An open letter to the faculty advisory board of the NYU student newspaper on the lies told about Milo Yiannopoulos in its reporting

To:
Yvonne Latty, Clinical Professor of Journalism
Meredith Broussard, Assistant Professor of Journalism
Nanci Healy, Assistant Director of the Center for Student Life

Re: The recent coverage in the Washington Square News of Professor Michael Rectenwald’s invitation for Mr. Milo Yiannopoulos to speak to his class on Halloween

Dear Colleagues,

I read with interest the statement published today by the WSN Editorial Board on their coverage of Milo Yiannopoulos. I understand from the WSN statement of ethics that the students take sole responsibility for the editing of their work, but I am concerned that their statement contains a number of libels against Mr. Yiannopoulos presented as facts in support of their coverage. The student editors have also seen fit to run an opinion piece by Ms. Abby Hofstetter which contains an even larger number of libels. As someone who is well-acquainted with Mr. Yiannopoulos’s public statements, I write to draw your attention to these libels, in the hope that you might advise the students about the legal danger they are in.

In their editorial, the WSN Editorial Board makes two clearly libelous statements.

1. “[Mr. Yiannopoulos] makes horrifying statements in order to gain attention, such as when he endorsed the pedophilia within the Catholic Church....”

Mr. Yiannopoulos has never made such a statement. He has spoken in videos easily available on YouTube about his experiences growing up as a gay man, including his experience being sexually abused by two older men when he was between the ages of 13 and 16. He made a public statement about these comments on February 21, 2017, in which he reiterated what he had said in the YouTube videos: he does not condone pedophilia and has spent much of his career exposing pedophiles. In his own words:

I would like to restate my disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors. I am horrified by pedophilia and I have devoted large portions of my career as a journalist to exposing child abusers. I’ve outed three of them, in fact — three more than most of my critics.... 

I do not believe sex with 13-year-olds is okay. When I mentioned the number 13, I was talking about myself, and the age I lost my own virginity... 

I shouldn’t have used the word “boy” — which gay men often do to describe young men of consenting age — instead of “young man.” That was an error. I was talking about my own relationship when I was 17 with a man who was 29. The age of consent in the UK is 16.

On the very day that he was scheduled to speak to Professor Rectenwald’s class, Bombadier Books released Mr. Yiannopoulos’s second book Diabolical, in which he criticizes Pope Francis and his supporters specifically for their role in the cover-ups of sexual abuse in the Church. He also details in this book his experience of abuse from the age of 13 and how he now understands why he spoke about it in the way that he did in the videos, for which he apologized in the press conference in February 2017:

I haven’t ever apologized before. Name-calling doesn’t bother me. But to be a victim of child abuse and for the media to call me an apologist for child abuse is absurd... I regret the things I said. I don’t think I’ve been as sorry about anything in my whole life. This isn’t how I wanted my parents to find out about this.

As Mr. Yiannopoulos makes clear in Diabolical, having spoken with other victims of Father Michael, he now realizes that others received far worse treatment at Father Michael’s hands and were more damaged by their experiences than he. In retrospect and with this additional information, Mr. Yiannopoulos now holds the matter to be much more serious than he had originally thought, when he was speaking solely on the basis of his own experiences.

2. “...and made racist, dehumanizing comments toward Leslie Jones.”

Mr. Yiannopoulos has never made a racist or dehumanizing comment about Ms. Leslie Jones. In the review that he published of the movie Ghostbusters, he specifically critiqued the character that Ms. Jones portrayed as racist and stereotypical, and he chided the writers of the movie for giving her such a demeaning role. In his words:

Patty [Ms. Jones’s character] is a two dimensional racist stereotype by even the most forgiving measure. 

Patty is the worst of the lot. The actress is spectacularly unappealing, even relative to the rest of the odious cast. But it’s her flat-as-a-pancake black stylings that ought to have irritated the SJWs. I don’t get offended by such things, but they should.... 

The petty, two-dimensional feminist posturing of Ghostbusters is demeaning to all four of its leads, particularly when you consider how complex and interesting the film could have been with someone like Joss Whedon at the helm.

When Ms. Jones went on Twitter to complain about the poor ticket sales the movie was receiving, Mr. Yiannopoulos tweeted: “If at first you don't succeed (because your work is terrible), play the victim. EVERYONE GETS HATE MAIL FFS.” Ms. Jones reported Mr. Yiannopoulos to Twitter and called one of his fans a “racist b*tch” for saying “how sad that a comedian would want to limit free speech. Lenny Bruce is rolling over in his grave.” Mr. Yiannopoulos responded to Ms. Jones: “Ghostbusters is doing so badly they've deployed @Lesdoggg to play the victim on Twitter. Very sad!” “Barely literate. America needs better schools.” At which point, Mr. Yiannopoulos was blocked from linking to her account. To which Mr. Yiannopoulos replied: “Rejected by yet another black dude.”

It is true that Mr. Yiannopoulos makes critical remarks about the feminist posturing of the movie and that in his tweets he suggested that Ms. Jones looks like a man, but unless men are not human, he did not “dehumanize” her. He explicitly defended her against the racist stereotype she was given to portray.

