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Comment by masfjo | Hacker News Reader

This was already debunked dumbass

Please don't post this way, regardless of how bad another comment may be. Even if you're right (as in this case I believe you are), it damages the container here.

If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the site rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

The excerpts linked from reddit are stuff that was published in the Exile. Are you saying they’re fake?

Can I get a link to the debunking?

Thanks.

Seems like he has been able to win legal settlements to get publications to retract or correct:

The Nation: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/963869669076688899

Newsweek: https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/977984283024424961

Guardian:

https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/983774657005477890

https://twitter.com/alayne_f

Keep in mind they literally have 0 accusers, and when the women they worked with were interviewed they all had 0 complaints, and even at the time of publishing the book was categorized as satire. The name "The Exile", IIRC, refers to the fact they were a satire of the piece of shit Americans that Ames and Taibbi witnessed coming to Russia as the USSR was falling in order to ravage the country in its moment of weakness.

Next let's confront Steven Colbert on his past as a right wing nutjob.

His wiki[1] says "Women portrayed in the book have gone on record to defend Taibbi, stating that none of the sexual harassment portrayed in the book ever happened."[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Taibbi

[2] https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/12/the-destructi...

Alright. The Paste Magazine piece is enough to raise doubts for me. I deleted my comment.

Thanks for the links, everybody.

"Raise doubts" is a bit stingy. Here is what one of the allegedly-harrassed women had to say (in the Paste article): “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 smear seems to me to have been completely refuted on the facts, and there's a second issue: if it hadn't been, there's no way those mainstream publications would have retracted it en masse (especially not given the social climate around that topic). When was the last time they all did that? It's practically a magic trick to get them to do that.

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