in our working together. I remember I followed you on Twitter for a while, maybe a year after I left WaPo. I felt guilty for the reasons mentioned above, and thought enough time had gone by that we could at least be cordial. Maybe that was a clumsy attempt on my part, but it also seems like a stretch for stalking. As for physical intimidation, I can't think of anything that could be construed as such. But if you have a different recollection, it's possible I forgot. That said, our time working together was only a few years removed from dealing with domestic violence in my own family. There's a cycle of abuse some people have to work through, and experiencing it within my family hardly means I couldn't have done it myself. At the very least, though, I would have remembered and felt terrible if I threatened a woman.
If you didn't in fact put me on the list, well, I'm at a complete loss. Obviously it's not your responsibility to figure this situation out. For what it's worth, even if it turns out I was screwed over and have been punished professionally and personally for things I didn't do, I still believe the list itself was a net positive. My career of making dumbass sports jokes online isn't more important than women's safety and livelihood. And the list was effective at getting some offenders out of the industry. Still, it would be nice at some point if I could clarify my side of this matter without fear of intense piling on or hurting my chances of employment elsewhere. Innocent or not, I know now is not the time with the Kavanaugh stuff going on. The last thing I want is to be a useful talking point for some bad faith conservative. Hopefully at some point in the not-too-distant future that will change.
I'm glad I could clear the air about the way I acted back then, even if it took less-than-ideal circumstances for that to come about. I hope it's of some use to you. In the meantime, keep up the hard work at Deadspin.
Mike
And her response:
Mike,
A few things:
1. If you intended this to be an apology, you miscalculated badly.2. I didn't put you on that list. I told people at the time that I felt unsafe going to the office, but I have no idea who added your name to an anonymous list and no desire to find out.
3. I have zero interest in your point-by-point refutation of your actions. It sounds like we agree you acted extremely inappropriately toward me, so we'll leave it there.
4. Emailing my colleague to tell him I destroyed your career and ask him to insert himself is wildly out of line. It doesn't matter how well you know or knew him; accusing me of being a vindictive bitch to someone I work with every day, and who was not involved in the situation, is never an appropriate thing to do.
5. I'd prefer that we end this here.
Okie dokie. Let's note a couple other things:
Megan provides zero specifics and insists on no further discussion. This is the last time we spoke.
It's been almost two years since I publicly challenged the claims made against me. If Megan thinks I'm some sort of menace, why not just come forward with the evidence she supposedly has against me? There is absolutely zero risk in her doing so in this climate. If anything, people would cheer her for it. She holds far more power in the industry and far more influence on Twitter than I do, and we both operate in liberal circles where women are automatically believed (unless they're accusing Joe Biden). Staying silent, however, ensures a cloud of presumptive guilt and uncertainty lingers over me without her having to do anything. Funny that HR has no ironclad evidence but she can call on friends to back up some vague claims of feeling "unsafe." She can basically say whatever she wants with corroboration that can be made up on the fly.
As far as my following her on Twitter: the last time I saw Megan in person was sometime early in 2008. By that point, I had moved to a different suburban bureau. Even though it was a lateral move as an editorial aide, it was a transition from the Southern Maryland bureau to the Montgomery County bureau, a bigger priority in the paper's local news coverage. The superiors knew I was upset that I had been passed over several times to get on a path to a full-time reporter job, so this was a way for them to placate me, not to mention a way to get me to do more work without actually giving me a promotion or more money. I was still volunteering to cover Saturday night breaking news shifts at the main office downtown because I thought it would win me brownie points and I could get some useful clips. My last memory of seeing Megan in person was her passing my desk on a Saturday night and saying hi to me. It had been months since we worked in the same office, and it struck me from that exchange the bad blood between us had cooled off a bit with some distance. In May 2008, I was forced to resign from The Post after outing myself as a foul-mouthed sports blogger on the side. The following year, I joined Twitter. As fellow sports media people, it's not surprising that I would see someone retweet Megan into my feed. So when her account popped up I followed her, said hi, she gave a terse reply to the same effect. This was a time before people based their entire lives and personalities on Twitter so I didn't think much of it. I wasn't spamming her or DMing her. I don't think DMs even existed yet. I unfollowed her after a while because tbh her feed is kind of boring.
