We’ve had one GOP candidate who is a robotic automaton, one candidate who I am pretty sure is the Incredible Hulk, and another one who is “not” the Zodiac Killer like I am “not” looking at a picture of Donald Trump’s grave right now. But lo, here is a picture of Trump’s grave, which leads me to another conclusion: zombies are real, and they are orange?
A Jezebel tipster sent in photos of a tombstone marked with the name “Donald J. Trump” that he or she purportedly took in Central Park. While I am unable to verify whether the Donald J. Trump on the tombstone is actually that of the billionaire, entrepreneur, and spittle enthusiast, I can confirm that both Trumps share the same middle initial—Trump’s middle name is John—and that both Trumps were born the same year.
No date or year of death is recorded on the grave marker, so yes, whoever this Trump is, he is very much alive—which means any Easter resurrection analogies I’d otherwise be obligated to make are thankfully, THANKFULLY moot.
What makes the appearance of the tombstone even weirder is Drumpf’s well-publicized attempt to build a 548-foot grave at the Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey, because he definitely isn’t overcompensating for his medium-sized hands or anything.
(One golfer’s comment to CBS on the matter? “Golf and dying are two very different concepts...[golf] has very little to do with dying.” On point, good sir...?)
Then again, Trump apparently thinks that Central Park should only be for white people, according to a comment he made in 2013 related to the vacated convictions of the Central Park 5, so is he attempting for a white supremacist stake-out or something?
Let’s solve this mystery, please, or at least come up with some satirical #NotMyZombieCandidate hashtag campaign.
Easter is not traditionally the time for gifts, but this year, the Easter gods are shining down on us all. Our gift: A stunning story out of Connecticut, where an annual Easter 10,000-egg hunt devolved into chaos after pushy parents rushed the field.
“Somebody pushed me over and take my eggs and it’s very rude of them and they broke my bucket,” Vincent Welch said.
Several parents were trampling over signs and shoving other participants at the annual hunt, causing chaos at the family-friendly event. One woman said an adult injured her grandchild’s nose.
PEZ, the sponsor of the event, was particularly miffed by the parents’ behavior.
“I take this personally. I don’t want this to be a reflection of the brand,” Shawn Peterson, a general manager at PEZ, told NBC Connecticut. “It was a fun thing up until this point.”
The company also commented on its Facebook event about the chaos:
Unfortunately people chose to enter the first field prior to anyone from PEZ staff starting the activity. The crowd moved to the 2nd field, waited for only a couple of minutes and proceeded to rush the field without being directed to do so and before the posted start time. The crowd then immediately moved to the 3rd field and took over and removed everything well before the activity was to even start.
The general manager and other staff Visitor Center staff members were on hand trying to talk with as many people as we possibly could, letting them know if someone didn’t get an egg or candy, we had plenty of candy at the front entry for them. We sincerely tried our best to create a fun, free activity for everyone to enjoy.
We made efforts to get everyone something before they left and passed out tons of candy and coupons and the front entry and tried to make the best of an unfortunate situation. Due to the actions of a few, the good intent quickly turned into a mess. I would like to sincerely apologize to each of our guests, this was not something created to frustrate or make people angry. We only wanted to do good for the local community.
Let us all be grateful this Easter season for friends, family, and the horrifying disaster that was the PEZ egg hunt.
I may not celebrate Easter myself, but from what I can tell, marshmallow Peeps and multi-colored eggs have nothing on the mad Easter game Mexico is running right now.
In an actual manifestation of Mexican president Vicente Fox’s response to Donald Trump’s claims that his so-called plan for a “wall” between the U.S. and Mexico will be paid by the country south-of-the-border, Mexican citizens have been setting effigies of our latest attempt at a bulbous, reality TV-produced anti-Christ.
“Or at least a 10-foot-tall papier-mache version of him: eyes wide, mouth agape, with a painted-on business suit and golden mane. On Saturday night, just as every year on the day before Easter, Mexicans gathered on street corners and church squares to celebrate the holy week and set fire to their Judases, a popular ritual in this heavily Catholic country. Those demons are typically forked-tongue devils and flaming dragons, and often, like this year, reviled politicians.”
To add a bit more context to the Mexican tradition described above, burning effigies also serves the purpose of a symbolic baptism-by-fire or cleansing of evil on one of the holiest days of the Catholic year.
But it’s the quotes, really, that are golden.
“For Latinos here and in the U.S., he’s a danger, a real threat,” said Leonardo Linares, a 52-year-old artist who built a Trump effigy over the past week in his Mexico City studio. “He’s a good man to burn as a Judas.”
And:
“’Mostly it’s devils, monsters,’ said Ricardo Sanchez [of the traditional effigies], a 27-year-old mechanic as he put the finishing touches on 20-foot-tall dragon. ‘One year we burned Osama bin Laden.’”
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more.
It might look weird as hell, but the Slingbox 500 is still the best way to stream live TV from your home’s cable connection to any device in the world, and Amazon’s knocking $85 off its list price today.
This genius little surge protector puts its plugs on swivels, allowing your cords to run flush with the wall and behind furniture, without any bending.
We’ve seen our fair share of sub-$20 Bluetooth speakers, but not many of them can join you in the shower. The Omaker M4 can do just that thanks to its IP54-rated splash resistance, and still deliver up to 12 hours of playtime on a single charge. That’s perfect if you like to sing in the shower, or just need to catch up on your podcast backlog.
It wasn’t long ago that portable, USB-powered external hard drives maxed out at 2TB, but Seagate’s new Backup Plus manages to double that, and you can pick one up for an all-time low $110 today. That price even includes 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive storage for two years, which is a $96 value on its own.
We’re not sure how long this deal will last, so if you need to keep a lot of storage in your travel bag, or plugged into your Xbox One, I’d grab this quickly.
What a lovely day...to catch up on the entire Mad Max franchise. This anthology has never been cheaper, and since this is a Gold Box deal, it likely won’t be this low again for some time.
If you like the idea of a car vent mount for your phone, but don’t have a case to hold a magnetic plate in place, this Aukey clamp model is only $6 right now.
In case you missed out earlier this month, Amazon’s offering a pair of Bosch Insight Blades for just $22 right now. All you have to do is pick the two you want and add them to your cart, then you should see the discount at checkout. This deal even allows you to mix and match sizes, so you can almost certainly find a combination that will work for your car. [Two Bosch Insight Wiper Blades, $22]
Note: The discount will only work on blades shipped and sold by Amazon directly. No third party sellers.
Commerce Content is independent of Editorial and Advertising, and if you buy something through our posts, we may get a small share of the sale. Click here to learn more, and don’t forget to sign up for our email newsletter. We want your feedback.
Approximately 200 right-wing demonstrators—dressed in black, some wearing masks, shouting nationalist slogans and making Nazi salutes—interrupted a memorial service at a square in Brussels on Sunday, the Guardian reports. Riot police cleared the square with water cannon.
Those in the square had gathered to honor the 28 killed and 340 injured in last week’s suicide bombings at the airport and subway station, despite the fact that a planned March Against Fear was cancelled a day before out of concerns over another terror attack.
One witness, Adam Liston, told the BBC there had been a “really positive atmosphere” in the square.
“Then a bunch of skinheads just turned up, marched into the square, and started a major confrontation with the peace protesters. They got in the face of the protesters and police. They set off flares and chanted and it was getting quite ugly,” he said.
He added that although it had been “pretty non-violent”, it looked like it “could have kicked off”.
The Belgian prime minister and the city mayor have strongly condemned the behaviour.
“I am appalled by what is happening, to learn that such thugs have come to provoke residents at the site of their memorial,” said Brussels mayor Yvan Mayeur.
PM Charles Michel said it was “highly inappropriate that protesters have disrupted the peaceful reflection at the Bourse (stock exchange).
The BBC originally reported that the group identified themselves as Fascists Against Terrorism, but that report was later revised to Casuals Against Terrorism.
On Sunday, March 27, Bernie Sanders spoke about campaign finance on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, referring to George Clooney’s upcoming fundraiser for Hillary Clinton as “obscene.” Guests at the April 15 event will pay as much as $353,400 for two seats at the event.
