‘Sh**ty Media Men’ spreadsheet creator Moira Donegan is back in the legal crosshairs of a libel suit

Malice. The word even sounds scary. Luckily for U.S. journos, anyone looking to sue for libel must prove that actual malice was behind the publication of false information. Well, there’s a caveat — any quote unquote famous person has to show malicious intent; if you’re a “nobody,” e.g. a private figure, the burden is lower and you just have to show negligence.

That issue was at the crux of whether a defamation suit levied against journalist Moira Donegan, the creator of the crowdsourced  “Shitty Media Men” list and an op-ed writer for the Guardian U.S., should be dismissed. Donegan and several anonymous women are being sued by widely published writer and director Stephen Elliott, who was included in the aforementioned list in an entry connecting him to “rape allegations, sexual harassment, coercion” and more, according to court documents. He has said the allegations are false.

On Tuesday, New York federal Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall denied Donegan’s motion to dismiss the case, ruling that Elliott is not a public figure and therefore does not have to show malice to proceed with the suit. Determining whether Donegan is eligible for immunity under a section of the Communications Decency Act is the next step in the case, according to The Hollywood Reporter. That Act is the same one tech companies are using to protect themselves from being liable for content on their platforms; it essentially says that providing the digital means for users to post content does not make one a publisher of that content. In order to be covered under that law, Donegan will have to show that the entry on Elliott was written by someone other than herself.

Elliot was one of more than 70 men listed in the “Shitty Media Men” database, a Google sheet that very, very briefly circulated in October 2017 following the revelations of Harvey Weinstein’s long history of sexual misconduct and assault. The spreadsheet acted as a virtual whisper network, alerting women in media to allegedly bad actors within the industry through anonymous entries outlining sexual misconduct and violence allegations ranging from inappropriate comments to rape. “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,” Donegan wrote in a 2018 piece outing herself as the creator of the list.

In describing why there was so much controversy surrounding the spreadsheet, Donegan’s attorney, Robbie Kaplan — a Time’s Up legal-defense fund co-founder and the lawyer who represented Edith Windsor in the landmark Supreme Court case legalizing same-sex marriage — told The Cut, “For centuries women have experienced harassment and abuse at the hands of men. And for the most part, they stayed quiet about it. This conspiracy of silence is now being ripped open.”