Journalist Matt Taibbi has filed a lawsuit against Democrat Rep Sydney Kamlager-Dove over comments she made at a South and Central Asia Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Tuesday, in which she accused Taibbi of being a "serial sexual harasser."
The Tuesday hearing, titled Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department, featured Taibbi as a witness alongside fellow journalist Benjamin Weingarten and former Biden administration official Nina Jankowicz. As the lawsuit noted, the hearing was televised.
During her opening statement, Kamlager-Dove said, "To distract from the dumpster fire this administration is pursuing, [the majority is] elevating a serial sexual harasser as their star witness." She requested unanimous consent to enter into the congressional record two 2017 articles: a Chicago Reader article titled "Twenty years ago, in Moscow, Matt Taibbi was a misogynist asshole—and possibly worse," and a Washington Post article titled "The two expat bros who terrorized women correspondents in Moscow."
In addition to her statements at the hearing, Kamlager-Dove also posted a clip of her calling Taibbi a "serial sexual harasser" to her X and BlueSky accounts, and also "republished her remarks on her congressional website on the same date, as making them accessible to Plaintiff’s community and professional network in New Jersey." That page appears to have been taken down as of Thursday evening.
"This reposting under the 'Media' and 'In The News' sections of her website, were by its own admission a newsletter or a press release. Defendant’s republications on X and her website, occurring outside the scope of her legislative duties, are not protected by the Speech and Debate Clause of the US Constitution (Art. I, § 6, cl. 1), which shields only statements made in the course of legislative activity, not subsequent public dissemination for political or personal purposes," the suit stated, making them "actionable under New Jersey law."
The suit stated, "Defendant’s accusation that Plaintiff is a 'serial sexual harasser' is false. Plaintiff has never been accused by any woman of sexual harassment, nor has he been charged with, convicted of, or found liable for any such conduct. The articles cited by Defendant do not substantiate her claim."
The suit accuses Kamlager-Dove of seeking to "boost her reputation at the expense of the Plaintiff’s."
The articles noted by Kamlager-Dove referenced "a satirical passage from a book Plaintiff co-authored with Mark Ames, titled 'The eXile: Sex Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia,' about their time editing a nightlife guide in Moscow in the late 1990s," the suit stated.
One passage in the book, which is referenced in the articles, has Ames describing "a fictional scene in which an American female co-worker complained about their treatment of Russian female staff, to which Plaintiff allegedly replied, 'But… it is funny.'"
"Both authors have repeatedly stated this was satirical and invented," the suit goes on to say, adding that a journalist interviewed women named in the passage, both of whom saying that it "never happened." The suit noted that Grove Atlantic, the book’s publisher, clarified to The Guardian that the book’s "non-fiction" label was not accurate, as the book combines "exaggerated, invented satire and nonfiction reporting."
In 2017 and 2018, "following similar false claims," Taibbi received settlements from numerous publications, in which corrections were issued.
Kamlager-Dove "acted with actual malice in making and republishing these statements," the suit stated, adding that she "either knew the statements were false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, as evidenced by her reliance on unverified, decades-old satirical content that had been widely discredited by prior legal action and public corrections—corrections of which she, as a public official with access to such information, was undoubtedly aware."
The suit requests compensatory damages "in an amount to be determined at trial, but not less than $10,000,000, for reputational harm, emotional distress, and economic loss."