Yahoo! Politics reports that “Clinton is asking donors for $353,400 for two seats at the head table with herself, Clooney, and his wife, Amal, at...the event in San Francisco. The next night, the Clooneys will host A $33,400 per person fundraiser for Clinton at the couple’s Los Angeles home.”
Sanders professes to be a fan of Clooney’s acting, but he’s vehemently opposed to lavish fundraising events like these. And he assigns the brunt of the blame to Clinton.
“It is obscene that Secretary Clinton keeps going to big-money people to fund her campaign,” Sanders argues in his interview. “I have a lot of respect for George Clooney. He’s a great actor. I like him...But this is the problem with American politics...Big money is dominating our political system. And [my supporters and I] are trying to move as far away from that as we can.”
Sanders notes that donations to his campaign average around $27 per person. And when he holds events, tickets cost “$15 or $50.” As a “self-described democratic socialist” relying on small donations rather than super-PACs is a fundamental part of his campaign ideology.
“It’s not only this Clooney event,” he explained on CNN. “It is the fact that [Clinton] has now raised well over $15 million from Wall Street for her super-PAC, and millions more from the fossil fuel industry, and from the drug companies.”
Clinton currently leads in the Democratic primaries, but on ABC’s “The Week” Sanders voiced his optimism that “he can make up the ground” in the remaining state primaries.
Since last summer, when U.S. authorities confirmed the presence of classified information in emails sent or received by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton using her private email server, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has tried to determine whether Clinton or any of her subordinates mishandled that information—which under certain circumstances is considered a serious crime. The stakes are so high, in fact, that the F.B.I. has deployed nearly 150 full-time agents to investigate the matter, according to a lengthy report by Robert O’Harrow, Jr. of the The Washington Post:
The F.B.I. is now trying to determine whether a crime was committed in the handling of that classified material. It is also examining whether the server was hacked. One hundred forty-seven F.B.I. agents have been deployed to run down leads, according to a lawmaker briefed by F.B.I. Director James B. Comey. The FBI has accelerated the investigation because officials want to avoid the possibility of announcing any action too close to the election.
Besides the sheer number of agents supposedly dedicated to investigating Clinton’s email server, the justification for doing so is noteworthy as well: The 2016 presidential election is over seven months away, but the Democratic primary, in which Clinton has successfully fended off Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders thus far, is operating on much shorter timetable. Indeed, there’s some anxiety among Democrats on the national stage about the possibility of Clinton receiving an F.B.I. indictment after the Democratic convention, by which time she would have presumably won enough delegates to capture the nomination, but before the actual election, when such an indictment would render her candidacy toxic, with no other option to replace her.
We’ve launched a new newsletter, full of our top stories of the day. Signing up couldn’t be easier.
Subscribing is easy. Just click here or hit the link below. Type in your email address, and you’re all done. Once you’re signed up, your first newsletter will arrive that afternoon at 4pm ET (or the following one, if you sign up after 4).
Last week, Emory University students were shaken to their very core when someone wrote “TRUMP” on the ground in chalk. After much wailing, the school is now struggling to prove to the world that is not afraid of chalk—though it will be an uphill battle.
Chalk is dusty menace and could ruin a white shirt or float into your eyeballs on the wind. Nevertheless, our young adults must learn to deal with this reality: chalk exists in the world. Denying that fact will simply postpone the inevitable. Sooner or later, in America, you can be sure that you will be faced with a piece of chalk.
Will you survive that challenge?
Though Emory students seemed to fail last week’s sidewalk chalk challenge by loudly proclaiming how scared it made them and thereby drawing ridicule upon their university from far and wide, others in the Emory community are now standing up for the cause of Bravery in the Face of Chalk. Inside Higher Ed reports that a student group named “Emory Young Americans for Liberty” made their own sidewalk chalk art of political candidates to prove a very important point: “This was about the right to chalk and the right to express opinions,” one of the chalk leaders told Inside Higher Ed, saying that the new political chalkings “show that students are capable of handling chalk and that we stand for freedom of expression.”
Emory students say they are capable of handling chalk. But is “the system” ready for it? In a groveling essay today that does its best to pander to all sides, Emory’s dean of campus life writes that “some of the chalkings on Emory’s campus were a violation of university policies, certainly not because of the content, but because the chalkings were done in unacceptable locations and without reserving the space.”
Okay—so “the man” doesn’t want you to chalk—big surprise.
Emory’s tuition is more than $45,000 per year. Is that enough money to teach a young person how to survive in a world in which chalk may appear in any location at any time—even without reservation? Only time will tell.
There is, however, reason to be skeptical that the task will be accomplished.
There are many things the GOP is willing to do to stop Donald Trump. Pretending to like Ted Cruz is not currently one of them.
But with Rubio’s exit from the race, Cruz—who is perpetually bombastic, annoying and frankly unsettling in a visceral way—has become the closest thing to a mainstream candidate the GOP has. And though politicos are beginning, reluctantly and unenthusiastically, to coalesce around Cruz, they are still unable or unwilling to hide how little they actually think of him.
There was Jeb Bush, who last week issued a statement endorsing Cruz because he’s not Donald Trump. Mitt Romney, who endorsed Cruz (but only in the Utah primary) because he’s not Donald Trump. And of course, Lindsay Graham—who said he’d rather be shot or poisoned than endorse Cruz—endorsed Cruz because he’s not Donald Trump.
But, as the New York Timespoints out, you’d expect more Republicans to be “supporting” Cruz, given how much they hate Donald Trump.
While the Romney and Bush endorsements drew headlines, what has been just as striking is the sound of silence from the vast majority of Republican elected officials and leading donors. Nearly two weeks after Senator Marco Rubio dropped out of the race, there has been no mass rush to Mr. Cruz, even as he appears to be the last line of defense against a Trump nomination.
The decision by so many leading Republicans to remain on the sidelines is all the more notable because it appears inversely proportional to the scale of concern about Mr. Trump. His recent attacks on Mr. Cruz’s wife and soaring unpopularity among women, minorities and college-educated voters have left many in the party more convinced than ever that, with Mr. Trump as their standard-bearer, they are churning toward a political iceberg this fall.
And that’s the thing—most people seem to hate Ted Cruz enough to just burn the whole thing down. Everyone hates Ted Cruz—even the people supporting him.
“If I can swallow my pride, they can, too,” is one way Graham has described his endorsement. “What can I say? He’s not completely crazy,” is another.
Ted Cruz: The Guy Who’s Just As Bad As The Other Guy But In Different Ways. A candidate you can really get behind, unless Paul Ryan runs—is he running?
Spencer Ackerman of The Guardian is reporting that, in the period following the September 11, 2001 attacks, agents for the Central Intelligence Agency systemically photographed suspects of terrorism after they had been stripped naked before rendering them to other countries to be tortured:
A former US official who had seen some of the photographs described them as “very gruesome”. The naked imagery of CIA captives raises new questions about the seeming willingness of the US to use what one medical and human rights expert called “sexual humiliation” in its post-9/11 captivity of terrorism suspects. Some human rights campaigners described the act of naked photography on unwilling detainees as a potential war crime.
The practice of photographing detainees naked was reportedly tied to the C.I.A.’s desire to document their physical condition in minute detail, in case questions of their treatment in U.S. custody later arose. However other terrorism suspects were frequently tortured by the U.S. while naked as well, under the apparent premise that the added “psychological discomfort” of nudity—the act of being physically degraded by one’s captors—would yield actionable intelligence to prevent further terrorist attacks.
In the same piece, well worth reading in full, Ackerman clarifies that these photos, copies of which remain in the C.I.A.’s possession, “are distinct from previously identified caches of torture photos from the U.S. military and the C.I.A. The renditions remain the most secret aspect of the CIA’s since-discontinued apparatus of detentions, prisoner transfers and abusive interrogations.”
Some of the “previously known caches of torture photos” to which Ackerman refers are the subject of a still-active 13-year-old lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Department of Defense in 2003. According to a government filing in federal court late last year, sitting Secretary of Defense Ash Carter intends to release 198 photos of detainees who were abused in U.S.-operated detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those photos belong to a much larger collection containing approximately 2,200 other visual records, the bulk of which the Defense Department has refused to release.