Megan also once got pissed off at me because she feels I poached a story from her about Kanye West's dad opening a water cafe in St. Mary's County, which was her reporting beat. I got an event notice from the cafe for my calendar and pitched a story about it to editors downtown. She and another Ivy Leaguer in the office (the one who mocked me for attending a state school) accosted me and said I should have turned the story over to her. Too bad! Anyway, ask me sometime about the day I walked around an exurban recreational park baseball field with Kanye in 2007.
A veteran journalist helped edit the piece I pitched to several corporate outlets then eventually self-published when they all declined. Her immediate reaction when I let her read Megan's email reply: "Wow, what a bitch!" Sorry, I still chuckle thinking about that. At a moment when it felt like no one would ever take my side in this dispute, it was nice to get some validation.
When I first went public in late January 2020, about 16 months after that email exchange, on my experience being an alleged "shitty media man," several former colleagues of Greenwell's who had been following me on Twitter - Deadspin/Defector Media's Laura Wagner, David Roth, Alberto Burneko, and Diana Moskovitz - suddenly unfollowed. The fact that they all did so at once struck me as suspicious, as if a certain someone had reached out to them behind the scenes. Maybe that's just a coincidence, but this story is lousy with such coincidences. Again, if Megan hadn't actually accused me, why would she and her friends care that I was denying the charges? Even though Greenwell never made the jump to Defector from Deadspin (she was content pushing the staff to quit then immediately bolting to a secure corporate job) the staff still refers to her as the site's godmother, and it's a safe bet that Greenwell's connections are a big reason Defector gets loads of free fawning publicity from corporate liberal outlets.
Another friend and former Deadspin colleague of Greenwell's is Lindsey Adler, presently a full-time baseball reporter at The Athletic. Here she is on Twitter in 2019 being part of a three-woman sandwich of corporate media employees openly encouraging people not only to automatically believe unvetted anonymous allegations but to ostracize the men who received them and shame anyone maintaining friendships or even polite contact with said men.
Maybe you think, "Oh, that's just one tweet." Well, I could give you plenty of other examples of New York media employees telling people to believe every accusation sight unseen. And what's more: these women received absolutely zero blowback, criticism, or reprimand for doing this. It's nothing but positive feedback. They know this kind of reckless, malicious behavior is completely accepted in their circles. I guess a counterargument would be that many of the men named on the list survived (but certainly not all - I can think of at least a half dozen off the top of my head who either disappeared from public life or were excommunicated - and that doesn’t even count the few who were investigated and fired), but that’s only the ones who had a solid foothold when it happened. I’ve pressed for investigation - which should be something these women support, but mostly they just want to shame men regardless of their guilt or innocence. Why, mainly this seems like a way of exercising professional jealousy, only through an acceptable woke lens.
Then there's Magary. Months after I came forward, Drew published a piece in SFGATE in August 2020 saying cancel culture is actually an undeniably positive force for the world, and nobody should think otherwise, because it's getting all the right people, despite the fact that Drew himself has done many cancellable things with zero consequences, and he knows other men who have misbehaved and completely gotten away with it. One reporter outside his social circle asked how he could publish such a thing knowing what I had been through. Magary ignored him and has never addressed the question. I've known Magary for about 15 years and while he's always been a self-serving, narcissistic careerist, I never would have guessed that he would sink to the level he has.
It is impossible for me, short of her flat-out admitting it, to definitively prove Megan wrote my entry on the list because Google is protecting the identity of the people who accessed the document while it was live. Yes, it's me vs Big Tech and Corporate Media put together. Appears my cishet white male privilege doesn't do me a hell of a lot of good when pitted against those titans. There is the remote possibility Megan technically didn't write it herself, but I think it's clear based on what I've shown that it was her. Between her curt email reply full of vague condemnations - despite denying writing my entry - and the way those close to her have acted since, it couldn’t be more apparent that she was involved. That the list was only available for a less than a 24-hour window to a very privileged, Brooklyn-centric corner of the industry that she occupies points to her as well. I no longer believe her denial, just like I don't believe the creators of the list who claim it was never meant to get out. You would have to be the biggest idiot alive to buy that. And even if Megan didn't physically write my entry, she has kept the punishment in place all the same. By refusing to discuss the matter further publicly or privately, she is giving me a lifetime sentence with no possibility of escape unless she has a change of heart. And since she refuses to revisit the matter, that is entirely based on her whim. It's been more than four years. Suffice it to say, she isn't changing her mind. It seems she enjoys being judge, jury, and executioner.
