Two Women Forced to Apologize for Calling Male Librarian ‘Sexual Predator’

Posted on | March 25, 2015 | 77 Comments

Judging from the retractions issued by Nina de Jesus and Lisa Rabey, their lawyers have advised them that making statements with “no factual basis at all” was a very bad idea. You can read Joe Murphy’s explanation of his $1.25 million lawsuit and ponder the difference between (a) branding someone a “sexual predator” de novo, and (b) citing previously published accounts and legal documents about a “notorious and thoroughly evil” felon. It would appear that Ms. de Jesus and Ms. Rabey have learned a valuable lesson. I hope they paid full price for that lesson.

Category: Journalism

Comments

77 Responses to “Two Women Forced to Apologize for Calling Male Librarian ‘Sexual Predator’”

Evi L. Bloggerlady
March 25th, 2015 @ 1:58 pm

Well he did have a penis and testicles didn’t he? Unless he is the process of gender reassignment, doesn’t that make him automatically a sexual predator?

[And just so there is no misunderstanding, I am saying that sarcastically as to Mr. Murphy, but to point out this is what many who make such false accusations actually believe]
RS
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:06 pm

Note the following contained in each of the “apologies:”

My intention in writing my blog post was to draw attention to the larger issue of sexual harassment of librarians.

and

My intention in posting these tweets was to draw attention to the issue of sexual harassment of female librarians in the profession.

As with all Progressives, evil is justified because of ostensibly “pure” motives of seeking a “greater” good, which good is known only to them and which, interestingly enough, is the complete antithesis to social norms and mores which have held us in good stead for millenia.
arcadius
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:08 pm

Victims! Survivors! Speaking out!
OrangeEnt
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:08 pm

They don’t seem to be asking people to stop contributing to the defense fund, so are we to assume the lawsuit goes on? Comments there closed, of course.
Jeanette Victoria
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:12 pm

As someone who has been libeled for a decade I know that the goons feel righteously justified in their attempts to completely destroy a life. Good for him for suing.
Finrod Felagund
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:14 pm

Stupidity should be painful; in this case, in the wallet.
Wombat_socho
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:19 pm

Nobody gives a shit about your intentions, girls. Pay up.
Wombat_socho
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:20 pm

Except for the part about there being no victims or survivors because of the lack of actual predation…
arcadius
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:29 pm

Minor details…
richard mcenroe
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:41 pm

You do realize that he will be punished anyway by the lefties/feminazis who dominate the library profession, right. Good luck with that promotion or job mobility…
Dianna Deeley
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:50 pm

They are sorry they got caught, and that Joe Murphy was willing to fight to the death. They are not even slightly sorry for their evil.

When will people learn that making it up is not activism?
Finrod Felagund
March 25th, 2015 @ 2:56 pm

I seem to recall something about the paving material used in the Road To Hell.
Fail Burton
March 25th, 2015 @ 3:15 pm

No one should be surprised those morons hang at the edges of the science fiction feminist community where innuendoes and defamation of any straight white man is the order of the day. The entire cult exists on scare quotes and they tried to fund a Kickstarter legal fund to defend these women. Damien Walter at The Guardian once tried to crowdsource bigoted quotes by SFF author Larry Corriea and couldn’t find a thing. That’s because their idiocy is based on anyone disagreeing with their weird cult being a racist. On the other hand, when Larry C. asked for actual quotes by these raggedy feminists, it was a flood. There’s a reason why that Google app that changes feminist rhetoric into hate speech works – that’s because it is hate speech. It doesn’t work the other way round cuz the anti-PC in SF don’t indulge in the group defamation of non-whites, gays and women. They go after actual people with actual quotes. An easy thing to do when some Hun who calls whites a “cracka” asks the world to not read white men for a year. The bottom line is gender feminists are some of the stupidest people who ever lived. They’re like a call-in radio show where they prank themselves every time they open their mouths.
Art Deco
March 25th, 2015 @ 3:36 pm

