Megan Greenwell's Other False Accusation

Not only did she make false claims about someone she had power over in the workplace, she messed with his money and lied about it.

In March 2022, about four months after I named Megan Greenwell as the source of the false accusation of criminal charges leveled against me on The Shitty Media Men List, I was quietly approached by David Bixenspan, a freelance writer who contributed to Deadspin while Greenwell was the editor-in-chief.

He shared with me abusive management practices that Greenwell engaged in as editor, as well as a false allegation of sexual misconduct she made about him with the deliberate aim to hurt him professionally. Bear in mind, at the time, he was a powerless freelancer and she was a well-connected Ivy Leaguer on salary as the top boss of the site.

His words in bold:

For now, here's the concise, bullet point list version of what happened, which seems to have resulted in me being ghosted by the bulk of the Defector staff and unable to land any work there. All seemingly thanks to Megan Greenwell spinning a yarn about me sending her "harassing emails," something that never happened. (We interacted very few times, period.)

* Megan, who, outside of generic invoicing stuff, I probably interacted with about half a dozen times during her Deadspin tenure, fucked with my pay, cutting it by exactly one third, and repeatedly lied about why. (Sometimes directly, sometimes by asking David Roth, my direct editor, to relay the message.) Fake budget cuts, made-up policy changes, and blaming Roth were the main excuses.

* When Deadspin was about to go kablooey [in late 2019] I sent her a short, polite email asking to hop on the phone to clear the air, she told me she didn't know what I was talking about, then made it clear she did and blamed Roth. Then she turned around and told Roth (and presumably the others) at a dinner gathering at Planet Hollywood that I sent her "harassing emails."

* In time (though not at first, because I was hanging out at the Deadspin Funeral without issue, among other things), it seemed like this was the only reason that made sense for about 90% of the Defector crew ghosting me and, later, my complete inability to even sniff any freelance work there. This despite my being a popular Deadspin contributor who had become a staple of the site to the point that I was widely assumed by much of the readership to be on staff.

* Nobody will give me a reason why any of this (the ghosting, the obvious good pitches barely meriting a response issue) is happening.

* As I'm sure you're figuring out, the relative overlap with your situation once I found out about your Substack post piqued my interest. Obviously, the accusations about you, regardless of if Megan put them in the spreadsheet, were more harsh/serious and ended up being public. (I have no idea if the nonsense about me spread beyond the Deadfector circle. I did have an increase in weird dealings with NYC media and publishing types afterwards. but they're probably unrelated.)

* But if she did write the spreadsheet entry about you, and I get why you think she did, there's enough overlap that it sent a chill down my spine: Vague allegation of harassment towards someone that would be pretty insignificant to her (me as a freelancer she barely dealt with, you as a coworker from a decade earlier who had entirely been a professional at-home freelancer since), the tone of her email response to me being very similar to her response to you, how the mass unfollowing of you on Twitter by the Deadfectorites long before you ever named her feels comparable to the ghosting of me, etc.

Do you have ANY understanding of why the ESPN stuff [ed. note: Greenwell was fired by ESPN for theft before joining Deadspin] hasn't followed her the way you'd expect it to? The "her nickname at ESPN was 'The Compulsive Liar'" and "she was fired for stealing from the ESPN cafeteria" rumors seem like pretty well-accepted lore in this media bubble, and yet she had zero issues getting major editor jobs subsequently? I mean, you'd expect that kind of thing to follow a woman more because of institutional misogyny in media and especially sports media! So how the hell did she avoid it? 

I had further back-and-forth with Bixenspan, and he ultimately decided, much to my frustration, that he did not want to come forward. Even though Greenwell had clearly intended to do him harm, and to some degree succeeded, Bixenspan figured that, because she did not completely destroy his career, that it was not in his interest to share his story publicly. I'm not sure why he approached me in the first place if he's unwilling to do anything about it. Knowing there's another story out there of her sadistic lying that I couldn't say anything about has, for me, been another layer of torture from this almost decade-long ordeal.

For a few years, I honored his wish. During that time, I have witnessed nothing but cowardice and cruelty on this issue, renewed each time the accusation-to-immediate-presumptive-guilt cycle begins anew. Many recognize the utter disgrace that is The Shitty Media Men List - the liberal media establishment that did it, swore it was 100 percent gospel without investigation, then a few years later changed their standards to let Joe Biden off the hook during the 2020 primaries, only to return to proclaiming men as guilty without evidence again months later - but no one will take a stand in any meaningful way. No one will hold these vicious media liars to the fire, even after they played the public like fools saying you couldn't comment on Joe Biden's senility for years, until they too suddenly turned on him. Everyone who isn't an explicit MAGA type is so shook by the coddled PMC white women who made the list and the powerful institutions that forever baby them. It's beyond maddening and I'm sick to death of it.

Again, I must remind progressives of what they have done by refusing any criticism or examination of the list, which amounts to corporate propaganda and scapegoating during a moral panic: you have granted an abusive boss, a privileged Ivy Leaguer, and a misandrist the power to impose life sentences with zero oversight, yet with the imprimatur of establishment media outlets. You should be deeply ashamed of yourselves. Megan Greenwell must be considered a serial abuser and should be shunned like one, and so too should her accomplices Drew Magary and David Roth. If feminists will never hold their abusers accountable, why should men? If she continues to get away with this scot-free, never having to answer for her lies, then I will never believe another woman's allegations, and I certainly will not hold them against any man, ever. You want justice or barbarism? Your call.

Outing Bixenspan without his say-so is a breach of journalism ethics, I'm aware, but at this point for me to adhere to bullshit "rules and ethics" that well-connected media insiders openly and constantly flout without consequence, often at the expense of powerless figures like myself, would be foolish in the extreme. When the entire journo establishment breaks their supposed rules in a way that irreparably fucks the little guy, then retreats into a code of silence about it, it’s no time to comply with decorum. Malicious careerists like Greenwell, Magary, and Roth believe in nothing but personal gain for themselves and petty destruction for those who dare to even get on their nerves. They must be made accountable for their significant misdeeds. If Bixenspan is upset with me, I'll have to live with that. I've given him nearly three years to muster the courage to come forward. And if anyone in Brooklyn shitlib media gets angry with him, he can just say I made him speak up, which I did.