Like any cynical girlboss worth her salt, Megan leans into reductive liberal identity politics to justify and excuse her sociopathy and rank careerism. I will give her credit - she is more savvy than most when it comes to covering her tracks and putting forth her most professional persona. The brand is strong, as they say. Hell, I would wager almost no one outside the most tight-knit NYC media circles knows that she was fired by ESPN for theft. Not that I would judge anyone for stealing from their corporate boss, though it is a bit revealing that a juicy tidbit like that about a media insider has been kept under wraps. It obviously hasn't hindered her career either way - she keeps getting plum job after plum job.
As for her deranged exploitation of identity politics, one need not look further than an advice column she wrote for Wired back in May of this year. Why Wired needs an "Ask a Manager" style advice column is anyone's guess, but Megan had one, and she used the format to address a woman who works as a middle manager and worries her male colleagues are intimidated by her solely because she is a woman in a position of power. Here's how Megan begins her advice, as it were:
This is absolutely, definitely, indubitably happening because you are a woman. I need zero additional information about your workplace or your personality or Steve to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is either scared of you—or he’s telling people he’s scared of you—because he’s uncomfortable with women in the workplace.
I know this because I have been told four times that I come off as scary, and every time the accuser has been a man. (In 75 percent of those cases, as in yours, the man has evidently been too scared to tell me himself, so I get the message filtered through yet another man.) I know this because I asked a bunch of other women—women I know to be nice people!—whether a man has ever accused them of being scary at work, and every single one said yes. I know this because I have worked with many men who call themselves feminists but visibly treat men and women differently in the office, and because I have worked with many women who have consciously or subconsciously altered their behavior at work over time to accommodate them. I don’t know your Steve, but I know Steve.
Well then, what can be done about these insecure dudebros who simply cannot handle women in positions of authority? Men, they're just so damn toxic, aren't they? Companies should stop hiring them altogether!
As it happens, I asked a woman who works in NYC media circles in which Megan operates, and she told me that the only people she has ever heard complaining about Megan Greenwell being scary are actually - wait for it - women! I don't doubt that some men have found her occasionally hostile and abrasive. I sure have! Though this is a common tactic among liberal feminists: launder all your issues by pretending it's only damn dirty men complaining about them. Must be nice when you can deploy your simple-minded identity bullshit to explain all of life's problems and to make sure nobody ever questions you.
Am I completely blameless in this scenario? I suppose not. The temptation here is to invoke the phrase "the punishment doesn't fit the crime," except, well, I haven't done anything even remotely criminal. I know liberal culture is in the process of pathologizing and criminalizing all sorts of generally benign behavior from straight men, but last I checked it's not yet a crime to be awkward, depressed, surly, or even kind of a jerk sometimes. I didn't harm Megan, never touched nor objectified her, and I couldn't deter her career even if I wanted to. I made a genuine attempt to clear the air. Fake leftist identitarian liberals callously dismiss my experience with "So what? It's not like you went to jail." I invite you to be publicly shamed by national media over false charges that everybody automatically believes during a fraudulent "societal reckoning," have multiple friends betray you, watch popular TV shows riff on your situation, have your career destroyed, spend every single day for years listening to a liberal narrative about cancelling that you know to be false yet echoed constantly by supposed friends and associates, and nearly be driven to suicide. See how you like it. Maybe then you won't consider the baseline for suffering to be literal prison. And while prison is terrible, at least it (usually) has defined terms of sentencing.
I've done what I thought was the right thing for so long and I've received nothing but cruelty. I reached out privately to apologize for what I actually did and to make sure I didn't forget something serious, and was rebuffed, cast into an eternity of shame with no hope for redemption. I stayed quiet for years hoping journalists would do their job and that liberal culture would ease off its obsession with reductive identity politics. A year after being cancelled by corporate liberal media on false charges, I turned down an offer for a salaried position at a conservative PR firm. Months after that, I became a canvasser for a progressive non-profit in Virginia. I worked there for a year and a half - helped the Democrats take the statehouse in 2019, pressured lawmakers to get several bills passed to help working class communities, and did work to make sure people of color were properly counted on the Census - only to get laid off after the 2020 election. The organization cited budget problems due to Covid, yet as far as I can tell only hourly employees were laid off, while the salaried workers stayed on.