My intention in posting these tweets was to draw attention to the issue of sexual harassment of female librarians in the profession
About 85% of all librarians and archivists are female, and, no, it’s not an occupation which attracts and retains a mess of dykes.
Those who are male do gravitate to academic libraries and downtown public libraries (‘central libraries’) where they are about a third of the total and those there are more than you’d expect to be in supervisory positions. The thing is, the men in that trade are also more likely than the norm to be homosexually inclined and vastly more likely than the norm to be introverted Irish-bachelor types. The rest of the men are the sort Elsa Maxwell called “overly married”. It’s hard to imagine a social environment where a woman is less likely to be hit on at work.
The inter-personal problems you find in libraries and archives tend to derive from the peculiar features of those drawn to those trades (melancholics). To the extent there are gender problems in libraries, it’s vague frustration on the part of male employees that their work day is disrupted by women who are process-oriented rather than goal oriented (hence pointless meetings and pointless disputes over whose staff will do what).
Steve White
March 25th, 2015 @ 3:40 pm

I took a moment to read the earlier “Team Harpy” blog posts. It seems that these two individuals were all the way into defending themselves, full of vim and vinegar, until … they weren’t, and were groveling out an apology.

I’m thinking that Mr. Murphy’s lawyer hit them with something in the summary deposition proceeding that made their lawyer say, “ah, $#%^!!&%##”. Or something like that. And then tell his clients that the jig was up and it was time to settle.

A quick note to the feminists: as word of actions like this get around, please understand that you might want to be sufficiently careful, in “calling attention to the larger issues of sexual harassment”, as not to libel someone.
trangbang68
March 25th, 2015 @ 3:40 pm

I remember a fight I saw growing up in New York. The one guy was taking his coat off and the other guy (who was universally hated) tried a quick kick to the nether regions. He missed. Time stood still as the kicker said “I’m sorry” Time resumed with a brutal beatdown. I hope Murphy gets a chunk of their lifetime earnings.
Art Deco
March 25th, 2015 @ 4:08 pm

More likely the wretched job market for those in the library trade will truncate his career (which currently includes ‘consulting’ rather than a salaried position).
The parasitoid wasps who have made the American Library Association a locus of bad comedy are not very numerous among working librarians. It’s just that working librarians lack the motivation to put the insects in their place.
The more salient problem would be that when you’re looking at a mess of resumes, any distinguishing feature can take on a larger significance than you’d imagine. That he has attracted ‘controversy’ would be a problem, not that librarians and archivists are gliberals and leftoids (which they generally are, but in a casual sort of way) or feminazis (which is quite unusual). If he has a special skill that the library in question was looking for, they’d let it slide. Of course if he did, he likely would be working in one now.
concern00
March 25th, 2015 @ 4:20 pm

“So if one guy gets his life ruined, maybe it balances out.”
Evi L. Bloggerlady
March 25th, 2015 @ 4:26 pm

Librarians are often targets of sexual predators: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SLDMMGzkyI
Evi L. Bloggerlady
March 25th, 2015 @ 4:28 pm

See, you did have a wonderful life…look how many were helped by your sacrifice!
OccupyDisqus
March 25th, 2015 @ 4:44 pm

I’d up vote this, but Disqus has become anal on that privilege for guest commenters.

So, y’know, like, “UpTwinkles”, dude!
robertstacymccain
March 25th, 2015 @ 4:53 pm

“process-oriented rather than goal oriented”

One of my pet peeves about bureaucracy is this attitude. Some people’s job is about nothing but emails and meetings, and so it is Very Important to those poeple that you reply to their emails and attend their meetings and never mind whether any of that relates to actual Work.
OccupyDisqus
March 25th, 2015 @ 4:56 pm

No, wait, now it’s “Jazz Hands“.

Sorry ’bout that, reet!
kilo6
March 25th, 2015 @ 5:27 pm

They have no regard for truth. There was a certain Roman prefect who had similar disregard for truth, see John 18:38
38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? …
Fail Burton
March 25th, 2015 @ 5:38 pm

One of those 2 feminist robots is unemployed and the 2nd never fails to mention she’s underemployed. That’s how they have time to go after the straight white man. Right now they’re apologizing and telling people to eff off at the same time. These people never learn. They are incapable of stepping outside their sociopathic obsessions.
The original Mr. X
March 25th, 2015 @ 5:40 pm

Excuses like this always make me wonder why, if the problem is as great as they suggest, they couldn’t just choose a real case of harassment and use that to spread awareness.
Phil_McG
March 25th, 2015 @ 5:41 pm

And do we really believe that the larger issue of sexual harassment of librarians actually exists?

Are we to believe that female librarians are often the victims of sex-crazed male librarians, chasing them around the nonfiction shelves like a bookish Benny Hill?

Seriously?

Who knew that the world of organising dead tree based media was so exciting?

