The two expat bros who terrorized women correspondents in Moscow (Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames)

The Washington Post ^ | 12-15-17 | Kathy Lally

[Salman]

There’s more than one way to harass women. A raft of men in recent weeks have paid for accusations of sexual harassment with their companies, their jobs, their plum political posts. But one point has been overlooked in the scandals: Men can be belittling, cruel and deeply damaging without demanding sex. (Try sloughing off heaps of contempt with your self-esteem intact.) We have no consensus — and hardly any discussion — about how we should treat behaviors that are misogynist and bullying but fall short of breaking the law.

Twenty years ago, when I was a Moscow correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, two Americans named Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames ran an English-language tabloid in the Russian capital called the eXile. They portrayed themselves as swashbuckling parodists, unbound by the conventions of mainstream journalism, exposing Westerners who were cynically profiting from the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.

A better description is this: The eXile was juvenile, stunt-obsessed and pornographic, titillating for high school boys. It is back in the news because Taibbi just wrote a new book, and interviewers are asking him why he and Ames acted so boorishly back then. The eXile’s distinguishing feature, more than anything else, was its blinding sexism — which often targeted me.

[Salman]

Not any sexual stuff, just being mean.

Not one righteous, no not one.

[caseinpoint]

Would have to pay to read the article but is it saying it is now time for revenge by the nerds? Is it time to dredge up every little slight and destroy people over them? Have we become so petty and eager to declare ourselves victims?

[Anti-Bubba182]

“...Have we become so petty and eager to declare ourselves victims?”

Yes, it works. Look at all the grievance groups for the last 100yrs or so.

[conservaKate]

I read the article. If what she writes is accurate, those two guys were utter pigs. Never been a fan of what Taibbi writes, so I will attest to a bias against him.

I an not familiar w/ Mark Ames. He sounds like a peach of a man. /s

Their mothers must be so proud of the two deviants.

[marktwain]

Hard to know how accurate it is.

Clearly, she has an interest. Maybe entirely accurate, just hard to know.

[marktwain]

Here is a review of sorts from 2000 that mentions Kathy Lally:

“Needless to say this kind of thing pisses some people off. In early 1998 Ames’s column about Natasha pissed off a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun named Kathy Lally, who lobbied to get an influential Internet newsgroup about Russia to stop posting the Press Review column. This in turn pissed off the Exile boys enough that they decided to give her the treatment. They had a female friend call her and, posing as an anti-Exile sympathizer, ask her to help shut the paper down by giving a statement to FAPSI—Russia’s Federal Agency of Government Communication and Information, an organization analogous to the National Security Agency that, according to Taibbi, has a reputation for being “a reactionary force on par with the old KGB.” They got Lally on tape agreeing to “think about it,” and of course they published the transcript. Upon hearing from a friend that they’d made her cry, Taibbi writes, “Mark and I burst out laughing. “

https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/beast-in-the-east/Content?oid=902762

[miss marmelstein]

These guys are, apparently, an abomination. I can’t remember reading anything worse than this outside of Mexican cartels. Particularly that stuff about forcing two women to have abortions by threatening to murder them...

So many Americans are lost to God.

[SunkenCiv]

Taibbi’s big mistake was crossing the leftist media shills about the fake Russian collusion smear against Trump.

http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/matttaibbi/index

[WatchungEagle]

This is all lies. The Exile writers didn’t do any of the things they are being accused of by these morons. Women who worked in their office have all said they were perfect gentlemen and this stuff is all fiction. Those writings were satire, influenced by the post modern writer Eduard Limonov’s novel “It’s me, Eddie” which is a fictional account of Russian immigrant to America who acts in a stereotypical way and tells crazy stories to people back home that exaggerate and make fun of anti-American stereotypes. Anyone who read those stories and didn’t understand that is total moron.

This is really about politics. Taibbi and the Exile were critical of neoliberal globalism and the establishment. They exposed the truth about what was going on in Russia in the 90’s when the establishment media was portraying Yeltsin’s government as a huge success story. They are being retaliated against for criticizing Wall St. too, which is what Taibbi has specialized lately.