The Accusations Were Lies. But Could We Prove It?

March 18, 2020 8:18 PM

When the university told my wife about the sexual-harassment complaints against her, we knew they weren’t true. We had no idea how strange the truth really was. (SLNYT)
posted by triggerfinger (33 comments total)

jfc people are crazy. those poor women. this is some Pacific-Heights-in-academia-shit.
posted by lalochezia at 9:14 PM on March 18, 2020

The modern academic job market colliding with the 2008 recession and the ongoing dismantling of the academy seems like the perfect storm for this kind of nightmare.

So many people pursued doctoral degrees once the recession hit and when they graduated, they found a job market dominated by adjunct positions that offer little pay, no job security, and no advancement. When there were tenure track positions open for application, hundreds or thousands of people would all be competing for them. And as senior faculty retired, their positions would simply be dissolved and turned into...you guessed it, multiple adjunct slots.

What happened to these women is a horrifying injustice that multiplies on top of the shocking degradation and stress every precarious academic has been facing for years now.
posted by Ouverture at 9:31 PM on March 18, 2020 [20 favorites]

It seems appropriate that making up imaginary people to attack himself is how the guy in question deals with nearly any stressor he encounters, including getting caught making up people to attack himself and others.
posted by Scattercat at 9:53 PM on March 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

I cant believe he got away with it. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr that makes me so angry. He'll do it again.
posted by fshgrl at 10:14 PM on March 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

I can't read the comments but the guy is doxxed like three comments in, right?

Or does that only happen to women
posted by Pyrogenesis at 10:19 PM on March 18, 2020 [17 favorites]

I really really should have followed standard protocol and not read the comments.
As usual some are from awesome supportive people and others are pure garbage fires.
posted by cirhosis at 10:36 PM on March 18, 2020

If he was doxxed the comment was removed. There are some harrowing accounts from other university faculty about their experiences with Title IX investigations and one Kavanagh sympathizer.
posted by fiercekitten at 10:38 PM on March 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'm seeing links to a court filing floating around on Twitter which seem pretty clear. I'm pretty sure linking them here would be over the line, but a name is definitely out there (and I hope it's the right one).
posted by CrystalDave at 10:48 PM on March 18, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yeah, this is some deranged shit. I have dealt with a person like this in my life (I was not her target, but someone close to me was), and what people who do this kind of thing will stoop to is unbelievable and scary. I feel like I've had enough experience with this kind of behavior that I am now extra sensitive to it, to the degree that if I sense the tiniest red flag in anyone I will run as far away from them as I can, forever. As far as I can possibly go.

The person I knew was actively trying to set her victim up to be charged with a felony and have him put in prison for a long time. She confessed to having murderous thoughts about him. He's a good and kind person whom everyone loves. For any human being to so casually decide to literally ruin another person's life is fucking really something else.
posted by triggerfinger at 11:32 PM on March 18, 2020 [9 favorites]

(opens article)
(sees two women pictured, and the word "wife")
(thinks: ok, this is going to be about anti-metoo well-poisoning from some incel fuckwad, isn't it)
(reads article)

Fuck, it was much worse than that.

With any luck J. will never never never make it off the whisper networks now, settlement NDAs notwithstanding.
posted by flabdablet at 12:17 AM on March 19, 2020

There will inevitably be people who use this case and others like it to argue that #metoo has "gone too far".

Truth is, it hasn't gone far enough. The best protection that academics or film producers or sports stars or judges could ever possibly have against false accusations is widespread and well-justified confidence in systems designed to ensure that abuses of trust and/or position and/or privilege are rare and that accusations of same will in general be competently investigated; as a global society we still have a long way to go to get anywhere near that point.

What happened to Sarah and Marta here is at least as much Weinstein's doing as J's.
posted by flabdablet at 12:30 AM on March 19, 2020 [21 favorites]

This J person should never work in education again. What a twisted excuse for a human.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:40 AM on March 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

I wonder if he got the job at Michigan.
posted by medusa at 5:56 AM on March 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

Wow. What a vile person is J.

Also this, about:
real weaknesses in academia: the way that harassers are often passed on between institutions, the fact that graduate students have so few rights — and are so dependent on their faculty mentors — that they fear going public with stories of abuse
posted by doctornemo at 6:04 AM on March 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

I'll be honest, my reaction is that they're lucky it wasn't worse. Obviously it's awful, but the guy sounds like he was pretty sloppy, and probably because he's kind of a mess. If he had been the cold, calculating sort of evil instead of the desperate, hysterical kind, who knows how bad this could have gotten? Life can be terrifying.

The story is also a useful reminder that the only rights you have are the ones you're willing/able to pay for.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:10 AM on March 19, 2020 [16 favorites]

Is there a version of this story without the paywall?
posted by mefireader at 6:34 AM on March 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

beta.trimread.com is good for getting around paywalls, in general.
posted by jeather at 6:50 AM on March 19, 2020 [7 favorites]

I can't read the comments but the guy is doxxed like three comments in, right?