When I first came forward, a couple conservative publications amplified my story. Sure, I recognized some of their motives for doing it might not be entirely pure, but at least they treated me like a human being, and Megan wasn’t named in any of those articles. When the other side won't give me justice or even recognition, what am I supposed to do? Just sit there and take it while everybody else lies and profits? Fuck that, not forever I won’t. Not a single liberal writer or outlet covered my story, despite having extensively covered The Shitty Media Men List as a whole, and having branded its creator, Moira Donegan, a hero. None of the people actually responsible for the sloppy mess The Shitty Media Men List became, such as former BuzzFeed News (the outlet most responsible for it going public) top editor and current New York Times media columnist Ben Smith, owned up to what they did. I was mocked by Gawker's social media manager Darcie Wilder for daring to think something unjust had happened to me, and her post was shared by several Jezebel writers. Again, none of her peers pushed back against this at all.
Weeks later, when Tara Reade came forward with her accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden, Jezebel's immediate reaction was to attack podcaster Katie Halper for giving Reade a platform. Donegan helped bury the Reade story in The Atlantic by shaming people for reasonably and justifiably criticizing liberal media's blatant hypocrisy on the issue. Despite the fact that Donegan is mostly known to the public as the creator of the list, The Atlantic, not wanting to remind readers about the sloppier aspects of MeToo after Biden was accused, only identified Donegan as "working on a book about sexual harassment." Months earlier, The Atlantic declined to publish my story, giving me a bizarre excuse about not having bandwidth for "stories of this complexity." The editor who issued that rejection in late 2019, Swati Sharma, took over as the editor-in-chief of Vox earlier this year. Donegan is currently being represented in court by Roberta Kaplan, the disgraced former leader of Times Up who privately helped Andrew Cuomo dismiss one of his accusers. The corruption runs deep.
Corporate liberal media and the online left continually lied about their shifting tactics during MeToo, and they routinely lie that cancel culture does not exist in any form, or they claim that it does exist but it’s only ever deserved “accountability.” After Magary wrote his toeing-the-line-of-liberal-consensus column about how cancel culture is an unblemished positive, I called him out for his lies and self-serving behavior then pressed him several times to explain himself. Over a year later, he hasn't responded. And now you know how intimately familiar he is with this ordeal.
Megan Greenwell is an abuser. She abused her power, her status, her professional connections to smear a less powerful person at the height of a moral panic without evidence or scrutiny. She imposed what she clearly intended to be a life sentence of social, professional, and psychological destruction. All based on lies. And until now, nobody even knew she did it. This is no marginal figure; she is one of the leading lights of her profession.
She has had endless opportunities to show mercy, yet she woke up every day for over four years and chose not to. She had her equally powerful and influential friends push false narratives so people wouldn't question the malice directed at her target. She and her friends deceived the public just for some petty bullying of a freelancer who controls nothing. I'm sure Megan Greenwell is far from the only abuser that NYC media has and/or continues to protect yet she is undeniably one of them.
I look back at that meek, simpering email I sent her, and the first piece I wrote saying the list was a net positive, and I hate myself for it. Why did I give these convictionless, hateful careerists the benefit of the doubt? They're opportunistic, social climbing liars who care about nobody outside their suffocating clique of NYC media insider pals. They change rules and shift standards in an instant to suit their needs. They didn't get rid of me because I did anything to Megan. They got rid of me because I would occasionally call them out on their bullshit. No dissenting voices allowed in the authoritarian corporate liberal consensus.
So, Megan, was it worth it? Did settling a grudge in such devastating fashion make you feel like a slay kween? Did exploiting a grassroots social movement for corporate PR and a personal vendetta help your already strong career? Were your fee-fees hurt because I reminded you that Ivy League class privilege not only exists but prevails over much of the media? Did you feel bad at all, after you did what you did, when your peers shifted their standards on a dime to protect Joe Biden?
I hope it was fun while it lasted, because it's over now.
UPDATE 12/10/21: Over a month has passed since this was published. No response from Greenwell or Magary. I tagged her on Twitter immediately after posting. The piece got a fair amount of traction there, so there’s no way to claim she didn’t see it. As I’ve established, there’s no risk for them to address this if they have any decent explanation for themselves. Clearly they understand their peers in liberal media circles will not pressure them to comment, so they’ve taken the cynical and cowardly path and decided not to speak on it at all. There is no rational choice but to view their silence as an admission of guilt. Given that progressives have spent the last few years droning on about “accountability culture” for identity politics transgressions, it’s more than a little hypocritical that media figures who have pushed this narrative the hardest are not accountable to anyone, and that progressives are fine with that.