Kimani Gray, the 16-year-old who was killed by NYPD officers in 2013 after allegedly pointing a gun at them, is back in the news. It’s worth remembering, when considering Gray’s case, that cops in the precinct where he died have a history of allegedly fudging with gun evidence.
NYPD sergeant Mourad Mourad and officer Jovaniel Cordova shot Gray seven times as he stood in the street in East Flatbush. A loaded handgun was recovered from the scene, and the officers said that Gray pointed the gun at them after they exited their unmarked patrol car to question him.
Three days after the shooting, a woman named Tinasha King who lives across the street told the New York Daily News that she was “certain” Gray was not holding a gun or anything else when he was killed. King was recently subpoenaed as part of a wrongful death lawsuit Gray’s mother filed against the city, and testified under oath that Gray’s hands were up and that he did not point a gun at the officers. (The city’s attorney did not directly ask King whether Gray was holding a gun at all.)
Someone is either lying or misremembering what happened, and without pictures or surveillance video, we can’t know for certain whether it is King or Mourad and Cordova. On the one hand, the officers have a more obvious motive for misrepresenting the facts than King; on the other, King witnessed the events from her window, a much further and potentially distorting vantage point than the cops’. The loaded revolver found on the scene is the only apparently irrefutable piece of evidence, and it clearly supports the officers’ story.
However, in the NYPD’s 67th Precinct, where Gray was killed, a gun recovered from the scene isn’t quite the infallible “smoking gun” evidence it might be elsewhere. About a year and a half after Gray was killed, a New York Times investigation revealed that cops in the 67th Precinct may have planted guns on as many as six different people in order to make arrests. One of the accused men had charges against him dropped after a judge found an officer’s testimony to be “extremely evasive” and not credible; in another case, a judge said there was “a serious possibility that some evidence was fabricated by these officers,” and that she believed the officers had perjured themselves.
The circumstances of those arrests were drastically different from Gray’s; none of men involved were killed, for instance, nor were they accused of pointing a gun at the police. No one is accusing Mourad and Cordova of planting guns, and the clique of cops who were involved in the potential planting cases have no connection to Gray’s shooting besides working in the same precinct. Still, while there’s no evidence that a gun was planted on Gray’s body, that kind of thing has been known to happen in his neighborhood.
Perhaps the best reason to worry about Wall Street money managers ripping off investors is that most of those investors are regular people—via retirement plans. The extent of the Wall Street skim is truly shocking.
A new research paper from a Duke University economist focuses on the North Carolina State Employees’ Pension Fund—the $90 billion fund that invests and manages the retirement money of the state’s teachers, firemen, and other governmental employees. These sorts of pension funds invest their money in a wide array of assets, including expensive private equity funds and hedge funds and other Wall Street vehicles that charge high fees in exchange for the (false) promise of enhanced performance and lower risk. When we speak of Wall Street investment managers overcharging customers and giving them nothing in return, we are not just talking about zillionaires picking the wrong hedge fund manager; we are talking about teachers and other thoroughly middle-class people who have worked for decades, and whose retirement money is being systematically plundered by Wall Street fees, thanks to bad pension fund management.
The new study of the fund did something very simple: it asked what would happen if North Carolina’s pension fund, instead of investing in a wide variety of of pricey funds, put all its money into a handful of simple, low-cost index funds, like the ones that anyone can buy through Vanguard. It is widely accepted that buying and holding low-cost index funds will save individual investors a great amount of money in the long run. But people who regard themselves as financially “sophisticated” often scoff at the idea of managing, say, a $90 billion pension fund according to the same principles that a normal person would manage their own tiny investments.
As is often the case, it is dangerous to listen to the sophisticated financiers. The study concluded that the state could be saving hundreds of million or billions of dollars per year by investing in simple Vanguard funds. Bolding ours:
Our various calculations... indicate indexing the equity part of the NC Pension fund would have increased returns by approximately $781 million per year (in the 3 years ending mid- 2015), $2.492 billion per year (last 5 years to mid-2015), and $969 million per year (last 10 years to mid- 2015). This is an increase in the return by between 0.87 percentage points/year and 2.78 percentage points/year.
The most conservative of these estimates translates into a saving of 3.59% of the annual NC State Budget or $82 per capita saving for each North Carolina Resident. Should the savings be allocated to raising teachers’ salaries, the saving would amount to $8,031 per teacher per year, which would be a 18.14 % salary increase. These are annual figures. The gain of $781 million per year translates into $7.810 billion over a decade. The likely growth of the pension plan makes this figure a slight underestimate.
An extra data point that you can include in your next discussion with some asshole who “works in finance” is that the study found that the fund managers actually do the opposite of “buy low, sell high”—namely, “managers adjust their asset holdings in the wrong direction, shrinking the allocation to asset classes just before they appreciate.”
Which is to say, these professional money managers actively made the investments worse than they would have been if you just let them alone and did nothing, ever.
At minimum, professional money managers are taking $800 million dollars per year away from middle-class residents of North Carolina, in exchange for nothing. This is only one state. “Pension reform” is a boring phrase, but there is a multibillion-dollar universe of Wall Street ripoffs out there that are completely legal, because no one is angry enough about it. Yet.
[The old people represent retirees getting robbed by inefficient investing and the child represents a hopeful future in which pension funds are primarily indexed: Flickr]
Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of The New York Times, weighs in on Hillary Clinton’s ongoing struggle to appear honest and trustworthy:
As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.
Curiously, Abramson defends this conviction even as she recounts the various instances in which Clinton has been less than “fundamentally honest,” including:
Her corporate speeches for clients such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and UBS, the contents of which she has withheld from the public as the Democratic frontrunner;
Her decision to use a private email server located in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y. mansion to conduct official government business, a practice she withheld from the public as Secretary of State;
Her secret State Department correspondence with Sidney Blumenthal, the former Bill Clinton aide who became an amateur spook, the existence of which Clinton refused to acknowledge even after Gawker reported on it in 2013;
And her well-documented flip-flops regarding the regulation of the finance industry and overseas trade agreements, the logic of which she has barely bothered to articulate.
“Still,” Abramson concludes her column, “Clinton has mainly been constant on issues and changing positions over time is not dishonest.”
Governor Nathan Deal has announced that he will veto a bill passed by Georgia’s Senate and House that purported to protect the “religious freedom” of the state’s citizens, but in practice would have given faith-based organizations legal rights to discriminate.
The “religious freedom” in jeopardy was actually “enacting inequality under the guise of godly self-righteousness”: No one wants to take anyone’s religion away, but plenty of wise people would prefer other people’s beliefs not impede their happiness and access to services enjoyed by heterosexual people without question or thought. Life is hard and miserable enough without formally sanctioned discrimination.
The measure “doesn’t reflect the character of our state or the character of its people,” the governor said Monday, urging state legislators should leave freedom of religion and freedom of speech to the U.S. Constitution.
“Their efforts to purge this bill of any possibility that it would allow or encourage discrimination illustrates how difficult it is to legislate something that is best left to the broad protections of the First Amendment,” he said.
The two-term Republican has been besieged by all sides over the controversial measure, and his office has received thousands of emails and hundreds of calls on the debate. The tension was amplified by a steady stream of corporate titans who urged him to veto the bill – and threatened to pull investments from Georgia if it became law.
I want you to understand, this legislation is about equal protection and not discrimination. It only impacts the government’s interaction with faith-based organizations or a person who holds faith-based, sincerely held beliefs as it relates to marriage.
It’s funny how often you hear the phrase “sincerely held beliefs” in this context, as though earnestness bespeaks morality, as though LGBT people should assess this like, “I wasn’t on board with you thinking that I am inherently inferior to you until I realized that you were sincere. Now I understand. You really mean this! My bad.”
As for next steps, AJC reports:
Already, several conservative lawmakers have owed to call for a “veto session” to rebuke the governor if he rejects the measure. It takes a three-fifth majority in both chambers to call a special session, and a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override a veto — a threshold the bill failed to reach by one vote in the Senate and 16 in the House.