I'm not going to post the details here, but users on Twitter have ID'd the guy.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 7:30 AM on March 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

I didn't even notice that it was paywalled, probably because somebody else's paywall annoyed me enough a few months back to have prompted installation of Bypass Paywalls for Firefox. Works well.
posted by flabdablet at 8:01 AM on March 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

This is less of an issue for the Times, but a lot of local news outlets are losing most of their ad revenue right now with the outbreak and are more dependent than ever on subscriptions to not lay off the journalists writing those paywalled stories.
posted by eponym at 8:16 AM on March 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

That's a crazy story! As someone with a bunch of friends who work for ASU, I appreciate you sharing it. Probably wouldn't have read it if you hadn't...
posted by ph00dz at 8:44 AM on March 19, 2020

Bypass Paywalls for Firefox lets you enable or disable bypassing on a per-publication basis if you'd rather rely on site nags to help manage your local news subscriptions. As for the NYT, until they remember the distinction between objectivity and knee-jerk both-sidesism they can go fuck themselves.
posted by flabdablet at 8:48 AM on March 19, 2020 [7 favorites]

Infuriating story with no resolution. Wish I hadn't read this, just angry now.
posted by GoblinHoney at 9:38 AM on March 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev on Twitter) believes she found him (name and picture in tweet at link).
posted by Etrigan at 10:02 AM on March 19, 2020 [13 favorites]

To be clear, the link Etrigan offers includes a screenshot of court filings that name the couple from the article and the person they sued, so it seems fairly ironclad.
posted by uberchet at 10:17 AM on March 19, 2020 [4 favorites]

For those of you who don't want to click Etrigan's link but want some sort of resolution: The guy still has a job, apparently, but it's not at Michigan.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:28 AM on March 19, 2020

I'll be honest, my reaction is that they're lucky it wasn't worse. Obviously it's awful, but the guy sounds like he was pretty sloppy, and probably because he's kind of a mess. If he had been the cold, calculating sort of evil instead of the desperate, hysterical kind, who knows how bad this could have gotten?

When I was much younger of my neighbours accused me of trying to assault her, much to my surprise as I am a straight woman and all I had done was turn down her tipsy advances, kindly but at a public block party. It turned out she'd also accused her male roomate(who asked her to clean up), two of her college professors (one of whom she'd had a long affair with) five women she worked with and another neighbor's fiance over the span of a year or so. All while having consensual affairs with her very married thesis advisor and very married boss that were apparently common knowledge. I came at the end of this spree so there were no repercussions to speak of to me personally, which was a huge relief, but several of her accused coworkers were let go during this period and the neighbor's fiance lost a lot of friends at least for a while and almost his teaching job.

Best part? She still works at a university to this very day. She's clearly not right mentally which is sad, but I am quite sure she is still spreading poison wherever she goes. Universities need much more transparent processes to protect everyone.
posted by fshgrl at 11:41 AM on March 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

In a perfect world, U Michigan would find a way to make this right. But we don't get a perfect world. In fact, this asshole continues to teach at MCLA, as far as I can find.
posted by tzikeh at 12:07 PM on March 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

Not abusing edit window: perhaps I spoke too soon
posted by tzikeh at 12:09 PM on March 19, 2020 [2 favorites]

The author is a professor of "creative nonfiction", and she and J. were the top two applicants for a very competitive position, so J. is likely to have a similar background.

It would be astonishing if a large percentage of J.'s creative nonfiction isn't mostly fabricated given what he's done here, and people won't be slow to look at his past work as the knowledge of his identity percolates through the community.

He's toast.
posted by jamjam at 12:28 PM on March 19, 2020 [6 favorites]

Sexual assault researcher Nicole Bedera has an informative thread on her own research and experience with false accusations though Title IX.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:17 AM on March 20, 2020 [1 favorite]

The thing about this that makes me the most furious is a man using Title IX as a weapon against a woman--the very law that literally was a big part of our liberation--and making it even harder than it already is for actual victims to come forward.
posted by hydropsyche at 10:23 AM on March 20, 2020 [8 favorites]

I've met someone just like this. I actually worked with him at a video store (where he just could not tell the truth about anything, it was pathological - big or small) before later he reappeared my life claiming he needed assistance for a few emergencies and then wanted to be a Unitarian Universalist minister. I was working as the office admin at one, and my boss was taken in by this guy. He even wrote a draft recommendation letter for the guy to a seminary. I couldn't believe when I heard his name and had a very serious talk with my boss about the stuff this guy had done and we looked over their correspondence. Nothing added up under scrutiny.

My boss withdrew his letter of recommendation. Sure enough, the scammer submitted it by removing the draft part... but my boss had also alerted the school.

These people are out there, they're incredibly brazen and shameless and... we are often not set up to punish them appropriately. If you never stop criming, it can be kind of hard to stop for reason I don't fully understand. Or if you do the RIGHT crimes, I guess. This guy falsified multiple rape and assault allegations... that is an incredible crime! But he did it through an academic process where the police weren't involved so he just... skates on. Fucking infuriating.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 10:09 AM on March 23, 2020 [2 favorites]