GQ Magazine says I’m a Very Bad Man

Le sigh… another Highly Prestigious Media Outlet has yet again chosen to produce a snide little featurette thing about me. Which would be way too redundant to even bother mentioning at this point — if not for the novel public service I can unfortunately provide by giving bemused, weary insight into how these journalistic negging exercises get formulated. Most “normal” people will hopefully never be subjected to such indignities, but may nonetheless find themselves morbidly intrigued to hear some behind-the-scenes deets about how the unseemly “sausage gets made.”

Semi-regular readers should remember the first time I journeyed to Ithaca, NY earlier this month, I attended a meeting of the Ithaca Common Council — their extremely high-minded version of a municipal government body. The meeting was brought to my attention by a local guy named Zach, who’s admittedly a bit of a gadfly, but often gadflies have the best info about what’s going on. He submitted a notecard on my behalf, per normal procedure, so I could speak for two minutes during the prescribed public comment period. I planned to declare opposition to a then-pending measure, demanded by the mayor, to impose a blanket prohibition on all student-organized events which require the issuance of a city permit — supposedly an urgent emergency intervention to curtail the scourge of sudden gang rapes ravaging this bucolic Ivy League locale.

When I wasn’t called upon as expected, Zach started to get mildly desperate, flailing around the meeting hall in manic search for whatever the heck happened to the little notecard with my name on it that he swore he’d duly submitted. At the time, I assumed the guy must’ve screwed something up — but whatever, I thought: not the biggest tragedy in the world if gadfly human error thwarted my ability to speak at this dopey governmental proceeding. But then Zach started rummaging through a trashcan next to the table where the City Clerk had been sorting through the speaker requests, and wowzers — he made the shocking discovery that my card was illicitly crumpled up and deposited in the trash. Given this dramatic turn of events, I asserted parliamentary prerogative and made a verbal “motion” to speak, which was gamely rebuked by the Mayor. I eventually decided to just speak anyway, and called on him to resign for his multifold malfeasance in the Jane Doe saga — namely his impugning the seven defendants as confirmed “perpetrators” of heinous Gang Rape crimes, based on nothing more than the scam-artist civil complaint crafted by a particular sleazebag plaintiff’s attorney.

Following this scandalous affair, Zach swiftly filed a Public Records request for security cam footage from the City Hall venue — and up until this week, it remained a tantalizing mystery how exactly my notecard wound up in the garbage receptacle. Or who the dastardly culprit might’ve been. Theories were proffered, but no one could be quite sure. Now we finally have our big climactic answer! Read on…!

Anyway, after I delivered my unsanctioned remarks and was heading for the exit, a young woman I did not recognize made a beeline for me — she furtively handed me a piece of paper, then walked off without saying a word. All in one seamless, nonchalant motion. Frankly, it was kind of a cool move: like a clandestine hand-off operation or something. When I unfolded the paper this woman slipped me, I learned she was a correspondent for the fabled GQ Magazine, and had been deployed to Ithaca to do some sort of stylish creative nonfiction dispatch on all the latest happenings with Gang Rape and so forth. The note said she wanted to talk to me, and her phone number was enclosed. Her name was Savannah Sobrevilla.

I had never heard of this person, but figured what the hell, sure, I’d have a chat. (I’ll have a chat upon request with just about anyone, for better or worse.) A quick glance at her Instagram seemed to indicate that she mainly covered “style”-oriented issues, perhaps with a slight on-and-off political bent — which did not seem to bode well for her “covering” me in any kind of rational or charitable manner. But so it goes. I guess I’m a sucker for people who nicely ask me to do things, and moreover, I definitely had to credit her smooth CIA-like approach strategy.

Here is a vaguely representative example of Savannah’s recent oeuvre:

“Hmm,” I thought at the time. “Well, whatever.”