“There are enough votes in the Senate to override,” predicted state Sen. Brandon Beach, an Alpharetta Republican facing a tough primary challenge who supported the measure. “I don’t know about the House, though.”
The governor, who didn’t take any questions after his remarks, anticipated the pushback.
“I don’t respond well to insults or threats,” he said.
This is one of several examples of lawmakers pursuing discriminatory “religious freedom” laws as a backlash to the Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling last summer. This is happening in over 20 states—for a good rundown, read Michelangelo Signorile’s Huffington Post piece “How a Ferocious Backlash to LGBT Equality Is in Full Force While Leaders Have No Strategy.” People are having a really hard time giving up their formerly government-sanctioned feelings of supremacy. How sad for them, how terrifying for LGBT Americans.
Donald Trump’s candidacy has been hard on everyone, it’s true. But it’s been especially hard on his daughter, Ivanka—the one who people like.
Ivanka—like her brothers Donald, Jr. and the other one—works for the Trump Organization and does the occasional scene on The Apprentice. It’s been good for her brand, which includes clothing, shoes, accessories, and a Pinterest-aware Twitter feed, but it’s also positioned her as a sort of soothing counterpart to her extremely rude father, which in many ways isn’t as good for her brand but is still, ultimately, good for her brand?
Because things were already going great for her—she’s building her own lifestyle brand, she’s married to real estate developer and owner of the New York Observer, Jared Kushner, and if all else fails, her dad is worth a lot of money, whatever that amount may actually be.
The Washington Post has a rundown of some of the many ways her father’s explicitly racist campaign has affected her this year—among them the removal of her made-in-China clothing collection from the Trump Organization website (it’s still sold in stores.) She had to find two new acclaimed chefs for the $200 million Washington D.C. Trump Hotel project to replace the ones that quit when her father said most Mexicans are rapists and drug dealers. She maybe lost Chelsea Clinton as a friend.
At the same time, her once-very famous, now extremely famous last name is landing her in magazines like Vogue. Morning show hosts bring her on TV to ask her about parenting advice. She’s currently designing “something a little glam, a little baroque,” for the new hotel project, which, incredibly, weathered the resignations. She’s onstage at campaign rallies more than her father’s current wife, Melania. Tiffany doesn’t get to go onstage, like ever. Not the worst life—still life as Donald Trump’s daughter though.
In public, everyone says that Thomas Sayers Ellis, 52, formerly of Case Western and Sarah Lawrence, a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop this semester, is brilliant. Even the people who find him off-putting and unprofessional tend to agree. He’s charismatic and surprising, a protest poet, a real intellectual, unafraid to cause alarm. His style is enjambed, urgent, and rhythmically afire; in the late ‘80s, he founded the Dark Room Collective to promote writers of color, and he’s been known as an activist ever since. He attracts women; several women I talked to said he had “groupies.” But in late February, a group of women came together to say that he’s abusive, that he preys.
Their accusations, collected and published anonymously by the advocacy organization VIDA, sent the administration and many students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop into private crisis. The program has a history of male poets becoming involved with students; a repetition of that history—let alone a worse version of it—wouldn’t do. Immediately after the VIDA post, Ellis’s classes were canceled, and by the time spring break was over, the week after the post went up, he’d been unofficially replaced.
The accusations against Ellis portrayed him as a familiar sort of figure. The story of the important, inappropriate literary man is so common and entrenched as to feel depressingly unremarkable. Women often circulate warnings about them in private, never sure what to do: they talk about incidents that are disturbing but often shy of criminally reportable, and they distribute warnings via hearsay, and they tell you they wish they, or their friend, or their friend of a friend, had known to stay away. There’s the grabby lit mag editor, the wildly volatile critic, the author you hear once hit somebody, the professor who every year dates a first-year grad student and manages to send her reputation, not his, into the mud. In terms of artistic value, this man is often phenomenal, the type that can define and support an institution; in terms of his effect on half the women writers he encounters, this man frequently adds up to shit.
The cultural landscape is set up ideally right now for women to speak out about this. Privilege and rape culture are phrases in common parlance; sexual inequity and assault are seen (finally) as an epidemic; social media allows whispers to grow into flames.
In the most prominent recent example of testimony and catharsis becoming semi-official allegation, multiple women publicly accused the “alt-lit” writers Stephen Tully Dierks and Tao Lin of rape, abuse and coercion in October 2014. The woman who first accused Dierks gave him a pseudonym on Medium, which other women on Tumblr linked to Dierks’s real name; Lin’s ex-girlfriend E.R. Kennedy (formerly Ellen, he now identifies as male) tweeted a story of rape that was picked up by Tumblr, “liked” by 7,000 people in a day, and noted by dozens of publications, including Jezebel.
Now women are speaking up about situations that fall outside the conventional definition of rape but nonetheless reflect a gender power dynamic that leaves women sexually vulnerable. Katz never used the word rape, but her essay spells out many of the reasons women have sex when they don’t want to. There’s baseline need (she had nowhere else to stay), physical intimidation (he was on top of her), and, most insidious, a deeply internalized sense of obligation.
Stoeffel’s piece was titled “It Doesn’t Have to Be Rape to Suck,” and addressed one of the most fungibly interpreted aspects of this informal pursuit of justice. Why are women talking about, and accusing, the important and inappropriate literary man? To ruin his reputation? To remove him from employment? Not as a priority, Stoeffel concluded, and to my eye accurately. “What it seems most women want,” she wrote, “is to warn other women about a category of jerk courts have no name for: a guy who can’t be trusted not to exploit his power over her.”
But at some point, personal responsibility (validate women’s experiences, keep your loved ones the fuck away) bleeds into institutional responsibility (tell your friends to fire him, to refuse to hire him, to boycott his class). What happens when the guy in question is employed by the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the most prestigious prominent writing program in the country? In Thomas Sayers Ellis’s case, the stories about him have ultimately (if unofficially) removed him from his post. His case seems to suggest that we’ve arrived at a new stage of this era. The important, inappropriate literary man is going to face his retribution. Or at least, certainly, the literary community is poised to bring him to some end.
The first person to say anything about Thomas Sayers Ellis was Larkin Grimm, a vocalist and songwriter, who played with him in the band Heroes Are Gang Leaders—a collective of poets and musical artists organized by Ellis in the wake of the poet Amiri Baraka’s death. On February 25, Grimm wrote a public Facebook post, claiming that a different man, Michael Gira of the band Swans, had raped her, and that what had prompted her to bring it to light was the fallout from an incident with Thomas Sayers Ellis.
“I experienced a traumatic incidence of sexual harassment in my band Heroes are Gang Leaders on February 6th and 7th,” Grimm wrote, in a note that’s now been aggregated or linked to on essentially every website that covers music news. “The band leader, Thomas Sayers Ellis, threatened to hurt me further if I called him out publicly,” she claimed.
So I have spent the last few weeks thinking it over, looking at my options. Many cases like this have been shared on Facebook and twitter lately. I do not believe in Facebook witch hunts or mob justice, and that is why I decided to take this issue to a government agency. [...] It turns out musicians cannot file a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because we are freelancers. Maybe this is why rape, assault, and sexual harassment are so common in the music world.
The EEOC rep, Grimm said, “urged” her to “see if there is anything you can do to help us protect women like yourself.” Prefacing her statement with “Twitter justice is not justice, y’all,” she continued:
I saw this man, whose sexual advances I had been calmly brushing off for months, abuse his girlfriend in front of 12 band members at Rutgers University in Newark on the night of february 6th. I went to speak to him afterwards wondering if he had gone insane. This was a man I loved and admired. The next day, I was publicly humiliated in front of our audience at The Firehouse in Brooklyn on February 7th right before the show, verbally abused and threatened, and kicked out of a band that I loved. Both these events had many, many witnesses.
The post was aggregated by Brooklyn Vegan on the same day Grimm posted it, and it quickly made waves in the music world. That story—concerning her statements about Gira, not Ellis—was aggregated by the Guardian, Billboard, the Village Voice, Stereogum, Spin, and many more.
