Linke on Valerie D’Orazio and Goodbye To Comics

A commenter named Linke discussed the background for the recent revelations about Chris Sims harassing Valerie D’Orazio. I thought I’d reproduce the comment here.

I find it disturbing that even in this moment of reckoning, the full backstory of why Sims targeted D’Orazio has gone unmentioned.

In 2006 D’Orazio caused a stir with a 12 part rant titled Goodbye to Comics: a blistering critique of misogyny by an industry insider. It includes a takedown of DC’s Identity Crisis, which many consider peak Women In Refrigerators, which is significant as she was the assistant editor on the book.

For the unfamiliar, Identity Crisis centers on the murder of Sue Dibny, wife of Elognated Man. The bronze age couple were known for being depicted as consistently loving, supportive and lighthearted. In issue 1 Sue Dibny was graphically burned alive. In issue 2 she was explicitly, brutally raped. Her murderer turned out to be the Atom’s ex-wife, literally a crazy bitch. The whole series was full of overwrought pain and suffering and a weird takes on female characters. It was inspired by Watchmen and the Killing Joke (even Moore admits Joke had flaws) but either missed the deconstruction of Moore’s work or discarded it for pure shock value.

Many hated it when it came out, but in 2004 it was easier for fans to handwave or rationalize the content. Some praise is disturbing in hindsight (including Joss Whedon who later hired Metzger to write the Buffy comic with equally creepy results).

Goodbye To Comics is pure rant, a digressive mix of insider dish, critique, personal anecdote (some a bit TMI) and now dusty topical humor. Some who didn’t like her blunt denunciation of misogyny seemed twice provoked by the raw, awkward presentation.

At it’s best, however, it’s very good:
http://occasionalsuperheroine.blogspot.com/2006/11/goodbye-to-comics-7-we-need-rape.html

Such a dramatic and at times scattered call out was bound to attract some scorn and eye-rolling. What’s striking is how aggressive and resentful some became and how little, if any, was initiated by D’Orazio.* Like Anita Sarkeesian, just being a woman making vehement statements was an affront those who disagreed with her.

It was in this context Chris Sims began picking on D’Orazio. As others speculate, it’s likely he was demonizing her to build up his own rep, but this involved knowingly embracing unhinged resentment of “too much” feminist critique and pushing it further.

I knew little about this, but when her Punisher special came out, the irrational hatred of her intense enough that it was visible casual fans.

Even then, it didn’t register just how fucked up it was and I suspect people might not have believed, pre-gamergate.

This is what bothers me about McDonald’s take – what she calls feuds was mostly people snarking at D’Orazio until she responded (or didn’t). It’s telling McDonald mentions Ragnell, whose grudge against D’Orazio is oddly into political correctness myths for a progressive (much like McDonald herself).

Thing is nothing D’Orazio wrote – indeed no comics criticism – merits hostility even Marvel took the death threats seriously. After recent death threats on Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn and others, it’s clear D’Orazio was an unwitting pioneer.

What’s ironic that that Sims has more recently said Identity Crisis is the comic that ruined comics – and his critique sounds a hell of a lot like D’Orazio. To echo the words of the person you tormented yet not apologize until called out is a bit more troubling than I think he realizes.

As McDonald reveals, Chris Sims only apologized after he was called out by gamergate – which he was because he was a precursor to gamergate. He didn’t start the rage against D’Orazio, but he fed on it for cynical reasons. In this context, Sims “are you going to cry, little girl” is far more disturbing. I do think change and genuine apologies are possible, but so far he and his cohort haven’t quite acknowledged how much he’s entwined in the forces which led up to this current wave of zealot trolls. Nor how the gender imbalance in mainstream comics has improved very little since then.

 

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30 thoughts on “Linke on Valerie D’Orazio and Goodbye To Comics

  1. How do we know Sims beef with D’Orazio had anything to do with Goodbye to Comics? There isn’t much if you do a search inside on his blog. The “little girl” comment, which is part of the big chunks of D’Orazio’s blog she erased, is obnoxious as hell but I’ve seen you say some pretty aggressive shit in your time, Noah, “I fuck your comments in the ass” to a rival blogger being one example. It’s like there’s this free-ranging, ever-expanding quest to indict Sims for more in the wake of his apology, meanwhile what he actually did and said diminishes the more you look for it; you can even see that happening toward the end of this piece.

