Thread by @monicabyrne13

So let’s talk about @MIT’s decision to retain Junot Díaz as a professor after two women publicly described how he sexually assaulted them.

First I need to post this. This landmark @nature study just came out. It confirmed everything I’ve experienced in terms of how institutions fail when dealing with the sexual harassers and abusers they employ.
nature.com/articles/d4158…

The most important takeaway is this: “The analysis concludes that policies to fight the problem are ineffective because they are set up to protect institutions, not victims.”

What does that mean in practical terms?

I’ll give you an example. I don’t know what MIT’s policies are, but I’d be willing to bet they’re similar to the ones I dealt with at another educational institution, relating to another professor.

I’d been hearing stories about a married white male professor for years—bullying, racial insults, sexual comments toward students, propositioning, encouraging “open expression of sexuality,” using one-on-one sessions to make moves on students, et cetera.

Those of us who wanted to do something about it were directed to the institution’s Title IX Compliance office. The first things they told me were: (1) they couldn’t guarantee my confidentiality, and (2) because I wasn’t affiliated with them, my testimony didn’t matter.

Which was really hard to hear. (This is naïve in retrospect, but I really assumed the officers were my allies, interested in protecting students.)

But okay. All right. I would be content to act in an organizational role, then.

I sent students who wanted to share their stories to these officers. I thought, because they were students, the officers would take their safety and privacy more seriously than mine.

Nope.

The first thing they were also told was, “We can’t guarantee your confidentiality.”

Why?
 
Because their policy stated that the accused must have a chance to hear the details of all stories reported about them and have a chance to respond to them.

In other words, the students would be identifiable, and face retaliation.

The officers were quick to add they had a zero-tolerance policy of retaliation. I asked, “How could they ever know they were being retaliated against, when so many forms of it happen behind closed doors in circles of power they don’t have access to?”
 
They had no answer to that.

Why was this the institution’s policy?
 
Because if they didn’t follow “proper procedures,” they explained, they could be sued by anti-#metoo legal organizations.
 
In other words, they prioritized the security of the institution over the health and safety of their students.

....exactly as stated in the Nature study cited above.

The result was that, out of the 6-12 students who either spoke to or expressed interest in speaking to the officers about this professor’s behavior, guess how many spoke on the record, after being informed that their stories wouldn’t be kept confidential.

I actually don’t know the answer to that, because all I heard was, a month later, one of the officers called me to tell me the investigation was dead in the water.

No student wanted to be identifiable to this professor.

And the very fact of that? That NO ONE wanted to speak up because they were too scared of this professor, and said so, and the officers *knew* that? Was apparently not in itself a reason to revisit his employment. Unbelievable.

Here again, I’d like to reiterate my point that of course abusers do some good for some people some of the time. And that that is a *conscious strategy* that serves as cover for abuse. So it was with this professor. So it is with Díaz.

I don’t know MIT’s policy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it were similar: built to protect the institution from legal damages, and not the students’ health and safety.
 
Which is why I’m not surprised that MIT’s “investigation” “cleared Díaz of wrongdoing.”

If their policy is similar, what it means is that even if students did go to MIT’s Title IX office (which is so difficult to get them to do in the first place), they were likely told “we can’t guarantee your confidentiality.”

I.e., they’d have to spend the rest of their careers and even lives afraid that Díaz would retaliate in some way. Of course they wouldn’t talk.

But hey, congrats to MIT for their “investigation” that included “extensive conversations with Professor Díaz and his colleagues.”
 
MIT didn’t talk to me. Or Zinzi. Or Carmen. Or Alisa. Or, to my knowledge, anyone who signed the VONA petition.
 
None of it matters to them.

I could have told them—even in broad terms—about the gropings at public readings. About the attempts to get minors alone. About catcalling students. About the racist and sexist bullying in workshops. About the unwanted touching and forced kissing and sustained harassment.

Congratulations, MIT. You got played by an abuser with a lifetime of practice of grooming his defenders. The fallout of which I am still wading through literally every day.

Congratulations, Edward Schiappa, Joshua Cohen, and Deborah Chasman. You protected your institution from legal damages, and you’ve maintained your proximity to status and wealth. Go celebrate at Toscanini’s.

I don’t know how to say this any more clearly:
 
It should be enough that Junot Díaz cornered Zinzi Clemmons when she was a 26-year-old graduate student at Columbia and sexually assaulted her.

It should be enough that Junot Díaz invited Alisa Rivera, a much younger woman, to what she clearly thought was a meeting about writing, racially insulted her, and then when she started crying, and sexually assaulted her.

It should be enough to lose his positions at Boston Review and MIT and VONA and the Pulitzer committee.
 
To lose any kind of position where he has paid power over and access to young women.
 
But I guess we’re still not there, in 2018.

Because for every abuser, there are ten enablers. For rich and famous abusers, there are hundreds.

In the last six weeks, they’ve been working pretty hard to pave everything back to the way it was before.

Including creating troll accounts to harass Zinzi, Carmen, me, everyone we communicate with, and anyone who even mentions Díaz; calling us ugly, bad writers, jezebels, you name it.

John Freeman, the partner of Díaz’s agent, has apparently blocked everyone who even retweets us. (Wonder why @lithub, the “a single, trusted, daily source for all the news...of contemporary literary life” has never covered the Díaz story? John Freeman is the Executive Editor.)

What’s so saddening is that his enablers know. They all know. In many cases, they’re the ones who were telling and repeating the stories of Díaz’s behavior in the first place.

But when push comes to shove, they’d rather deny their complicity and preserve their security, and if young women are traumatized in the process, they’re apparently fine with that.

These enablers include (1) men in the literary world who know they’ve done the same as or worse than Díaz, and are afraid of stories coming out about them; and (2) women who are or were partnered to those men, and don’t want to believe it, nor own up to their years of complicity.

Their protection of him is a projection of their own fears. If he were to lose his position, that would mean a lot of others would also be in danger of losing their positions.

I wish I could tell Díaz directly to stop. It is his responsibility to stop. It is not young students’ responsibility to avoid him. But by retaining a sexual predator, MIT has put them in an impossible situation. So I’d like to speak directly to those students, as an MIT alumna:

I strongly recommend that you avoid situations where you are alone with him.
 
I guess I’ll leave it at that.

I truly wish I had never met him. I would so much rather be spending my creative energy writing right now than cleaning up his piles of shit.

But I will not ever regret speaking up for all the women who can’t.

And so I’ll end with this:

MIT’s investigation doesn’t mean shit.

We’re only six weeks into the overall investigation. Many of them take months or years—for women to come forward, for journalists to investigate, for all the dots to be connected.

I’m not going anywhere.

My DMs are open. My email is [e-mail].

Whenever you’re ready. ❤️