Awful

Reading shit like this makes me want to go out and kick puppies or something. The hell that Amanda and Melissa went through? I can't even imagine it. I sincerely hope that Donahue has a rent-boy in his past, and rehab is in his future.

Looking back, the detail that astonishes me the most is the sheer amount of ink, air time, and energy devoted to keeping this phony scandal going until McEwan and I felt we had to resign. One question that's hard to avoid is how much of the venom had to do with the fact that McEwan and I were young women entering into a field (Internet communications) that's viewed as almost monolithically masculine. From my vantage point, it appeared that sexism was one of the primary motivating energies behind the campaign. Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note of my gender or suggested that I would be a more pleasant woman if I wasn't so "angry." Bluntly put, I find it hard to believe that many men would end up being denounced on TV for using words like "fuck" or "cunt" on their blog and expect to receive piles of e-mail offering an opportunity to suck the sender's dick.