BHL the intrepid reporter writes a book on the killing of Daniel Pearl, and it’s rife with errors and prejudice.

He’s prospered in intellectual circles despite his tragic inability to button a shirt in part because he’s a successful businessman, born into wealth and friends with the French corporate elite. He writes with the self-assuredness of someone quite convinced of his brilliance, and that self-assurance perhaps explains why he so regularly makes shit up and gets shit wrong.

Like, for example, claiming that Himmler, who killed himself, stood trial at Nuremberg. And citing a well-known fake satirical philosopher in a book.

For a taste of the sort of hackneyed, half-assed work he produces on the major issues of the day, try this item on the eurozone crisis. It’s the sort of inane nonsense that gives claptrap a bad name. BHL noticed that the crisis involved Greece and Italy and that made him excited because he could then write about how civilization was invented in those places. To understand the European debt crisis, apparently, “we should be rereading Gibbon, Humboldt, or even Polybius — these theoreticians of the fate and the fall of the Athenian paradigm or the Roman road — rather than Friedman or Keynes.” Actually I think in this particular instance Friedman or Keynes would be a bit more helpful?

As if being pompous, self-serious, self-important and lazy weren’t enough, he’s also the public face of not one but two campaigns dedicated to defending powerful men against rape accusations. He organized a petition decrying Roman Polanski’s extradition to the United States to face prison for jumping bail after being convicted of raping a child years ago. Polanski didn’t deserve to go to jail, according to BHL, because he is a very good filmmaker.

Then BHL’s dear friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for raping a hotel maid, and BHL wrote a truly astounding column defending his friend by attacking the victim and decrying the American justice system for not providing adequate special treatment to a man as rarefied and well-respected as Strauss-Kahn.

“What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs,” BHL said of the totally standard treatment of Strauss-Kahn following his arrest for rape.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
After the charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped due to unknown inconsistencies in the accuser’s story, BHL declared victory and claimed that Strauss-Kahn was the victim of “torture” due to his class, and his being French.

I must state, to be clear, that I don’t think it has much to do with this worldwide religion and delirium that is anti-Semitism. But what I do believe is that this is the appearance of a new variation on Maurice Barrès’s phrase that has become, “That X—in this case Dominique Strauss-Kahn—is guilty, I deduce not from his race, but from his class.”

Hm, yes, Americans, always throwing rich powerful white men in jail. Our rich white male prison population is truly our national disgrace.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Some mostly harmless memoirs, one novel and one well-reviewed study of literary marriages later, Roiphe is back in the headlines, again for being a reliable source of controversial-sounding contrarian anti-feminist bullshit. (Seriously, if you’re a struggling woman writer with no soul, consider rape victim-blaming! It’s lucrative!)

This time, Roiphe is saying that what Herman Cain is accused of doing to multiple women is no biggie, because blah blah blah there is no such thing as sexual harassment, just men being men and feminists being too shrill and fragile to handle that.

Obviously there is a line, which if the allegations against Mr. Cain are true, he has crossed, but there are many behaviors loosely included under the creative, capacious rubric of sexual harassment that do not cross that line.

In other words, the news event that led to my writing this column pretty much directly contradicts my point about sexual harassment being the criminalization of perfectly acceptable behavior but on the other hand feminists want to make dirty jokes illegal.

Roiphe is not just a one-note anti-feminist hack, no! She also writes very badly about the Internet and people on the Internet who are mean to Katie Roiphe. At the beginning of this month, Roiphe broke the news that there are Internet commenters who are mean. They accuse Katie Roiphe of being rich, just because she went to Princeton and Harvard and wrote about her nice house in rich people magazine New York and was photographed for that article holding a very expensive-looking handbag. Roiphe basically adopts the “haters gonna hate” line beloved by people serene in their refusal to acknowledge what they’ve done to inspire the hatred. This is a line most utilized by teenagers, because it requires a slightly sociopathic narcissism to imagine that literally everyone who criticizes you is jealous of your wonderfulness.

When people who troll for a living act surprised to discover that their intentionally obnoxious work had the desired effect of annoying a great deal of people, you can generally write that off as more trolling.

Continuing her tour through the most popular hacky Internet trend essay tropes of 2007, Roiphe wrote a piece on how Gawker is stupid, because Gawker made fun of her. The Gawker post that inspired her piece was three years old. Seriously. It was a three-year-old post with three paragraphs and a block quote. Because poor Emily Gould asked Roiphe for a book blurb Roiphe wrote, in October of 2011, a lengthy Slate column in response to three paragraphs Gould wrote making fun of her in May of 2007. “I did not find the piece very wounding,” Roiphe writes, in case you’re worried that she is letting the haters get to her. She totally isn’t! She just devoted a column to how much she didn’t care about the mean thing someone said about her, three years ago, to show how much she is over it.

