A Lawsuit Tests the Limits of Anonymous Speech

Last October, amid a national reckoning with unpunished sexual misconduct in the workplace, a journalist named Moira Donegan created a shared Google spreadsheet that she titled “Shitty Media Men.” Then she invited women in her industry to add names to it.

The document “collected rumors and allegations of sexual misconduct, much of it violent, by men in magazines and publishing,” she later explained. “The anonymous, crowdsourced document was a first attempt at solving what has seemed like an intractable problem: how women can protect ourselves from sexual harassment and assault.”

In mere hours, the list of accused men grew to more than 70 names as the document spread from its creator to the media professionals she invited to edit it to whatever unknown persons they included at their discretion. “It spread much further and much faster than I ever anticipated,” Donegan wrote, “and in the end, the once-private document was made public—first when its existence was revealed in a BuzzFeed article by Doree Shafrir, then when the document itself was posted on Reddit.”