Journalist Matt Taibbi Slandered By California Representative.

A Democratic Representative Repeated An Old Debunked Smear Of Matt Taibbi In

Recently, the House Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia Subcommittee held a hearing on government censorship.

Journalist Matt Taibbi testified on government censorship of social media based on his reporting on the Twitter files leaks.

The leaks reported by Taibbi exposed the fact that the U.S. government-funded think tank Virality Project pressured Twitter to take down “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy,” including “stories of true vaccine side effects” and that the FBI tried to pressure Twitter to censor journalist Aaron Mate for his critical reporting on the Ukraine proxy war among many other things.

Representing the pro-government censorship view at the hearing was Nina Jankowicz, the woman who was briefly put in charge of the Biden administration’s “disinformation governance board” sub-division of the DHS before it was shut down.

Jankowicz styles herself a “disinformation expert” despite the fact that she herself has a long history of spreading CIA-approved disinformation such as Russiagate, the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian Disinformation”, the Russian bounties hoax, and even whitewashing and defending war criminal Neo-Nazi paramilitary groups in Ukraine.

As I wrote about recently, the Republicans and Democrats are massive hypocrites on the issue of free speech.

This was apparent in the recent censorship hearing, where Republicans correctly called out the Democrats using social media to crack down on speech while ignoring Trump’s authoritarian crackdown on speech critical of Israel.

Meanwhile, Janowicz - at the hearing- correctly called out the Trump administration’s censorship of speech critical of Israel on college campuses, despite the fact that her pro-censorship advocacy under the Biden administration would make George Orwell blush.

Matt Taibbi, however, has been one of the few free speech advocates who actually cares about it as a principle, calling out the Democrats’ censorship and the Trump administration's crackdown on pro-Palestine speech.

During the hearing, the democrat that was the harshest when questioning Taibbi was Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democratic Representative from California’s 37th district.

Dove claimed the entire hearing was a “distraction from the dumpster fire foreign policy” of the Trump administration.

While I am certainly a strong critic of Trump’s foreign policy, the issues Dove brought up are the least of my worries.

In the hearing, she claimed that Trump was “siding with Putin against our national security interests,” ignoring the fact that the “national security interests” in Ukraine under Biden included intentionally provoking the Russian invasion by refusing to take NATO membership off the table for Ukraine, blocking a peace deal that would have ended the war two months in, blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline and almost causing World War Three by approving CIA cordernated strikes in Russian territory with American weapons.

Dove also said that Trump was “risking the lives of American soldiers in a signal group chat,” taking more issue with the fact that the Trump administration accidentally added an Atlantic reporter to a signal chat about Yemen than the fact that Trump is bombing Yemen on Israel’s behalf.

Elsewhere, Dove has taken issue with Trump’s dismantling of USAID, the CIA cutout that has funded and coordinated coups and coup attempts in Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ukraine, and Romania.

This alone is nothing new and just another example of Democrats attacking Trump from the right of foreign policy.

However, Dove went much further than this, attempting to slander Taibbi as a sex pest and sexual assaulter of women based on a years-old debunked story.

Dove, in her response to Taibbi, falsely labeled him a “serial sexual harasser” and entered two articles into the record that falsely alleged this.

Dove doubled down on this false claim on X where she tweeted, “After this, Republicans gave Matt Taibbi time to defend himself. It’s telling that he didn’t.” referring to her false allegations against Taibbi.

Taibbi is now defending himself by opening a defamation lawsuit against Sydney Kamlager-Dove for this allegation.

This is because the two stories she entered into the congressional record, one in the Chicago reader and one in the Washington Post, have been 100 percent debunked.

The False Claims Against Taibbi.

Unlike Democratic royalty like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, Matt Taibbi has never actually been accused by anyone of sexual assault or harassment.

Even the articles that Dove admitted into the congressional record admit this. The Chicago Reader article states that “No one has come forward to publicly accuse him (Taibbi) of assault,” while the Post article admits that there is no evidence of Taibbi “groping a woman or forcing a kiss on her to humiliate her,” instead accusing him of “Bullying and treating women with contempt” for satirical articles he wrote years ago.

Both pieces base their case that Taibbi is a sexual harasser on a book he wrote in 2000 with journalist and “Radio War Nerd” host Mark Ames titled “The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia”.

The book was actually a mostly satirical and fictional book written by Taibbi and Ames about their time working at “The Exile,” a comedic newspaper that the reporters wrote for when they were based in Russia.

The book was falsely identified as “nonfiction” by its publisher, leading mainstream journalists to believe the accounts of sexual harassment in the book were confessions when in reality they were satirical shock humor.

