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Another possible #metoo incident at the Globe
By adamg on Wed, 05/23/2018 - 9:16am
CommonWealth details an accusation by former Globe intern and boston.com deputy editor Hilary Sargent against current Globe editor Brian McGrory.
In December, the Globe fired a State House reporter after accusations against him surfaced (during the Globe's investigation into State House sexual harassment).
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Comments
Please let it be John Tomase
Please let it be John Tomase
I'll believe this is being
I'll believe this is being taken seriously when people start going to jail.
Work place harassment isn't a
Work place harassment isn't a criminal offense. You think it should be?
Absolutely!
When you mess with someone's livelihood, it should be criminal.
Grow up and learn to behave yourself and stop making excuses.
Criminal prosecution of
Criminal prosecution of workplace harassment that is short of already existing crimes is not warranted and would be an utter mess in application.
Maybe she can make a witty
Maybe she can make a witty tshirt about the incident.
So are you saying her past
So are you saying her past should be brought up and that this shouldn't be taken seriously? I can't tell if you're joking or just being a pee-pee head.
Newspaper editors like to think that they own the high ground.
You know, take on the powerful on behalf of the little guy. It's just that sometimes the high ground they occupy is the gutter. Pompous asses like McGrory are why the Orange menace has carte blanche on fiction as fact. His counter part at rival bird cage liner the Boston Herald, while perhaps not a closeted perv, demonstrates a twisted understanding of opinion. Dumb and Dumber 4.
There's flirting and then there's sexual harrassment
He asked her what she generally wears when she writes and then, apparently, dropped it when she wasn't receptive. No one argues that the line between appropriate and inappropriate is always clear. However, defining that exchange as sexual harassment - worthy of being fired - seems wrong.
Gotta Agree
Without more information, such as a pattern of refusal to take no as the answer, or the work (or not) relationship of the two parties, there is no reason to put this in the #metoo basket.
Thank you for mansplaining
Next up: a white guy explains how calling the cops on black people who are well within their rights to be where they are and doing what they are doing isn't racism.
It's not racism
If I see someone who is not my neighbor carrying things out of my neighbor's house, I'm going to call the cops. It might turn out that they are my neighbor's guests, or otherwise well within their rights to be where they are doing what they are doing. Or not. That's what the cops will determine when they arrive.
Are you seriously making the claim that if the people carrying things out of my neighbor's house were black, then my call would be racist, but if they were white, it would not? Or that I would be wrong to call the police in such a situation?
RTF comment
What part of "well within their rights to be where they are and doing" did you not understand?
WELL WITHIN THEIR RIGHTS TO BE WHERE THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY ARE DOING
DOES ALL CAPS HELP YOU?
Does the hypothetical caller
Does the hypothetical caller to the police know the hypothetical neighbors are well within their rights when calling? It seems to me that there could any number of situations in which an observer could not be certain whether someone is doing something lawful.
RTF comment indeed
What part of my scenario do you not understand? The part where I said "It might turn out that they are my neighbor's guests, or otherwise well within their rights to be where they are doing what they are doing. Or not. That's what the cops will determine when they arrive."
If the people I saw carrying things out of my neighbor's house turned out to have been my neighbor's guests, then they would have been, in your all-caps speak, WELL WITHIN THEIR RIGHTS TO BE WHERE THEY ARE AND WHAT THEY WERE DOING. And yet I would have called the cops, because, well, that's what good neighbors do when they see strangers carrying things out of a neighbor's house.
Now please answer the question I originally asked: Would calling the police on them have been racist if they happened to be black, but not racist if they happened to be white?
Depends entirely
On whether or not your first reaction to the situation would be to call the police if you saw white people instead of black people in that scenario.
Let's not forget that the original statement qualified "well within their right to be there." Then you changed the scenario. Why? To me, that reads entirely self-serving.
I didn't change the scenario at all
My neighbors' friends are well within their right to be there, carrying their suitcases out of my neighbor's house after having borrowed the house for the weekend. If they are people whom I have never seen before, I'm going to call the cops. Even though they are well within their rights to be there, since I don't know that. What, exactly, did I change about the scenario?
My point being that there are countless examples of white people calling the cops on black people who are obviously doing nothing wrong, for reasons of pure, spiteful hateful harassment. But that does not mean that every instance of a white person calling the cops on a black person who turns out to be innocent is racist.