  2. Apologies for the typos and multiple omitted words in that comment. It was composed in haste and I lack the ability to proofread as I type. I’m glad people still got the gist, but Noah is free to edit it for coherency.

    To clarify: Sims didn’t target D’Orazio for criticizing Identity Crisis – her posts made her infamous and bloggers like Sims fed on the animosity and escalated.

    I think Sim’s harassment points to the problem of perpetuating conflict without analyzing or knowing the larger context. I know I’ve responded to someone based on received wisdom, not looking further because it played into my own biases.

    Thus I share Noah’s discomfort about what comes next.

    Chris Sims acted within a larger demonization of someone who was at worst acerbic, to the amusement and encouragement of an audience. In the larger context many others were complicit, if indirectly – even the attitude behind the writing of Identity Crisis.

    I wonder if our response to Sims should end with directing shame at a more deserving target. Is the dichotomy of irredeemable vs. enlightened where the discussion should end or is a more complicated/uncomfortable discussion needed? Is the reductive nature of shame why people ignore or compound failings until shamed into addressing them? Or is shame necessary to overcome the incessant rationalization of the status quo? Or is shame a neutral construct used for good and ill?

  3. Additional apologies for not using the same name for all comments – this is very poor blog etiquette. Anyway, this whole thing has made me examine my own behavior as well.

  4. Hey Rambling. I can sometimes be aggressive…but usually I would have had to have someone come at me pretty angrily for me to say something like you quote, unless I was talking to a friend and I was flat out joking…I don’t know. I can’t say I recall saying that, though it’s not outside the bounds of possibility. I haven’t found it googling. Do you have a link?

    I think Linke was saying the same thing as you? That is, Sims was not necessarily disagreeing with D’Orazio about identity crisis, but the context of that time was that D’Orazio was already a target for many because of her opinions.

  5. Yeah…I think you’d have to do some pretty fancy explaining to make that comment out to be harassment, in context. You misquoted as well. The entire sentence is:

    “I shit on your taste, I fuck your relative merit in the ass, I urinate freely on your criticism, and I think your comics aren’t even worth defiling. If that gives you an enjoyable frisson of sorrowful superiority, so much the better, I suppose.”

    That’s in response to this from Sean:

    “Noah: First, thanks again for your patience as I got to the bottom of wtf happened to your comment. I will say that I’m well aware of how hated the Journal was (and remains!), and it’s not that HU is hated that’s my problem with HU, it’s what I regard to be generally really atrocious tastes in comics; a sort of slippery, protean intellectual dishonesty in articulating the superiority of those tastes (and the methods used to articulate them) over others; and an atmosphere of self-congratulation for same; all of it often perversely facilitated by the passive-aggressive and ostentatious abandonment of the very notion of taste, relative merit, the value of the very act of criticism, and the value of the very medium of comics. The fact this is all occasionally done with the sort of antagonistic scorched-earth rhetoric of prime take-no-prisoners Journal stuff is the least of its problems.

    That’s all pretty harsh, so I want to add that this is all despite the fact that you, personally, seem like a really friendly and chill guy even when dealing with your harshest critics, including me! I’ve certainly had nastier exchanges with any number of writers and critics, Dirk included (nastiness on both their part and mine). But that’s sort of my point: It’s not HU’s role as the Gary Groth obituary of Carol Kalish to the wider comics discourse’s Peter David that rankles, it’s all the underlying values and methodology. It’s much deeper than pissing people off. I’m always more saddened than pissed.”

    The one paragraph you quote is me saying, hey, look, here’s me not being passive aggressive. Pretty much everything else I say in that thread is civil, including the following paragraph:

    “Anyway…glad you finally read that whole essay of Dirk’s. He’s such a great writer; I’m crossing my fingers and hoping he starts writing criticism for the Journal or some other outlet soon.”

    Which hardly seems either like a barn-burning provocation or bullying. I think you have to do some serious stretching to see any of that as anything like the deliberate targeted feuding that Sims has admitted to. Among other things, I’m not going at Sean out of the blue (he sneers at HU in the original post, and escalates in comments) and I’m not actually attacking him; I’m describing my own position. It’s really different.

    Using that exchange as a way to say, “hey what Chris Sims did isn’t so wrong or unusual” is pretty thoroughly disingenuous, in my view. I don’t mind being called out if I’ve done something wrong (which does happen), but having my actions and words mischaracterized to give cover to harassment and bullying does in fact piss me off. I presume you’re writing in good faith, but this exchange rather strains that assumption. I really think you should retract and reconsider.