Though I imagine that with the sheer volume of critical things people have written about Roiphe, because she’s awful, it might simply have taken her three years to work through the backlog. I imagine she’ll respond to this (“Isn’t it interesting that Salon hates me so much, not that I care” by Katie Roiphe) in 2014.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
A truly wretched and self-parodic Slate column about how the popularity of the book “Go the Fuck to Sleep” — the joke is that it’s like “Goodnight, Moon” with swear words, and that is the full extent of the joke — “means” that dumb yuppie liberal parents are full of bleak existential rage because they aren’t as good at sex-having as Katie Roiphe, because feminist yuppie women have castrated their good yuppie liberal husbands, and Katie Roiphe is operating on a plane you yuppie liberal sex-hating feminists can’t even understand, maaaannn.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Here’s Wolf’s version of events:

I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke. I understand, from the alleged victims’ complaints to the media, that Assange is also accused of texting and tweeting in the taxi on the way to one of the women’s apartments while on a date, and, disgustingly enough, ‘reading stories about himself online’ in the cab. Both alleged victims are also upset that he began dating a second woman while still being in a relationship with the first. (Of course, as a feminist, I am also pleased that the alleged victims are using feminist-inspired rhetoric and law to assuage what appears to be personal injured feelings. That’s what our brave suffragette foremothers intended!).

Here’s what those alleged victims say happened:

Her account to police, which Assange disputes, stated that he began stroking her leg as they drank tea, before he pulled off her clothes and snapped a necklace that she was wearing. According to her statement she “tried to put on some articles of clothing as it was going too quickly and uncomfortably but Assange ripped them off again”. Miss A told police that she didn’t want to go any further “but that it was too late to stop Assange as she had gone along with it so far”, and so she allowed him to undress her.

According to the statement, Miss A then realised he was trying to have unprotected sex with her. She told police that she had tried a number of times to reach for a condom but Assange had stopped her by holding her arms and pinning her legs. The statement records Miss A describing how Assange then released her arms and agreed to use a condom, but she told the police that at some stage Assange had “done something” with the condom that resulted in it becoming ripped, and ejaculated without withdrawing.

That seems a bit less than consensual! And:

The following day, Miss W phoned Assange and arranged to meet him late in the evening, according to her statement. The pair went back to her flat in Enkoping, near Stockholm. Miss W told police that though they started to have sex, Assange had not wanted to wear a condom, and she had moved away because she had not wanted unprotected sex. Assange had then lost interest, she said, and fallen asleep. However, during the night, they had both woken up and had sex at least once when “he agreed unwillingly to use a condom”.

Early the next morning, Miss W told police, she had gone to buy breakfast before getting back into bed and falling asleep beside Assange. She had awoken to find him having sex with her, she said, but when she asked whether he was wearing a condom he said no. “According to her statement, she said: ‘You better not have HIV’ and he answered: ‘Of course not,’ ” but “she couldn’t be bothered to tell him one more time because she had been going on about the condom all night. She had never had unprotected sex before.”

And that seems like rape.

Whether or not Assange’s case was taken more seriously by authorities than other typical rape cases for nakedly political reasons — and it very probably was — the fact remains that Assange was accused of serious sexual crimes by two separate women. And Wolf joined the chorus of people who defended Assange from those charges based solely on the fact that Assange was a guy whose work they liked. He was important and did good deeds, so the two separate women accusing him of violent non-consensual sexual encounters must be wrong. (And, indeed, Wolf went on to argue that they should be named.)

Since publishing that vile Huffington Post piece a year ago, Wolf has continued to defend herself, claiming that the Huffington Post piece was “satirical.” It was, as I said, sarcastic, but the aim of the satire was to lampoon Interpol as “the dating police,” which necessarily means pretending a rape charge is a simple complaint that the sex was bad.

I dunno, I leave it to you to try to parse the myriad arguments she makes in her account of a heated discussion with Salon’s Irin Carmon. How about this closer:

Wolf concluded, “I don’t think that it helps for the feminist establishment to not recognize that there is nuance in this situation. And that doesn’t mean that ‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘no,’ but that we need to evolve a legal concept where ‘yes’ is acknowledged, too.” Though, she added, “The ‘yes’ shouldn’t dilute the ‘no.’”