So I called up the number she’d secretively scribbled, and told her I would be at a certain cafe-type place Zach was bringing me to a few blocks away. She’d be welcome to come by if she liked. Which she eventually did — arriving with another young woman in tow, whose purpose for being there was left curiously unexplained the entire time. But again, whatever. We spoke for around 45 minutes; I gave her my whole “Jane Doe” spiel. She recorded the conversation on her phone; I didn’t bother to do likewise. I figured she’d probably wind up trashing me regardless of what I said or did, but at the same time, miracles are always possible. Gotta keep hope alive. At one point I did say something like: “Am I crazy, or [some aspect of the issue].” She said no, I’m not crazy — we just disagree, which is fine. OK, great, I said. Maybe that’s some very incremental progress? Pleasantries were exchanged; she and the unexplained companion then departed the cafe without incident.

So now here we are a few weeks later, the much-anticipated GQ dispatch is finally out — and take a look at how she characterizes the nature of our essentially unremarkable interaction:

Huh? Wait a second. This might sound trivial, but I guess I’m a stickler for accuracy — or “autistic,” as the kids annoyingly like to say these days. (After all, I accepted two rounds of “fact-checking” phone calls for this article with some hard-to-understand GQ lady in Mexico?)

So here’s the problem. I did not “ask” Savannah to do anything, much less meet me anywhere! That’s just… not what happened! She’s the one who initiated the whole idea of meeting! First by doing that cool hand-off move, which I even complimented her on at the time. Then at her express written request, I simply told her where I was going to be sitting around with Zach, and said she could swing by if she wanted. But somehow this subtly transforms into me — a creepy “contrarian Substack” guy — proactively “asking” her to come meet up with me in the lobby of a hotel. (It wasn’t even the lobby of a hotel, it was an adjacent cafe/lounge type place.) Hopefully you get the seedy little implication she’s going for here. Especially since the article overall was framed as a rueful/sardonic lament by Savannah about how a particular segment of “men” — typified by me, I guess, LOL — were behaving so very badly in relation to the Jane Doe brouhaha:

“I drove up from New York City to understand how men were making sense of a civil suit brought in September by an anonymous accuser,” Savannah writes in one of her opening paragraphs. It’s a potentially interesting prompt for an article, I guess — potentially — but the reader quickly becomes pessimistic that Savannah will muster any remotely interesting thoughts about anything at all, since her whole posture is just so down-the-line predictable. I could probably have ghost-written the ensuing article in my sleep. She has to settle for organizing much of her dime-a-dozen thesis around the frumpy personage of “me,” since I apparently fit the bill as an emblematic weird/creepy male who swooped in to cravenly leverage the Cornell situation:

Plaintiff anonymity is “used to manipulate the court system and thereby the public as a PR tactic to create pressure,” Tracey told me. “I have nothing against Jane Doe. She seems kind of cool, actually.” He showed me a text he sent to a number he claims belongs to her: “Given that settlement funds are being sought, especially considering that criminal investigations have been triggered, I consider it in the public interest to report on your identity.” When I pointed out that anonymity enables sexual assault victims to come forward with less fear of vitriol and death threats, he described the death threats he has received. This is what one of the loudest male voices I encountered in Ithaca sounds like. [emphasis mine]

Obnoxiously, she gives the impression that I was whinging with self-pity and painting myself as some horribly wronged victim, merely because I mentioned the giant deluge of murder / gang rape / torture threats that I — along with my completely uninvolved relatives — had received from deranged supporters of the “I am Jane Doe” movement. Which was hilariously triggered by me, for having the audacity to report the litigant in a massively consequential civil complaint. This provoked a truly gargantuan firestorm, the scale of which is still comical to contemplate.