Grove Press, the book publisher, noted that “the statement on the copyright page is incorrect. This book combines exaggerated, invented satire and nonfiction reporting and was categorized as nonfiction because there is no category for a book that is both.”

Furthermore, journalist Walker Bragman of Paste Magazine reached out to the employees mentioned in the book, who confirmed that the passages about sexual harassment were indeed satire.

Bragman noted that in the book, “the authors joke about sexually harassing two of their female employees (Masha and Sveta)”.

However he wrote that “like the original magazine, much of eXile was made up for the purposes of satire.”

Bragman reported that “There were two women who went by Masha at The eXile at the time. Both told Paste that the passages were fictional,”

One noted that “I was never harassed by Matt Taibbi, nor did I see him sexually harass anyone at work or outside work either” and that “It was a ridiculous passage written by Mark (Ames)”.

Furthermore, Steva also went on record to say the book was satire, telling Paste magazine that “the encounter described in Ames’ passage never happened, and that neither Taibbi nor Ames ever acted inappropriately towards her or any other woman in the office.”

Bragman went on to write, “When asked if the two editors ever ignored impropriety by other male staffers, she told us there was nothing to ignore. In other words, The eXile’s work environment was not hostile for women.”

As Bragman wrote

….for most Americans today, the culture and stereotypes Taibbi and Ames were lampooning are completely foreign and unfamiliar. For that reason, eXile does not really connect, or perhaps hold up as well as a show like “South Park,” which also delights in vulgar satire but deals in stereotypes widely understood by American audiences.

Taibbi told Paste Magazine that:

The paper was to be a mirror of the typical expatriate in ‘exile,’ who was a pig of the highest order … He was usually a Western consultant who made big bucks teaching Russians how to fire workers or privatize markets in the name of ‘progress,’ then at night banged hookers and blew coke and speed. The reality is most of the Westerners in town were there to turn Russia into a neoliberal puppet state by day, and get laid and shitfaced by night. So the paper was a kind of sarcastically over-enthusiastic celebration of this monstrous community’s values.

So the evidence that Dove used to accuse Taibbi of sexual harassment is actually a fictional book written to make fun of American billionaires who went to Russia to profit off the Western-imposed neo-liberal economy after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The blurb on the back of the book even advertises it as this, noting that “no person is spared from their (Ames and Taibbi’s) razor-sharp satiric viewpoint,” and that the book is a “darkly funny, take no prisoners profile of the sordid underbelly of the New World Order that you will never forget”.

Most media outlets that have covered this false story have since issued a correction.

When the Guardian first covered this story, they later had to issue a correction saying:

This article was amended on 10 April 2018 to remove a reference to Matt Taibbi and a book he co-authored. In October 2017, Grove Publishing added clarification about the book saying: “This book combined exaggerated, invented satire and nonfiction reporting.” At the time, several reviews indicated that the book was satire. The women referred to in the passage have since said in an interview that they have never been harassed by Taibbi.

The Nation magazine also issued a correction for repeating this false claim writing:

This article, “Are Sexual Predators in the Workplace Finally Facing Justice?” contained a statement about Matt Taibbi that was inaccurate. The Nation has reached a settlement with Mr. Taibbi pursuant to which the inaccurate statement, as well as the rest of the passage regarding Mr. Taibbi, have been removed from the online version. We apologize for the error.

Newsweek also issued a correction acknowledging that the allegations against Taibbi were false.

The Cost Of Doing Journalism.

Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the “censorship industrial complex” has certainly hit a nerve with many powerful interests.

In 2023, when he first testified on the contents of the Twitter files, he received what the Wall Street Journal called “a Strange House Call” from the IRS on “the same day Mr. Taibbi testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about what he learned about Twitter.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that this was not typical procedure for the IRS, noting that “Typically when the IRS challenges some part of a tax return, it sends a dunning letter. Or it might seek more information from the taxpayer or tax preparer. If the IRS wants to audit a return, it schedules a meeting at the agent’s office. It doesn’t drop by unannounced.”

The paper noted that “The curious timing of this visit raises questions about potential intimidation” and shows that “the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.”

Taibbi was also threatened with “five years in jail” in a letter from democratic representative Stacey Plaskett, who falsely accused him of “lying under oath” for a minor error he made in the Twitter Files reporting, which he later corrected.

Now, Sydney Kamlager-Dove is recycling a debunked smear of Matt Taibbi in an attempt to intimidate him into silence.

No matter what one thinks of Tabbi’s reporting or political views, there is no denying that this false smear being weaponized against him is wrong.

---

Note to readers: The Dissident is a reader-supported outlet. If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid subscriber.