More likely though, is that librarianism is another one of those odd little niches that has been taken over by feminists / social justice warriors, and the issue of sexual harassment of female librarians in the profession is an imaginary issue they’ve invented.
Phil_McG
March 25th, 2015 @ 5:45 pm

2,000 years on and in another language, you can still hear the weariness and cynicism in Pilate’s bitter words. He wasn’t a bad man. Just an unfortunate one to get posted to the arse-end of the Roman Empire.

These SJW’s are not like Pilate. They’re like the blood-crazed, hysterical crowd screaming for Barabbas to be freed and Christ crucified.
Phil_McG
March 25th, 2015 @ 5:56 pm

They’ll all be unemployed soon.

Librarians will go the way of night soil men and iron puddlers, and good riddance.

There is no good reason, outside a few historical archives, to keep information on paper, with limited copies available, and only during certain hours of the day. That model is now as anachronistic as transcribing books by hand.

Universities and municipal libraries have no excuse not to digitise all their content and replace the meat-based librarian with search engines. We don’t even need “libraries” any more – just put it on the cloud.
Art Deco
March 25th, 2015 @ 6:35 pm

They’d only do that if they had no regard for the preferences of their clientele. Libraries are service points and amenities, not just book depositories.

Academic journals which are primarily accessed through indexes, abstracts, and databases do not have much of a future for a variety of reasons, but that does not apply to collections of monographs.
Art Deco
March 25th, 2015 @ 6:37 pm

Who knew that the world of organising dead tree based media was so exciting?

Again, the work of librarians is more variegated than that, and has been for a generation.
Art Deco
March 25th, 2015 @ 6:39 pm

One of those 2 feminist robots is unemployed and the 2nd never fails to mention she’s underemployed.

Depends on time and place, but that’s been pretty unremarkable among recent graduates of MLS programs for 25 years or more.
Art Deco
March 25th, 2015 @ 6:42 pm

Oh, they have things to do, but its characteristic of work in philanthropic enterprises with weak operational measures of competence that their default settings trump sense (and their default settings are to get into petty arguments with people).
Art Deco
March 25th, 2015 @ 6:58 pm

More likely though, is that librarianism is another one of those odd
little niches that has been taken over by feminists / social justice
warriors,

1. They vote Democratic in proportions you see on arts and sciences faculties.

2. The population of them considered in aggregate have signature shortcomings.

3. Intense investment in social or political viewpoints is really seldom a problem. The thing is, the sectaries are very active in the main occupational association. However, if you look at the background of those people, few of them have plum positions.

4. Keep in mind also that someone may be a political sectary and perfectly reasonable in office settings and wretched administrators can be people who have no discernable politics at all. People are funny that way.
Phil_McG
March 25th, 2015 @ 6:59 pm

Pfft. Service points and amenities indeed.

What service do they provide, other than directing people to the right section or checking out books? Municipal libraries are just glorified drop in centres for the homeless and the jobless these days. Their most popular amenity is the internet.

Librarianism as a profession was on borrowed time from the day the printing press was invented and the chained library became obsolete. That borrowed time has now been spent. Sic transit gloria libelli.

To the dustbin of history with them, where they can join the switchboard operators and milliners and shower curtain ring salesmen.
Art Deco
March 25th, 2015 @ 7:07 pm

What service do they provide, other than directing people to the right section or checking out books?

What are your usual clientele, and why are they there? The model in your head is a suburban branch library, the customer in your head is someone looking for light reading, and your image of the materials on offer is characteristic of someone who has not been in the door in 25 years or more. In academic settings, the librarian is going to have a much more interactive relationship with the customer as that customer’s research project is fleshed out (although that’s been changing as well).

Municipal libraries are just glorified drop in centres for the homeless and the jobless these days.

You’ll see a few such characters in the central library or (perhaps) some odd urban branch, but generally no.

To the dustbin of history with them, where they can join the switchboard
operators and milliners and shower curtain ring salesmen.

You’ll see these questions played out in the settings where current budgets and capital projects are considered. Your preferences in media, service, and amenity are your preferences. They are not necessarily community preferences.
RS
March 25th, 2015 @ 7:23 pm

The problem with purely technological repositories of knowledge is that the technology can fail or become instantly obsolete and unusable. You may have a thousand titles on your tablet, but they become useless without a battery.

