Moira Donegan's Lawyer Advising Andrew Cuomo is the Latest Proof Post-Weinstein MeToo Has Been a Corporate-Driven Sham

Roberta Kaplan helping to smear one of Andrew Cuomo's accusers is in keeping with the priorities of MeToo the last few years: cozying up to powerful Democrats while denying justice to everybody else.

Just as the establishment of the Democratic Party and its media apparatus have finally turned on New York Governor Andrew Cuomo with calls for his resignation and talks of impeachment if he doesn’t leave office willingly, a startling revelation has come out: when Cuomo’s first accuser went public late last year, the governor turned to Roberta Kaplan, the chair of the board of directors at Time’s Up, for advice on how to defuse the situation.

Oh dear - another supposed champion of liberal feminism doing consulting work for a powerful Democrat in times of crisis! Kind of like how Anita Dunn went from Harvey Weinstein’s PR team to working on Joe Biden’s campaign and now being a senior adviser in his administration.

Following the publication of an open letter on Medium this week signed by more than 80 victims of sexual misconduct outraged by her assisting Cuomo, Kaplan resigned from the board of Time’s Up, an organization that has already been criticized - only in conservative media, of course - for allocating most of its considerable resources toward executive salaries and conferences yet barely any toward actually helping victims of sexual harassment.

Corporate media outlets have dutifully reported on Kaplan’s departure from Time’s Up, that Kaplan is representing E. Jean Carroll in her defamation suit against Donald Trump, as well as a host of other notable cases in which she has been involved.

What absolutely none of these outlets is mentioning is that Kaplan is representing Moira Donegan in the lawsuit filed against her by Stephen Elliott for organizing The Shitty Media Men List. This is hardly surprising as corporate liberal media has covered the list, its fallout, and the resulting lawsuit in brazenly one-sided fashion. Since the obvious double standard legacy media showed for Joe Biden in the spring of 2020 when he was accused of sexual assault, they’re now in the business of insisting that journalists were always careful in publicizing misconduct allegations, which means pretending things like The Shitty Media Men List never happened, and weren’t amplified by the biggest publications in the country and their employees on Twitter.

In January 2020, when I first wrote about my experience being falsely accused on the list, I said I opposed the lawsuit. That stance was based on the misplaced faith I had that journalists, faced with a reminder from a former peer that they had abandoned their principles at the height of a moral panic, would do a little digging or even acknowledge that what they had done was more complex than they had let on. They didn’t. The closest I’ve gotten to a response is a mocking subtweet from New Gawker’s social media manager Darcie Wilder. That post was retweeted by multiple Jezebel writers. Weeks later, Jezebel attacked podcaster Katie Halper for giving Tara Reade a platform to accuse then-presidential candidate Joe Biden of sexual assault.

These are the type of malicious, convictionless corporate propagandists who have hijacked the movement for their own purposes since late 2017. Savagery and lack of due process for political enemies and disposable nobodies, protection and careful scrutiny for powerful Democrats.

I’m ambivalent about the lawsuit now. Sure, if Elliott wins, I will have some small measure of spiteful satisfaction at Donegan’s defeat. But it will likely only cause those who promoted, weaponized, and whitewashed the list to dig in their heels even further, and deny there were ever any downsides to their reckless behavior. As much as I disdain Moira, to me she’s not the real villain. The self-serving corporate media class is the real villain. Oh, and whoever falsely accused me of criminal-level charges. I guess they’re pretty vile as well.

About a month and a half ago, following the New York mayoral primary, New York Times media columnist Ben Smith wrote a bit of nauseating revisionist history about journalists' role in MeToo and how failed candidate Scott Stringer’s allegations fit into the movement as it stands in 2021.

I sent Smith the following email on June 29:

From your piece on Scott Stringer:

As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”

Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.

Blatant lies of omission - reporters and editors, including those at your own paper, also amplified allegations without investigation or scrutiny. The New York Times publicized The Shitty Media Men List and lionized Moira Donegan without bothering to dig into anything. Years later, no legwork has been done, and you are in the business of trying to memory hole the matter, advancing an oversimplified narrative that conveniently casts journalists as diligent and principled, when they were often anything but. I won't even bother to get into the stark difference in approaches between Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade.

More recently, last year your paper ran with a story about the artist Jon Rafman losing museum shows because of unvetted allegations of consensual misconduct based on anonymous claims publicized by an Instagram account. Sure, you could say the news peg was reporting on the craven decision of the Hirshhorn, but that's only if you're a cynical coward who relies on technicalities. No follow-up has been done in nearly a year. Another miscarriage of journalism.

Where's the craft of corroboration, Ben? Or are you more in the business of covering for your peers?

Ben Smith did not respond to me.

It should be noted that Smith was the top editor of BuzzFeed News when that outlet made an incredible mess of The Shitty Media Men List by publicizing it in October 2017 when the spreadsheet was still active. So Smith has quite a bit of responsibility for what a shoddy embarassment that whole ordeal has become, and yet here he is nearly four years later in the supposed paper of record pretending like journalists on numerous occasions didn’t amplify unverified allegations with no fact-checking whatsoever.

Multiple blue-check Black women on Twitter have complained about how they and others were excluded from contributing to The Shitty Media Men List for reasons that remain unclear. Perhaps you’re one of those liberals who frames every issue through the lens of reductive identity politics and you don’t particularly give a shit that some cishet White dude was falsely accused of sex crimes with the assistance of national media outlets. I think that’s a misguided attitude but at least I get where you’re coming from. But shouldn’t you care about a bunch of hyperprivileged White media feminists denying the opportunity for precious ~accountability~ to Black women? Seems like you should.

This is a story that demands further examination. The only thing stopping that is cowardice and careerism, two qualities rampant in present day journalism. When I first came forward with my story, some critics claimed I was only trying to save myself. That assumes I would want to rejoin the ranks of media figures who gleefully threw me under the bus then spent several years lying about it and the conditions that made it possible. Why in the world would I want to associate with them again?

I have nothing but contempt for these people.

By the way, 10 days from now will be the one-year anniversary of my former colleague Drew Magary publishing a corporate liberal propaganda piece in the San Francisco Chronicle’s website arguing that “cancel culture” is an unblemished positive and that everybody who has been cancelled deserved it. Including me, there are several former colleagues of Magary’s who have been cancelled, and another who arguably could be for past behavior, but he does not address any of us. In addition to roughly a dozen of my own attempts to get him to respond to my post breaking down how breathtakingly cynical and dishonest his argument was, journalists Michael David Smith and Jesse Singal have sought comment about this from Magary as well. To date, he has not replied publicly or privately to any of these requests.