The Daily Cannibal

Posted: 15 Aug 2015 12:34 PM PDT

History repeats itself, we have been told, and recent events in the world of online journalism seem to bear this out. A few weeks ago, Gawker.com, an internet playpen for the lower-information millennial set, saw the departure of its three top editors, accompanied by a solemn promise from the publisher that the site would now become “20% nicer.” The impetus for all this arose from an article that claimed the CFO of a competitor online media company had solicited paid sex from a male prostitute, and the article was based solely on the claims of the prostitute, with no corroborating evidence — or attempt to obtain any. Further, in order to “protect” the accuser, Gawker named only the CFO in the article.

Alas, it obtained that the “accuser” was an extortionist, albeit a somewhat unbalanced one, who successfully duped Gawker into acting as an accomplice in his plot to blackmail the CFO. This was a little much, even for Gawker’s readers, who turned on the publication with the fury of an enraged Macbeth, blasting the site for more than a week with an endless stream of taunts and vitriol in its comments section.

Sound familiar? Perhaps only to those who followed the exotically bizarre Village Voice series on Bruce McMahan and his ex-wife Elena. The two narratives are eerily identical: a deranged and ruthless extortionist contacts a publication so eager for pageviews that it finds a way to print nonsense of the flimsiest and abjectly absurd tenor, despite obvious red flags and bone-jarring contradictions in the blackmailers’ narratives. Elena enlisted the Village Voice as her dupe, which ran two articles claiming that McMahan had a lengthy affair with his own daughter.

This naturally created more than a little consternation in the McMahan family, which watched helplessly as the Voice printed a rich tapestry of absurdities supported by impossibilities, including the assertion that McMahan had married the daughter in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey. This story fell apart very quickly under the briefest scrutiny, but the Voice never offered a retraction or apology. The damage to McMahan was done; his only recourse was to sue, but such a suit could only draw more attention to the story, and the Voice was facing bankruptcy for other reasons, including an outstanding judgement of roughly $15 million against it for unfair business practices in California. Subsequently, it was revealed that Village Voice Media was essentially a front for an online child prostitution website, Backpage.com, which provided by far the majority of the company’s revenues. In short, a pretty squalid little bunch of gangsters and pimps had walked into McMahan’s living room and sprayed it with bullshit, leaving him and his children to clean up the mess as best they could.

Gawker is still reeling from its outing fiasco, with major advertisers dropping the site in revulsion, and the Village Voice now limps along under new ownership, as the former owners sold it off for almost nothing. They did, however, maintain ownership of the kiddy-hooker website, which remains under attack by various parties, including a few dozen state attorneys-general.

In Gawker’s case, the extortion plot was quickly unmasked. In McMahan’s case, it took many years finally be decided in any satisfactory way.

Now, a decade later, the final chapter has been writ, this time by a circuit court in Florida. McMahan’s ex-wife, frustrated by her failure to gain control of McMahan’s sizable fortune through outright blackmail, has spent the past ten years in a prolonged attempt to regain leverage on him through custody of their two children, which was awarded to McMahan some time ago after evidence of his ex-wife’s bizarre and inappropriate behavior was reviewed by court after court.

Now a Florida court has ruled that Elena no longer may claim any parental rights to the children whatever, awarding sole and permanent custody to Bruce McMahan. Moreover, it does so by describing her behavior towards the children in unambiguous terms of clinical precision.

Elena McMahan told a story to the Village Voice, seeking to extort virtually all McMahan’s money from him. She wished to do McMahan harm, certainly, but that opens the question of what she thought she was doing to her own children. “Your daddy is a monster” is hardly good news for a child to hear, even if true; in McMahan’s case, it was as malevolent and shameful a lie that she could possibly tell. Now the court has told its own story, in language of soul-shriveling harshness, using words and phrases no mother could ever bear to hear.

This is small comfort, I assume, for Bruce McMahan, but Gawker — beware. Sometimes justice, which may “grind exceeding slow but exceeding fine,” does triumph, even in the courts. Having done a great wrong to an innocent man, with no objective other than boosting readership and revenues, you put yourself in the Village Voice’s unenviable position of village dupe. And although karma may be a bitch, she’s not a whore. That’s reserved for folks like you.

McMahan, we understand, put Elena behind him some time ago; the court’s recent decision, however, essentially provides the whole sorry saga with a full stop instead of a nagging ellipsis suggesting more might yet come. As for Elena, the game is now over. No check, no mate.

Siliguri Page

Sunday, August 16, 2015

The Daily Cannibal

The Daily Cannibal

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