Another Ugly Story of ‘Progressive’ Vigilantism

Article here. Excerpt:

'The campus rape panic that dominated western media for well over two years suffered a severe blow in late 2014 thanks to the credulous reporting of hoax allegations in Rolling Stone. Those who had long harboured doubts about the panic, such as Glenn Reynolds and Emily Yoffe began to lend aid to long-time sceptics like Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young. Today, Bloomberg columnists casually refer to this chapter of history as a moral panic. Meanwhile, colleges that embraced the panic by abandoning due process are facing a wave of lawsuits from aggrieved students.

This is all good news. But the focus on college campuses is limiting. It blinds us to the bigger picture. In truth, the “rape culture” panic spread far beyond the walls of universities, injecting an atmosphere of vigilantism into almost every community where both genders happened to mix. In all of these arenas, opportunists seized on the opportunity to ruin the reputation of innocent people on little more than hearsay. One of the most egregious examples, in fact, did not occur on a college campus but in the community of professional librarians.

The librarian, Joe Murphy, was publicly accused of being a ‘sexual predator’ by two colleagues on social media. This was followed up by blog posts urging his professional community to ban him from conferences, despite the fact that none of the allegations had been proven true.

In a blog post entitled “Time to Talk about Community Accountability” (translation: time to talk about vigilantism), librarian Nina de Jesus made a series of public allegations against Murphy, a “ubiquitous presence” on the library conference circuit. This followed a tweet by fellow librarian Lisa M. Rabey, who alleged that Murphy was a “known sexual predator”. Rabey’s followers on Twitter then joked about ruining Murphy’s career.'