This is a job for the Spotlight Team!
A corrupt corporate culture, decades of rampant sexual harassment, shaming and legal threats against female victims of sanctimonious male superiors, cover ups of the despicable behavior of powerful male hypocrites, a highly-paid employee under arrest for allegedly exposing himself to his young female immigrant neighbors and then getting the case broomed….
And now, allegations that some of the leading male lights of this vile organization may have maintained a list of supposedly available young women – a “bleepability” list, so-called.
Imagine how much fun the Boston Globe could have exposing this sordid, sexist scandal if it weren’t… the Boston Globe.
The Washington Post’s motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” The Globe’s motto should be, “Democracy Dies in Deviance.”
Talk about the War on Women – the Boston Globe is ground zero. If it weren’t for double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
The pampered puke in the crosshairs this week is Brian McGrory, the editor of the floundering, foundering broadsheet. He is accused by a former reporter, Hilary Sargent, of sending inappropriate texts, one of which asked her, “What do you generally wear when you write?”
The date of that text is unknown, but there is a significant difference not only in power, but in age between the man and his victim. McGrory is 56, Sargent is 39.
There are supposedly many more texts, but Sargent has not released any – yet. In a brilliant PR move, a Globe lawyer on Wednesday sent Sargent the draft of a civil lawsuit to be filed against her, demanding more information about the text(s).
Be careful what you wish for, bow-tied bumkissers.
Actually, I’m more interested in this alleged “bleepability” list, compiled by male reporters at the Globe a few years back. It was a listing of the paper’s female interns and “co-ops,” (who in those days weren’t allowed to write). The list rated them on their, shall we say, hotness, and their availability to older predatory males who prowled Morrissey Boulevard when they weren’t cashing the checks from their trust funds.
Sources tell conflicting stories about how the list was maintained. One said it was informal, like the list some college fraternities used to keep of freshmen coeds, for use on “Pig Night.” Others say the list was actually filed in the Globe’s then fairly primitive Atex computer system. According to one story, it was once seen by a co-op at City Hall after one of the reporters left it up on a computer screen after a brief visit to the press room on the ninth floor.
“I was told they said I had ‘bedroom eyes,’” one female on the list told me Wednesday night.
Various names are mentioned as being involved in curating the list. Yesterday, I called McGrory – now nicknamed “McGiggity” – and left him a detailed message inquiring what he knew about the bleepability-list quagmire. My call was not returned. (You can listen to my phone message to McGiggity here.)
The Globe has a long record of predatory older males taking advantage of young women. When I started at the Herald, one of the PR types for a local public agency was an ex-Globie who’d knocked up an intern. One of the managing editors actually married a co-op 20-plus years his junior.
There’s all kinds of ugly Globe stories about looking for love in all the wrong places. A few years back, photos were sent anonymously to this newspaper of a frightened woman in a large dog cage – supposedly her estranged husband had locked the cage behind her and then photographed her, in a rage over her affair with a Globe scribe.
This latest sex scandal is even messier because of the parties involved. McGiggity is a social-climbing legacy hire, two-toilet Irish as they say. His second cousin was Mary McGrory, a spinster sob sister who couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag, but she loved the Kennedys. They eventually gave her a Pulitzer Prize for decades of looking the other way at an even more vile group of predators than the Globe’s.
The Globe rumpswabs may claim that much of this, even the list, happened a long time ago, but that’s never stopped the Globe when it comes to reporting sexual harassment. Look at what they did to Matt Patricia last week, over a dismissed 1996 charge.
Just last month, the Globe sent out this tweet:
“Clarence Thomas remains on the Supreme Court, unchallenged, unprotested, with all we know now about sexual harassment and other accusations against him.”
Those allegations date back to the early 1980’s, maybe 20 years before the bleepability list was compiled.
Perhaps the sick culture in the Globe newsroom has changed. Before his death, Will McDonough was heard to complain: “This place is turning into a fern bar.”
But depravity has always thrived in the PC media. Look at NBC, or MSNBC, or CNN, or the Times, or….
Does someone have the number of the Spotlight Team?
