You know whose stories get told often enough? Men’s. Especially men engaged in masculine fields of law enforcement or sports. Yet even in a world in which the man’s point of view is the default point of view, this one went pretty far out there. So here’s a lesson that maybe now the editors at SB Nation will consider — after a man’s been found guilty of raping a bunch of women, the prime narrative can be something more than the tale of a “once-promising young man.”

In a swiftly yanked SB Nation feature last week, writer Jeff Arnold asked, “Who is Daniel Holtzclaw?” Sure, for some, the answer might be, an Oklahoma City police officer who last December was convicted of eighteen sexual assault charges, including first-degree rape, forcible oral sodomy and sexual battery, involving eight of the thirteen women who have accused him of sexual abuse. But for Arnold and his editors, he was also an aspiring football player from Enid whose failed NFL dreams, combined with possible head trauma, may have contributed to his pathology. So over the course of nearly 12,000 words, Arnold delved into the mind of Holtzclaw, talking to his father and friends. And in the the final paragraph, he observed, “Pending an improbable successful appeal, everything he had worked for was now gone, likely never to be recovered, ever again.”

ProPublica Reporter Madi Alexander quickly called the piece “the nicest depiction of a serial sexual predator I have ever read,” while ESPN’s Kevin Van Valkenburg said, “Know what? You shouldn’t have to be a woman to see writing about the NFL dreams of one of the worst rapists in law enforcement ever is wack.” Five hours later, the story was deleted, replaced by a note from editorial director Spencer Hall calling the piece “a complete breakdown of a part of the editorial process at SB Nation.” He added, “There were objections by senior editorial staff that went unheeded. It was tone-deaf, insensitive to the victims of sexual assault and rape, and wrongheaded in approach and execution. There is no qualification: it was a complete failure.” 

On Monday, the writer himself weighed in. In a Twitter statement, Arnold apologized for “a lopsided account that failed to acknowledge the suffering of Mr. Holtzclaw’s victims.” He also revealed that the story had been “reviewed and signed off on by at least four editors prior to its publication.” So that’s a minimum of five people who didn’t object to a profile that observed, “Unlike in the past, when his shortcomings only kept him from playing professionally, these failures, as first defined by a prosecutor and then by a jury, carried much heavier consequences.”