The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Bye, Felicia!

Posted on | June 10, 2022 | 1 Comment

Took her seven days to tweet herself out of a job:

The Washington Post fired its political reporter Felicia Sonmez on Thursday after she publicly criticized the paper and her colleagues for nearly one week straight.
Sonmez started internal drama at the company when she called out fellow reporter Dave Weigel on Twitter for retweeting an alleged sexist tweet last week.
Weigel retweeted a tweet that joked, “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.” Sonmez shared a screenshot of Weigel’s retweet and said, “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!”
On Monday, the Post suspended Weigel for one month without pay over his retweet, despite his public apology.
Sonmez’s feud with Weigel was not the only fight with one of her colleagues. Washington Post reporter Jose A. Del Real criticized Sonmez for publicly lambasting one of their colleagues.
“Felicia, we all mess up from time to time. Engaging in repeated and targeted public harassment of a colleague is neither a good look nor is it particularly effective,” Del Real told Sonmez. Ultimately, Sonmez doubled down on her decision to call out Weigel, adding that it was “important that all those who saw Dave’s tweet also see Washington Post reporters standing up for our newspaper’s value.”
After the feud, Del Real temporarily deactivated his Twitter account. When he rejoined the platform, he blocked Sonmez from viewing his tweets.

Sonmez kept up the crybully act all week, and continued parading around on Twitter like a heroic martyr after she got fired. Honestly, she seems mentally ill, but so does everybody at the Post. because, let’s face it, you’d have to be crazy to want to work at such a toxic institution.

Bad causes attract bad people — I started saying that years ago, during the Kaitlyn Hunt controversy. The #FreeKate movement attracted people whose argument was essentially that it should be legal to have gay sex with minors, because age-of-consent laws were “homophobic.” These people would not admit that this was what they were arguing for, and none of them were smart enough to see they were being manipulated on behalf of a criminal pervert who just didn’t want to take the plea bargain (which is what happens in nearly every statutory rape case).

So stupidity and dishonesty were sort of baked into the pie of the #FreeKate crowd, and the reason I bring this up is because Felicia Sonmez was one of the opportunistic vipers who felt a need to scramble onto the #MeToo bandwagon a few years ago. Can we all now recognize that the #MeToo movement was not a worthy cause? It began, you will recall, with Harvey Weinstein — arguably one of the worst people in Hollywood, a town full of bad people — and everyone was happy to see Harvey get his long-overdue comeuppance. But from there, it started to snowball into a lynch-mob mentality. It seemed that every woman with a Twitter account felt a need to proclaim herself a victim of rape, or sexual harassment, or at least some kind of vaguely “sexist” behavior.

It was like living in Paris during the Reign of Terror, and every day the tumbrels went rolling across the cobblestones, conveying their victims to the scaffold. One got the impression that the entire entertainment industry was staffed by rapists — Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K., Les Moonves, James Franco, Aziz Ansari and a long list of names less familiar. Then the #MeToo movement turned its sights on the journalism business, and a whole new set of villains were sent to the guillotine — Mark Halperin, Charlie Rose, and Matt Lauer among them. Where would it end? I remember reading the accusations against Ansari and thinking, “What? Clumsy foreplay is now a crime? Dear God, every teenage boy is a felon!” But every girl who ever had a bad date was now a victim, it seemed, and during all that uproar I lost track of exactly who was accused of doing exactly what to exactly whom. Everything kind of blurred together, and among the cases that completely slipped my mind was this:

Consider the case of Jonathan Kaiman, a young journalist who was Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, and was elected in 2017 as president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCCC). And then #MeToo happened. In January 2018, a girl he’d hooked up with one night in 2013 wrote a blog post in which she described their encounter as, well, not entirely consensual on her part:

After an evening out drinking and flirting, [Laura] Tucker drove Kaiman on her scooter back to her apartment. There, she wrote, they mutually and consensually undressed and got into bed. . . .
Tucker wrote that while making out in bed with Kaiman, she had a change of heart, so she stood up and said she didn’t want to continue. . . .

Evidently, Kaiman persuaded her to resume their encounter, but she says it made her feel “gross” and, once Tucker did her #MeToo hit-piece on Kaiman, another woman came forward to say that she, too, had a less-than-entirely-consensual encounter with him. The result was the destruction of Kaiman’s once-promising career.

That was what I wrote in 2019 and can you guess the name of the second woman who “came forward” to accuse Kaiman? Felicia Sonmez.

The wheel of karma has turned, as it always does. Robespierre ultimately went to the guillotine, you know. The end of Felicia Sonmez’s employment at the Washington Post may not be the end of her journalism career, but it is hard to imagine why any editor would hire such a troublemaker. Sonmez is still on Twitter claiming to be a victim, but I doubt this act is going to get her hired at any organization remotely as prestigious as the Washington Post.




 

Category: Journalism

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One Response to “Bye, Felicia!”

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