Further, technology allows for greater censorship and/or bowdlerization of writings deemed “dangerous” by whomever is in power. See, e.g. the PRC. Try to access any number of otherwise open sourced works there, and you are stymied or have a visit paid to you by the police.

This is not to say that either or both are good or bad. Rather, there is a place for both in the preservation and transmission of knowledge.
Wombat_socho
March 25th, 2015 @ 8:04 pm

I do wonder sometimes whether anyone actually reads K. Tempest Bradford’s stuff. I haven’t even seen it in the local libraries, which are usually quick to pick up popular fantasy and SF.
DeadMessenger
March 25th, 2015 @ 8:15 pm

Wow, Wombat. I’m glad I don’t owe you any money. You might break my kneecaps.
DeadMessenger
March 25th, 2015 @ 8:56 pm

Thank you for summing up my corporate work experience. I hate the petty, mindless bureaucratic tasks I have to do that have no purpose whatsoever. Like TPS Reports. They’re not called that by name, but that’s what they are.
DeadMessenger
March 25th, 2015 @ 9:02 pm

Agree wholeheartedly with your characterization of SJW’s. But I disagree about Pilate. He was a bad man. One did not become a Roman prefect by being good hearted. And He had the Son of God flayed to the bone and crucified simply because it was convenient for him to do so. He chose to appease the Jews rather than do what he knew was right.
librarygryffon
March 25th, 2015 @ 11:07 pm

Having worked as a special librarian for years, I can tell you that digitizing everything can have unforseen consequences. Backup is better now than it was a decade ago, but do you know how many of our professional journals were unavailable on line and for how long after 9/11? It was months before I had all of my online access back. (A lot of publishers had everything on one set of servers in NYC.) And we had no access during the 2003 blackout because some of the servers and/or ISPs were down so we had no internet access, and more importantly, even if we had been online, online searching has extremely low priority for a hospital running on generators.

In a special library setting, the librarians are partners with the patrons in accessing information. Yes the job is changing, and becoming extremely IT heavy, but it’s not disappearing. I lost track of how many times I found what my patron needed in 15 or 20 minutes when they came to me after several hours of fruitless searching on their own. Patrons may be the specialists in how to use the information, librarians are the specialists in getting the info and the patron together.
Fail Burton
March 25th, 2015 @ 11:31 pm

She’s written a couple of short stories – that’s it. There are people who write fan fiction who are far more active.
Fail Burton
March 25th, 2015 @ 11:35 pm

The weird thing is that with an unprecedented amount of knowledge available and at the touch of a finger, people seem to have less of a grasp of history than before.
Daniel Freeman
March 25th, 2015 @ 11:45 pm

When will people learn that making it up is not activism?

I think that most people already know that. The ones that don’t might never. If their moral compass is so broken that they imagine that the ends justify the means, what would fix it?
Picayune
March 26th, 2015 @ 12:05 am

Stacy make sure you report on the ramifications of these harpy’s libel. Right now it looks like a fake apology gets them off the hook, I want the libeled in this case to get all of their assets
texlovera
March 26th, 2015 @ 6:35 am

Because deep down, they realize they lead meaningless lives, and they desperately seek “meaning”. But how to find it?

OH WAIT! Let’s show how much we buy into the GROUPTHINK!! The group will LOVE US!!!
texlovera
March 26th, 2015 @ 6:38 am

When their targets, like Joe Murphy, shove it right back up their a**, and make them cry groveling apologies. Nobody likes a loser.
Crabtree
March 26th, 2015 @ 8:19 am

“Mistakes were made.” Ladies, you are librarians. Information professionals. Use the active voice. You made mistakes. Actually, even that’s wrong. “Mistake” implies that you weren’t acting out of malice. You were. You deliberately targeted this man out of a sheer delight in harming him. Because it got you all excited. Now… what does that make you, I wonder.
Phil_McG
March 26th, 2015 @ 8:29 am

He certainly wasn’t a good man (though some Ethiopian Christians regard him as a saint), but I’ve always felt a bit sorry for Pontius Pilate.

He tried to do the right thing, but was confounded by a baying mob of fanatics. Rather than provoke a sectarian riot, he took the easy way out, and washed his hands.

Who among us would have done differently in his place? Even Peter denied his Lord three times.

You are right that Roman prefects weren’t cuddly characters. They were fierce and brutal, as were the times they lived in. But they weren’t, generally speaking, monsters. They were men of the law. A harsh and merciless law, to be sure. But such was life in the ancient world.