  6. Also…I’m pretty sure Kim is not in fact saying, context is privilege. She’s saying that the call for context and nuance in Sims case appears to be a way to avoid dealing with the fact that what he did was wrong (according to everyone.) She did not mean that you can misquote and say context doesn’t matter in order to pretend that I harassed someone when I didn’t, and that therefore Chris Sims didn’t harass someone when he did.

    I’m sure your misquotation was accidental. The rest of it seems like it’s moving towards more deliberate bad faith…though maybe you didn’t read that whole thread, I guess? I don’t know.

  7. Yikes! EthanR, you weren’t bluffing — both about the specific comment and about how various forms of analysis and explanation have been nudged off the table. (Now wait while I go read that again.)

  8. Left my comment while Noah was leaving his.

    And while I get your point, c’mon Noah: don’t you see any similarity to this kind of “cheerfully aggressive” language and the very kinds of words that Sims possibly wrote? Isn’t this the very kind of thing that people point to when they say, “That was just what it was like online”?

    And second, isn’t there a bit of irony — in the context of recent discussions — that clarification of exact words, rhetorical context, and even satirical intent are exactly what’s needed to understand this passage? (One might even ask folks to consider the heat of the emotional moment as a mitigating circumstance.)

    I mean without these things, what’s left? “Well, I did use ass-fucking as a stand-in for degradation, mastery, and defilement. But at least I was ass-fucking UP.”

    No, this is not a way to excuse harassment or Sims, but I don’t think that was Ethan’s intent for a moment.

  9. We have no context for Sims’ remark. We have some hyperbolic statements of dislike on his blog, but we don’t know if it was out of the blue as you say. Hey, I can’t imagine a context in which “are you going to cry, little girl” is acceptable. I can imagine it being slightly less horrible, for example as a caustic response to someone who’s claiming victimhood in ways you don’t find credible, but that’s when you check yourself and say something different. I don’t find that your elaborated context makes your rape allusion any less aggressive or more consistent with the tone of the conversation. Do a search inside Sims’ blog if you want to see what we have Sims actually saying. The evidence is consistent with his apology; it was out of line and unacceptable. I’m glad he apologized and like with any apology it doesn’t confer the status of prince among men. It means everyone is free to decide how they want to react to him going forward based on what we know. But when we get to his orchestrating a wave of attackers or riding a wave of attackers that gave Val PTSD that sounds like a tenuous attachment of blame.

  10. “I don’t find that your elaborated context makes your rape allusion any less aggressive or more consistent with the tone of the conversation. ”

    Again, that doesn’t really seem to be in good faith. You were suggesting originally that I was harassing a rival blogger, or that’s what it sounded like; you fiddled with the quote (accidentally, I’m sure) to make that seem like a reasonable reading. But I start the thread by complimenting Sean’s post, go on to recommend he read a piece I liked, and then appreciate the fact that he liked it. We also talk in general about technical difficulties with the thread. I made a hyperbolic allusion about the way I treat works of art in general (*not* about the way I am treating his comments thread or his space.) And this is supposed to be equivalent to Sims conducting what in his own terms was an extended feud? What the hell?

    Seriously, when you first posted, I thought, well, jeez, maybe I was out of line. Now as I said, I’m struggling to see the good-faith reason to have brought this up. Do you actually think this constituted harassment on my part? It’s equivalent to what Sims did? It’s hard for me to see how you could think that, and if you in fact don’t think that, then why bring it up as a way to defend Sims (which seems to be what you’re doing, Peter’s assurances notwithstanding)?

    To your last point about Sims not being responsible for D’Orazio’s PTSD… The way Gamergate works at the moment is that someone is targeted, not infrequently by someone with a platform outside social media. Then tons of people swarm that person. Everyone has deniability. The person who originally posted the piece was just posting a piece. Any individual participating in harassment was just sending a few tweets. Blame is always “tenuous”, no one is actually at fault. And if critics say, hey, this appears to be set up as a free-floating way to harass particular targets, the response is often to go digging through the critics’ past statements, pull something out of context, and say, well, you’re another.

    I haven’t had that happen to me much yet; I’m too small to really be on gamergate’s radar, and the wrong gender as well. Still, you’ve given me a taste of the way it operates, I guess. If I ever am targeted by gamergate, I’m sure this quote will now pop up — or more likely your misquotation will. Something to look forward to.

