Thread by @JolyonMaugham

Earlier this week I was called by a Daily Mail journalist who told me Cohen had explained the messages he had sent on social media to a junior female colleague offering to take and send photographs of his penis as a "joke".

The Mail jounalist was interested in running a 'cancel culture' story, and asked whether Cohen's departure from the Observer, according to it on the grounds of his ill health, was actually related to his advocacy against trans women.

I explained I had spoken to many women assaulted or harassed by Cohen. I told him a journalist at another broadsheet (I did not tell him it was the FT) had spoken to five of Cohen's victims and had recently filed copy for a piece that the FT had then decided it would not run.

I told him I had been in lengthy correspondence with the Observer's management, and its lawyers, trying to encourage them to acknowledge they had a broad duty to less senior women who might be exposed to men like Cohen (he is not the only such man in that stable).

I told him I did not believe the FT had declined to run the journalist's piece because of legal risk but because they were worried about what the Observer might report about the FT. And I told him I had written privately to a senior figure at the FT asking for an explanation.

My experience with the FT mirrors a conversation I had with a senior female journalist at the Sunday Times in which I encouraged her to take up the story. She said there were well-known skeletons in the closet of a very senior editorial figure there.

I said to the Mail journalist, if you want to write about the institutional failure at the Observer I will help you write that story. I mentioned to him this 👇 tweet about what the behaviour, and the blind eye the media turns towards it, costs.

https://twitter.com/jhedelstein/status/1619025358598328321?s=20&t=L3zY1RXWyCp4fLxKZT61tg

The Mail journalist has not got back to me. The senior Financial Times figure has not replied. The Sunday Time has not reverted. The same Guardian News and Media management remains in place and women who lack power continue to tell me they are unhappy with its complaint handling.

I still hear from women who receive letters from expensive lawyers acting for powerful men who assault women and then seek to silence those who speak out. I have such a letter from Cohen's lawyers (addressed to someone who lacks my ability to defend myself).

I am very well aware that this is not a problem confined to the print media but stretches to ITN and implicating a senior editorial figure at the BBC. And I have the receipts.

I have spoken to perhaps twenty women with direct experience of this conduct. I cannot say conclusively, but this is my clear impression, that those who do not 'make a fuss' about what happens to them enjoy better career outcomes.

It seems that no one with power to change things will speak of this. But the media's self-interested silence carries a high cost, as Jean Hannah Edelstein points out. It blights the lives and careers of the women harmed by predatory men who are enabled by a culture of silence.