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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/IHad360K_KarmaDammit on 2025-02-08 15:18:32+00:00.
Background
Emily Gould is an author and editor who got her start as a blogger in the early 2000s. Her posts on her own blog, Emily Magazine, attracted the attention of the website Gawker, where she became a writer and eventually editor-in-chief in 2006. If you're not familiar with Gawker, they were infamous for posting private information about celebrities, not fact-checking anything, and generally being scummy as all hell.
In 2007, Gould was invited onto Larry King Live for an incredibly awkward interview about the site's Gawker Stalker feature. Gawker Stalker allowed readers to send in celebrities' current locations, which were put together using Google Maps so that paparazzi could find where they were at any time. During the interview, Jimmy Kimmel accused her of helping actual stalkers find celebrities, suggested that the site would sooner or later get a celebrity killed, and pointed out that much of what was posted on Gawker was demonstrably false. Gould responded by laughing nervously, claiming that it usually took a few hours for celebrities' locations to be posted anyway, and insisting that nobody expected the information on their site to be accurate all the time.
Gould soon followed up the interview with a New York Times op-ed defending herself, which claimed that there's nothing wrong with Gawker Stalker since privacy is a thing of the past anyway. This is the internet age!
Certainly, the stalker sightings invade celebrities’ privacy. Because of the Internet, they can no longer demand attention only when they’ve got something to promote, and are subject instead to constant scrutiny. But these stars deserve only as much sympathy as the people who get fired because their employers discover a “my boss is awful” blog posting. There’s just more information available to more people, about more people, than ever these days.
A year later, Gould followed it up with another article, in which she talked about the harassment she'd received after the interview and an article about Gawker's scummy business practices later the same year. In a genuinely shocking twist, she actually showed some self-awareness and quit her position at Gawker:
By revealing my flaws to whoever wanted to look, I thought — incorrectly, as it turned out — that I was inoculating myself against the criticism my Gawker co-workers and I leveled most often. Maybe I was talentless, bad-complected, old-looking and slutty, but no one could call me a hypocrite. I had said that everyone was subject to judgment and scrutiny, and then, by judging and scrutinizing myself relentlessly, I’d invited others to do the same. But maybe I was a hypocrite after all, because now I was beginning to feel that no one should be subject to that kind of scrutiny.
Anyway, none of that is the actual drama. That's just context before we get to it.
The Middling Millennials
Edward Champion was another blogger who became popular around the same time, running a blog and a popular podcast where he played the role of his alter ego, Bat Segundo. Champion/Segundo had something of a reputation for both genuinely interesting discussion and combative, aggressive behavior, and The Bat Segundo Show was a big enough deal to get interviews with people like Alison Bechdel, Weird Al and David Lynch. Appearing on the show could give a new and obscure author a significant boost, and this gave Champion a decent amount of clout in the NYC literary scene. In addition, he was dating Sarah Weinman, the news editor of Publisher Marketplace, which made him even more of an influential figure within the the publishing world.
In June 2014, days before the release of Emily Gould's newest book, Champion posted an 11,000-word essay called "Emily Gould, Literary Narcissism, and the Middling Millennials". For reference, that's about six times the length of this post. It set out to criticize the state of modern literature in general, but mostly Emily Gould. Why? Well, back in her Gawker days, Gould had apparently written an insulting article about Champion, and he'd waited seven years for a chance to get back at her. Unfortunately, the essay seems to have been pretty much scrubbed from the internet, but I was able to find a few quotes in various articles about it, the most notable being this one, which marks the only time I've seen anyone use the word "minx" as an insult outside of A Confederacy of Dunces:
When a minx’s head is so deeply deposited up her own slimy passage, it’s often hard to see the sunshine.
He went on to complain about female writers who "confuse the act of literary engagement with coquettish pom-pom flogging", and called Gould a narcissist for putting her name in the title of her blog. (Keep in mind this whole thing was posted on a blog called "Ed Rants".)
Now, a blog post criticizing Emily Gould probably wouldn't have caused much drama on its own, because, well, go back and read the first section of this writeup. But the vulgar, misogynistic and just plain weird tone of the whole thing (at one point he starts imagining what Gould was like as an infant and refers to her "dewy newborn hands”), along with Champion's dismissive attitude towards female authors in general, led to an enormous controversy on Book Twitter.
Not only was Twitter full of insults towards him--one person memorably described him as "the kind of guy who splits bar tabs with a calculator"--but many other writers started talking about their own bad experiences with him in the past. He'd frequently insulted other authors, sometimes threatened them, and revealed their unpleasant secrets to employers:
On one trip to New York, however, Lennon had become absorbed in a particularly painful family issue and emailed Champion explaining why they wouldn’t be able to meet up. Champion rejected Lennon’s reasons, called the family issue “a first world problem,” and broke off the friendship. Then Champion forwarded the email in which Lennon had described this dreadful, and clearly private, situation to every contact he had at Graywolf Press, Lennon’s publisher. Champion demanded that they drop Lennon as an author: Graywolf could not in good conscience support the work of a person whose family was involved in such circumstances.
He'd told Emily St. John Mandel to "go swallow a glass of cyanide", and the closest anyone came to defending him against charges of misogyny was pointing out that he'd said similar stuff to plenty of male authors. (Champion himself insisted that it was clearly a joke, since you can't fill a glass with pure cyanide.) Some accused Weinman of covering for her boyfriend and using her publishing clout to prevent anyone from calling him out for his behavior.
Various websites and blogs wrote about the incident, and Champion showed up on many of them to defend himself. On one site, he insisted that
We are dealing with words here, not actions. I did not grasp Gould’s hand and force her to read the piece. Although the language emerged as fierce and I now see why the words threatened people, I never had and do not have any intention of physically harming or confronting her. Furthermore, while I understand why some people have perceived my unfiltered essay as misogynistic, I did speak glowingly of several women writers.
I wanted to purge all this accumulated hatred I had for Gould (not as a woman, but as a writer and as a “journalist” and as someone who had harmed the careers of some utterly kind friends). That terrible negativity vanished after writing this piece.
Thank you for writing this response and for challenging my views. I am sorry that you were disturbed by them.
About eight hours after posting the essay, Champion went on Twitter and announced:
No money, no job, no gigs, no agent (a MS out with three). Not good enough. So I’m going to throw myself off a bridge now. No joke. Goodbye.
A few hours later, he tweeted that he'd abandoned his plans and was returning home, and "staying off Twitter for months, seeking help".
I Won't Be Intimidated!
As it turns out, "months" means "almost exactly three months", and Champion got involved in another round of drama that September. Porochista Khakpour, an author known for her 2007 novel Sons and Other Flammable Objects, deleted a comment that Champion had made on her Facebook page insulting another author, Dan Kois. Champion responded with a series of angry tweets about how "Porochista Khakpoour [sic] is an awful narcissist", declaring that "I won't be intimidated", and complaining about how "the publishing industry had done ZERO for me. Fuck you. Fuck all of you".
He announced that he knew a man who had nude photographs of Khakpour, and threatened to reveal publicly who it was unless Khakpour apologized for deleting his Facebook comment by 11:00 that night. Pretty much everyone involved in the NYC publishing industry frantically tweeted at him not to while he counted down the time to 11. He posted the man's...
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