  11. Noah, your words to “relative merit” came at a time when “relative merit” (hereafter RM) was being attacked for his tell-all memoir about Miriam-Websters. I realize you were threatening up, and not down, but please, RM almost certainly lost sleep over your coarsly worded speech-act. Moreover, your sarcasm was almost certainly lost on RM’s detractors who, still angry over his tenuous association with French theory, were more than happy to join your burgeoning HU empire. For shame!

  12. Just to be clear…I’m not saying Ethan is associated with gamergate, or that Sims is. I think the Sims/D’Orazio mess seems to foreshadow some of gamergates themes and tactics though. Ethans “you’re another” argument again fits in with the sort of thing gamergate does, though his intentions seem much less malign (which I appreciate.)

    Nate, never will I apologize for my attack upon relative merit. It deserved all it got.

  13. No, your response to Sean T Collins’ criticism of your site was extremely aggressive. The polite exchanges you cite come before, and you’re accusing me of bad faith? Only, you’re not quite accusing me of bad faith, just like you’re not quite accusing me of being Gamergate, and yet why do I feel like I’m being accused of those things?

    When somebody says “I fuck your (whatever) in the ass,” be it your comment, your taste in art, whatever, that thing is a proxy for you. It’s threatening, aggressive language, obviously not to be taken literally but also way out of proportion to Sean’s polite but firm “here are my problems with your site.”

    I don’t know how Gamergate operates, but the model you’re describing could be applied to anyone who says anything negative or critical on the Internet. I keep telling you to look at Sims’ site. When I search for D’Orazio the things he says are few and consistent in tone with things When Fangirls Attack was saying about her and things I’ve seen Val quoted as saying to former FoL sisters. I believe everything she says about the DC offices bc it’s all realistic and consistent with what I know about the company. But her post about Sims that leads with a trigger warning and that Batgirl/Joker cover, i.e. “that’s me and that’s him,” strikes me as florid and vague when it comes to actual things he said beyond the “little girl” line. She says, “it’s not so much what he said,” but his blog served as a platform for these attacks… but when I search on his blog he’s not saying much. He says he doesn’t like her two or three times and announces he’s going to refrain from reviewing Punisher: Butterfly. And I don’t think it’s cool to use your blog as a platfo to simply say you don’t like somebody; if you’ve got good blogger reasons like problems with her punditry, then argue with her punditry, or call her a bad pundit. But if you’re not saying that he was in collusion with Gamergate, and you’re not saying that I’m in collusion with Gamergate, then what are you saying, Noah?

  14. Nope. I’m polite before, and in the paragraph immediately after. Which I quoted in this thread.

    My understanding is that some of Chris’ most aggressive comments were not on his site. So…not sure that searching the site is necessarily the way to go.

    I think I’ve been pretty clear about what I’m saying re gamergate. One way misogyny and abuse works on the internet is that you single someone out and then encourage others to go after them. The assertion that this is the same as any criticism is really pernicious bullshit. Targeting someone isn’t all that subtle; you represent them as a horrible person unworthy of sympathy in a public forum, denounce their iniquity, and wait for people to back you up. (That is *not* what I did to Sean, and I strongly suspect you realize that…or would if you weren’t now invested in doubling down.) It is what Sims seems to have done. It is what Gamergate does.

    Gamergate is also into taking quotes out of context as a smear tactic, and as a way to change the discussion from harassment to a welter of pointless accusations and counter-accusations. I guess I’ve fallen into the trap; it’s hard to avoid. Someone says, “You’re a harasser and an abuser” and your first reaction is to try to deal with that. I’m going to try to stop now though; people have the link to the thread, and they can make up their own minds, I suppose.

    I’m sort of accusing you of bad faith, yeah. As I think I’ve said fairly clearly, I’m vacillating here. I tend to try to give people the benefit of the doubt. You’re rather pushing at the edges of my ability to do that…

  15. I didn’t accuse you of leading a campaign of harassment, I pointed out that you also are prone to saying aggressive shit; that the one really damning thing Val has on Chris is a single, indefensible comment; and that Kim’s post is encouraging us to disregard context in these matters. I’m asking you if you think Chris was deliberately inciting a mob against Val, and if you think he did that in retaliation for Goodbye to Comics, and if not why it seems like you’re suggesting that. Ditto for your comparisons of me to “how Gamergate works”. I think you’re missing or ignoring my point about the idea that we should disregard context as a shifty function of privilege, and I find the context & explanation you’re providing in your spat with Sean completely unconvincing when you obviously just blew up at a critic in an ugly and bullying way. If someone says I’m being passive-aggressive, I’m reasonably certain that responding with “I buttfuck, shit and piss all over (every noun in your sentence), how’s that for openly aggressive?” would not be interpreted as a balletic spin on the theme but a threat with a cutesy justification. People say obnoxious things on the Internet. Sometimes they own up and apologize, and sometimes they spin and spin.

