Short Take: The Price of Being “Shitty”

The time was 2018, and some women were feeling their oats. One such woman was Moira Donegan, who created the infamous “Shitty Media Men” list, an idea of such insufferable hubris that it would have been inconceivable at pretty much any other time in social history. Imagine throwing out to angry women an opportunity to take revenge on any man who did them wrong or pissed them off, and spread the word, true or false, factual or fantasy, where no one named, no one accused, needed to be proved bad nor had a chance to defend himself.

The spreadsheet was intended to circumvent all of this. Anonymous, it would protect its users from retaliation: No one could be fired, harassed, or publicly smeared for telling her story when that story was not attached to her name. Open-sourced, it would theoretically be accessible to women who didn’t have the professional or social cache required for admittance into whisper networks. The spreadsheet did not ask how women responded to men’s inappropriate behavior; it did not ask what you were wearing or whether you’d had anything to drink. Instead, the spreadsheet made a presumption that is still seen as radical: That it is men, not women, who are responsible for men’s sexual misconduct.

But this was a time when women felt empowered to take their revenge, to name names and make claims. What could possibly go wrong, as this was the #MeToo moment and what man would possibly be bold enough, crazy enough, to take Donegan to task? Stephen Elliott was that man.

Elliott was accused by anonymous women of heinous conduct, except he claimed it was all a lie and that not only did he not do what he was accused of doing, but he was gay and everybody knew it. And so he sued.

At Techdirt, Cathy Gellis went after Elliott both on a legal basis, ascribing Section 230 protection to Donegan as the accusations were written by others on her list, although it was unclear the Donegan didn’t contribute to the accusations of others with her own highlighting, and that Elliot was a shitty man for fighting back, and so deserved no solace even if the accusations were false.

At the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg called Elliott a “right wing snowflake” using legal process to silence scorned women.

Yet, Elliott persisted, represented by Andrew Miltenberg, who took the case on contingent fee, despite realizing the difficulty in suing Donegan and trying to ascertain who the other anonymous accusers were who destroyed Elliott’s writing career and branded him a #MeToo pariah, despite his sexual orientation. Donegan, represented by Roberta Kaplan who, it’s believed, took on the case at no charge to Donegan as a feminist cause, fought hard against disclosing the identities of Elliott’s accusers, but was unable to overcome her involvement in the viral fiasco she created.

The case has now settled, and it settled for a very substantial amount. For a brief and shining moment, women felt free to toss about wild accusations with the assumption that they could harm any man they pleased and there was nothing, nothing, the man could do about it.

For Moira Donegan, the bill just came due.