The same day, Gira wrote on his Facebook page that Grimm’s account was a“slanderous lie”; through a spokesperson, he called the incident in question an “awkward mistake.” Grimm sent Pitchfork a response, saying she had been incapacitated at the time of the encounter: “In a gentlemanly move he admits the act happened but cannot conceive of himself as a rapist. Thank you Michael Gira for your honesty. This is your truth as you remember it. Unfortunately, this was still rape.”
The truth, for a long time, was that no one wanted to listen to rape accusations. That still holds in many institutional contexts, but the world of media (starting with social media; search #BelieveWomen, and look at how these accounts spread now) is listening up. Grimm’s account was aggregated widely. And as it went bigger, the literary internet, which moves a few degrees slower, had seen Grimm’s passing mention of Thomas Sayers Ellis and taken note.
Ellis, again, is a unique figure. In interviews, I asked a dozen women who have known Ellis in various ways to describe him: they said “genius,” “egomaniac,” “atypical,” “extraordinary,” “punishing,” exclusively extreme words like that. Within contemporary poetry, his reputation is large enough that several people I talked to said the phrase “cult of personality”—large enough that Ellis feels comfortable, according to a current student, referring to himself in third person during class.
Respected men in the literary community are still almost never challenged in the open about borderline or far-over-the-line behavior; when they are, women respond with a pent-up force that feels electric. It’s part of the reason Claire Vaye Watkins’ Tin House essay “On Pandering” was received with such gratitude and fervor: in it, she called out Stephen Elliott of The Rumpus for trying to get in her bed and then belittling her for it in his public newsletter. “I’m not presenting Stephen Elliott as a rogue figure, but as utterly emblematic,” she wrote. Larkin Grimm had done this for Ellis, and so a group of women writers decided to act.
The week that Grimm’s Swans accusations were breaking, 11 women collected their accounts of varyingly intimate interactions with Ellis. Requesting anonymity, they sent these stories to VIDA, an advocacy organization best known for the VIDA Count, which tallies up the aggregate presence of women writers in major magazines at the end of the year.
“After Larkin’s thing, they were like, ‘You know what? As a matter of fact, I have something to say on this too,’” said a woman with knowledge of the situation, who knows Ellis through the residencies and conferences that delineate the literary circuit. She had no account to contribute; Ellis is an “intense person,” but she’s never been harassed by him, she told me, and she doesn’t like the idea of “allowing yourself protection that you’re not allowing the person you accuse.”
The following sample of de-identified disclosures are from women who have experienced traumatic interactions with a respected literary arts community member. In the recent weeks, we have learned the extent of his violations — a system of disturbing sexual and professional misconduct within and beyond learning spaces. The damage reaches back much longer than one decade and stops today.
[...] We begin our efforts with these disclosures of interactions with Thomas Sayers Ellis. We appreciate these women’s strength in putting their stories in strangers’ hands.
Within hours after this post went up, a dozen people I’d met through my MFA program had linked to the article on Facebook. As I read it, I felt increasingly surprised, and worried.
It wasn’t—and whose fault is this—the content of the stories: working at Jezebel and having spent much of my post-college time in one writing-centric community or another, it is unsurprising to me that any respected man in any enclosed community would be accused of being abusive, inappropriate, a creep. And it’s also worth mentioning that, while all the stories describe some sort of distressing behavior, not all of them describe violence, and the “de-identification” means that crucial potential incriminating factors (a student-teacher relationship, an institutional context) are completely obscured. The first entry calls Ellis “predatory” for lying to the writer about recommendations and giving off bad “energy,” and the last VIDA entry is a diary detailing a consensual relationship that ends in slightly uncomfortable sex. “He hurt me kinda yesterday, rushing,” the writer said. (When I asked about the last entry, Amy King, on the VIDA executive board, wrote back, “We felt [the entries] illustrate the evolution of giving over power, of how manipulation evolves.”)
Rather, I was surprised at the gap between the aim of VIDA’s post, which is unimpeachable, and the execution of the post, which was—if you expect it to stand journalistically, which they told me repeatedly that they don’t—flawed. I was surprised by the words they used, too: “de-identified” for un-vetted and impossible to corroborate, and “strength” for something I’m still trying to figure out. “Strength” can work as both a feminist and literary tautology for the plain act of speaking. But the logic involved can get imprecise. When we’ve called women strong for speaking out about trauma, it’s often been because doing so has traditionally, and unfairly, been as difficult as (or more difficult than) enduring the trauma itself.
What we’re encountering here, however, is a sea change. It is a new thing that a woman could type out her story anonymously, attach it to a public figure’s name, and know that an organization with a respected platform would accept it without context and publish it like this:
He said let me fuck you there. One day I will fuck you there. I said from there, on my body, things go out, not in. I said no. He said you are mine. He said I worship you. He is not small. I screamed. He said it was an accident. You know it was an accident. Right? I kept silent. After the scream. [....] He paced barefoot in his accident speech in his unzipped khaki pants. Words bled from his mouth. Accident, accident, accident. I love you. I bled and cleaned and shook. I think it was late fall. Bald trees and pale gray sunlight. I bled in my silence and it became a flat rage. I put up my hand and he finally shut. Up. I went silent except to grow cold over days to let him go. He said I love you. I had nothing to do but try to reconcile love and bleeding.
This type of writing can be essential as an act of artistic catharsis, but it has never functioned as official denunciation—as it did for many women who had been waiting for it, and in practice, for Iowa too—until now. VIDA did not ask us to hold their post to a journalistic standard, but they wanted the post to stand with journalistic strength. And they are not alone in blurring the line between activism and journalism.
After a similar incident in January in which multiple women tweeted sexual assault claims against the music publicist Heathcliff Berru, Brooklyn Magazine aggregated the tweets speedily; the post’s author, Caitlin White, tweeted that she “broke” and “reported” the story, and that publications that hadn’t re-posted those tweets were disrespecting the women’s stories, or actively doing harm. (Some publications, Jezebel among them, were “late” because they were reporting, which takes longer; Berru has since resigned from his post, and denies raping or drugging anyone, but called his behavior “disgusting” to BKMag.)
A month later, White published another BKMag piece “exposing” a man with 238 Twitter followers, whose arguably broadest claim to fame had come from the magazine itself listing him on its “30 Under 30 Envy Index” the previous September. The piece, which went up February 22, is a collection of allegations of sexual assault about him, all contextualized but anonymous, except for one.
Our awareness of the prevalence and magnitude of sexual assault has outpaced the systems that expose and adjudicate it. It’s incredibly difficult to match these two things up. But for activism to carry the authority of journalism—or for journalism with an activist conclusion to work—there are basic practices that can’t be set aside. Noble goals can be quickly rendered immaterial: Rolling Stone should’ve been enough to teach us that good intentions—that “believing women”—can end up hurting them dramatically in the end.
And believing a woman, anyway, isn’t the same as supporting her. Supporting a woman means strengthening her position, and the women who spoke to VIDA have been presented on shaky ground. The poet Sandra Beasley wrote on her blog: “There’s a possibility that the manner in which testimonies are gathered means that their circulation sparks a really important conversation—but then, ultimately, limits it.” She added, “That doesn’t mean that I doubt the veracity of these testimonies.”
In fact, the more seriously you take the VIDA stories, the more regrettable the method of their publication becomes. There is no correct way to process trauma—let’s be clear about that. There are, however, best practices for taking someone down. The latter, which was VIDA’s stated goal in their post, requires precision of language. A rape accusation that is supposed to strip someone of their power cannot be written creatively “for effect.” Let’s say you truly believe a man like this is dangerous. Say you want to get him out of his prestigious teaching position. Do you write an anonymous account about blood and trees and sunlight? Or do you contact someone in a position of power, confirm their protection of your privacy, and write down, as clearly as possible, your account of anal rape?
I called Larkin Grimm, the woman who started the conversation. Again, she’s a musician, and relatively separate from the MFA world; it doesn’t seem coincidental that she’s the only woman thus far who’s willing to attach her full name. In the month since she wrote her Facebook post about Gira and Ellis, she says she’s consistently received threats, including death threats. “People saying I had something to gain by telling the truth have no idea what it is like,” she says. I also reached out multiple times to Ellis for comment while I was reporting; he declined to speak to me about any aspect of this piece, so this is Grimm’s account.