  16. So, I think the thing with Sean is completely a distraction. It seems to be intended as such. Despite the temptation, I’m done talking about it.

    You realize this post here is not by me, right? It’s by a commenter named Linke. From what I’ve read of the discussion with D’Orazio, it sounds like she’s saying that Chris participated in harassment of her, and that his participation encouraged others. Linke is saying that D’Orazio was a target because of Goodbye to Comics; others have said that seems reasonable to them, and it seems so to me as well.

    I talked about Gamergate because I think it’s important to understand how online harassment works. Kim’s post is not saying to disregard context, I’m fairly certain. It’s saying that the most important issue here is not Sims’ growth as a human being.

    Also…D’Orazio doesn’t have any damning thing on Chris. I guess I could be wrong, but my understanding is that these issues were not raised by her, but by a third party. It’s not he said/she said; it’s x said, he agreed, she also agreed. So…I’m honestly not sure what your issue is. He’s actually said he participated in a campaign of harassment, right? Or at least, he was a one man campaign of harassment. “Between 2007 and 2010, I harassed and bullied Valerie D’Orazio online.” That’s what he said. Not, “I said this one mean thing and I’m sorry.” But, I harassed her for 4 years, give or take. So…if you think that he only said one indefensible thing, it seems like you should go tell him to retract his statement. Yelling at me for what Linke said, and what Chris Sims said, seems kind of pointless.

  17. Chris says he harassed her online during that time. Val says he was the ringleader and director from his blog of harassment she received from others that gave her life-threatening PTSD.

    Here’s the thing about apologies. When you get caught out in public you own up to the wrong you did. You don’t pick apart problems in your accuser’s statement, you don’t repeat offensive things you said or talk about how it all started, and you don’t stick around to defend yourself against every excessive thing people say about you in the aftermath. It’s up to us whether we handle an apology like a jury or a feeding frenzy.

    What I notice about Val’s post is that every time she approaches the area of what Sims actually did she qualifies and backtracks.

    “I have PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. I have specifically been diagnosed with it because of cyberbullying that I experienced between 2007-2010…

    “I had several cyberbullies during that three-year span, but Chris Sims was one of the worst. Not so much for what he said about me directly, but because he had a popular forum from which to direct harassment to me by many other people.

    “I never could figure out what I did to Chris personally to be singled out for this type of treatment. But week after week, he would have posts focused on me in which he would be a ringleader for others, who would then go off and harass me personally via my blog, social media, and emails.

    “This hit its peak when it was announced that I was to write a one-shot for The Punisher. Apparently Chris thought this was the wrong choice, and he made his opinions clear…

    “While at that point the highly-influential Sims had pulled back from the harassment—me at one point engaging in a “cross-blog” interview in the hopes that if he “liked” me, the harassment might stop—the damage was clearly done…

    “The irony that Marvel hired the man who ring-led the harassment against me over my Punisher comic is not lost on me.”

    Listen Noah, I understand the phenomenon in which a demagogue can incite violence while maintaining deniability. That’s older than the Internet. But in those cases there are always statements you can argue had that effect. All I’m asking is where they are with Chris.

  18. I don’t know that you need particular statements. If Chris was writing week after week about how she was awful, or was going after her for four years, that seems like it would work.

    I’d point out that just having this discussion has given HU worse, more targeted spam than it’s had in a long time. Worse in some ways than when we had our CH post go viral with more than 500K hits. People keep popping up to yell obscenities and/or make accusations, not even at the original poster, but at whoever happens to be standing around nearby. I’ve had to ban more people than I have in years. And again, these posts aren’t getting much traffic, really. So I look at my comments sections, and I feel like I have some evidence that there are people out there very invested in D’Orazio being awful, and in harassing and smearing whoever happens to defend her.