Then we disagree
Because the reason they seem to suspect nefarious behavior is because they are black. I already alluded to that before when I said if your first reaction is to call the cops because they are black when you wouldn't have if they are white, then, yeah, that's racist. The thought process then becomes "because these black people I don't know are in a place I don't expect them to be, I'm going to call the police." It's solely based around race. It's not saying you're a white hood wearing racist, but the assumption certainly is, again, based around a judgment and determination on race.
Law-splaining
There's a big body of law about what is and isn't harassment. A single mild statement doesn't come close to unlawful harassment.
forgot to mention...
...those laws are written by misogynists and racists.
Sorry
I didn't realize I couldn't weigh in on what society should and shouldn't condemn.
Adam, is there a sticky post where I can bone up on the rules of commenting?
As the first step in my atonement, let me add to the chorus and say: McGrory should've been fired the minute the first tweet hit the internet. Shame on the Globe for keeping him employed, hell, shame on the Globe for hiring him in the first place. And ugh, men, more of the same. (Is that how I do it, anon?)
Maybe you should have started
Maybe you should have started with that statement and then went on to talk about what should and shouldn't be condemned. Because reading your post at first made it seem like society and not the victim should decide what it a #metoo moment.
Society decides in many cases
This is sort of a gray area. In the case of an actual crime, then, yeah, generally, it is society that decides what constitutes any given crime or offense. Whether it's "Rape," or "Theft of intellectual property," or "assault," the definition is made up by our elected representative government and embodied in statute, which is in turn interpreted by courts. That's "society" deciding, not the victim.
So we need to decide whether a #metoo moment is sort of like a crime where there is a victim and a perpetrator, and the perpetrator should be called to account, or whether it's entirely idiosyncratic to the person experiencing it, in which case there is no perpetrator and no calling to account.
Except sexual harassment in
Except sexual harassment in the workplace is anything that makes someone feel uncomfortable. Which is why the "know your audience" is a good rule of thumb.
False
That is not the law.
How could that possibly be true?
How, under any conceivable theory of law, could that possibly be true?
Do the people in power at
Do the people in power at your work (or any place you have ever worked):
ask you what you are wearing, have ever made a comment about what you are wearing or how you look in what you are wearing when you are or have working?
People wonder why work place harassment is still so rampant... no one wants to say anything for fear of responses like this (and the one below from Rob).
Men are ridiculous
If you were a women, you would know why this is threatening.
Because you would have already lost at least one job for saying no to such a "just flirting" "request".
Use your big brain instead of your little brain for something better - like empathy
This is a lot of sexist garbage, imo.
Imagine a man making these sorts of blanket generalizations about all women.
Every woman whom I know well enough...
Every woman whom I know well enough to have this conversation has experienced at least one career-altering incident of abusive sexualized treatment at the hands of a person with enough organizational clout to be pretty much immune to consequences.
That doesn't warrant blanket "Men are ridiculous" generalizations, which you are right to call out, but it's equally a mistake to ignore the magnitude of the problem.
As a woman,
May I ask you if you are on the rag?
In case you missed it in your Gender Studies class, Misandry is a word, analogous to Misogyny.
This can't be true - he goes
This can't be true - he goes on WGBH!
Screenshot
The screengrab in the article shows a "bubble style" iphone style text messaging interface which wasn't used in 1999. The text messages could be real but the conversation would need to have happened a decade later if the screengrab is original.
If you read the linked article
She isn't saying the conversation is from 20yrs ago.
Does McGrory still appear on
Does McGrory still appear on the Eagan and Braude show?
Ask Sargent to discuss inconsistencies
in her behavior and various stories and watch how quick she blocks you. Sargent's hatred of the Globe borders on the psychotic and her lust for vengeance has taken to her throwing in with those scumbags at WEEI over the Cullen flap.
Prediction: McGrory is toast.
Which may set a record for the most minor mistake to cost a powerful man his career, if this stupid text was indeed the only thing he did. So it goes. I hate the powerful anyway, being part tarantula, so to me it's all gravy. My thing is, would a female editor be fired for asking a male reporter what he wears when he writes? I know that history matters a great deal, and the context of patriarchy and so forth. But it seems that at some point "the rules" will have to apply to everyone equally- isn't that one of the end goals of any movement for equality? And there is also this slightly distressing aspect of zero tolerance to the latter phases of #metoo, which seems to go against the progressive principles of "restorative justice" and so forth, and which may end up hurting everyone in the end by creating a sort of snitchy police state. The only survivors will be those who never, ever, say anything stupid....and Trump, of course. He will also survive, perhaps because everything he says is stupid.
I thought he was clearly
I thought he was clearly offering her sage advice on overcoming writer's block. Change your clothes. If that doesn't work, change your surroundings.