“Each time, the ban served as a constant reminder that she was assaulted and that her editors viewed her as being somehow ‘defective,’” Sonmez’s lawsuit states.Details like these quickly went viral on Twitter, and Stuckey, who’s now a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, soon added her voice to the digital chorus. Reading Sonmez’s lawsuit, she tweeted, had made her burst into tears.“Everything that happened to her at @washingtonpost is what I feared FOR YEARS would happen to me at papers if I disclosed my assault,” Stuckey wrote. “There are no two sides to this issue: Sexual assault is bad and also illegal.”“I had so many people tell me, ‘That’s ridiculous, you’re not gonna get punished for that. That makes no sense. You’re not gonna get kicked off the project.’ Then Felicia went public, and I was like, ‘I was right to be concerned.’”
The lawsuit also arrives just a year after newsrooms were forced to publicly reckon with how their screaming lack of diversity shapes their coverage, and as they’re still grappling with the afterlife of an administration addicted to politicizing reality. Sonmez’s case accuses the Post of gender discrimination and unfairly believing that one, already-marginalized aspect of her identity—her status as a known survivor—poisoned her ability to do her job.A Washington Post spokesperson told me that it had no comment on the lawsuit or its allegations, but on Friday, the Post filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. The motion argued, among other things, that Sonmez had waited too long to sue, that she hadn’t proven that the bans had led to “significantly diminished responsibilities,” and, in any case, that the Post “based the ‘bans’ and other allegedly adverse action on Sonmez’s public advocacy, not her victim status.”“There are no two sides to this issue: Sexual assault is bad and also illegal.”
Sonmez’s lawsuit evokes fundamental, urgent questions about journalistic ethics, objectivity, and who gets to be considered a good reporter. And it raises a specter that has long haunted journalism: In a profession that remains dominated by white, straight, cis men, will people who are sexually assaulted—a crime that happens overwhelmingly to women—ever be considered equals? “The traditional stance of objectivity and appearance of a conflict of interest has always been applied selectively. I’ve never heard, for example, of a combat veteran-turned-reporter who said, ‘Oh, you’re a veteran, you can’t cover veterans’ issues,” said Bruce Shapiro, executive director at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. “These kinds of identity fights come up again and again, and it’s always about membership in a group that’s been at the losing end of the power equation.”“Each time, the ban served as a constant reminder that she was assaulted and that her editors viewed her as being somehow ‘defective.’”
Alison Berg, a reporter at the Steamboat Pilot & Today in Colorado, fought similar fears as she debated coming forward as a sexual assault survivor.“I think my first one was that I would be pulled off of any sort of sexual assault coverage, because it would seem like I was too close to the situation or there was a conflict of interest,” she recalled. “After that, I think it was: What if I get judged? The newspaper industry—and every industry, honestly—is male-dominated. And, honestly, to be perfectly frank, I was worried that, particularly, male editors would have judged me.”A female reporter who covers crime at a legacy outlet told me that she has been more traumatized by comments from male editors than by any story she has covered. (Legacy news outlets are typically understood as the venerable institutions born before the advent of the internet. Think: the New York Times, CNN, and, yes, the Washington Post.) The reporter recalled some of the remarks she’s heard at a past job: “Why didn’t she report it to [the] police?” “That’s not sex assault. That’s just fondling.” “Since when do we take the word of a 12-year-old girl?”“These were editors I liked and thought they had good judgment,” she said. “Up until then.”
Meredith Shiner covered politics for Washington, D.C.–based publications like Politico and Roll Call. She no longer works as a full-time reporter and, in 2018, published a piece about, in part, what she called “the moments of corrosive misogyny that have punctuated my career in journalism.” In Sonmez’s lawsuit, she saw lesions of a noxious culture of politics reporting—one that’s so obsessed with avoiding the appearance of bias and skirting political stances that it ignores moral truths.“You hear these things from male editors all the time: ‘Why is she doing a press conference if she’s so traumatized? What evidence does she have?’”