Grimm and Ellis met two years ago, on an Amtrak train from Chicago to San Francisco. Both Ivy League alumni with “similar concerns about how race is handled in society,” they hit it off immediately. Ellis, a photographer, took photos of Grimm; she invited him to have dinner with her family; soon, he asked her to join Heroes Are Gang Leaders.
“He was making an effort to include women’s voices, which I really appreciated,” Grimm told me. “I felt so good about being in this band. We had almost an equal number of women and men, and it was a wonderful escape from the whiteness of indie rock. And I hate that it’s is all crashing and burning.”
By Grimm’s account, the trouble started when she and Ellis both started to play middleman roles in each other’s relationships—made more complicated by the fact that they were now bandmates, as well as both dating other members of the band. Grimm says she took issue with the way Ellis treated his girlfriend, crossing physical boundaries in a way that she says made the woman fearful, and “publicly berating her until she shut down.” (Ellis’s ex-girlfriend has strongly disputed Larkin’s account, writing on the band’s Facebook page: “Clearly Larkin Grimm is not well. Mental illness does not equate with dishonesty. However, in Grimm’s case, both are active to the detriment of my colleague and former life partner, Thomas Ellis’s reputation and career.” She, along with other members of the band, politely declined to talk to me.)
Involved both professionally and personally with Ellis, then, Grimm detailed a pattern that multiple women have described to me in similar words: increasingly forward emails, requests to photograph her, an escalating need to control her creative production, repeated denunciations of other women and other writers, and sexual jokes that she felt were harassment. Grimm brought up a long text that was written like a poem—a habit several people mentioned—which she said mentioned his penis.
“I wrote back, like, ‘WHAT?’ He told me that it was an accident; it was for somebody else. Well, I’ve never sent an accidental long poem to anybody over a text message.” It made her uncomfortable, she said; they had to work together. And then, by her account, he started asking her to “wear certain things to recording sessions, because he wanted to photograph me in those things.” Grimm noted that she appreciated having good photos of herself. “But that kind of attention was not always welcome.”
Grimm left the country, staying in Nepal for a couple months, returning shortly before the incident she wrote about in her Facebook post, when the band played a gig in Newark on February 6. As Grimm tells it, Ellis and his then-girlfriend got into a physical fight backstage, which she heard but did not visually witness: “There was screaming, they were moving from room to room, stuff was getting thrown around.” The woman came out in tears, says Grimm, because Ellis had smashed her phone; the band was shaken, but they played the show anyway, as the fee was $600 each.
Afterwards, according to Grimm, a band member tried to remind Ellis why he’d formed the band in the first place, “to celebrate the poetry of Amiri Baraka.” Ellis then brought up the fact that Baraka had himself been jailed, in 1979, for beating his wife in a car. In other words, as Grimm put it: “There’s a precedent for this.”
Precedent may be too light a word for the long history of troubling behavior from powerful men in creative fields. “Tradition,” maybe, is closer. I have encountered this “tradition” many times myself, both from men in the music business and men in the business of literature (the latter being the former’s shabbier, often trickier twin). At their shittiest, both types of men have a partially sincere, partially predatory appreciation for “sexy female weakness” and its creative expression. (Youth is often taken to be a sexy female weakness in itself.) Both types of men have propositioned me in professional settings, subtly and explicitly. Every incident made me feel demoralized about my own abilities, and bad.
Every woman I spoke to asserted that Ellis—attractive, accomplished, charismatic, uncompromising, male—reaps the benefits of this tradition, at least implicitly. But this tradition, or more specifically the long-buried, justifiable indignation that women have developed in response to it, is exactly what’s reared up to bite him now.
Whether or not you think that’s fair likely correlates to how recently you’ve had a man in literature take advantage of his power over you. And the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in particular, according to a dozen current and former students I spoke to, has a solid history of male poetry professors dating female graduate students and—according to women who had no words to mince about this—behaving in misogynistic ways. A former student told me, “What I find interesting about the situation with Thomas Sayers Ellis is that, because of this VIDA article, the administration is being forced to pay a little more attention.” She brought up a poetry professor who’d been on staff when she was in the program: “It was at least equally bad in his situation, but they swept it under the rug.”
In interviews, multiple women with current or recent professional ties to Iowa independently brought up this prizewinning and respected poet, who no longer teaches at the program. As they detailed it, he had an affair with a student shortly before leaving his professorship, and everyone in the program knew. And while institutional policy varies on professor-student relationships, particularly in graduate programs, the effect on the women I spoke to was inhibition—a quiet sense of being undermined by the suspicion that success is achieved through sexualized means.
I talked to a woman who asked for anonymity because she’s still employed by the University of Iowa. “When I got to Iowa,” she told me, “I was like, who the fuck are these people? And where are the adults? Shortly before I’d gotten there, [the poet] had made out with a student at a party, in front of everyone.” She noted that the program’s funding structure, which is infamously competitive, made professor-student affairs even more fraught. The female student in question got a competitive fellowship and a place in this poet’s workshop, and many students felt that this was blatantly wrong.
Later in her first semester, the former student said, the university held a mandatory sexual harassment training seminar (it was schoolwide, and unrelated to the rumors in the department). Everyone in the program was brought into the library on a Monday afternoon, right before the poetry workshop of the professor in question. “Students started asking questions about him, right in front of him, to the lawyer. A student raised her hand and said, ‘What if there’s a professor on faculty right now who’s sleeping with a student?’ The lawyer said, ‘Well, then you should come talk to me.’”
Soon afterwards, the poet left the program voluntarily. When I reached out to him for comment—leading with an apology, like a good young woman—he wrote me back: “This was a pernicious and virulent rumor and if you insist on propagating it, I will sue you. Show some professional restraint.” And indeed, the affair in question may have all been a rumor; I wasn’t there, and the dozen current and former students who told me their impression of it aren’t him. Nonetheless, the story is entrenched program lore, and it is the reason that the Ellis allegations are now being received the way they are.
According to everyone I spoke to, the department’s sympathy appeared to lie with that poet—as did many of the students’ sympathy, particularly the men. Even a decade ago, an affair with a student was not seen as widely distasteful. But the stories about Ellis are arriving in a different climate: one in which we know what harassment is, in which a lot of industries feel ripe for a reckoning, in which social media has worked as a megaphone for people whose protests would have otherwise been ignored.
The week that the VIDA post went up, Ellis’s workshop students, as a unified group, boycotted his class. They went to a student’s house instead, to discuss what to do. “There are some people who are really legitimately shaken,” said a student in Ellis’s other class, a seminar on conspiracy theories. “They’re concerned about being in this really personal space with a known harasser.”
But is Thomas Sayers Ellis a known harasser, or an alleged one? How much has VIDA, or its audience—with the best of intentions—flattened the space between the two? I talked to three other women who had been students of Ellis’s outside of Iowa. They all said he made people very uncomfortable in workshop—and that, furthermore, they appreciated the intellectual and creative challenge this gave them. One said that this state of productive discomfort was “exactly how things should be.” Another said that her many one-on-one experiences with him were “always unnerving, but I never felt unsafe.” Another wrote to me over email:
At no time did he interact with me in a sexual, sexist, predatory, or misogynistic manner. At no time did I receive an inappropriate amount of communication from TSE nor did I receive any messages or emails that disturbed or alarmed me on the basis of tone, content, or frequency. My experience in the classroom with TSE contributed to my becoming a more confident writer, while constantly developing my critical eye.
There is a degree to which—at least within the institutional context of Iowa—VIDA has positioned Thomas Sayers Ellis as a stand-in for the “litany of men in academia and the writing world who are creeps,” as his current student put it. She named other two men who teach in the Writers’ Workshop: “Don’t expect them to give you any consideration if you’re not a straight white dude, or a woman who writes graphic, sexual poetry.” A former Iowa student pointed out that these men had married former students—as did the professor whose story is referenced above. “It’s so gross that they treat their grad students like a dating pool,” she said.
