Lady Business: Kobe Bryant, The Washington Post, and public heroes
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 91st issue, published January 31, 2020.
Protecting the Institution
“We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priests. Practice and policy; show me the church manipulated the system so that these guys wouldn't have to face charges…. Show me this was systemic, that it came from the top down.”
--“Marty Baron” (Liev Schreiber) in Spotlight, 2015
“Please stop. You’re hurting this institution by doing this.”
--Marty Baron (Marty Baron) to one of his Washington Post employees, this week
Not many journalists get to see themselves heroically portrayed by classically trained (yet cerebrally sexy) Serious Actors, in Academy Award-winning movies about how they stood up for unpleasant truths and victims of sexual assault, in the face of entrenched institutional power.
(Of course, these opportunities are mostly reserved for male journalists. I mean, someone has to do all the work while we lady reporters are running around fictionally sleeping with our sources!)
So it’s an ... interesting choice, let’s say, by Washington Post executive editor and Spotlight hero Marty Baron to take that recent Hollywood canonization of himself and apparently stomp all over it this week. Especially by chastising and suspending one of his female employees, a survivor of workplace sexual assault, when she reacted to the news of Kobe Bryant’s death on Sunday by Tweeting about the 2003 rape charges against Bryant:
Ms. Sonmez received an email from The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, at 5:38 p.m., before she was told that she would be placed on leave. … “Felicia,” Mr. Baron wrote. “A real lack of judgment to tweet this. Please stop. You’re hurting this institution by doing this.”
The question of the “appropriate” way to discuss Bryant’s death and legacy is messy, and tied up in race as well as sports, celebrity, power, and gender. His sudden and tragic death -- in a helicopter crash that also killed his young daughter, two other 13-year-old girls, and those girls’ parents, among all nine people aboard – has caused national, widespread mourning. It also kicked off a lot of criticism of those people -- especially women and particularly white women -- whose initial reaction to the shocking death of a widely-beloved black man was to bring up the old but credible allegations that he once raped a woman.
Many smart, nuanced writers have weighed in on when and how to reconcile that one assault with Bryant’s many other accomplishments in his abruptly terminated 41 years -- or whether the assault should be considered at all at a time of massive public mourning. And Sonmez’s Tweet was not nuanced. Her decision to link to a 2016 article about the assault case, in the blunt forum of breaking-news Twitter, was not a polite reaction, or accommodating of many people’s grief.
But that’s no justification for the thousands of threats she immediately received, or the “doxxing” online publication of her home address. When she told her employers that she feared for her safety, she was told, in essence, that she had brought this upon herself -- and then publicly suspended for it. (The Post has since ended her suspension, and said that it regretted “having spoken publicly about a personnel matter.” Which certainly implies that Baron is sorry that he got caught siding with “the institution,” not that he did so.)
So much of journalism -- and especially of reporting on sexual misconduct by people in power, as that Spotlight hero might have said -- comes down to the conflict of good taste vs. truth. Sonmez’s Tweet highlighted one truth, tastelessly. But Baron’s “please stop” email seems to prioritize taste not only over truth, but also over his reporter’s safety, and over The Post’s public reputation for defending its journalists. By appearing to side with Sonmez’s trolls, her employer gave comfort and cover to all those who would attack and undermine female journalists for doing the work that we all devote our careers, our public reputations, and sometimes our lives to doing. Even if it rarely makes the movies.
Lady Bits
--“In every conversation I had with dairy farmers and industry insiders in northwest Iowa, it was taken as a fact that the local dairies are wholly dependent on undocumented labor. … In the heart of Steve King’s district, a place that is more pro-Trump than almost any other patch of America, the economy is powered by workers that King and Trump have threatened to arrest and deport.” Related to last week’s newsletter, thanks to Ilena for flagging this Esquire article* about Devin Nunes’ family’s Iowan dairy farm. (*Incidentally reported by a man who lost one job over allegations of “improper sexual conduct,” yet who is since continuing to have a pretty great career!)
--Attention Pete Buttigieg: Apparently we all now need to be saving at least $3 million for retirement.
--Okay, okay, I (very belatedly) see what the Fleabag big deal is. The cringe factor of the first season was a bit too high for me to get past, but I finally skipped ahead to the second season and became an instant convert to the glories of the Hot Priest, Kristen Scott Thomas’s menopause monologue, Olivia Colman’s amazing passive-aggression, and the terrific, funny, thorny yet touching relationship between the sisters:
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