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Wolf’s need to prove that Assange is the victim of a politically motivated investigation has her continuing to distort the nature of the accusations in order to make them seem like something other than rape. Like: “(There is one point at which Miss W asserts she was asleep – in which case it would indeed have been illegal to have sex with her – but her deleted tweets show that she was not asleep, and subsequent discussion indicates consent.)” Oh, deleted tweets, you say? Drop all the charges!
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

The problems begin with the passive headline, “What happened to Dominique Strauss-Kahn?” and the declaration that “May 14, 2011, was a horrendous day” for DSK. It cannot be denied that it’s very unpleasant to be arrested for sexual assault and attempted rape, even for a man less famous than DSK. But you could also argue that it’s even more unpleasant to be allegedly sexually assaulted by a wealthy and powerful man, which is Nafissatou Diallo’s side of the story.

Why should we believe that something happened to DSK as opposed to him doing something? Epstein never offers a coherent alternative theory of what happened at the Sofitel, only an exhaustive timeline, a diagram and a series of mysterious details that may add up to nothing at all. Those details include Diallo visiting another room after the encounter, with no details known about its occupant; the Sofitel’s unexplained delay in calling the police, and a silent victory dance of three men caught on camera.

The timeline reveals that the encounter took place in a time frame of six to seven minutes — just after Diallo entered the room, just before DSK chatted on the phone with his daughter. (The piece doesn’t ask the coarser, biologically puzzling question of how a 62-year-old man was able to initiate and complete the act so quickly.) Epstein doesn’t mention injuries logged in a medical report cited by Diallo’s lawyers (DSK’s lawyers contested it, saying the injuries described were self-reported or could have been from consensual sex), but he does mention how tall she is. (She is taller than DSK.)

What happened in those six to seven minutes besides DSK’s semen getting mixed with Diallo’s mouth? He has never had to publicly offer an explanation, even if he can’t deny it happened. Maybe she was irresistibly seduced by him in those minutes. Maybe a transaction was negotiated, except that Diallo’s lawyers were confident enough that it wasn’t to sue the New York Post for libel after it printed anonymous reports that Diallo was working as a prostitute. Or maybe he sexually assaulted and tried to rape her. As hard as these things are to imagine in a world of mysterious victory dances, they do happen. Even to women who get confused about the timeline, or who have lied about rape to get a green card.

Epstein makes much of the disappearance of DSK’s IMF BlackBerry. A “researcher” at the rival party who somehow has reliable access to such information has told DSK by text (to which Epstein inexplicably has access too) “that at least one private email he had recently sent from his BlackBerry to his wife, Anne Sinclair, had been read at the UMP offices in Paris. It is unclear how the UMP offices might have received this email, but if it had come from his IMF BlackBerry, he had reason to suspect he might be under electronic surveillance in New York.” Except that there was no need to have DSK surveilled in New York in order to access his email — an enterprising hacker could have hacked into the server without any access to the physical device.

It is also supposed to mean something that the BlackBerry was lost and then its GPS was disabled at 12:51 p.m. As others have pointed out, one way to disable a GPS on a BlackBerry is letting the battery run out. But it’s more alluring to imagine foul play than to imagine that DSK just forgot to charge his BlackBerry with his busy schedule of rapid-fire fellatio, international finance and meeting his daughter’s new boyfriend.

Epstein asks us to believe this without a single named source or any contextualizing information about his unnamed ones, although it’s plausible DSK’s attorneys and investigators would have been the ones with all this information. For example, Epstein has viewed the cellphone records of the hotel parent Accor’s head of security, who called someone else at the company on his way to deal with the situation at the Sofitel. That someone could be anyone at Accor … but maybe it’s his “ultimate superior” who was at a soccer game seated in French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s box at the time. Or maybe it was someone in between them in the line of command? This is one of those details that could say a lot, but so far seems to say very little at all.

He has also viewed surveillance video from the hotel wherein two men, one of them the hotel’s chief engineer, seemingly an American, “high-five each other, clap their hands, and do what looks like an extraordinary dance of celebration that lasts for three minutes.” That is a long dance. Does it have anything to do with bringing down DSK? Actually, the hotel, which dismisses Epstein’s account, says it was only an eight-second dance and that it probably was about sports. Accor also denies that there is any significance to Diallo going to another room on the floor after the assault, another Epstein trial balloon, because the guest there had already checked out. (She originally omitted mention of the second visit.) Maybe she went there for a quiet place to process what happened. Or even to clean it!

The Washington Post says the story has set the “French political world afire,” while the Economist terms the reaction a “shrug,” because DSK is now tarnished by his alleged involvement in a prostitution scandal in Lille. Which shadowy opposition set up that conspiracy?