“The Cuomo brothers are a symptom of an industry that uses the red herring of objectivity to protect and enable abusers, while punishing women, survivors, journalists of color, and anyone else who disrupts or otherwise disturbs the narrative of power,” freelance journalist Lexi McMenamin wrote in Dame last month. “Yet, reporters who come out as survivors, like the Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez, are treated as ‘unreliable narrators’—an extension of how rape culture treats survivors writ large—while abusive men and their enablers lose nothing.”“Reporters who come out as survivors, like the Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez, are treated as ‘unreliable narrators’—an extension of how rape culture treats survivors writ large—while abusive men and their enablers lose nothing.”
“Journalists of color, particularly women of color, in newsrooms I’ve been in, have borne the brunt of that for a long time. I think that has increased at every level—antisemitism, people doxxing. It gets worse and worse and worse,” said Christina Bellantoni, who heads the University of Southern California Annenberg’s Media Center. She formerly ran political coverage for the Los Angeles Times and served as the editor-in-chief of Roll Call. “Journalists are leaving the profession because of this. It’s just not worth it for them.”Harassment and violence are occupational hazards for journalists, particularly those who are female.
The Chronicle also published statements from 18 massage therapists in support of Watson, which had been cobbled together by Watson’s lawyer; the “story” was essentially a glorified press release. Stuckey had a weekend phone call with Maria Reeve, now the Chronicle’s executive editor, where, Stuckey recalled, she tried to explain why she found the Chronicle’s coverage so damaging. “It’s the weekend, you know? I don’t want to be doing this,” Stuckey said. “I get off the phone and I need a drink, because I’m trying to process all of this and all of my clearly unresolved trauma of my own.”“In order to get my point across about some of our coverage, I felt that I needed to say, ‘I am a survivor and this is not OK,’” she continued. “That was traumatic for me, having to sit in a room with a bunch of editors and say, ‘This happened to me and I feel really bad about how we’re framing these things.’ Because I have been so public, I do feel kind of a sense of necessity to be the one in our newsroom that stands up, so that other people don’t have to. But with that comes an additional layer of, ‘Oh my God, are they listening to me? Are they not? Am I being triggered by doing this?’”Stuckey ended up covering the Watson case herself. Her reporting uncovered several errors in the massage therapists’ statements released by Watson’s lawyer, as well as mistakes made by the lawyer who’s representing the accusers. For example, two women who are described as being “licensed” could not be found in state licensing databases. There is no correction on the original Houston Chronicle story.Reeve told me that the Chronicle would “look at” adding a correction to the story. The newspaper published the profile of Watson because, Reeve said, “There was a thought that what people thought they knew about Watson did not match what these allegations were and so that story was an effort to look at: Who is Watson? What do we really know about him?” Asked if the story was appropriate to run, Reeve said that was for others to decide.“There was no thought on our part to exclude her from coverage,” Reeve said of Stuckey. “I think her experience helped inform our coverage and made it better, because a lot of people didn’t have that perspective. A lot of people didn’t have that sensitivity. Her participation was invaluable.”“How do you explain to someone that just because a crime was committed against me doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in fair reporting and telling the truth?”
In June, Stuckey published an essay about the assault she survived. The day it went live online on the Chronicle’s website, she was fact-checking a story about Watson.“How do you explain to someone that just because a crime was committed against me doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in fair reporting and telling the truth?” Stuckey said. “It’s OK. I dare you to tell me it’s not.”Every reporter I spoke with said that surviving an assault had sharpened their reporting; the experience had left them more empathetic. The reporter who covers crime at a legacy outlet said she does a lot of work involving lawsuits, and she’s trying to rely less on police narratives and attorneys. She’s willing to let sexual assault survivors back out mid-interview.“Sometimes, writing these stories makes me feel like, ‘OK, I’m giving a woman a voice,’” she said. “I don’t have a voice still, and that’s my choice. But I am giving a woman a voice who didn’t have it before. I’m telling the world about something that happens every damn day and you all just have closed your eyes and ears to it.”Sonmez declined to speak to me for this story. But her attorney, Sundeep Hora, told me that sexual assault survivors should know: “They don’t need to be silent, because their employers are being put on notice.”Hora declined to say whether Sonmez would consider a settlement in the case. But, he said, a just outcome to the case would have to involve some kind of acknowledgement that what happened to Sonmez was unlawful and that things need to change.“Because that’s all you can hope for at this point. What’s done has been done,” Hora said. “But moving forward, what does it mean for others?”“They don’t need to be silent, because their employers are being put on notice.”