Matt Taibbi Files $10 Million Libel Suit Against Dem Rep. for Accusing Him of 'Serial Sexual Harassment'

"No woman has ever accused me of engaging in sexual harassment once, let alone serially..."

This article originally appeared on ZeroHedge and was republished with permission.

Guest post by Tyler Durden

Journalist Matt Taibbi is suing Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove for libel, after the California Democrat claimed during her opening remarks in a House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee hearing on Tuesday that he's a "serial sexual harasser."

"To distract from the dumpster fire this administration is pursuing," she said, the Republicans were "elevating a serial sexual harrasser as their star witness."

While Taibbi wouldn't have been able to sue due to lawmaker protections under the Speech and Debate clause of the constitution, Kamlager-Dove was stupid enough to then post those claims on social media; both on X and Blue Sky.

As Taibbi directly notes to Kamlager-Dove via Racket News, "Rep. Kamlager-Dove, no woman has ever accused me of engaging in sexual harrassment once, let alone serially. See you in court. Please do not evade service."

Context via Paste Magazine in 2017:

Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, known for his hard-hitting reporting on Goldman Sachs in the wake of the 2008 Subprime Mortgage Crisis, fell from grace this October after controversial passages from an old book he’d co-authored, The eXile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia, resurfaced and were spread online.

eXile purports to be the memoirs of Taibbi and co-author Mark Ames, both of whom headed the notorious tabloid magazine by the same name in Moscow in the ‘90s. Indeed, a disclaimer on the copyright page calls the work nonfiction. However, this is not entirely true.

Emails obtained by Paste from Oct. 31 show that when the book’s publisher, Grove Press, received an inquiry from The Guardian about the disclaimer, a representative responded that ”[t]he statement on the copyright page is incorrect. This book combines exaggerated, invented satire and nonfiction reporting and was categorized as nonfiction because there is no category for a book that is both.”

Put simply, like the original magazine, much of eXile was made up for the purposes of satire.

This includes the controversial passages in question—all written by Ames—in which the authors joke about sexually harassing two of their female employees (Masha and Sveta), and in which Ames describes having sex with a 15-year-old girl (Natasha), coercing a woman (Katya) into having an abortion, and raping other Russian women.

There were two women who went by Masha at The eXile at the time. Both told Paste that the passages were fictional, but requested their last names not be included. One wished not to be quoted directly.

“I was never harassed by Matt Taibbi, nor did I see him sexually harass anyone at work or outside work either,” the other Masha told Paste in a phone interview. “It was a ridiculous passage written by Mark.”

She and Taibbi, whom she described as naturally shy, would end up dating for seven years—a relationship she recalls fondly despite a “bad breakup.”

“These claims that Matt would do this stuff are ridiculous,” she said. “I left The eXile because we started dating, and Matt was worried about impropriety. He didn’t even ask me out at work! Matt is a fundamentally decent and kind person.”

The woman referred to as Sveta (whose last name has also been omitted for professional reasons) also told Paste that the encounter described in Ames’ passage never happened, and that neither Taibbi nor Ames ever acted inappropriately towards her or any other woman in the office.

“It never happened,” she wrote over email.

When asked if the two editors ever ignored impropriety by other male staffers, she told us there was nothing to ignore. In other words, The eXile’s work environment was not hostile for women.

[…]

Matt Taibbi has never been accused by any woman of sexual assault or impropriety. The women he is accused of harassing (those who weren’t fictional) based on satirical passages from a book he co-authored nearly two decades ago, have all denounced the allegations. It’s the same with Ames, who actually wrote the passages.

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