In fairness to Savannah, I suppose, the New York Times also pretty much did the same spiteful shtick: both NYT and GQ wanted to put across the idea that I was running around claiming personal victimhood, and making myself “the story,” which the average reader of those publications would naturally find repellent. Further, these Prestigious Journalists made it seem like the only way one could ever know if my family members and I were really inundated with crazed threats would be to just mindlessly take my word for it — and why would the average reader do that, with me being set up as this creepy / weird “Substack” provocateur? The spin is doubly ridiculous, because it’s not like it would’ve been logistically infeasible for Savannah to spend five minutes perusing my Twitter/X feed, where I’ve posted a sample of the wild and crazy threats — which are very often also darkly humorous, I have to say. Alternatively, she could have simply asked me for ample evidence of the threats, if she really felt that was necessary, and I would’ve been happy to assist. But nope: the whole idea was to cast me as a presumptively untrustworthy and foul-motivated antagonist, who has inserted myself into the Jane Doe controversy for crass, self-serving reasons.

“He told me that he had driven from Jersey City to Ithaca to report on the Cornell case,” Savannah writes, “motivated by his belief that Jane Doe’s identity should be made public.” That is not what I told her. If it had been, she could’ve easily just quoted me saying something to this effect, rather than falsely paraphrasing my purported motivations. I mean, we did spend 45 minutes — again, at her request — comprehensively going over my rationale for appearing at the Ithaca Common Council meeting, and I made clear it had nothing particularly to do with the specious anonymization of Jane Doe, especially since I had already de-anonymized her by then. I explained all my issues with the huckster lawyer Thomas Giuffra, and how nonsensical it was that the Mayor and City Council would literally just copy-and-paste from his profit-seeking lawsuit in their newly-enacted governing decree. I recounted Giuffra’s record of using fallacious appeals to “safety” as a basis for demanding anonymity on behalf of clients alleging sensational sex crimes against lucratively well-endowed litigation targets, such as Sean “Diddy” Combs, Harvey Weinstein, and (so he claims) Jeffrey Epstein. I summarized the extensive reporting I had done months earlier on an unrelated Jane Doe claimant, represented by another band of similarly extortionate plaintiff’s attorneys, who had been judicially ruled to have committed fraud. Etc. etc. etc.

But apparently none of this registered with Savannah, nor do I suspect she bothered reading any of my full-length articles, because it better served her petty little purpose to just dismiss me as someone “best known for social media provocation” — like I’m just another one of those asshole male “influencer” troll-types, doing vacuous stunts for cheap engagement. (I’m sure she wouldn’t have hesitated to declare me a disreputable right-winger if I hadn’t gone out of my way to disabuse her of that notion when she started fishing around for clues about my political affiliation.) So the most she really had to go on was that I supposedly barreled into Ithaca and “filmed [myself] cross-examining students and faculty.” Which sounds pretty stunt-ish. She could have said that I participated in a press availability with a cross-section of other journalists, including a dapper young fellow from the sainted NYT, as well as her own GQ photographer. But she wanted to trivialize and deride — by creating the hazy impression that I was only there on a one-man stunt/troll mission, just like all those other crude influencer-instigator dudes. On the basis of which she could then decry the general poor behavior of “men.” (Meanwhile, her stated mission of doing an anthropological examination of how “men” had callously undermined the Gang Rape “conversation” was to be hailed as inherently virtuous — nothing trollish about that, of course.)

By the way, the only reason I had “described the death threats [I] received” in our conversation was not that I was looking for Savannah’s sympathy — give me a break — nor that was I pining for GQ Magazine to hold me out as some beleaguered media martyr for truth and justice. It was because the half-formed argument I’d elicited out of Savannah was something along the lines of the typical refrain that “reporting Jane Doe’s identity is bad, because she could thereafter receive death threats.” This logic was wholly untenable, I tried to explain to her: everyone who’s ever involved in any kind of public controversy inevitably gets lunatic comments from loons on the internet — yes, myself included. But that can’t be perpetually cited as a catch-all justification for stymieing public transparency and disclosure. I emphasized that I was of course not seeking any kind of special treatment or accommodation in any respect. I was merely pointing out that there’s always going to be some kind of theoretical online “threat” that can be invoked, and this whole facile line of argument — appealing to the nebulous prospective existence of such “threats” — has been stretched to the limits of absurdity. Sorry: you can’t just gesture at the purported specter of internet-based “endangerment” and think this should suffice to emotionally blackmail everyone from reporting things in the public interest. Or at least I’m not going to be cowed by that nonsense. (And furthermore, not that a vindictive tit-for-tat should be the primary imperative here, but it’s surely worth noting that Giuffra and Jane Doe did not hesitate to ensure the seven defendants would be ruthlessly hounded and “threatened” by incensed online agitators.)