This is another situation where awareness has sped far ahead of procedure. And in a few arenas, I think procedure should not be expected to catch up. If MFA programs disqualified people from employment or admission because of their predictable aesthetic preferences, the entire system would crater in. A healthy institution cannot and shouldn’t create codes dictating attitudes, priorities, vibes in the classroom. What they can and should adjudicate are actions: documented harassment, for instance, or a teacher-student affair.
But there is no proof that Thomas Sayers Ellis has done any of this during the time he has been teaching at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. There appear to be no open allegations about his behavior during this period, though the department solicited them. After the VIDA post went up, a secretary in the department sent a student a message that was passed on through a general listserv, opening her email up to “anyone has experienced or paid witness to an inappropriate experience with TSE.”
The workshop declined to comment on any part of this piece, citing an inability to speak on “personnel issues.” In the week following the VIDA post, the Office of Strategic Communication wrote, in an email to me, “The allegations are concerning and we are looking into the situation. We will proceed in a manner that is respectful to all parties.” (The allegations mentioned here appear to be VIDA’s, exclusively, by unofficial but unchallenged account.) The communications director pointed me to Iowa’s institutional policies, which are typically vague on both consensual student-teacher relationships (they are “prohibited” in theory, but adjudicated in any number of non-ways) and sexual harassment, whose procedure section is dizzying.
So Iowa had the latitude to proceed essentially however they wanted to, which doesn’t mean there was an obvious way to proceed. The situation opens up a series of questions that remain open: Should you terminate someone’s employment if a website publishes a series of anonymous allegations against him from deliberately impossible-to-confirm points in the past? Should an institution simply trust the odds that women’s unconfirmed allegations tend to be true? Will those odds change if this type of takedown becomes widely viable?
And further—and I have asked myself this, and come to no good answers: What do schools do if a student feels uncomfortable about her professor based on unofficially reported warnings? Do they dismiss the professor? Move the student around to another class? At what point would an employer begin to have a legally sound case for official dismissal? What if the professor in question were reportedly terrible enough to an ex-girlfriend that she’ll get on the phone with a stranger, late at night, barely able to breathe straight, holding back tears?
Here’s the central complication: In creative fields like writing and music, the boundary between personal and professional is thin. Your personal life is expressed in your professional output; your professional connections within your industry are likely your closest personal connections, too. And so, the boundary between personal misconduct and professional misconduct remains logistically fluid. The ex-girlfriend I spoke to was a fellow poet, a respected, credentialed, widely published one—a woman who had met Thomas Sayers Ellis through her work. Her voice broke when she said she was afraid to tell me the year she met him. “If I say anything like that, I’m scared that he’ll know it’s me.”
Again, this is her account, as Ellis declined to comment on the story after multiple rounds of contact. She detailed a pattern of escalating emails, then a few months of a whirlwind relationship that turned “demanding, and violent.” I asked if she meant emotionally. “Sexually, too. He would be gentle at first, and then go over the line. And he would just say how much he loved it, and you would wonder what’s wrong with you that you’re not enjoying this thing he says is so good.” She views these encounters, she told me in later conversations, as rape.
When she read the VIDA post: “I went to therapy,” she told me. “My therapist called it ‘vicarious trauma.’ With all of those stories, and with the Larkin Grimm thing, I thought, that sounds exactly like Thomas. I had no trouble believing any of the women. There is no mistaking him.”
I asked her what she would say to a young poet who had Ellis in workshop, who was thinking of him as a professional mentor. Her voice, shaky up till that point, grew urgent. “I would tell her to run away screaming from Thomas,” she said, “and I would ask her if she needs help. I would tell her to stay the hell away from him at all costs. Our world is so personal, and our work is so personal, and he takes advantage not only of his authority, but of people’s confidences and their vulnerability.”
Finally, I asked her whether she thought the language currently being used to describe Ellis was accurate. “Yes,” she said. “He’s an abuser. He hurt me. We went to a writers’ conference, and I kept telling him I didn’t want to do something, so he pushed me in a closet and tried to have sex with me in the closet, and he kept grabbing my breasts and I kept saying no and I had to scream to get him to stop.” She took a deep, shuddering breath, and couldn’t speak for a minute; my own heart caught in my throat.
“He didn’t just do it one time,” she said, after a little. “He was untouchable, or he thought he was. But that era is over, for all those guys.”
I think she’s right on that last point, and thankfully. Finally. But I wonder if we have a clear sense of what here can be adjudicated, and how.
Some of what is being alleged against Ellis is criminal. What some women are talking about—including the woman I spoke to above—is physical and sexual assault. If these allegations are unreported and un-investigated, or alleged in public but anonymously, then the personal methods of holding someone accountable start to diverge from the institutional ones. You can denounce someone personally based on deliberately “de-identified” hearsay, but can you fire them? As an institution, without a corroborated or formal report, can you say anything at all?
People have tweeted at Sarah Lawrence, asking the school to issue a statement (presumably) condemning Ellis. “Have you been reading or nah??” one writer tweeted, to which the college replied: “We are concerned by these allegations but have no record of complaints from the time he was on our faculty several years ago.” The writer replied again: “Will the college make a statement?” But the type of denunciation they are looking for, from an institution like Sarah Lawrence, is not legally permissible without a report on the record. The two most prominent outlets that have collected signatures in solidarity with the women who spoke to VIDA do not even mention Thomas Sayers Ellis by name.
After the point of institutional responsibility, it gets even blurrier. Almost everything in the VIDA stories makes Ellis sound reprehensible—but reprehensible is not against the law. Nor does it seem to be a universal experience with him: An ex-girlfriend who asked we only identify her by her intials, K.K., lived with him for several years with a young child in the house, and talked to me on the phone for a half-hour about his unqualified kindness to her: “The VIDA post was in complete contrast to my experience. It was entirely different from what I knew.”
And some of what is being called traumatizing about him is related to his personality. These women say Ellis is harsh, critical, uncaring in the face of another person’s discomfort.These qualities are bad in a relationship; they are warning signs in men, and they are central to the dynamic that defines abuse. However, these qualities are not universally unwelcome in the classroom. Without a criminal complaint or a verified investigation, these qualities are not, on their own, grounds for firing. They do not negate Ellis’s ability to teach, or even teach well.
“There’s a landscape of affirmation that a lot of writing programs have turned into,” said another poet, who has known Ellis for several years. (She’s the one who had no negative experiences to contribute to VIDA.) “Everyone wants to get a pat on the back. But do you come to get a pat on the back or do you come to learn how to think? Thomas knows he’s antagonistic, that his style is abrasive. He wants people to learn how to take up space in the room.”
It’s telling to me that this woman expressed serious concern that her honest, considered assessment of the situation would be seen as traitorous to feminism; she thought about withdrawing her point of view from the story, anonymous as it is. The VIDA stories, she said, mainly detailed regret. “Relationships don’t always end up the way that they might, and people can get very upset and very hurt. And our greatest defense as writers is our pen, so we use it.”
She said, “And of course, the claim that you don’t feel safe is going to be valued no matter what. Even if there’s no harm that’s imminent. You can say, ‘I feel threatened,’ and you know what? Most people feel threatened by the black male body anyway. If society tells us anything, it’s that.”
I asked her if any of the accounts had surprised her or made her think differently about Ellis. “A man who’s 50 and never been married? Who’s attractive? No, it is no surprise to me that he’s had sex before,” she said. “He’s troubled. He’s manipulative. But if we take the accounts to be true, doesn’t he need exactly what the victims are asking for? Privacy, healing, help. He deserves compassion the way the women do, too.” She saw the VIDA post as “an eye for an eye. I felt like I was done poorly so I’m gonna do people poorly. But that’s vengeance, that’s not justice. You want something to change, you go the legal route.”
“And I’m not discounting their claims,” she said. “I’m not discounting Larkin’s claims, either. I’m just reserving judgment for now. Because, the idea that the literary world is so narrow that a man like that holds the key? These men do not have as much power as we think they do. When you believe that they have power over you, you are reinforcing whatever power they do have. There’s no one gatekeeper. The gates are open.”
Only a month has elapsed since Larkin Grimm accused Thomas Sayers Ellis of harassment in public. Ellis is no longer a visiting professor at Iowa; he has not taught a single class after the VIDA post was published. He has been quietly moved out of his position, his students moved to other teachers and other seminars.