  19. And now I feel like I’m being accused of being the public face of Gamergate, the kind that says “Really, it’s about ethics in gaming journalism.” One who happens to have a detailed memory of old Comics Journal feuds. Yeah, I’m sure they sit around 4chan discussing the Peter David fax controversy.

    Look, I believe Val about DC corporate culture. I believe Chris harassed her. If he did so week after week on his blog, and orchestrated and directed her harassment over the Punisher one-shot, I’d like to see it because I didn’t hear he deleted anything. I tried searching his blog for D’Orazio and Butterfly. I found two posts, in one of which he does make his feelings about Punishe:Butterfly clear… while declining to review it because of his claimed antipathy for her, and some time after its publication. I’m asking how he directed the harassment and how she would know that. I’m also curious about the 2007-2010 period she cites for the harassment that gave her PTSD… because if, as it seems more likely to me, she got harassed because a bunch of misogynist fanboy trolls remembered her Goodbye to Comics blogging at the time of the Punisher one-shot, wouldn’t she have gotten the same kind of experience at the time of Goodbye to Comics? That was late 2006. It just seems like her post, with its trigger warning, Batgirl/Joker image, health diagnosis and allegation that Chris orchestrated the whole thing is itself vindictive and designed to cause maximum damage. Am I allowed not to feel great about either?

  20. I would say that D’Orazio is obviously still angry about Sims harassing her. That seems pretty reasonable and expectable since he (a) harassed her for four years, (b) didn’t apologize for another 5 years, and then only directly because his career was threatened, (c) initially apologized to her husband rather than to her. I don’t really doubt that Sims’ apology was sincere…but D’Orazio has plenty of reason not to feel especially comforted by it. This was part of what I was talking about when I said that I wish we had better ways to think about justice and reconciliation in these matters. Like, if Sims approached D’Orazio, and said, what can I do to help fix this…maybe nothing happens there. But there are possible solutions which seem like they could have gotten everyone to a better place, maybe.

    The fact that there aren’t that many posts on Sims’ blog about D’Orazio…I don’t know why that is. It contradicts what Sims says in the posts that remain; he refers several times to his notorious dislike of D’Orazio’s work. It’s possible he deleted posts (and possibly out of good motives.) It’s possible the harassment occurred in different venues. The internet is not always a perfect record. Sims says there was harassment; D’Orazio says there was harassment; other folks who were around say there was. I don’t think a blog search function outweighs the testimony of the principals involved.

    You can feel shitty about whatever you’d like, and I don’t think the 4chan thing is your fault or anything; I was just pointing out that this dynamic exists around this issue, since you seem somewhat skeptical that it does. But I’m not very sympathetic to the argument that everyone involved is equally at fault here.

  21. I didn’t say they were equivalent. I’m saying I see an atmosphere of an expanding field of accusations against Chris, with all these warnings and insinuations against anyone who might want to look more closely at what happened. Now can we agree that you’re getting tired of me, and I of you?

  22. I think I made it clear I was tired of you a while ago? I don’t think anyone’s forcing you to post on this thread on my blog…I hope not anyway.

    You’re welcome to look more closely at what happened…but in doing that, you seem in this thread at least to be trying to argue that the expanding field of accusations was perpetrated *by Sims*, who you seem to feel has grossly overstated the extent of his harassment. Or at least, I don’t know how else to take your argument that there’s only one piece of evidence against Sims, or that D’Orazio only has one thing on him, or whatever. Sims says he harassed her for 4 years. You look at the blog and say, well I don’t see it. So is Sims lying? Is he confused and railroaded into giving a false confession? Or what?

    I don’t personally have any desire to see Sims lose business; I wouldn’t boycott his X-Men comic (I mean, I wasn’t going to buy it anyway, but I wouldn’t refuse to buy it because of this.) I find the resistance to crediting the harassment *that Sims himself has admitted to* baffling and depressing, and the vitriol unleashed against D’Orazio really disturbing.

  23. Also, fwiw, I didn’t take D’Orazio’s post to be saying that Sims organized the whole thing. When I read her, it sounded like she had a lot of harassers, and that Sims was in a position to do more damage than most because he had a higher profile. Which, again, seems credible.

  24. You can’t rape opinion or merit. You can rape a person. To threaten the former is metaphor, to threaten the latter is assault.

  25. Hey; we’ve probably reached diminishing returns with this comment thread, so I’m going to close the thread. Thanks for commenting everyone.

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