Look — even if Savannah still ultimately disagreed with what I was trying to get across, that’s all well and good. I wouldn’t have expected anything different. I had no delusion that I could miraculously “convince” this woman of anything consequential over the course of one stilted 45-minute conversation. At the same time, you might think that since I did agree to talk to her for a decent chunk of time, when I could’ve been doing a million other things, and we carried on what appeared to be a moderately reasonable back-and-forth, that this could have at least plausibly translated to a minimally non-derisive or non-catty portrayal of me in the final GQ creative nonfiction article. Especially since Savannah even acknowledged that I was making some defensible points about stuff. But once again, nope — that was clearly too much to ask. (Not that I’m “surprised” at this outcome. Just disappointed, like a forlorn media father figure.) My reward for being “nice” and collegial with Savannah was to get caricatured to the readership of GQ — to the extent any “GQ readership” even exists in 2026, which is questionable — as an implied sexually-suspicious weirdo who creepily “asked” this young woman to come meet up with me at a random hotel. When it was 100% her who initiated the whole “encounter,” to borrow her term: “This is what one of the loudest male voices I encountered in Ithaca sounds like,” she wrote, in reference to me. (As best I can recall, our cafe conversation was conducted at a very standard volume???)

I even agreed to a ridiculous on-the-spot photoshoot the following week with a freelance GQ photographer who unexpectedly approached me outside the October 14 meeting of the Cornell Faculty Senate, where a bunch of journalists had gathered for impromptu press availabilities with a trickle of professors and even a few students. I chatted uneventfully with the photographer, named Bowen Fernie, and she initially had me “pose” for some “normal” photos — first standing in front of a tree, then with the hilltop vista of the campus in the background. Yes, I’m well aware that I will never look “good” in any photo, not least for a “fashion”-themed magazine, but c’mon:

I’ll concede that it’s intrinsically funny for me to even have had any kind of GQ magazine “photoshoot” in the first place. And believe me: I was very much aware of this at the time. (I’m not actually “autistic” or r*tarded.) Further, I can obviously see the logic in them going with a photo of me that was taken on the sly, where I’m goofily playing around with my phone. Because it makes me look like a big goof! Which I guess I am, in a way. So, whatever. 😂

But the absolute dumbest little dig Savannah and her editors attempted was to quote my remarks before the Ithaca municipal government, and throw in a cutesy little [sic] notation — as if I made an embarrassing error in my use of the word “conclusorily,” which they apparently didn’t even bother to look up before going to print:

Here, Savannah, let me google that for you:

Also allow me to bedazzle you with this amazing video, acquired by Zach via public records request, in which the Ithaca City Clerk, Brittni Griep, is caught red-handed surreptitiously tossing my “request to speak” notecard in the trashcan. Since you alleged in your article that I only “alleged” this happened.

*Cue Benny Hill theme song*

And for posterity, here is my entire chain of text communications with Savannah, starting with our initial “encounter,” and ending with a succession of pointed followup questions/observations I sent her last night. Of course, she has now predictably “ghosted.”

OK, enough with all that baloney for now. I’m sure you readers are enthralled with the upcoming US midterm elections, and desperate for me to pivot more fulsomely to that awe-inspiring subject; I will try to force myself to oblige over the next few days. I’m actually on my way right now to an undisclosed location for various Midterms-related chicanery — so, as always, “stay tuned.” 🙄

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