And so the VIDA post worked exactly as the women and the organization intended it to: It has started an overdue conversation; it has ensured these women were heard; it has taken Ellis out of favor. This means that the VIDA post has also, depending on your point of view, either proved or disproved its fundamental logic, which is that no one ever wants to listen to women’s accusations without these tactics—that allowing these women to tell their stories of alleged abuse at the hands of Ellis without holding them to any standard of corroboration or contextualization was the only way that this conversation could be had.
Amy King of the VIDA board read me this statement over the phone:
Allegations have been circulating for some time now, for years, and given Ellis’s prominence in the community, VIDA believes that the issues raised in the post are important to discuss. As noted in the post, it was written by a collective of writers and artists who wish to remain anonymous. We had no reason to doubt them. The culture and system as it stands now does not support women who come forward as individuals, and allowing women to post their stories together provides them that support. We at VIDA have historically given women a platform for their voices, and that’s what we’ve been advocating for. We are an activist organization. We are advocating for women to be heard.
“Some of these posts may be by students,” she told me. “Some of them detail personal relationships, like the last one, disrupting the idea that abusive relationships start out abusive—or that attackers are strangers, or people you’ve just met.”
I asked King if VIDA considered trying to contextualize the stories that seemed like they may have been by students. Engaging in an undisclosed teacher-student relationship is in many places a rule violation; it is solidly actionable in a way that being a horrible partner is usually not.
“I’m not speaking to the truth of these testimonies,” she said, after reminding me repeatedly that she was not engaged in writing or reporting. “What I’m speaking to is that we gave this collective of anonymous artists a platform to speak about issues that we find important to discuss.”
What has struck me most, in reporting this, is the extent of the duress women have found ourselves under—which has already resulted in women associated with this VIDA post believing that we are fundamentally at odds. We agree on almost everything: that the legacy of bad men in creative fields is onerous and near-universal; that it’s terrifying that whispers about an important and inappropriate man can circle for decades without anyone doing anything; that any man who repeatedly takes advantage of his power over women should be called to account.
We agree, even, that institutions have failed women so dramatically that we’ve reached this particular state of things—where a deeply flawed but pragmatically essential hierarchy of systems is beginning to be reversed. We believe that the police system fails women, that the courts fail women, that institutions fail women. But on the next step, we differ dramatically. VIDA, and many of the women who spoke to VIDA, believe that this “guerrilla activism” is the only option; that asking women to present their stories in any other way than the way they’ve decided to—any other way than what makes them feel most comfortable—is infantilizing, and re-traumatizing, and asking too much, and wrong.
In reporting this piece, I’ve spoken to women who have withheld part or all of their story when they heard I was criticizing VIDA’s methods. The opinion that VIDA’s way is the only way to do it, in other words, is deeply and sincerely held. “The women at VIDA are heroes,” said the poet who detailed her assault to me on the phone.
But as I see it, with the criminal justice system so stacked against women that Jian Ghomeshi’s not guilty verdict was near-universally viewed as a symbol of exactly why women do not file official reports—with the jurisdiction of creative writing institutions being usually temporary and scattershot and often irresponsible—it is the press who holds the final line of responsibility. And this responsibility is getting complicated as journalism blurs with activism, which cannot deny the obligations of journalism and then ask to claim its weight. This is a method of “believing women” that will contribute to a wider disbelief of women. Forget journalistic standards, even—if we move towards establishing anonymous accusation as a moral gold standard, it will weaken our position in the end.
On March 18, 12 days after the VIDA post, the founders of the organization (none of whom sit on the organization’s Board of Directors) quietly resigned over email. “None of us knew that VIDA intended to publish such a report,” they wrote. “We were not consulted by the executive committee, nor were we alerted to its forthcoming publication by anyone from VIDA.” They note that “women often feel unsafe reporting harassment, rape, inappropriate conduct,” and “for good reason”—but that they are “deeply concerned by the notion of where internet ‘call out’ and ‘take down’ culture could easily lead.” They say that anonymous accusation has “enormous and disturbing implications” for “any ethical, thinking person.” (It suggests, again, the changes in this conversation that the accusations against Ellis were made publicly, while the founders’ editorial denunciation was not.)
Though I’m not sure everything in the VIDA post is measurably of public interest—asking to be called “daddy” in bed is not the same as sexual assault, and it should be a feminist priority to keep the two things separate on the spectrum, rather than collapse them—I wouldn’t call it “call-out culture” either. It was motivated by pain, and panic, and what felt like last resort. As Kat Stoeffel said in response to the “alt-lit” accusations in 2014, these women wanted to warn other women; they wanted to be heard. But they are also calling for and eliciting an institutional reaction, in this case. And the responses to the founders’ statement have been telling. One woman tweeted, not only affirming the link between VIDA’s post and “call-out culture” but defending the latter’s validity: “You can only get mad about anonymous call-out culture if you know you’re wrong.”
That is untrue. When the goals are crucial, the execution is even more so. We finally have people listening; we are finally in front of a set of wider cultural values that make it possible to end the era of the important, inappropriate literary man. And it’s not fair in a larger sense that women bear the procedural responsibility I’m asking for. It’s horrifically unfair that so much more is asked of victims than rapists, who, as one blogger pointed out, get to be “anonymous guerrillas” no matter what.
But there is no righting that wrong through blurred methods, through asking informal testimony to bear an institutional burden. There is too much at stake here for a woman who comes forward to be put in the position where anyone could say—as people tend to, and as we continue to make possible, through a scrim of good intentions—that it’s not quite clear what she’s talking about.
How do you save face when America’s most prominent racist fires you from his campaign for doing something racist? The answer is simple: endorse the racist’s less-racist opponent, and claim you’re doing it because the racist is too racist for you.
Such was the situation faced by Sam Nunberg, a Donald Trump aide who was fired from the candidate’s campaign last year over a Facebook post that referred to Al Sharpton’s daughter as “N—-!” and others calling Barack Obama a Kenyan Muslim and “Socialist Marxist Islamo Fascist Nazi Appeaser.” (Nunberg said at the time that he was “shocked” and did not remember writing the posts.)
Now, according to an item in this morning’s Politico Playbook, Nunberg is endorsing Ted Cruz. He told Mike Allen that he was concerned about Trump’s lack of national security bona fides, but said that the last straw was the candidate’s “KKK Tapper interview,” in which he failed to immediately disavow the support of former the Klan leader David Duke. Coming from Nunberg, a close associate of fellow racist and ex-Trump staffer Roger Stone, that’s pretty rich.
Of course, it’s not strictly true to say that Nunberg was fired from Trump’s camp for being racist—the candidate himself is plenty racist, after all. Nunberg was fired for expressing his racism in direct terms, not using vague signifiers to give it a patina of plausible deniability, as is the traditional GOP way. And while Trump is pretty good at this dog-whistling, Ted Cruz is even better. You don’t see nearly as many commentators calling Cruz out for racism, despite his proposition that we surveil and patrol law-abiding American Muslim neighborhoods, for instance.
If Nunberg is looking to rehab his image and bring it back toward the mainstream, team Ted Cruz is the perfect fit. No need to get rid of the racism, even—just, you know, tone it down a bit.
According to the AP, both Congress and the White House are on lockdown after a gunman shot a police officer outside of the Capitol building.
Reports of the shooting, which apparently occurred near the Visitor’s Center, broke around 2:40 p.m., when reporters on the scene were told by Capitol Police they had to stay inside. According to The Hill’s Scott Wong, police also told tourists to run away from the Capitol.
Capitol police tell the AP one Capitol police offer was shot and hospitalized with a non-life threatening wound. The shooter is now in custody. [UPDATE: The AP is now reporting that the injury was actually sustained by a female bystander who was injured when a Capitol police officer fired at the shooter, who reportedly pulled a weapon at a security checkpoint.)
As the Washington Post’s Carl Hulse points out, the Capitol Visitor Center where the shooting occurred was actually built as a security measure after a shooter killed two police officers in 1998.
In an apparent coincidence, an email went out last week advising employees there would be a lockdown today as part of a security drill.
