The author of a document listing men in the media industry accused of sexually harassment and assault has revealed herself, saying she “only wanted to create a place for women to share their stories without being needlessly discredited or judged”.
Writer and editor Moira Donegan came forward following speculation that Harper’s magazine planned to publish an article naming her in its March edition.
Dubbed the S***ty Men List, the Google spreadsheet included the names of men working in the US media who were accused of wrongdoing.
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It attracted criticism for preserving the anonymity of contributors and was branded “reckless” and “harmful” by some critics.
“The anonymous, crowdsourced document was a first attempt at solving what has seemed like an intractable problem: how women can protect ourselves from sexual harassment and assault,” she wrote in The Cut.
“The hope was to create an alternate avenue to report this kind of behaviour and warn others without fear of retaliation.”
She said formal reporting routes available to people who witnessed sexually inappropriate behaviour, such as going to the police or to human resource departments, were “bad".
The existence of the list was first revealed in an article on BuzzFeed and the spreadsheet in full was published by Reddit.
Donegan, a 28-year-old former editor at The New Republic, said the list was intended to be private, but it had “spread much further and much faster than she anticipated”.
She said she was “incredibly naïve” to have made the spreadsheet, saying she was misguided to believe “the focus would be on the behaviour described in the document, rather than on the document itself”.
A number of journalists threatened to pull their articles from Harper’s in protest if it published the name of the list creator. Several women also posted on Twitter to say they were responsible for the list in an attempt to shield Donegan.
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Donegan says essayist Katie Roiphe contacted her in December to ask her if she would comment for a Harper’s story on the “feminist moment”.
“She did not say that she knew I had created the spreadsheet. I declined and heard nothing more from Roiphe or Harper’s until I received an email from a fact checker with questions about Roiphe’s piece,” Donegan wrote.
“Katie identifies you as a woman widely believed to be one of the creators of the S***ty Men in Media List,” the fact checker wrote, although Roiphe has since denied she planned to name the author.
“All of this was terrifying,” Donegan said. “I still don’t know what kind of future awaits me now that I’ve stopped hiding.”
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