In Aftermath of Zoom Dick Fiasco, Believer Staffers Say, Bosses Used Public Records Law Against Them
Long before Joshua Wolf Shenk reportedly stepped out of his bathtub and into infamy as the latest media figure to expose his penis to colleagues via Zoom, there were already issues at The Believer, the prestigious literary magazine where he served as editor-in-chief. And months after his departure, the fallout is still affecting staffers there, one of whom has resigned in protest. Staffers at both The Believer and the Black Mountain Institute—an affiliated institution that is, like the magazine, part of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas—say that records requests from Motherboard seeking documents about how UNLV handled both the bathtub incident and previous complaints about Shenk were improperly used to intimidate staffers.
The situation is both highly unusual and deeply rancorous: Maxwell Neely-Cohen, the staffer who resigned in protest, for instance, was involved in fundraising, and told UNLV that its handling of the records requests cost the university “millions of dollars” in donations, in a resignation letter obtained by Motherboard. It’s just the latest dramatic turn in the strange saga of an uncomfortable relationship between a respected literary magazine and the academic institution that houses it.
“As UNLV’s leadership goes, I never have any idea where incompetence ends and nefariousness begins,” Neely-Cohen, who was editor-at-large at The Believer for three years before his resigning in protest this week, told Motherboard. “I just don’t know.”
. . .In late April, a Los Angeles Times story broke the news of the Zoom dick incident and of Shenk's resignation from his roles as EIC and as director of the Black Mountain Institute (BMI). The version of events presented to the paper by Ira Silverberg, a famed literary personality acting as an advisor for Shenk, was that Shenk had, while wearing a mesh shirt, taken a bath during a February staff meeting to ease pain from his fibromyalgia, and inadvertently displayed his penis to Believer staffers when he stepped out of the tub. The article, which touted Shenk's many achievements but didn't manage to quote any of his colleagues, portrayed the incident as a ludicrous and regrettable but isolated one-off. . .
The issue, they made clear, was not that the staff was too fragile or ungenerous to countenance having been inadvertently flashed, but what they said was a long, frustrating history of mismanagement.
"Our experience of Shenk," staffers wrote in the open letter, "is that he was an inattentive and negligent boss who created a fractured workplace rife with pay and labor inequalities, and whose behavior on the Zoom call matched a pattern of callousness and abusive disregard for the staffers who worked under him."
One puzzling thing—which speaks to the concerns of staffers that their voices haven't been heard—is that while the Los Angeles Times story, relying on Silverberg's account, presented Shenk as having been in the bathtub, exposing himself by mistake when he stood up, no one who was actually on the call and who spoke to Motherboard found that to be a credible version of events. One person said that Shenk had told different stories to multiple people: that he’d been on the toilet with a towel covering him, for instance, or that he’d sought to keep his relevant parts under wraps with a robe.
“It never crossed my mind that he was in water,” one person said. Nor was he wearing a “mesh shirt.”
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