*

In her opinion piece, Ms. Abby Hofstetter makes a number of even more libelous assertions.

While the WSN Editorial Board claims that Mr. Yiannopoulos “endorsed the pedophilia within the Catholic Church,” Ms. Hofstetter calls him a pedophile. In her words: “I was also surprised at how many students I heard excusing Yiannopoulos’ racism, anti-Semitism and pedophilia in the name of the First Amendment.” This is clear libel. Ms. Hofstetter has stated that Mr. Yiannopoulos has sex with children, an actionable crime.

Ms. Hofstetter supports her assertion of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s “racism” with a link to an article about Ms. Jones. She links to an article citing statements that Mr. Yiannopoulos made on a video with Dave Rubin about Jews being prominent in banking and the media to prove his “anti-Semitism.” She links to the article that Mr. Yiannopoulos co-authored with Mr. Allum Bokhari on the alt-right as it was in March 2016 as proof that Mr. Yiannopoulos himself is “alt-right.” She uses Mr. Yiannopoulos’s marriage to his black husband John (whom she describes as Muslim on the basis of no evidence whatsoever) and his references to his Jewish grandmother as proof of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s “racism,” and she links to the video where Mr. Yiannopoulos was singing America the Beautiful as proof of his association with Mr. Richard Spencer.

In Ms. Hofstetter’s words, Mr. Yiannopoulos is “[a] man who waves his ‘blind for love’ black Muslim husband and Jewish grandmother around like they signed his permission slip to be hailed by Richard Spencer,” insulting both Mr. Yiannopoulos and his husband in one go, while at the same time suggesting that Mr. Yiannopoulos has any control over Mr. Spencer’s actions. Not only does Ms. Hofstetter dismiss both the fact that Mr. Yiannopoulos is married to a black man and that he is ethnically Jewish in order to call him a racist and an anti-Semite, but she also implies that Mr. Yiannopoulos’s husband is a pawn in the machinations of a “white supremacist,” while insisting that a man who describes himself as an “utterly unreconstructed Zionist” can have his Jewishness stripped from him as a consequence of his politics. Ms. Hofstetter also claims that Mr. Yiannopoulos is a “white supremacist,” a libel for which Mr. Yiannopoulos has rightly been granted a retraction by numerous journalists and publications. The one citation Ms. Hofstetter gets right is that Mr. Yiannopoulos described himself on October 30, 2018, as “the most censored man in America,” the day on which Mayor Bill DeBlasio stepped in to cancel his visit to NYU.

I have written at length on my blog about the slurs cast against Mr. Yiannopoulos over the past two years, including the claim that he is in any way an associate of Mr. Richard Spencer. The mutual dislike between Mr. Yiannopoulos and Mr. Spencer is well-documented and public. Any inference that they are “associates” is dishonest in the extreme, as the tweets Mr. Spencer made on the day of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s shaming for speaking loosely about his own abuse make clear:

Not only does Mr. Spencer think Mr. Yiannopoulos is “totally done” and “[not] a deep thinker.” He thinks Mr. Yiannopoulos is a Zionist and a cultural degenerate thanks to Mr. Yiannopoulos’s friendship with Pamela Geller, herself a Jew and whose name he (Mr. Spencer) can’t spell:

Ms. Hofstetter argues that NYU needs to “acknowledge its anti-Semitic problem.” Given that she has described a man who is close friends with a Jewish woman now under a fatwa for her outspoken defense of Western civilization as “anti-Semitic,” it is unclear what anti-Semitic problem Ms. Hofstetter means. Not only is Mr. Yiannopoulos friends with Ms. Geller; as the publisher of her book Fatwa: Hunted in America, he is under the fatwa himself as her business associate, in effect risking death for her—hardly the action of an anti-Semite.

To cap it all off, Ms. Hofstetter claims that the talk that Mr. Yiannopoulos live-streamed on Halloween in lieu of his appearance in Professor Rectenwald’s class was “riddled with jokes about Anne Frank, pedophilia and suicide.” If Ms. Hofstetter watched the video as carefully as she must have in order to glean even a few examples of things she did not find funny, she knows that she is taking them out of context. Also, Mr. Yiannopoulos did not mention pedophilia, and if he had, it would have been to condemn it as he does in his new book.

*

According to the conduct policy published on your About page,

WSN requires its staff and writers to behave in a professional manner and adhere to industry-standard guidelines for reporting. We seek to find the truth and report it while minimizing the risk of harm, protecting sources and striving for honesty and accuracy in what we publish. 

You also note that “WSN will correct articles as soon as possible and provide updated information whenever possible.” I hope to see the corrections to the articles above made as soon as possible, particularly those statements libeling Mr. Yiannopoulos with opinions he does not hold and labeling him an actual criminal of the worst kind. I would hope that your editors would see fit in future to research such claims properly, rather than relying on hearsay and links to uncorroborated reporting. I would not want for their sloppiness in reporting on this important issue to stand as a reflection on the caliber of education they are receiving at your institution nor on the quality of mentorship you have offered them as their advisors. I trust you share my respect for the gravity of this responsibility.

Yours sincerely,

Rachel Fulton Brown
Associate Professor of History
The University of Chicago

For my complete reporting on Mr. Yiannopoulos, go here.